What are the long-term effects of chronic loneliness?
Over time, loneliness can impair our ability to exercise self-control and delay gratification and it can compromise our executive functioning. It interferes with judgment, complex thought, will power, and perseverance as well as one’s ability to read other people. What causes some people to get stuck in “chronic” loneliness? Because loss of social connection was such a threat, loneliness engenders fear as well as pain. For each of us, our need for social connection and our sensitivity to social pain is biased by our individual genetic inheritance. Fear-based responses, understandably, prompt us to look out for ourselves, which can interfere with the accurate perceptions we need to effectively connect with others and the selection of the social skills or appropriate social responses in any given occasion. Thus, when a person becomes lonely, he or she can get caught in a feedback loop in which the undercurrent of danger and threat associated in evolutionary terms with social isolation ca
