‘Social recession’: how isolation can affect physical and mental health

• As countries across the globe hunker down, long-term isolation can have profound physical and psychological effect.
• As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, millions of people in the US are coming to terms with being increasingly cut off from society.
• Beyond the inconvenience of working from home, or not being able to go to bars, restaurants or cinemas, however, experts have found that social isolation can have a profound effect on people’s physical, as well as mental health.
• Long-term, isolation even increases the risk of premature death. It’s being called a “social recession” to match any economic downturn also caused by the growing pandemic and it can have profound physical and psychological effects.
• “People who are more socially connected show less inflammation, conversely people who are more isolated and lonely show increased chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation has been implicated in a variety of chronic diseases,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University.
• Loneliness increases earlier death by 26%, social isolation by 29% and living alone by 32%.
• “Each of these significantly predict risk for premature death,” Holt-Lunstad said.
• “Holt-Lunstad didn’t find that one cause of death was more prevalent than another. The risk of every cause of death – including heart disease, cancer, stroke, renal failure – increased from isolation.
• A period of a few weeks in isolation should not lead to the inflammation and risk of cardiovascular trouble that Holt-Lunstad described. People could still see an impact on their health, however.
• “We do have evidence that these [periods of shorter isolation] can have immediate and short-term kinds of effects on our physiology. But, for instance, if your blood pressure is elevated acutely, that’s going to have a different kind of an effect than if your blood pressure’s elevated chronically,” Holt-Lunstad said.
• “For those with underlying pre-existing conditions, those acute elevations might precipitate some sort of acute event. But for most of the rest of us, who may not have some kind of underlying condition, we hope that this would just be acute and wouldn’t have these long-term effects.”
• One of the reasons people can suffer in social isolation is because personal relationships can help us cope with stress, Holt-Linstad said.
• “For instance: the ongoing uncertainty of what’s going on right now in the world, your body’s response to that may differ. Depending on the extent to which you feel like you have the resources you need to cope with that. And that in large part may be dependent on whether or not you feel like you have others in your life you can rely on. That you’ve got someone who has your back or you can count on, or you can get through it together.”
• Dhruv Khullar, a physician and researcher at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, said short periods of isolation can cause increase anxiety or depression “within days”.
• “We have evolved to be social creatures. For all the history of humanity, people have been in family structures, people have been in groups, we’re evolved to kind of crave and rely on that interaction with other human beings,” Khullar said.
• “So when we don’t have that it’s a huge void in the way that we go about being human. This is something that has been kind of hard-wired into who we are as beings.”
• Khullar, who stressed the crackdown on social gatherings was necessary, said people do at least have a wealth of options to stay connected. Texting, video calling or even the phone could potentially help avert the sense of isolation or loneliness, Khullar s…
• SOCIAL RECESSION: lead also Alienation.