Vivek H. Murthy served as the Surgeon General from 2014-2017, so you can probably consider him a health expert. He’s got an important message for us about our brains and bodies: if you sometimes feel like loneliness is killing you slowly, that’s because it is.
Earlier this year, I went to a dinner party at a friend’s house. The household and guests slowly assembled in the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets, moving a stack of plates from a shelf to a table, volunteering for a deli beer run, until finally a meal was prepared. It was a nice dinner, and by the end, sated and…
Is watching your cat drink a glass of wine the loneliest you can feel?
On Thursday evening, while Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders wore away at each other and the nation with an aural nail file, Republican candidates attended a gala with 800 of their closest donors.
A woman who sent an online stranger more than a million dollars without ever having met him is desperately trying to keep her positive thinking intact. Even though her boyfriend's voice has differed and he keeps asking for money despite the fact that he has no plans to meet her, she is hoping against hope that he's a…
Dust off your OkCupid account and reactive that PlentyOfFish profile you'd almost forgotten about (almost); It's the new year and right now is the busiest time for online dating sites. So take a new photo and start frantically sending winks and woos to everyone you're attracted to
You know that feeling you get when you come home to an empty house with nothing but the TV to keep you company and a delicious Swanson dinner with reconstituted brownie in the fridge? Well, your problems are solved. No matter how lonely you are, there's now a chair that will make your life a joy.
Unless you’re an Immortal from the Highlander franchise, being alone can be pretty tough at times, and nowhere is one’s loneliness more acute than in a city teeming with busy, socializing people, a city like the mythical island of Manhattan. People cope with the isolation and loneliness of living in Manhattan in all…
If you're the kind of person who found both the book and movie for Confessions of a Shopaholic to be stunningly accurate depictions of the sadness that comes from valuing material possessions too much, a new study from the Journal of Consumer Research has got your back. Researchers have found that the more…
It was chanteuse Britney Spears who once sang, "My loneliness is killing me" — and, as is so often the case with warrior poets, her words held a certain truth. A new study out of the UK suggests that isolation and loneliness might be as important to cause of death as other common contributors like smoking and that…
New research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Insult to Injury Papercut Society suggests that chronic loneliness can have a negative effect on our immune systems. Awesome, guys. I mean, can we not give the lonely people one break? Now they have to have mono too? With no one to bring them soup? It's a…
Cheesy name aside, the premise behind "Invite for a Bite," a female-only app that allows traveling businesswomen to meet up when they're in the same city, is pretty awesome: why not hang with a bunch of professional women with great stories to tell? Naturally, though, the CNN reporter who profiled the service didn't…
Some people love sleeping alone. Many folks prefer to have a warm body there in the dark with them, and there are those who could go either way, depending on whether the other person is a heavy snorer, sweats the bed, or kicks. But apparently there's a link between loneliness and sleep disruptions — meaning if you…
For one writer, the aftermath of Hurricane Irene provided "a kind of high school reunion with boredom." For me, it was a brush with isolation.
It's not even the end of the day and we're already reading a lot about how lonely everyone presumably is.
Divorce is no fun for anyone. But a new study shows that it affects men and women in different ways, with women more likely to take a financial hit, and men an emotional one.
Victor LaValle's account of his two years of (almost) celibacy — alleviated occasionally by phone sex — makes the case that not getting any will drive you crazy. But actual lack of sex may matter less than just plain loneliness.
The title Lonely tends to conjure up words like shy, sad, and withdrawn, so it's something of a surprise that Emily White has written an impassioned call to arms on behalf of a condition no one wants to talk about.
BoingBoing's Lisa Katayama writes of a woman in San Francisco who walked into a restaurant, requested a table for two, and unfolded a three-foot cardboard cutout of a man, with whom she had dinner. Art project? Maybe. Or: Loneliness.
Loneliness is contagious, say researchers. Apparently, it quickly becomes a vicious cycle, leading to the complete isolation of those already on the fringes of society. Experts believe this is a function of our natural tendency to drop the loners. [Reuters]
