The Village Effect

If intimate face-to-face contact is protective—girding our cardiovascular and immunological systems and even raising our lifetime IQ levels—loneliness has the opposite effect. Feeling lonely exaggerates the inflammation and reactivity to stress that are linked to heart disease while interfering with our ability to retain facts and solve problems, according to work by the British epidemiologist Andrew Step

THE SCIENCE
The

the kind of social contact we need to thrive.

Interacting with others exerts such fundamental changes in us that it is hard to deny that we have evolved for face-to-face social contact.

that loneliness drives up the cortisol and blood pressure levels that damage the internal organs in both sexes, and at all ages and stages of adult life.2

loneliness is not about that sacred block of uninterrupted time that we need to think and work. It’s a distressing physiological state. The evidence tells us that about a third of us now feel lonely, sometimes

Feeling lonely is as painful as being wildly hungry or thirsty