孤独的社会烙印与生理损伤
从很小的时候起，我们就习得了一种污名化观念：如果一个人独处，那么他一定出了什么问题。这种对孤独的感知以及我们对自己孤独感的叙事，反过来改变了我们在世界上的行为模式。当我们感到孤独时，更容易在社交情境中陷入反刍思维，将问题灾难化，从而被这些负面的思维模式和信念所困扰。这种心态不仅改变了我们的行为，还深入影响了我们的大脑和身体。
一些研究表明，缺乏亲密朋友或感到孤独，其对健康的危害程度等同于每天吸烟15支。虽然我们常听到孤独对健康有害，但实际上，在许多情境下，独处本身是有益的。孤独并非反映了我们是谁，而是反映了我们需要什么；它是信息，是数据。孤独始于一种思维模式或情绪，它会触发体内的应激反应，导致皮质醇水平升高，增加炎症反应，进而削弱免疫系统，使我们更容易受到疾病侵害。
Original English Source
- From a very young age, there's a stigma that we learn, where, if you're alone, something's wrong with you. Our perceptions and the stories that we tell ourselves about feeling lonely, in turn, change the behaviors that we go out and do in the world. When we feel lonely, we're more likely to start to ruminate, to catastrophize in social situations and to get caught up in these sort of negative thought patterns and beliefs but then influence our behaviors, but they also influence our brains and our bodies. - There are some studies that suggest, for example, that being without a close friend, being lonely is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. - We often hear that being alone is bad for us. This messaging is getting us to believe that being alone is bad for us. But there are many situations in which being alone can actually be good for us. - Our social lives are rewiring our brains and in turn, changing the experience that we have inside of our bodies. Loneliness is not a reflection on who we are. It's a reflection of what we need. It's information. It's data. Loneliness starts out as a thought pattern or an emotion. This actually triggers a stress response in our body that is associated with heightened levels of cortisol, that's associated with more inflammation, which weakens our immune systems and actually makes us more susceptible to disease.神经科学视角下的连接需求
神经科学研究清晰地揭示了这一点。在一项研究中，参与者在观看浪漫伴侣或完全陌生人的照片时接受轻微的电击。结果显示，当人们观看浪漫伴侣的照片时，报告的恐惧感更低，且大脑中与疼痛相关的区域活动也更弱。这表明，个人的感知会因是否感到与他人连接而产生巨大差异。如果认识到健康不仅是生理和心理层面的，更是社会层面的，我们将改变自己的行为。拥有丰富的友谊、深深扎根于社区并获得强有力的支持，将彻底改变你体验世界的方式。
目前，一个重大课题是我们是否正面临“友谊衰退”（Friendship Recession）。这是美国企业研究所（American Enterprise Institute: 美国的一家保守派智库）的学者丹尼尔·考克斯（Daniel Cox）提出的术语，用于描述缺乏一定数量亲密朋友、在危机时刻求助无门的人数上升的现象。如今，15%的年轻男性表示没有亲密朋友，而这一比例在20世纪90年代仅为3%。有趣的是，大流行期间女性受到的影响最大，超过一半的女性表示与至少部分朋友失去了联系。传统机构如家庭、宗教和劳动力市场的衰落，意味着人们需要在这些机构之外寻求社会关系和连接，这使得友谊显得格外重要。
Original English Source
We can see this in the neuroscience research. In one study, people went through mild electric shocks while looking at photos of either their romantic partner or a complete stranger. What researchers found was that people who are looking at a photo of their romantic partners reported feeling less fearful and the brain activity in the regions associated with pain was lower. People's perception differs according to whether or not they feel connected to another person. If we start to understand that health is not only physical and mental, it's also social that's going to change our behaviors. If you think about having rich friendships and being embedded in your community and having a really strong sense of support, that's going to completely transform the way that you experience the world. - I think a big question now is whether we're facing a friendship recession. That's the term that Daniel Cox, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has used to describe this rise in the number of people who lack a certain number of close friends, who have fewer people to turn to in times of crisis. Today, 15% of young men say that they don't have a close friend. That was just 3% back in the 1990s. The pandemic, interestingly, there we see that it's women who've been most affected. With more than half of women saying they've lost touch with at least some of their friends. We've seen a decline in lots of traditional institutions, including a family, people marrying later if they do marry. Obviously in areas like religion. In some cases, the labor market. And so what that means is there's more of a need for people to have social relationships, connections outside of those institutions. That's where friends are hugely important.重构信念：从孤独到创造
如果没有朋友，不仅会导致经济或社会意义上的孤立，还会让人感到悲伤。而悲伤同样对生理和心理健康有害。友谊对于人类的繁荣至关重要。交友的一个必要步骤是承认自己想交朋友，并对此持开放态度，这需要一定的脆弱性。随着年龄增长，没有足够朋友往往会带来一种羞耻感，而真正说出“我需要一个朋友”或许是人类最难开口的话语之一。
近年来，对孤独负面后果的关注度日益增加。媒体将独处经历描述为负面的频率大约是描述为正面频率的十倍。然而，针对时间的跟踪研究显示，如果你认为独处是有益的，那么你在独处时实际上会感到愉悦。这一发现非常关键，因为它给了我们干预的机会：我们可以改变人们对独处的信念。我们不必将独处视为反映自身或环境出了问题，而可以将其重构为发挥创造力、与自己的思想进行愉悦交流的机会。当我们谈论这些话题时，它们便会进入人们的思维，并在更广泛的文化中产生影响。
连接自己与连接他人同样重要。对于你而言，最佳的社会健康状态可能与他人不同，这取决于你享受社交的程度以及何种连接方式让你感到满足。孤独只是一个进一步探索社会健康、在“社会生活”这个实验室中充当科学家的机会。我们可以拓宽你所处的“感知箱”（Perception Box），帮助你感到更紧密的连接，从而克服孤独带来的孤立体验。
Original English Source
And so it's not just that being without friends can make you isolated in a sort of economic or social sense, but it can also make you sad. And being sad, it turns out, is also bad in terms of your physical as well as emotional health. There's obviously a dystopian version of how these trends could continue, which is a world of, essentially, atomized individuals without friends, isolated, perhaps in ill health. I think that's why we have to recognize that friendship is incredibly important for human flourishing. One of the necessary steps to making a friend is to admitting that you want to make a friend. To being open to that. That requires a certain vulnerability. And I think as we get older, there's sometimes a sense of shame that comes along with not having enough friends. And actually saying I need a friend is maybe one of the hardest sentences that any human being can utter. - There's been an increasing amount of attention over the past several years about the negative consequences of loneliness. We've done research on this and found that the media is approximately ten times more likely to describe experiences of being alone as negative as compared to positive. When we do research where we track people over time, what we see is that if you're the kind of person who thinks being alone is good for you, you actually feel good when you spend time alone. What I love about that finding is it gives us the opportunity to potentially intervene because we can shift people's beliefs about being alone. Rather than thinking about that experience as reflecting something wrong about me or the circumstances, we can reframe that situation as an opportunity to be creative, to be alone with our thoughts in a pleasant way. The more we talk about these things, the more gets on our minds and the more it penetrates into the culture more broadly. - Connection with yourself is as important as connection with other people. Being optimally socially healthy for you might be different than someone else based on how much socializing you enjoy, and what kinds of connection feel fulfilling to you. Loneliness is just an opportunity to go further, to explore your social health, to be a scientist in the laboratory that is your social life. We can broaden the Perception Box that you're living in and help you to feel more connected and overcome that isolated experience of loneliness.📌 文中提及的人物和组织
人物: Daniel Cox