John Cacioppo on How to Cope with Loneliness | Big Think

John Cacioppo on How to Cope with Loneliness

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Why loneliness can be useful and what kinds of relationships help us cope, with John Cacioppo.

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JOHN CACIOPPO:

John T. Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago, the Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and the Director of the Arete Initiative at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.

Professor Cacioppo is a Big Think Delphi Fellow.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Cacioppo: One of the things we’ve learned in our research on loneliness is what a cool species we are. It’s really… It’s what contributes to us being human, to humanity itself. So, it… I think it’s great that we all experience loneliness on an acute basis. It helps bind us together. It helps keep us bound together. It helps us think about other people’s perspective and empathize and care and go beyond just our own personal interests, and I think one of the things that makes us a very cool species indeed is that we can operate only out of self interest but that isn’t a very satisfying way to live, and it’s partly the story of human nature that the study of loneliness is informing that it’s part of our very nature. It’s part of our genetic inheritance and our social customs that we care for one another, or sometimes it’s as much as we care about ourselves.

Question: What steps can people take to overcome loneliness?

Cacioppo: So, if one is feeling loneliness, you can ask how would, how would you climb out of that chronic grip of loneliness, and the answer is, first, to recognize what it is, that it’s very much like hunger and thirst and pain. It’s an evolved signal because something is going wrong with you as an organism and as a species and one needs to respond to that pain cue, and the way you respond is to take the time to reconnect, and it’s not reconnecting by having 4,000 faces on Facebook, as friends, it’s having a few high quality connections, a few good relationships. And so, one has the capacity to get out of that grip if you know what it is that it takes. It’s not the number of friends, it’s really the quality. And to do that, one also needs to understand what loneliness does to you and to your psychological functioning. As I suggested, it impairs executive function. It makes one ready to take a shorter term rewards that’s actually perhaps more harmful than the long term. If you know that, then one can be more guarded about taking that short term benefit, knowing that it’s going to have long term cause, because one knows that it’s not actually going to help you climb out of loneliness. To know that loneliness is associated with threat, because, evolutionarily, being isolated was very, very deadly, and onto genetically, when we’re born, we’re completely alone and we depend on others for our very survival, and that’s the case for quite a while, in our lives. And so, there’s a fear associated with isolation, and knowing that there’s a fear and threat and that much of our reaction to other people is premised on that fear and threat is important for getting out of this. So, one of the things lonely individuals who are chronically lonely tend to do is they want to connect with others. In fact, brain imaging studies we’ve done show that if you saw a picture of other people, it’s the lonely individual whose visual cortical activity just lights up, right, because they’re very attentive to social stimuli. That fits a need, just like when I’m very hungry, fast food signs jump out at me, right? Because it fills a need. So they’re kind of monitoring that, but because they expect to be rejected, they expect to be... they don’t think they’re worthy of those connections. This is all associated with others telling us what our own worth is, that they tend to withdraw. And to overcome it, one of the first things you need to do is to get out and have contact, but do so in a safe environment. So, people who are hungry for social...

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