For many of us, the holiday season evokes warm
feelings of togetherness and love. We gather with friends and family to
reconnect and celebrate at the end of each year.
But for people who experience chronic
loneliness, the holidays can be a particularly difficult time of year — one
they approach with a sense of dread. While other people are attending holiday
parties and rejoicing in what can be a magical and heartwarming season, they’re
at home with nowhere to go and no one to talk to.
If you Google loneliness and the holidays,
you’ll find a raft of articles that offer tips for lonely people on how to
endure the season. These articles are well-intentioned but mis-guided. The
burden of confronting the profound sense of sadness that the loneliest among us
feel during the holidays shouldn’t lie with the lonely. It should lie with each
of us.
We are living through an epidemic of
loneliness. According to a recent study, nearly half of Americans report sometimes or
always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent), and just 53 percent
say they have meaningful in-person social interactions on a daily basis. And
while we may think of loneliness as being particularly widespread among
seniors, some 45% of whom experience loneliness, the study noted that
“Generation Z (adults ages 18-22) is the loneliest generation.”
“During my years caring for patients,” former
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in 2017, “the most common pathology I saw was not
heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” Research shows that a person who suffers from extreme
social isolation faces the same health risks as one who smokes fifteen
cigarettes a day.
Faced with what we are finally acknowledging
is a major crisis, the instinct in health care has been to build interventions
to solve the problem. Two years ago, CareMore, the health care delivery system
that I lead, created a Togetherness program that connects lonely seniors with
social work assistants and volunteer phone pals who regularly reach out to
members and connect them to community resources. Likewise, Cigna is using its employer-sponsored health plans to promote
social connections in client workplaces. A startup called Papa has partnered with several health insurers to
connect seniors with college-age people who sign up to help out with chores or
just chat. And Intuition Robotics is developing a robot that can have complex conversations with lonely
people.
All of these initiatives offer hope that
extreme social isolation can be curbed in the near future. But for now, I’d
like to suggest that we all embrace the spirit of the holidays and do our part
to reduce loneliness simply by being good to one another.
Over the next few weeks, stop by your elderly
neighbor’s house for a cup of coffee and a conversation. Call a relative you
haven’t seen in years. Visit a senior center and share some of your favorite
music with someone you’ve never met before. Ask your co-workers what
they’re doing for the holidays, and, if they don’t have a place to go for
Christmas dinner, invite them over. Make sure that single friend isn’t avoiding
going out on New Year's because they don’t have a significant other to kiss
when the clock strikes midnight. Unplug from social media and resolve only to
have in-person conversations for a day. Eat lunch with your co-workers in the
break room. Buy an extra movie ticket for someone you’ve been meaning to catch
up with. Heal a broken relationship. Recommit to romance with your significant
other.
Loneliness won’t be solved through health care
interventions alone. Instead, it will take a vast social movement to conquer
this epidemic that begins with every one of us. There is no better time to get
started than the holidays.
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