Visit Your Parents Or They Might Die

A British study has found that for people aged 50 and over loneliness can be particularly unhealthy. How unhealthy? Twice as unhealthy as obesity, according to the research. Another study by Judith Shulevitz has shown that loneliness can be as harmful as smoking.

According to Schulevitz’s report, The Science Of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You, loneliness sends messages to your brain that can be harmful in a number of ways. It sends misleading hormonal signals, changes the way molecules on genes govern behaviour and essentially throws all kinds of brain systems out of whack.

The diseases this causes include Alzheimer’s, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases. Even tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people. The British study showed that loneliness has twice the impact on an early death as obesity. Even poverty is better. People living in poverty (those who aren't lonely) have just a 19 percent higher risk of dying early.

What does this mean for us? Most of us aren't old yet. And we've got plenty of friends. At least on Facebook. Except, as it turns out, Facebook is no substitute for genuine human to human, face to face interaction! Kit Harington, the guy who plays Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, knows this all too well. He's opened up about his battle with Facebook addiction, and now won't even use Twitter.

A Relationships Australia study found that the more social media and technology you use, the more lonely you're likely to get. And those who are more lonely are more likely to use Facebook to contact friends than using other forms of communication, like talking. More than half of lonely people rely primarily on Facebook, while only a quarter of those who have never been lonely use it.

The scariest part of this research is that it's not the oldies who are most at risk here. The loneliest group out of those surveyed was 24-35 year olds—more than a quarter frequently felt lonely. If we don't do something about it, we're going to end up in retirement homes hunched over cracked old iPhone 17s trying to send messages to our grandkids on Facebook which they never get because no-one's used Facebook for, like, twenty years, so instead we'll challenge the guy next to us to a game of Candy Crush and then go and kill ourselves.

Something has to be done.

One way to help with your own loneliness and that of your aging relatives is to go and visit them. Increase their life expectancy simply by listening to them talk. Offer them a cigarette, chomp down on some wholesome fried chicken together and then steal their credit card details—better to be fat, nicotine addicted and poor than lonely!

Or, there's The Community Visitors Scheme, a National Department of Health program that “provides companionship to socially isolated people” in aged care homes. It's a particularly sweet idea. The scheme matches a volunteer visitor to a retirement home resident with similar “likes and dislikes” for fortnightly visits. (If you don’t have parents or grandparents whose lives you could save with a weekly iced vovo, perhaps this is one for you.) But if war stories and passive aggressive criticism of your generation's inability to just get a job are too much to handle, you'll just have to learn how to fight loneliness yourself. Join a religion! Find a loving and supporting spouse! Quit Facebook! Or get some help from everybody’s favourite dad rockers, Wilco.

Follow Evan on Twitter: @evanwilliamsss