Loneliness Isn’t Just Bad for Your Health—It’s Deadly

livemint.com:

If you think canceling plans is always good self-care, you might want to think again. People who keep an active social calendar not only enjoy a better quality of life—they could also stave off an early trip to the grave. Loneliness and social isolation were linked to an increased risk of death from any cause, according to new research.

That includes missing out on seeing loved ones, not having weekly group activities like a book club, or just often feeling lonely. “Just like we need to make time in our busy lives to be physically active, we need to make time in our busy lives to be socially active," said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, director of the Social Connection & Health Lab at Brigham Young University, who wasn’t involved in the report. A combination of several loneliness factors could be even more harmful, the data suggested.

For example, having few family and friend visits was riskier when the person also lived alone. The study, published Thursday in the medical journal BMC Medicine, tracked people for more than a decade and collected loneliness data before the Covid-19 pandemic. It adds to increasing evidence that loneliness can be bad for our health, contributing to health problems including anxiety, heart disease and dementia.

“It is hard to think of a health condition that is not impacted by loneliness," said Dr. Carla Perissinotto, a geriatrician and palliative care physician at the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn’t involved in the most recent study. Americans are now spending more time alone and less time socializing in-person, compared with two decades ago, a trend that started taking hold even before the Covid-19 pandemic.