Loneliness can be as harmful to your health as smoking cigarettes, says the U.S. surgeon general in a new report that equates the effects of loneliness to those of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
“We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told the Associated Press in an interview.
“Millions of people in America are struggling in the shadows, and that’s not right,” he continued. “That’s why I issued this advisory to pull back the curtain on a struggle that too many people are experiencing.”
Murthy declared loneliness a national public health emergency, likening it to an epidemic and claiming that it costs the health industry billions of dollars each year.
According to the report, social isolation — based on the average time a person spends alone — has increased from 285 minutes per day in 2003 to 333 minutes per day in 2020. Likewise, the amount of time that people spend socializing in person with friends decreased from 60 minutes per day in 2003 to 20 minutes per day in 2020.
“In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,” reads Murthy’s letter in the report.
Recent research also confirms that there has been a notable decrease in social interactions with family members, community groups, and places of worship such as churches and synagogues.
More people have reported feelings of loneliness than ever before, and single households have doubled in the last 60 years, according to the surgeon general’s report, per Fox 4.
The COVID-19 shutdowns apparently exacerbated this crisis as people were told to isolate from family, friends, school, and workplaces in an effort to stem the progression and spread of the virus.
The report further states that loneliness is hitting people between the ages of 15 and 24 particularly hard, with a more than 70% drop in time spent with friends between 2003 and 2020. Social media and technology have also exacerbated the issue.
The solution, Murthy suggested, is to increase in-person connections and for companies to reconsider remote work as a means of doing business.
“There’s really no substitute for in-person interaction,” Murthy said, per AP News. “As we shifted to use technology more and more for our communication, we lost out on a lot of that in-person interaction. How do we design technology that strengthens our relationships as opposed to weaken them?”
According to the report, the mortality impact of loneliness is “even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity,” itself one of the gravest public health crises in the United States.
Loneliness in childhood can even contribute to obesity later in life, as studies have found that social isolation in childhood is “associated with increased cardiovascular risk factors such as obesity, high blood pressure, and blood glucose levels in adulthood,” per the report.
