3 in 4 Americans Struggle With Loneliness

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

 (HealthDay News) — Folks feeling lonely as the holidays approach have a lot of company, a new study suggests.

Loneliness appears to be widespread among Americans, affecting three out of every four people, researchers have found.

Further, loneliness appears to spike at specific times during adulthood. Your late 20s, mid-50s and late 80s are times when you are most at risk of feeling lonely.

Wisdom appeared to be a strong factor in avoiding feelings of loneliness, the researchers said. People who had qualities of wisdom — empathy, compassion, control over their emotions, self-reflection — were much less likely to feel lonely.

The extent of loneliness detected in the study was a “surprise, because this was a normal population,” said senior researcher Dr. Dilip Jeste, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience with the University of California, San Diego. “This was not a group of people at high risk for emotional problems.”

On the other hand, the peaks of loneliness discovered in the study made sense to Jeste.

“These are three periods of life that are full of stress for different reasons,” Jeste said.

For this study, Jeste and his colleagues surveyed 340 average adults, aged 27 to 101, living in San Diego. Each person’s loneliness was measured using several different measures, including a 20-point loneliness scale developed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

About 76 percent of people showed serious signs of loneliness based on results from the UCLA questionnaire, with 54 percent gauged as moderately lonely and 22 percent ranked as highly lonely.

Loneliness might not mean what you think it means, however.

“There’s a misperception that loneliness means social isolation,” Jeste said. “Loneliness is subjective. It is what you feel. The definition of loneliness is distress because of a discrepancy between actual social relationships and desired social relationships. There’s a discrepancy between what I want and what I have.”

Thus, people can feel lonely even if they are married and have a network of friends, if in their hearts they feel like it’s not enough, Jeste explained…..more here