Confused and feeling lonely is bad for health & bull; hello healthy

Basically, humans are social creatures who need good interactions with other people to survive. If the need for interaction is not met, we tend to be isolated from a social environment characterized by feeling lonely. This phenomenon can affect a person's mental health, and indirectly also affect physical health.

The impact of feeling lonely on mental health

Feeling lonely can exacerbate a person's emotional state, causing stress. Unlike stress in general, stress caused by loneliness tends to last a long time and always recurs when someone is experiencing a problem. Chronic stress from feeling lonely can lead to depression and social phobia, and even increase a person's tendency to commit suicide.

As people age, someone who experiences loneliness will experience faster cognitive decline. This is because social interactions also affect how the brain works and memory strength, so that people experiencing loneliness are more at risk of experiencing decreased function of the central nervous system. One study also showed that feeling lonely increases the risk of dementia by 64% in old age.

A person who feels lonely tends to have an unhealthy lifestyle

One of the effects of feeling lonely is a decreased ability to control thoughts and emotions, which can lead to behavioral changes. In general, individuals who experience loneliness find it difficult to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Addictive substance abuse such as drugs, alcohol or cigarettes are one of the lifestyle changes that often occur in someone who experiences loneliness. The main cause is a lack of social support that a person needs when facing a problem. This condition is also interrelated when a person experiences stress, and he believes that consuming these addictive substances is the best way to avoid the problems they face.

Lower your physical activity routine often done when someone experiences emotional disturbances, including when experiencing loneliness. In one study, someone who experienced loneliness tended to reduce the frequency of physical activity and experience changes in the intensity of physical activity, so that they did not do physical activity at all. Lack of physical activity itself can reduce endurance, lead to obesity, and the development of various degenerative diseases.

The stress of feeling lonely also has an impact on your physical condition

Decreased physical health is a side effect of feeling lonely. There are several body mechanisms that are a response to the impact of mental health and behavior changes in individuals who feel lonely. Here are some of the physical effects of loneliness:

1. Sleep disturbance

Sleep time is very necessary for the body to regenerate optimally. Lack of sleep can reduce sleep quality, daytime fatigue, and changes in sleep patterns. One of the causes of sleep disorders is emotional disturbance caused by loneliness. The relationship between loneliness and sleep disorders is cyclical. Feelings of loneliness at night make it difficult to relax and cause you to wake up in the middle of bedtime. Furthermore, it causes a lack of quality time to increase the stress effect of loneliness.

2. Lower body resistance

In fact, the immune system not only reacts to the threat of pathogens, but the emotional state of a person experiencing loneliness can affect the performance of the immune system. When under chronic stress due to loneliness, the brain responds to the environment as a threat, and this also affects the body's resilience. Therefore, the immune system cannot work optimally against pathogens that coincide with stressful conditions.

3. Trigger the development of heart and blood vessel disease

Besides psychological disorders, feeling lonely triggers abnormal reactions that affect the cardiovascular system. Researchers from Harvard (as reported by the Telegraph) say that the body also responds to stress due to loneliness by producing the protein fibrinogen, which is usually produced when the body is injured. In addition, chronic stress conditions also trigger an increase in the hormone cortisol which affects the performance of the heart in pumping blood. This abnormal mechanism causes flow disruption, thus triggering atherosclerosis and hypertension conditions. A recent study also showed that individuals who have poor social interactions have a higher risk of coronary heart disease and stroke, namely by 29% and 32%.

Until now, various studies have shown that feeling lonely is a cause of decreasing the quality of a person's physical health. Basically, loneliness itself is not a fact, but a perception or emotional state of one's social relationships, and this is not caused by loneliness. Therefore, the easiest way to deal with loneliness is to distract for a moment and engage in social interactions.