Lonely people can feel their heartbeat clearly like everyone else, but their brains respond differently
For a long time, psychologists have described loneliness as the discomfort that comes from wanting more social connection than we feel we have, but there is more nuance to loneliness. Scientists are increasingly finding that loneliness is also linked to how we respond to negative emotions and how sensitive we become to signs of social threat.
A recent study by researchers from Hiroshima University has found that while lonely individuals can detect their heartbeat as accurately as their peers, they interpret and feel about their bodily signals differently. The research, published in Biological Psychology, aimed to explore the link between loneliness and interoception, the brain's capacity to perceive and interpret internal bodily signals such as heartbeats.
The study involved 39 healthy young adults who completed questionnaires assessing loneliness and social isolation, body awareness, and depressive symptoms. They then completed two heartbeat tasks and had their resting brain activity recorded using EEG alongside their heart activity using ECG. The findings revealed that lonelier people scored lower in four areas of body awareness: trust, self-regulation, emotional awareness, and freedom.
Additionally, they reported feeling less comfortable with and less able to regulate their emotional and bodily experiences, while also showing weaker automatic brain responses to their heartbeats in the frontal regions of the brain. The researchers suggested that this weaker processing could be why loneliness keeps the body locked in a state of high alert or hypervigilance.
The study highlights the need to understand the intricacies of loneliness, not just the psychological but biological ones, as chronic loneliness is linked to serious health problems such as high stress, depression, and immune system dysfunction.
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