For two years you didn’t see friends like you used to. You missed your colleagues from work, even the barista on the way there.
You were lonely. We all were.
Here’s what neuroscientists think was happening in your brain.
The human brain, having evolved to seek safety in numbers, registers loneliness as a threat. The centers that monitor for danger, including the amygdala, go into overdrive, triggering a release of “fight or flight” stress hormones…. Subconsciously, you start to view other people more as potential threats — sources of rejection or apathy — and less as friends, remedies for your loneliness.
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Even before the pandemic, the United States surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, said the country was experiencing an “epidemic of loneliness,” driven by the accelerated pace of life and the spread of technology into all of our social interactions. With this acceleration, he said, efficiency and convenience have “edged out” the time-consuming messiness of real relationships.
The result is a public health crisis on the scale of the opioid epidemic or obesity, Dr. Murthy said. In a 2018 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said they always or often felt lonely or socially isolated.
The pandemic only exacerbated these feelings.
