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BEWARE: Wordy but very informative article ahead 
As a psychology major I’ve been lucky to learn about loneliness, but I’ve been finding it difficult to post some helpful, concise, less jargon filled information about it here (I didn’t know how to summarize 6 years worth of readings into one article!)
I finally found this article, which I think is really, really good. The entire article is here (8 pages long..yikes!) - http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Loneliness-Research-How-Loneliness-Affects-Health-How-to-Help/1 but it is worth reading. Lots of research findings. I’ve highlighted some bits here that I thought might be relevant and easier to read.
1 is a Lonely Number
Lonely people tell themselves that it could always be worse. "Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world," says a character in Zoë Heller's novel What Was She Thinking?: "You make out to-do lists—reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself—slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up...and think, 'I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next 15 hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.'"
Yet they do, the lonely people—they pull themselves together. They fend off the fact of their own misery and trundle forward, carrying its granite load, hour by hour, job by job, year by year. They walk down the streets, grazing knuckles against buildings just to confirm, despite how unwelcome and unnoticed they may feel, that they do indeed exist. They remain rooted to the front seat of the minivan, trying to figure out how to get from the drive to the house without shattering in front of the children or the husband or the indefatigably chirpy couple across the street. They sit, recently divorced, carefully groomed, and warily hopeful, for hours on a Saturday afternoon in the park.
(…)
The two types of loneliness:
One he described as emotional isolation, the "response to the absence of...a close, indeed intimate, attachment" (what the rest of us call a partner).
The second, social isolation, he explains with an image: "It's like a child home sick from school: Everybody else goes off, the neighborhood is suddenly empty, there's nobody to do anything with." People suffering from this kind of loneliness lack a sense of community—a healthy network of friends, acquaintances, or coworkers. Weiss says, "Theirs is a problem of maintaining a sense of being meaningful or mattering to other people."
(…)
"Owning up to being lonely is often viewed as saying there's something seriously wrong with you," Russell says.
(…)
He and researchers at other institutions also began to systematically dispel the social doofus stereotype: The lonely, it turns out, are as intelligent and as physically attractive as happily connected people. Their incomes are comparable to those of the nonlonely. Their levels of education, their average body mass index, their diets, and their rates of seat belt use—all are virtually indistinguishable from those of their fellow citizens. They even have as many roommates as anyone else.
If lonely people are impossible to pick out at 20 paces, though, they can be distinguished from socially connected people up close. They carry their unhappiness with them, and they often display, as Weiss describes it, "all the stigmata of loneliness: they're drawn, tense, restless, inattentive." They're less trusting of others, their self-esteem is usually in the cellar, and they're less inclined to ask for help—qualities that reinforce a sense of their solo-ness.
(…)
Cacioppo likens it to a pain threshold: If you're born with a low social-pain threshold but raised in a caring and supportive environment and taught techniques for managing your discomfort, you might never become lonely. Alternatively, if you're continually bruised throughout your formative years, no matter what your genetic setting, you might plunge into lonely episodes repeatedly.
(…)
For example, lonely and nonlonely young adults were faced with approximately the same number of negative and positive life events, but the nonlonely group coped better with stressors. (In the older group, the lonely had slightly more negative life experiences.) To the lonely, the same irritation felt like a bigger hassle than it did to the nonlonely, while a happy coincidence wouldn't lift their spirits as much as it would the nonlonely.
Cacioppo's team also did a brain-imaging study with the young adults, and the preliminary results suggest physiological reasons for the different outlooks. Researchers scanned lonely and nonlonely people while certain images flashed before them. When the nonlonely looked at positive pictures of people (happy, smiling folk), they showed greater activation in the reward center of the brain than when viewing an equally positive photo of an object (a cake).
A lonely person, however, showed no difference in that part of the brain, suggesting that he intuitively associates connecting with others as a less rewarding experience than the nonlonely do.
Faced with negative pictures, the nonlonely person didn't react differently to an object (a dirty toilet) and a person (a battered woman). But the lonely did; they showed a much stronger response in the threat surveillance part of the brain to the negative picture of a person than to the object. The finding indicates that when a lonely person has a negative interaction, or even sees a negative interaction, he'll feel more threatened than the average person.
(…)
"Lonely individuals want to connect with other people," Cacioppo theorizes, "but they also expect to be ultimately rejected or negatively evaluated. So they engage in self-protective behavior."
"This fear of being rejected means the lonely don't open up. They also tend to select relationships badly. They're looking for the quick fix. With anybody."
(…)
"Depressed people are dissatisfied with everything in their life; lonely people are dissatisfied with their relationships." Loneliness is a distinct condition—unfortunately, a condition that has been found to be a huge causal factor of depression.
(…)
The last thing socially isolated people want to hear is that their loneliness might be self-inflicted; yet if their despair is in some way their own doing, then it is within their means to reduce it.
The experts all say getting out of the house is a good first step, if only to stop the self-hating marination that so often takes place at home. Human contact—even a pleasant exchange with a store clerk—can soften the harsh pitch of an uninterrupted day. Since self-esteem tends to be lower for the lonely, anything that will boost self-image is worth a shot (a trainer, a personal shopper, speech lessons, purple contact lenses).
Cacioppo suggests getting involved with a charity. Although lonely people can't simply will themselves to see the world as a hospitable place, they can make adjustments based on the awareness of their faulty, tending-to-negative vision. If they know, for instance, that their brains are wired to come up with the worst possible interpretation of cocktail party interactions, then maybe they decide never to go to a social function without a friend to provide a reality check, a home base, a mid-party buck-up.
Before lonely people even attempt to launch themselves into a social gathering, Russell advises lining up their expectations to see what exactly they're hoping for. Are they looking for a partner? Are they married but feeling alone in the community? Are they new mothers with a million single friends but no one who can tell them what a nasal syringe is for?
To meet new people to fill some of these slots, Jacqueline Olds, MD, recommends joining organized groups. She insists the group must revolve around a project—not a passive event, like a lecture series—because having work in common gives participants something to do and talk about. People need to pick something they are interested in, says Olds, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, because they'll need enthusiasm for the subject to carry them through the awkward early times. And there will be awkward early times—many more of them than you'd imagine.
Olds acknowledges that knocking on a new neighbor's door or getting involved in a group can be difficult for some people. "They're so depleted by their loneliness that they're not the least bit welcoming in conversation or their facial expressions," she says. "One client looked standoffish because she was trying not to come off as weak or desperate." But it's okay to be weak, Olds says. We all need help with the trash barrels, the copy machine, or the ever perilous warrior III pose in yoga class.
Olds encourages clients to ask for aid when they need it and also to offer it: to run a neighbor's errand, shake the toner cartridge, or help that poor klutzy yogi on the next mat. Olds reminds clients that while they're doing all this, they also need to be aware of body language—essentially to muster as many optimistic and hopeful gestures as possible to avoid Weiss's stigmata of the lonely: the nervousness, the crossed arms, the worried frown, the impulse to withdraw. The lonely can't force people to like them, but they can at least be aware of the habits that cause others to avoid or overlook them.
As a psychology major I’ve been lucky to learn about loneliness, but I’ve been finding it difficult to post some helpful, concise, less jargon filled information about it here (I didn’t know how to summarize 6 years worth of readings into one article!)
I finally found this article, which I think is really, really good. The entire article is here (8 pages long..yikes!) - http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Loneliness-Research-How-Loneliness-Affects-Health-How-to-Help/1 but it is worth reading. Lots of research findings. I’ve highlighted some bits here that I thought might be relevant and easier to read.
1 is a Lonely Number
Lonely people tell themselves that it could always be worse. "Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world," says a character in Zoë Heller's novel What Was She Thinking?: "You make out to-do lists—reorganise linen cupboard, learn two sonnets. You dole out little treats to yourself—slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall. And then, every once in a while, you wake up...and think, 'I cannot do this anymore. I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next 15 hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.'"
Yet they do, the lonely people—they pull themselves together. They fend off the fact of their own misery and trundle forward, carrying its granite load, hour by hour, job by job, year by year. They walk down the streets, grazing knuckles against buildings just to confirm, despite how unwelcome and unnoticed they may feel, that they do indeed exist. They remain rooted to the front seat of the minivan, trying to figure out how to get from the drive to the house without shattering in front of the children or the husband or the indefatigably chirpy couple across the street. They sit, recently divorced, carefully groomed, and warily hopeful, for hours on a Saturday afternoon in the park.
(…)
The two types of loneliness:
One he described as emotional isolation, the "response to the absence of...a close, indeed intimate, attachment" (what the rest of us call a partner).
The second, social isolation, he explains with an image: "It's like a child home sick from school: Everybody else goes off, the neighborhood is suddenly empty, there's nobody to do anything with." People suffering from this kind of loneliness lack a sense of community—a healthy network of friends, acquaintances, or coworkers. Weiss says, "Theirs is a problem of maintaining a sense of being meaningful or mattering to other people."
(…)
"Owning up to being lonely is often viewed as saying there's something seriously wrong with you," Russell says.
(…)
He and researchers at other institutions also began to systematically dispel the social doofus stereotype: The lonely, it turns out, are as intelligent and as physically attractive as happily connected people. Their incomes are comparable to those of the nonlonely. Their levels of education, their average body mass index, their diets, and their rates of seat belt use—all are virtually indistinguishable from those of their fellow citizens. They even have as many roommates as anyone else.
If lonely people are impossible to pick out at 20 paces, though, they can be distinguished from socially connected people up close. They carry their unhappiness with them, and they often display, as Weiss describes it, "all the stigmata of loneliness: they're drawn, tense, restless, inattentive." They're less trusting of others, their self-esteem is usually in the cellar, and they're less inclined to ask for help—qualities that reinforce a sense of their solo-ness.
(…)
Cacioppo likens it to a pain threshold: If you're born with a low social-pain threshold but raised in a caring and supportive environment and taught techniques for managing your discomfort, you might never become lonely. Alternatively, if you're continually bruised throughout your formative years, no matter what your genetic setting, you might plunge into lonely episodes repeatedly.
(…)
For example, lonely and nonlonely young adults were faced with approximately the same number of negative and positive life events, but the nonlonely group coped better with stressors. (In the older group, the lonely had slightly more negative life experiences.) To the lonely, the same irritation felt like a bigger hassle than it did to the nonlonely, while a happy coincidence wouldn't lift their spirits as much as it would the nonlonely.
Cacioppo's team also did a brain-imaging study with the young adults, and the preliminary results suggest physiological reasons for the different outlooks. Researchers scanned lonely and nonlonely people while certain images flashed before them. When the nonlonely looked at positive pictures of people (happy, smiling folk), they showed greater activation in the reward center of the brain than when viewing an equally positive photo of an object (a cake).
A lonely person, however, showed no difference in that part of the brain, suggesting that he intuitively associates connecting with others as a less rewarding experience than the nonlonely do.
Faced with negative pictures, the nonlonely person didn't react differently to an object (a dirty toilet) and a person (a battered woman). But the lonely did; they showed a much stronger response in the threat surveillance part of the brain to the negative picture of a person than to the object. The finding indicates that when a lonely person has a negative interaction, or even sees a negative interaction, he'll feel more threatened than the average person.
(…)
"Lonely individuals want to connect with other people," Cacioppo theorizes, "but they also expect to be ultimately rejected or negatively evaluated. So they engage in self-protective behavior."
"This fear of being rejected means the lonely don't open up. They also tend to select relationships badly. They're looking for the quick fix. With anybody."
(…)
"Depressed people are dissatisfied with everything in their life; lonely people are dissatisfied with their relationships." Loneliness is a distinct condition—unfortunately, a condition that has been found to be a huge causal factor of depression.
(…)
The last thing socially isolated people want to hear is that their loneliness might be self-inflicted; yet if their despair is in some way their own doing, then it is within their means to reduce it.
The experts all say getting out of the house is a good first step, if only to stop the self-hating marination that so often takes place at home. Human contact—even a pleasant exchange with a store clerk—can soften the harsh pitch of an uninterrupted day. Since self-esteem tends to be lower for the lonely, anything that will boost self-image is worth a shot (a trainer, a personal shopper, speech lessons, purple contact lenses).
Cacioppo suggests getting involved with a charity. Although lonely people can't simply will themselves to see the world as a hospitable place, they can make adjustments based on the awareness of their faulty, tending-to-negative vision. If they know, for instance, that their brains are wired to come up with the worst possible interpretation of cocktail party interactions, then maybe they decide never to go to a social function without a friend to provide a reality check, a home base, a mid-party buck-up.
Before lonely people even attempt to launch themselves into a social gathering, Russell advises lining up their expectations to see what exactly they're hoping for. Are they looking for a partner? Are they married but feeling alone in the community? Are they new mothers with a million single friends but no one who can tell them what a nasal syringe is for?
To meet new people to fill some of these slots, Jacqueline Olds, MD, recommends joining organized groups. She insists the group must revolve around a project—not a passive event, like a lecture series—because having work in common gives participants something to do and talk about. People need to pick something they are interested in, says Olds, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, because they'll need enthusiasm for the subject to carry them through the awkward early times. And there will be awkward early times—many more of them than you'd imagine.
Olds acknowledges that knocking on a new neighbor's door or getting involved in a group can be difficult for some people. "They're so depleted by their loneliness that they're not the least bit welcoming in conversation or their facial expressions," she says. "One client looked standoffish because she was trying not to come off as weak or desperate." But it's okay to be weak, Olds says. We all need help with the trash barrels, the copy machine, or the ever perilous warrior III pose in yoga class.
Olds encourages clients to ask for aid when they need it and also to offer it: to run a neighbor's errand, shake the toner cartridge, or help that poor klutzy yogi on the next mat. Olds reminds clients that while they're doing all this, they also need to be aware of body language—essentially to muster as many optimistic and hopeful gestures as possible to avoid Weiss's stigmata of the lonely: the nervousness, the crossed arms, the worried frown, the impulse to withdraw. The lonely can't force people to like them, but they can at least be aware of the habits that cause others to avoid or overlook them.
