Loneliness is no longer just a problem for the elderly – adults aged 25-44 are now five times more likely to be living alone than they were in 1973, according to the latest government figures. You are not immune even if you’re in a long-term relationships. Feelings of loneliness are fairly common in teenagers, and less common in those in their 20s and early 30s, but then there is a peak again, particularly for women aged from 44 to 55.

Celebrities including Lily Allen and Lindsay Lohan have spoken out about feeling lonely, and Stephen Fry has said that loneliness is the ‘most terrible’ of his problems. But there’s still a stigma attached to it and it’s hard for people to admit to feeling lonely. It’s tied up with feelings of shame and failure, and worry that people will think there’s something wrong with us. Yet it only takes a slight shift in circumstances for loneliness to start creeping into your life – when you’re the first your friends to have a baby, when you get promoted and find that you’re no longer ‘one of the gang’, or when your children leave home and you realise just how much of your life revolved around them.

As well as being more likely to relocate away from family and friends for work, we also work longer hours than ever before, squeezing out time for socialising – recent research from Relate found that only one in seven of us have daily contact with friends, and only 42 per cent count any colleagues as close friends. Even outside work, there’s a social pressure to be seen to be seen as super-busy without a minute to spare. We’ve been sucked into busy lifestyle syndrome, packing our schedules from morning to night, and a classic situation is that you end up having meaningful conversations with very few people other than your partner.

And the irony is that one of the main reasons more of us are dealing with ongoing loneliness is the rise of social media. Rather than making us feel more connected with those around us, social media sites such as Facebook actually erode our sense of wellbeing, and the more time we spend on them, the more dissatisfied we feel with our lives, according to new research. It’s no coincidence that in a major report into loneliness by the Mental Health Foundation, the group that is most worried about loneliness is those aged 18 to 34, the generation that have grown up with social media. The problem is that technology has evolved but our brains haven’t. The cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, registers digital contact, but the primitive part of our brain, the amygdala, doesn’t, so it feels deprived of human contact.

The definition of loneliness is ‘the feeling that you’re socially isolated from other people’, according to neuroscientist and world-renowned loneliness researcher Professor John Cacioppo, co-author of Loneliness – Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (Norton). It’s related to being physically isolated from other people, but it’s not the same thing. One can be lonely in a marriage and in a family. And loneliness does serve a purpose – it motivates you to seek out other human beings, and as a species, grouping together increases our chances of survival. Being in the presence of other human people sends ‘I’m safe’ signals to our brain. By contrast, when we feel lonely, we feel physically threatened, which puts our stress response on red alert.

According to the Mental Health Foundation, short periods of loneliness, painful as they may be, are normal and harmless, and something all of us experience at some point in our lives, whether it’s the first few days of a new job, or the weeks after a relationship ends. Loneliness only becomes a problem when it’s ongoing. Ongoing loneliness can lead to mental health problems such as depression – research has found that 47 per cent of women have felt depressed because they felt alone. And it becomes a vicious circle, because feeling low can make it even harder to connect with people. When you feel vulnerable to rejection, you can send out subconscious ‘keep back’ signals and may even come across as hostile in social situations.

Not everyone is equally sensitive to feeling lonely, as we have different needs and expectations of our relationships with others. Introverts may need only one or two close friends and will need to see them far less regularly than more extroverted types. Feeling unloved or abandoned as a child can leave you more vulnerable to loneliness as an adult, but it can also affect those who had a happy childhood.

And you don’t need to spend a lot of time on your own to suffer from loneliness – you can feel lonely in a relationship if you don’t get the quality of connection you need. If you’re single, you could experience ‘emotional’ loneliness because we all have a need for intimate connectedness. Not having close friends causes ‘social’ loneliness, as we also need ‘relational connectedness’, which comes from having face-to-face contacts that are mutually rewarding. Not having a connection to a community, meanwhile, causes ‘existential’ loneliness, or a feeling that life has no meaning, because we have a need for ‘collective connectedness’, which comes from feeling that you’re part of a group.

Read more – 6 Strategies to Beat Loneliness