Loneliness has been an inevitable concern during a COVID-19 pandemic that has forced many of us to live in isolation for extended periods.  Indeed, for those identified as being particularly vulnerable to the virus, isolation has been highly recommended for most of 2020.  It’s a state of affairs that has prompted inevitable concern about the impact of this on people’s mental health.

Economist Noreena Hertz believes the problems of loneliness go further than this most unusual of years, however, and in her latest book, The Lonely Century, argues that we’re actually living through a loneliness epidemic that is just as harmful as the COVID epidemic.

New research from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and University of Rome La Sapienza explored loneliness among older adults in both Italy and the US and found a strong negative correlation between loneliness and wisdom, with a degree of wisdom appearing to act as a buffer against loneliness.

“An important finding from our study was a significant inverse correlation between loneliness and wisdom. People with higher scores on a measure of wisdom were less lonely and vice versa,” the researchers say.  “Loneliness was consistently associated with poor general health, worse quality of sleep and less happiness, whereas the reverse was generally true for wisdom.”

Protection against loneliness

The researchers examined four distinct groups, featuring adults aged between 50 and 65, and adults over the age of 90 from Cilento in Italy and San Diego in the US.  The inverse correlation between wisdom and loneliness was present in each of the four groups.

“We translated the rating scales for loneliness and wisdom from English to Italian. It is remarkable that the findings related to these two traits were largely similar in two markedly different cultures — a rural region of southern Italy and an urban/suburban county in the United States, both with different native languages and unique historical, educational and socioeconomic backgrounds,” the researchers say.

The researchers highlight how wisdom has a number of components, including compassion, empathy, self-reflection, and emotional regulation.  It appears that compassion and empathy were most strongly associated with reductions in loneliness.

With societies across the world rapidly aging, there is an obvious need to better understand how this can be done as healthily as possible.  Social contact is crucial to our mental wellbeing, so studies like this might provide interesting insights as to how this can be achieved.

“Routine assessment of loneliness with evidence-based, compassion-focused interventions for prevention and management of loneliness should become an integral part of clinical practice. So how do you increase compassion? Utilizing approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy or writing in a gratitude diary can help someone become more compassionate,” the researchers conclude.