What’s the deal with community loneliness and what to do about it

11 minute read

There’s a lot of talk about isolation today. I’ve read through at least four grants to ‘tackle social isolation in my local area’. Last year about four billion people across the world were under some kind of lockdown in their homes, and after almost a year being in and out (currently in) of lockdown restrictions I think it’s safe to say we’re experiencing a bit of a red flag for potential harm.

And we are right to be concerned. Humans are social creatures and however introverted a person may be, we all need a bit of person time eventually.

Solitary confinement is the worst punishment a society can dish out in most parts of the world (or second only to capital punishment) after all.

We tend to use isolation and loneliness interchangeably, but there’s a core difference that’s important if we’re going to try and fix it.

Isolation is when you are physically and socially cut-off from others. The standard image is of a little old lady sitting in the corner of a dim room with nothing but ticking clocks for company. This is because it's easier to be isolated as you pass through your third age, since you and your friends are more likely to have health problems that get in the way of meeting up, such as, for instance, death.

But while most studies and campaigns focus on the isolated elderly, anyone can be cut-off from people to talk to. Anyone moving to a new area, country, or life stage increases their chances of being isolated; think of that one guy who never comes out of his room at university, or a new parent with only a baby for company.

I met a man once who lived in an area of Scotland where the average population density was two people per five miles. It’s worrying when you’re potentially outnumbered by rewilding programs.

The invisible killers

Being isolated is a detriment to health on its own, as people have a 20%-50% higher chance of dying early compared to their connected counterparts. That’s at least partly because they are less likely to meet someone who says ‘if I was you I’d get that seen to’, and why isolation increases the risk of early death from all causes, not just one or two.

Some of the other headline issues are:

30% increased risk of stroke
30% increased risk of heart disease
50% increased risk of dementia.

This last one is more about ‘use it or lose it’. Generally speaking, brains love people because they’re so stimulating. Millions of years of evolution have gone into teaching us that people (plural, not generic singular) are the best way to survive, so we have vast swathes of neurons sitting there waiting to analyse a bit of social stimulation. Without it, our brains start to compost, which accelerates the progression of dementia even if it’s not a primary cause.

Whilst isolation is a physical state, loneliness is a mental one. We feel lonely, even if we regularly meet people. So even though isolation is a bigger risk factor for those aged 50 and over, 10-24 year olds are most likely to feel lonely.

In some respects this is natural (if not desirable). Late childhood to early adulthood is when we go through the oft traumatic process of working out who we are in relation to others. That can be pretty brutal, especially if others don’t embrace your identity as much or in the same way as you would like.

And it’s for this reason that loneliness is more likely in marginalised and minority groups such as immigrant populations or LGBTQ+ peoples. But again, anyone can feel lonely at times.

While isolation has the insidious advantage over our physical ill health, loneliness correspondingly chips away at our mental health. People who feel lonely are more likely to suffer from:

depression
anxiety
suicidal thoughts

Loneliness will also affect physical health through your immune system by hitting up the stress response. This tends to weaken your body’s ability to fight disease but also causes widespread inflammation, which makes certain health conditions worse as well making you achy and miserable.

Lonely and isolated communities

So far we’ve looked at, quite understably, loneliness and isolation in individuals. Given the problem is all about disconnect, this has major implications for any group (by definition, people who are connected), including communities.

The Danish word for community is fællesskab or 'common cupboard', meaning all the great stuff you get to share that stops you from being eaten/frozen/starved to death. The smaller your cupboard the less you have to survive and thrive with.

Areas with higher rates of isolation mean people are cut off from the networks that make up the metaphorical cupboard. Isolated people can't contribute or take advantage of them, so everybody has less.

Less connected communities have higher rates of crime, lower feelings of security and trust, and fewer resident-led projects. Local governments and healthcare trusts also spend more on supporting people with isolation (and loneliness) related health conditions, leaving less for everything else.

Lonely communities suffer from similar problems. Although lonely doesn't necessarily mean isolated (and vice versa), the emotional toll of feeling disconnected means you have fewer spare resources to give to the community cupboard and you're less likely to ask for help. Barer cupboards all round.

Well that all sounds horrible, give me some good news

The good news is there are lots of interventions for individuals. The less good news is there are relatively few tested for communities, which is more than just lots of people stuck together.

Since isolation is a physical condition, it can be improved by addressing issues of physical space, particularly navigation and access. The joy of the internet is that physical distance matters a lot less, making it an ideal medium for the isolated.

For instance digital exclusion is being aggressively tackled as a barrier to service and social engagement, particularly at the time of writing where England is in the depths of its third national lockdown.

When we’re all not afraid to touch outside surfaces, good public transport links and mobility enablers such as easy-to-cross roads, public toilets and comfy bus shelters help get people out and about. And wheelchair/buggy accessible ramps. Please, please, buggy ramps.

Generally speaking, if you get the conditions right then people will start building connections by themselves. This isn’t true for all individuals, who may need extra support such as skills development, but it’s a good enough heuristic for communities.

Some of the negative health impacts in the community at large can be countered with good and accessible support services, such as your local GP and mental health clinics. This still isn't great as you have to get ill first and then make an appointment, and it doesn't do much to improve the root cause of loneliness or isolation, but you'll be a touch less ill on average.

Finally, Community Navigators who link the needy to the local groups or services right for them have been shown to reduce isolation, although connecting with the isolated in the first place is the biggest challenge.

But, and it’s a big but, just because people are more connected doesn’t mean they feel more connected.

Projects that improve physical isolation don’t always succeed in reducing experienced loneliness because of this, and loneliness interventions often make the mistake of focusing on objective change rather than subjective ones.

For example the four most common ways to improve individual loneliness are:

social skills training
enhancing social support
increasing opportunities for social contact
changing unhelpful thinking patterns

While a meta analysis in 2011 suggested all four helped a bit, it’s the last one that’s the most successful. This is obvious once you think about it. Thoughts are usually the puppet masters behind our feelings (or so Cognitive Behavioural Therapy will have us believe. But that’s an article for another day), so if you can change them then you solve loneliness.

But that’s for individuals. How on earth do you make an entire community ‘think’ less lonely?

Changing the thoughts of thousands

The first thoughts that need to change are ours. We’re not trying to reduce social isolation, we’re trying to promote a sense of belonging.

This turns up a lot more useful studies and reveals how nuanced the issue truly is.

For instance an exercise intervention (which generally does all sorts of nice things for wellbeing) found being active with another person did not increase feelings of belonging, including when compared to doing exercise alone. It’s not enough to just do something with others.

But the researchers found having the motivation to belong did have an impact on reducing loneliness when participants exercised with others.

And here we come to an interesting Machiavellian split in the history of belonging interventions. Do we motivate through love or by fear?

Having a common threat, be it enemy combatants, natural disasters or a rival football team is a powerful way to give people a sense of belonging. This was famously demonstrated in Sherif’s Robbers Camp experiment which saw boys form different groups, then develop hostilities towards each other during competitions before finally uniting over a shared goal.

Who you share the threat with determines 1) what group you feel you belong to, and conversely 2) which groups you see as competitors and therefore threats themselves.

For instance, at the time of writing Europe is running short on vaccines for the Covid19 virus. Where previously there was little ‘us and them’ rhetoric in the newspapers (all being united against the common infectious enemy), now nations can see themselves as competing for the same limited resource. This fractures that wider sense of belonging. Today’s headlines include:

The last headline in particular shows attempts to a) strengthen the EU identity with shared flag imagery, and b) improve the sense of British identity by making fun of it.

Motivation for belonging through fear and conflicting goals is certainly powerful and easy enough to invoke, as long as being part of a group is what saves you from the threat. All you need are comms from a trusted source to that effect.

Take these rather unsubtle World War II allied propaganda posters:

This also works for climate change. Hitler might have been a climate denier, you never know.

Also technically true today. Take that, German bloggers!

Belonging to your own group (in this case a country) is strengthened through messages of fear coupled with personal action, and ultimately at the expense of positive regard for the other nation.

However, as well as wartime propaganda, the same mechanics are at play in organisations such as Antifa and white supremacy. Be careful what you wish for.

Which brings me to motivation through love.

Belonging is not just about seeing one group as ‘good’. In his book Community, Solidarity and Belonging, Andrew Mason discusses ‘multicultural education’ as a way to promote belonging - not simply teaching that other cultures exist but that they “have something important to say to all human beings” i.e. to see the personal value in them at the same time as being aware of your participation in your own culture.

Mason suggests that teaching subjects such as history, geography and literature through varied cultural lenses allows us to understand our own groups more deeply and see the usefulness of others.

Take Neil McGregor’s Living with the Gods for example, where he shows how ancient beliefs from distant lands are embedded in our everyday, such as the blending of Roman and Anglo-Saxon gods in the English names for the days of the week.

Thank gods it’s Frige (image copyright of Penguin)

This is more important in multicultural societies where difference is an easily observable fact of daily life, and for multinational identities such as the EU or UAE. Motivation through fear is more likely to end in flames when your ‘out group’ is also your neighbour.

Yet the most powerful way to strengthen a sense of community belonging is what united the boys in Robbers Cave in the end: meaningful action towards a common goal.

After all the hostilities, including flag burning, the boys had to pull a stuck car out of a ditch together to get shared camp supplies. This is an example of shared meaningful action, and by the end of the holidays the groups were on friendly terms again. Previously having the two hostile groups come in contact with each other just tended to make things worse (an example of failed cultural integration, you might say).

There is a tendency in modern interventions to ask participants for (endless) feedback about what they have just experienced. On paper this counts as a big tick towards community participation and somebody gets a pat on the back somewhere.

Yet without any link between the action of giving feedback and some kind of change, this is in fact rather disempowering for the feedbackees. Their action seems meaningless to them, regardless of what the actual impact is, chipping away at that coveted sense of community.

The use of ‘You Said, We Did’ campaigns in the NHS and elsewhere is a good example of how community participation can be shown to be meaningful and thereby strengthen that identity, as long as you put up enough posters for people to see it.

The same can be said for the many Mutual Aid groups appearing at borough- and street-level, where people offer what they can to support others through the pandemic. The fact that most group activities are freely and frequently communicated through shared messaging groups helps bolster that sense of shared meaningful connection by making actions and consequences visible.

Connecting a community

So to recap, to tackle isolation within a community, we must improve the physical barriers to connection. To sort out loneliness we need more nuance and a focus on feelings. Think about:

Whether you want to motivate belonging through love or fear
Who you can use as your ‘trusted source’ of communications
Valuing aspects of your culture with others
How to create opportunities for visibly meaningful action

Postscript: There’s a gap

While researching this article I came across Colin Ellard’s book Places of the Heart: the psychogeography of everyday life. In one chapter he talks about ‘places of affection’ and points out that through quirks of development, our brains will see meaning, intention, emotion, causality and all sorts of deeply important things where they have no right to be.

We might think a tree looks sad or a house seems scary. I have plants that I truly believe persist in living through sheer stubbornness rather than any physical reality that supports life.

This sets the groundwork for what is at once incredibly bizarre and extremely normal: relationships with inanimate objects. Our lives are full of extraordinary relationships with things, such as a revered piece of (fairly ugly) heirloom jewelry, well-worn favourite books, and seriously important work mugs.

And this strangely quotidian connection to stuff extends just as easily to places.

I have a fondness for the town of Bath in the west of England (mainly because living there as a student it’s the only place I have ever been permitted to sleep in ‘til 10am). My face will soften remembering it’s Georgian buildings and, like any good relationship, we’ll share a joke about how vain Bath is by having such fine stonework on the front of houses and rubbish ones at the back.

No doubt you have your own spot somewhere in the world you hold a certain affection for.

And that is what’s missing from the literature on loneliness - love of place. What is connection if not love? What better way to change how you think and feel than to love a place? Years of study and hundreds of research papers have so far thrown up very little about connecting through affection for spaces, possibly because ‘cognitive behavioural therapy for space love’ sounds like my breakout sci fi novel. Yet it is a bit strange to omit such a natural behaviour from the literature.

But imagine if it could be done. An intervention to inspire love of a place, rather than a ‘psychoeducational workshop on utilising local networks’. Watch this space...