January 24, 2025

Why Loneliness Can Be Hazardous to Your Health

About Brookdale Senior Living

Brookdale Senior Living offers multiple care levels for seniors in more than 600 communities nationwide. Brookdale helps you find the right care plan for yourself or your loved one. With amenities such as transportation services, salons and private dining rooms and activities such as gardening, fitness classes and trivia nights Brookdale caters to a wide range of interests and needs.

Loneliness is nothing new. And despite an abundance of devices designed to “connect” us, in 2025 the real human contact we crave still eludes many of us.

Tiffani Bell Washington, MD, MPH, a psychiatrist, told the American Medical Association in 2023, “Loneliness is essentially the feeling of being uncomfortable or in distress when someone feels that there is a gap between the connection they would like and the connection they actually have.”

Loneliness is nothing new. And despite an abundance of devices designed to “connect” us, in 2025 the real human contact we crave still eludes many of us.

But loneliness is more than an emotion. It is a condition with life-threatening implications. An unmet need for human connection can have serious consequences for both physical and emotional health. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, in a 2023 advisory, targeted an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation … that has harmed individual and societal health.” Among senior adults, loneliness can present an even greater challenge, exacerbating existing chronic conditions and creating a vicious cycle of illness and social withdrawal.

The Toll of Loneliness

A November 2024 Medscape report cited multiple studies showing the negative effects loneliness can have on physical and mental/emotional health. Among the findings:

1 in 3 American adults report experiencing chronic loneliness, or feeling lonely at least once a week.
Social isolation and loneliness can increase one’s risk of coronary heart disease and stroke mortality. Medscape adds, “Many studies have shown that individuals experiencing social isolation or loneliness have an increased risk for anxiety and depression, dementia, infectious disease, hospitalization, and all-cause death.” And according to the National Institute on Aging, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, social isolation and loneliness also are linked to high blood pressure, obesity and weakened immune function.
Loneliness and social isolation increase the risk of early mortality by about one-third. That’s similar to the risk posed by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Eliminating loneliness could prevent 11% to 18% of cases of depression.

The total eradication of loneliness might seem like an unrealistic goal, but the only way to approach the challenge is one person at a time, leveraging a potent combination of expertise, knowledge and empathy.

What Health Providers Can Do

What can healthcare providers do to help address loneliness among their patients? Surgeon General Murthy’s 2023 advisory recommends, among other steps:

Providing healthcare professionals with more formal training and continuing education on the connections between loneliness and health (including advanced training on prevention and interventions)
Facilitating the inclusion of assessment results in EHRs
Educating patients on the risks of inadequate social connection
Integrating social connection into patient care
Enabling partnerships between clinicians and researchers to “evaluate the application of evidence-based assessment tools and interventions within clinical settings”

The recognition of loneliness as a significant health risk factor aligns with healthcare organizations’ growing commitment to a proactive, whole-person approach to care. But effectively providing such a comprehensive level of care requires a team approach, ideally connecting the patient and their family with each provider and caregiver. And this approach is enabled by timely and relevant communication, shared information, regular observation and ongoing engagement.

Loneliness and Senior Living

As we wrote in an April 2024 blog post, senior living communities are in a unique position to combat loneliness among older adults. By fostering connections, friendship and community, senior living communities can help keep residents active, engaged and less likely to suffer from loneliness.

In addition, because the operators and staff of senior living communities see residents daily, they are likely to notice signs of isolation and loneliness. Signs might include a loss of interest in hobbies and other activities, a decline in personal hygiene, poor eating and nutrition, or a living space marked by clutter and disrepair. Some of these symptoms, in addition to signifying loneliness, also pose direct threats to one’s health, safety and general well-being. Timely interventions can get residents back on track and help prevent them from developing “learned loneliness” caused by their own habits.

Brookdale communities are designed to help mitigate loneliness and isolation, whether the resident is in independent living, assisted living or memory care. Our commitment to the unique needs and desires of each individual guides us in the creation of a living arrangement with the appropriate levels of care and engagement.

Please reach out to us if you’d like to know more about how Brookdale can work with you to combat loneliness, one person at a time.

Inside Brookdale Communities

See what’s happening on our community Instagram pages

Chat Now