GET HEALTHY: BE A FRIEND AND WIN A FRIEND

As a medical physician for over 50 years, I strive to give you the best medical information on controversial medical subjects and let you the reader come to your own conclusions. I have no ties to any organization, pharmaceutical, or lobby group. As an acupuncturist since 1982, I find western medicine and medical acupuncture are very complimentary with astounding results.
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CURE FOR LONELINESS:   BE A FRIEND, WIN A FRIEND

Have you noticed how few people talk to you, look at you, speak to you, touch you, and look connected?  You work all day, if you still have a job, come home, eat alone, exercise alone, watch TV alone, go to ale houses and watch sporting events alone, and even sleep alone.  You wake up more at night and spend less time in bed. The process is repeated day after day. 

Certainly you feel lonely sometimes—after a break-up with your friend or lover, when you move to a new place, when you are excluded from some social gathering.  Chronic loneliness, however, is something else entirely.   It is one of the surest markers in existence for health maladjustment.

Friendship is a lot like food. Social relationships and contacts are needed for survival.  Lack of close friends and relationships cause you distress.  This awareness plays like a sound track in your brain and that makes you very unhappy.   The absence of meaningful social relationships causes you to fall apart mentally and even physically.

Desperately seeking company, you find only robotic companionship: TV commercials, the Internet, your beloved I pod, and Face book. 

Having left your family for the big city, where there is a lot of excitement, you realize, your basic needs—which you can’t identify --- are not being met.  Being a social animal, you need social relationships.

BODY CHANGES

Cardiovascular problems, viral infections, and higher mortality are associated with loneliness.    As a lonely person, your health, compared to a popular person, is that of a smoker verses a non-smoker.

Loneliness undermines regulation of the circulatory system: the heart muscle works harder and the blood vessels, by blood flow turbulence, become damaged.

The very genetic core of your body—your genes— is affected by loneliness. Gene expression, in 209 different sites, display elevated immune activation and inflammation.  

The glucocorticoid receptors are desensitized, cutting off the immune control and anti-inflammatory effects of cortisol, a stress-related hormone   Levels of circulating stress hormones are raised, blocking the conversion of carbohydrates to energy.

In short, loneliness alters your sleep habits, depresses your immune system, and leaves you depressed.

CONCLUSION

Increasingly, loneliness is the cause of a range of medical problems.  Unmet social needs take a serious toll on your health, eroding your arteries, creating high blood pressure, and even undermining your learning and memory systems.    When your social needs are met, you are buffered from stress, and you function at your best.   It becomes easier to stay motivated, stay on track mentally, and to meet the challenges of life.

Perhaps its time to look at your neighbor, say hello and thank you more often, give a friendly tap on the shoulder for a job well done, and above all be a friend to someone else.  Reconnect with the human world and let technology take second place for a while. 

Be a friend, and you will win a friend.

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