Loneliness Has Now Become An Epidemic

From the outside, Clare Stevens had an enviable life: a stylish apartment in a beachside suburb
in Sydney, a well-paid job as a management consultant that she enjoyed, and a group of dependable and interesting friends. Yet most weekend afternoons, a knot of fear would begin to form in Stevens’ stomach as she anticipated the inevitable dread she knew would begin once she walked through the door of her one-bedroom apartment.

“When I’d been out with friends and had a great day, I would then come home to a totally different reality of just me, standing in the kitchen all by myself – that’s when it would really hit,” she says. Stevens, 37, was a year out of a difficult marriage when she began living alone, and the feelings of loneliness and isolation consumed her.

“Living alone wasn’t a huge shock
 to me, as I was already lonely in my marriage, but it was still really hard. It was at a time when most of my friends were coupling up or having babies, so it felt like a sort of double whammy of loneliness. It was almost like I became scared of going home at the end of the day, because I was afraid of all the feelings that would overwhelm me in those dark hours
by myself. The loneliness started to feel terminal, which was terrifying.”

Ironically, Stevens is not alone in her loneliness. Worldwide, loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions. 
In the US, nearly half of Americans report they often feel lonely, while the problem has become so bad in the UK that a minister for loneliness was appointed in January. In Australia, the statistics are just as worrying.

An alarming 60 per cent of Australians say they often feel lonely and 82 per cent believe loneliness is on the rise. Those findings, from a 2016 Lifeline survey, also revealed couples were just as likely to report high rates of loneliness as the stereotypically lovelorn Bridget Jones. Statistically, loneliness cuts across all the social barriers of age, race, wealth, education and gender. Though for women, who are often expected to acquire nurturing roles in marriage and motherhood, it can be especially jarring to find that one day they wake up with neither.


“I call it a crisis in motion,” says Alison Brook, national executive officer of Relationships Australia.

“Loneliness has become a life-and- death situation.”

Exacerbating the issue is the number of people now choosing to live alone, a situation sociologist and author Hugh Mackay calls the “global warming” of demographics. Recent figures from the Australian Institute of Family Studies estimate that the number of people living alone will double by 2026, making solo dwellers more common than “traditional” two-people households. And the majority will be women. 

Relationships Australia findings show that women who live alone typically have higher education levels, are higher income earners and are more likely to be professionals than women living with others. In other words, the higher the achiever, the more likely she is to be on her own.

This was the case for Stevens.
“I had a great job and some amazing, wonderful friends, who really helped me but sometimes the loneliness felt like a physical pain,” she reveals.

The feeling of pain is not an exaggeration. A brain imaging study undertaken by scientists at the University of Michigan in 2011 found that social rejection activates the same areas of the brain that register pain. The MRI scans of participants showed an 88 per cent overlap between the sensors activated by rejection, loneliness and physical harm. It’s the disturbing health risks attached to loneliness that have alarm bells ringing. While persistent loneliness can cause depression and has been linked to higher rates of suicide, not all the risks are confined to mental health. The findings of a 2016 UK study, which monitored more than 180,000 people over several years, revealed that lonely people
have a 30 per cent increase in the risk of heart attack and stroke. Another study revealed that loneliness can increase the likelihood of death by 
26 per cent. Shockingly, loneliness is as detrimental to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Jane Mathews was 49 when 
she found herself divorced and living alone. With two adult children and
 a life that had, up until that point, revolved around her family, it was a difficult adjustment.

“I remember one day calling up a friend to tell her about how lonely I was feeling. She told me, ‘I can’t talk long, I’m busy getting ready to have seven people over for dinner.’ I thought, ‘Where’s my invitation?’ I hung up the phone and burst into tears. That feeling of being nobody’s top priority – that everyone is off having a great time without you is what makes loneliness so debilitating.”

It would take a year before Mathews felt comfortable in her own skin. Eight years later, she has written a book, The Art of Living Alone and Loving It (Murdoch Books), because, she says, she could find no real advice on how to cultivate solitude. Mathews firmly believes that loneliness can be overcome by arming people with new skills. Her book is full of practical advice to combat it: from handy tips such as putting your lights on a timer so you return each night to a warm, welcoming home, to warding o isolation by being proactive about owning your own social life.

“I wanted to write something because times have changed and loneliness is more common than ever before,” she says. “But it wasn’t until I was divorced that I realised how left out you feel. I had no idea there was a club until I was out of it.”

When loneliness was previously a condition commonly associated with the aged, young people are now more likely to feel lonelier. Research undertaken by Britain’s Office for National Statistics found that people aged 16 to 24 were three times more likely to report feeling “always or often” lonely compared with those over 65.

Social media and the digital world are thought to be large contributors – researchers have found teenagers are far more likely to feel lonely because
of the social media accounts they operate. Ironically, despite connecting more people than ever before, social media can commonly fuel feelings of isolation and impact self-esteem.

Realising the negative effect
it was having on her life and the inevitable “why doesn’t my life look like theirs” feeling it was creating, Stevens imposed a social media ban on herself to minimise the damage to her self-worth. “I’d log onto Facebook and see another wedding or another baby and just feel so awful,” she explains. “It was much healthier 
for me to stay away from it entirely.”

Melissa Ferrari, a psychotherapist and relationship specialist, agrees, and while she admits that it can be a great space to catch up with what your friends are doing, it shouldn’t replace real-life friendships.

“When we look just at posts that are clinical, we lose seeing how someone’s face lights up when they are happy, or [how they appear] when feeling down,” says Ferrari.

“These kinds of observations of another through the face, voice 
and gestures are what helps create bonding.” It’s also good to remember that social media accounts may be curated to perfection and rarely reveal all the facets of people’s lives.

Outside of FOMO, the bigger impact of technology is the huge amount of time it sucks from our lives – time that used to be spent cultivating relationships with friends, family and neighbours. A recent survey from R U OK found that Australians spend an average of 46 hours a week looking at various screens, from smartphones to televisions, outside
 of work hours.

Lifeline’s executive director
of research and strategy, Alan Woodward, agrees our modern lives are filled with distractions that leave us very little time for nurturing relationships. “These distractions affect the quality of our interactions and are undermining our ability to form real-life human connections,’’ he says.

“We now have more ways to communicate than ever before, yet technology hasn’t created a solution to the sense of isolation.”

So while it might be easier and more convenient to keep busy on your phone or watching Netflix in order
to avoid the inconvenience of dealing with real-life people, Woodward
says we are robbing ourselves of a core aspect of life that we all need. “We shouldn’t forget that we are social beings and that what makes
us tick as people is being able to
care and look out for others,” he says.

“We have an intrinsic need to give – not just to take. In fact, helping others has been identified as one of the key ways to find meaning and satisfaction in our relationships.”

Alison Brook agrees that stepping away from the screen and making more effort with face-to-face connections – specifically within the family unit – can be hugely beneficial.

“We need to culturally value families,” she says. “We need to lean into them more, work at it and work at forgiveness. If it’s not possible to include the family unit because of dysfunction, then have other supports in place, like friendships where you consider that person to be like a sister.”

But it’s also smaller initiatives, such as keeping in touch with your neighbours, that can ensure you stay afloat emotionally. “They’re not your best friend but they aren’t strangers, either,” Brook says. “And if you have just one neighbour you can call on, it can make a world of a difference.”

Loneliness should not be confused with the art of being alone, nor is loneliness owned solely by singletons.

“Living alone does not equal being lonely – it’s also a state of mind,” Mathews says.

“You can feel lonely in a crowd or in a relationship – many people are deeply lonely in their marriages.”

A study in the Journal of Relationships revealed that up to 40 per cent of couples feel lonely in their marriage at one time or another. A more recent study puts the figure at 60 per cent.

“It’s the feeling of not been understood, known or seen by your partner that can make you feel lonely,” says Mathews. “It’s better to
 be single than lonely in a relationship.”

That is the attitude of many women, who would prefer to battle loneliness on their own terms than suffer it as part of an unhappy couple, though isolation can be the unintentional by-product. Isolation is seen as a huge factor in the battle against loneliness, as the effort to “get out there” is one of the greatest challenges of living alone.

“I’m hardly a moping single woman,” says Jenny Haward, 34, a digital editor.

“But if you do feel lonely it can be hard to pull yourself out of that feeling of melancholy, and you can unintentionally isolate yourself.” Mathews agrees, adding that some
of the advice around combating loneliness, such as “join a club!”, may feel patronising rather than helpful.

Instead, she recommends taking your social life into your own hands.

“After a miserable birthday on my own, I vowed it would never happen again,” Mathews recalls. “So now I invite
eight friends around for dinner every year. I also organise outings to places such as art galleries and festivals with my friends. I tell them to invite their friends, too. I make sure there’s something like this happening at least once a month.”

Friends can provide more than just company to socialise with, too. “It’s not difficult for me to call up one of my friends and tell them, ‘I’ve had
 a crap week, can I come and stay with you for a couple of days?” says Haward, who will often travel interstate. “It acts as a circuit-breaker, so you can go back home and enjoy your own space again.”

For those who don’t have many close connections, there are still ways out of the fog of isolation. “It took me about a year, but I slowly made it back,” says Stevens. “Music and books became my company in those dark times ... it means I have a much more enriching life now.”

Mathews is also philosophical.

“Going through that level of loneliness has made me a much more thoughtful person,” she says. “I check in with my friends more because I now know the value of those small gestures. [But]
I think it helps to remember that everyone feels lonely sometimes, and that it can pass ... it’s not forever.”

This article originally appeared in this month’s October issue of Marie Claire. On sale now.