What Unexpected Health Issue Really Worries the Surgeon General? Loneliness.

Feeling lonely is awful for our health and wellbeing. And loneliness - if we are honest - is a problem that affects many of us.

I’m in the process of packing up my belongings and readying myself to leave Silliman College - the residential college at Yale I help run - for a year-long sabbatical. 

My experiences as Head of College were the main reason I got into happiness science in the first place (Read more HERE). Living with more than 400 college students revealed that young people face a surprising problem – despite all the privileges of making it into an Ivy League school, a lot of them weren’t very happy, and some were really struggling. 

I hope my work has done some good – giving the students in my care simple, science-backed strategies to improve their daily levels of happiness. But as I prepare to move out of Silliman College, there is still so much left to do. 

A recent study of 10,000 British students caught my eye this week. For the first time the Higher Education Policy Institute asked specific questions about students’ experience of loneliness. 

The answers didn’t exactly shock me – but they still deeply saddened me. 

One in four students said they felt lonely “most” or “all” of the time (and if you add in students who admitted to weekly bouts of loneliness, then a full 59% described a lack of social connection as regular feature of their college lives). 

Think about that for a moment. 

Loneliness is terrible for our sense of wellbeing – and a significant proportion of the young people questioned are beginning their adult lives with a potentially scarring experience of deep social isolation. 

And the picture for US students (and Americans more widely) is just as bleak. 

A report from last winter suggested that nearly 60% of Americans could be considered as “lonely”. Worryingly, those aged 18-24 seemed to be suffering even worse – twice as many admitted to feelings of isolation (79%) as respondents aged 66+ (41%). 

We’re only slowly waking up to the scale and seriousness of this problem. A while back, I spoke to Vivek Murthy about it. Vivek is two-time Surgeon General of the United States and the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. 

When Vivek was first appointed by President Obama, he assumed his priorities would be tackling the opioid crisis; addressing obesity; and continuing anti-smoking efforts. 

“What I didn't know was that I would end up appreciating just how deeply loneliness was affecting people,” he told me. When he spoke to ordinary people about the issues facing them Vivek says the topic of loneliness came up again and again. 

“They would say things like: ‘I feel like I need to deal with all of these problems on my own. I feel like if I disappeared tomorrow nobody would even know. I feel like I'm invisible and nobody can see me.’”

Vivek argues that loneliness affects more people than smoking or diabetes. 

“That means that you likely know somebody who is struggling with loneliness. It could be your spouse. It could be your friends. It very well may be you.”

And feeling lonely has a real physical effect as our bodies. “It stimulates a cascade of hormones,” says Vivek. And as regular readers will know, if our bodies constantly experienced heightened stress the damage can be awful. 

Back when Vivek was a medical resident, he found that loneliness was often a root cause of other ailments, but a doctor seeing a patient might not realise what the true problem is. “[Loneliness] can often masquerade as other things, it can look like depression, it can look like anxiety, it can look like irritability.”

Thanks to advocates like Vivek, the medical profession is taking loneliness more seriously, but the rest of us can join the fight too. 

“I think the big challenge of loneliness is that many of us struggle with it in the shadows. [We have] to pull the curtain back on loneliness. To not only speak to other people about it, but admit to ourselves that perhaps we are lonely.“

So over the next few weeks I’m going to try to “pull back the curtain” on loneliness. We’re hear the Vivek’s personal story of feeling lonely and see what concrete steps we can all take to add more social inactions to our daily lives. 

Stay well and stay happy,

Laurie