In this newsletter, I want to bring up some key insights into how to be healthier and happier, and have better sex… by fixing loneliness!
Pay close attention, there are specific discoveries that may apply to YOU and your loved ones… discoveries you can apply NOW.
For most people, living alone means living an unhealthy lifestyle.
Living alone, for example, was found to be an independent risk factor for recurrent myocardial infarctions and cardiac deaths.
And:
People with smaller or less diverse social networks, less frequent social interactions, or fewer people living in the household had significantly increased risk for cardiac and all-cause mortality 2–15 years later.
In fact:
Among 1,290 patients who underwent coronary artery bypass surgery, ratings of the statement “I feel lonely” predicted survival at 30 days and 5 years after surgery.
Now I know that you probably think the above is fairly obvious, but I assure you we are going to get into some fascinating facts that are not obvious and that will help you rethink your entire life.
So bear with me.
The paper goes on to say that blood pressure was normal for lonely and non-lonely adults, but the blood pressure was achieved in two different ways, and this is really critical.
Lonely individuals were characterized by relatively high levels of total peripheral resistance, whereas non-lonely individuals were characterized by relatively high cardiac output.
Total peripheral resistance refers to the elasticity of the blood vessels.
So, lonely people may have normal blood pressure, but they achieve it by having more relaxed arteries and organs, while…
non-lonely people achieve normal blood pressure by having a higher heart output.
Higher heart output is highly predictive of long-term survival and good health.
So it’s FAR better to have high heart output, than not.
Now here’s a fascinating fact about loneliness.
Relationships with women appear to be more protective than relationships with men in many ways.
And some of these ways may involve deeper friendships and more intimate social interactions, but they don’t have to.
You can beat loneliness even with “shallow” relationships with women…Yes,
Even spending time with women, in a non-intimate way, helps protect people against loneliness:
When not alone, both men and women appear to be protected against loneliness by spending more time with women but not with men.
The time doesn’t have to be quality time– it just has to be time.
This seems to help a lot, and may account for how people flourish more when they’re in a work environment than when they’re just home working by themselves.
I have always believed that women have a huge advantage over men in the area of having better social interactions.
I think this may be the crucial reason that women, in general, outlive men.
I’ve noticed that many women maintain friendships throughout their life, while often men, especially after getting married, reduce their number of friendships, and often have no friends at all.
And if they do have friends, as the researchers note:
They tend to be friends that they see and interact with infrequently.
While women are much more dependent on a social network of friends, and, therefore, I think protected against loneliness better than men are.
Loneliness tends to be experienced at least as intensely in males as in females.
There are men who have a lot of friends.
I have a number of good friends, but my wife has always had more friends than I have.
My dad had no friends, and my father-in-law had virtually no friends.
I think this is very common for men, especially professionally accomplished men, who spend a lot of their time on their career and neglect their social life.
But let’s get back to the study.
The questions the researchers wanted to answer:
Does loneliness cause health problems? How much impact does loneliness have on behavior?
First of all, the observation on blood pressure was confirmed: even with blood pressure the same as non-lonely people, that yes,
lonely people had lower heart output.
Moving on to other factors in the study, here’s one that is super important:
In contrast to nonlonely individuals, lonely individuals reported higher overall stress and threat in response to the circumstances of daily life.
Lonely people were more likely to interpret someone’s random look as disapproval reflecting on THEM.
And, lonely people were less competent:
They tended to appraise everyday events as more demanding and themselves as less able to meet these demands than did non-lonely individuals.
Because of how this study was done, the researchers have good reason to say that:
psychological construal is more important than objective life circumstances in characterizing loneliness.
In fact, loneliness is the FEELING that you should be around more people than you are really around…
In other words, being lonely is a result of a comparison between how many people you spend time with, as opposed to, how you could spend time with.
That doesn’t mean loneliness is not real.
Loneliness is completely real.
And loneliness is a physiological phenomenon.
But so much of loneliness is perception. It’s comparing how you are, with an imagined idea of how you COULD be.
Or as they say in the paper, loneliness is a “psychological construal.”
One surprising fact is how men experienced ungratifying interactions with other men.
Regardless of loneliness levels, men, compared with women, gave lower positive ratings to their interactions with other men.
And finally, to summarize:
Lonely individuals reported greater levels of stress, greater interaction negativity, and less interaction positivity during the day than did non-lonely individuals.
So what do you do with this information?
I would definitely try something very different for yourself.
If you’re feeling lonely, you need to use today’s tools and social media, but in a unique way.
To be blunt, the best thing to do is
- to find places to meet up with people, using meet up.com as an example
- and then shut off your computer, leave your smartphone at home, and
- go out and explore the world.
This is a part of life that is rapidly getting lost in the midst of smartphones. They are your enemy. They are a way to avoid feeling lonely, and therefore they help to reduce your motivation to interact with others.
Plus, there is a huge problem if you don’t plan events and get-togethers ahead of time…because
It’s best not to be spontaneous.
Most people think that being spontaneous will lead them to do new things on a whim.
But for the majority of people, being spontaneous is more about letting how you feel guide what you’re going to do next. It’s the path of least resistance, meaning you won’t put yourself out there if you are spontaneous.
You need to plan events, plan new things to do, to get you out there meeting other people, ESPECIALLY women (even if only as friends for now).
Don’t aim to be spontaneous — aim to plan more events in your life that put you in contact with WOMEN. In fact,
The best thing to do is to schedule your life.
Schedule groups to meet with after work, schedule weekend activities.
Activities such as dance lessons, hiking, volunteering to clean up the environment or work in a soup kitchen, are all fantastic ways of countering loneliness.
It takes hard work and scheduling these activities, but by the time a couple of months of past, you’re going to be in a whole different world.
One of my students went from a lonely life of doing nothing but partying on weekends with a few of his friends, to volunteering and getting out to dance classes and meditation.
And this man’s life is entirely different now.
It only took a couple of months. He had grown very lonely over the years following his wife’s untimely death. Now he’s getting out and meeting women every night.
Don’t expect this to work instantly: It may only take you a couple of days to make this change, but it is likely to take a couple of months to reinforce the change and make it a habit.
Everything changes when you’re less alone. The key is to make contact with others, especially women, a habit, the way loneliness has been a habit in the past.
Citations
Loneliness in everyday life: cardiovascular activity, psychosocial context, and health behaviors.
http://researchgate.zoemgozz.com/profile/Louise_Hawkley/publication/6521408_Loneliness_in_everyday_life_cardiovascular_activity_psychosocial_context_and_health_behaviors/links/09e4150ad2965ac331000000.pdf
Click for more information on Loneliness, for information on Mental Health, or for more on how heart diseases.