loneliness college essay

It’s Lonely In College: How I Survived & Dealt With My Loneliness

» Situational Loneliness

• What Is College Loneliness
• When Do You Experience College Loneliness
• How To Cope With College Loneliness

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Loneliness in college students often presents itself as feelings of sadness, isolation, and disconnect and it is far more common than you may realize, especially for those living away from home .

• One study revealed that over 60% of college students have struggled with loneliness in the past year, while another showed that over one-third felt moderately or severely lonely.
• College loneliness is often triggered by unfamiliar new routines, a student’s uncertainty about their education or future, isolation from family and friends, and a lack of friendships — especially if they are new to college
• Even when it seems like their peers are enjoying vibrant social lives, college students who are struggling with loneliness are not truly alone in their feelings and there are effective ways to cope.

Struggling with loneliness or having a mental health crisis?

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Growing up, my family always emphasized the importance of education.

When I was accepted into my college of choice during my senior year of high school, I couldn’t wait to start the next chapter of my life.

Though I was expecting to get lost on campus, meet some interesting people, and learn about new subjects, I was not expecting the overwhelming loneliness that often accompanied my college experience.

That feeling overtook me right away — in fact, the very first night I arrived was one of the loneliest nights of my life.

After running across campus in a storm, getting lost in the rain, and finally finding my way back to my dorm room, I felt as if I’d made a mistake in even attending college.

Physically, I had pushed myself way beyond my limits — I was still figuring out how to manage my disability at the time — and that only fueled my feelings of loneliness.

To make matters worse, I lived in a single-occupancy dorm room, so while others at least got to know their roommates and ease into the college experience with some companionship right away, I was stuck in my room alone, with no one to talk to.

Sure, I’d gotten into the college I had always dreamed of attending, but being prepared academically didn’t mean I was prepared emotionally.

After changing into some dry clothes and hanging up the phone after tearfully begging my mom to pick me up — I’m thankful now that she didn’t — I opened my door.

Looking around, I saw everyone else leaving to go to their first college parties or hanging out with their roommates.

After a little while, I shut my door, feeling lost and overwhelmingly lonely.

• How It Manifests
• Transitioning From High School
• Facing Academic Challenges
• Struggling To Make Friends

Connect With Others

• Be Aware & Ask For Help
• Remember You're Not Alone

What Is College Loneliness And Why Does It Occur?

Students feel alone at various points throughout college often triggered by the unfamiliarity of a new routine, uncertainty about their education or major, isolation from family and friends, and lack of friendships and connections if they are new to college.

Though loneliness is common in college students, many students frequently feel as if they are unique in feeling lonely.

I grew up thinking of college as a place to further my education, make new connections, and begin my adult life. For me, college was a place for all of those things — but it was also immensely lonely at times.

When I was in college, I wouldn’t have guessed that so many other people felt as lonely as I did.

Everyone else seemed so happy, hanging out with their friends and juggling a multitude of extracurricular activities between classes.

In reality, feeling lonely in college is incredibly common.

A 2017 study asked students if they had felt lonely in the past year — and over 60% said they had.

In 2018, a study of loneliness in college students suggested that over one-third of college students felt moderately or severely lonely.

When talking to current college students or recent college graduates, I was surprised at how familiar their stories of loneliness felt to me.

Sara, who earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Portland State University, says that despite her love for school and learning, she felt lonely throughout college.

She tells me: “The years I spent working toward my bachelor’s degree were the most lonely. I felt isolated, depressed, and angry.”

Nichole Proulx-King is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and works as a mental health therapist at Husson University. She has worked with students from all backgrounds who have experienced loneliness.

“Loneliness can leave a person feeling isolated and as though no one cares about them,” Proulx-King tells me.

“These feelings can impact overall wellness which encompasses all facets of functioning. Mental health practitioners working in the college setting often see students with significant symptoms of anxiety and depression when this occurs.”

She goes on to say that “symptoms of anxiety and depression can impact physical health as well as emotional health. Unfortunately, one of the complicating factors with anxiety and depression symptoms are that students are less likely to seek new connections. These symptoms pose a barrier forming new connections and this further isolates them.”

Though loneliness can manifest itself in various ways (which I’ll touch on later), there are many reasons college students often feel lonely, including:

• Being away from home or moving to a new city
• Not having an established group of friends
• Lacking a familiar routine
• Uncertainty about the future
• Struggling to balance daily domestic activities, such as eating, washing clothes, cleaning, etc., with academic tasks and social activities
• Lack of traditions around birthdays , holidays like Thanksgiving , and other big events
• Not knowing what to study or what they are passionate about
• Struggling with time management
• Feeling as if no one else understands, or as if everyone else is happy
• Academic challenges
• Not getting along with a roommate

Feelings of loneliness can often lead college students to experience anxiety and depression, too.

As a result of these feelings, students often avoid interacting with others, which can, in turn, make students feel more alone.

When Are College Students Most Likely To Experience Loneliness?

When preparing for college, the topic of loneliness is rarely discussed, however, the majority of students experience loneliness at some point in their college careers.

In reality, more students than not are likely to be lonely at any given time and it can result from the transition from high school, various academic challenges, and difficulties associated with making friends.

Transitioning From High School To College

Graduating high school is such a thrilling experience for so many students, especially for those attending college a few short months later.

Most students are so focused on what lies ahead, however, that they don’t realize what a major transition they are about to experience.

As a mental health therapist at Husson University, Nichole Proulx-King has often seen students struggle with loneliness in their first year of college. She explains to me:

“Loneliness can certainly peak at a variety of times in a student’s academic career. One of the most common times that we see loneliness is about halfway through [students’] first semester and at the start of the spring semester of their first year. There are many reasons for this, and among these is that for many, this is their first time being away from home.”

During the initial transition from high school to college, many students are likely to feel homesick.

Though homesickness isn’t unusual — one study suggests that 66% of college students felt homesick in their first year — it’s not something that most people talk about.

After my first week at school, I returned home to recover from a physically and emotionally draining week.

When telling one of my new acquaintances that I was going home, he asked, “Why? This is your home now.”

Not wanting to delve into my list of reasons — or start crying on the spot — I only smiled and muttered something about needing to get some things from home.

This, in addition to seeing everyone around me appearing to click instantly with their roommates and new friends, made me hesitant to talk about my loneliness.

Beyond homesickness causing loneliness in students, having to figure out real-world challenges can make college students feel frustrated and lonely, too.

Lindsey, who is now a Content marketing strategist, attended Brigham Young University. Though the transition from high school to college wasn’t difficult academically, she was surprised at how different her life felt in college.

“The first initial day at college was strange,” Lindsey tells me. “There was no one to come home to [who was] making dinner every night or doing the dishes while I studied.”

“I had to learn to not only be good at school and extracurriculars, but I also had to be good at balancing running errands, making dinner, and providing for myself. It was a fun transition, but it took time and a lot of practice before I figured out how to actually balance and manage everything.”

While every college student will have unique experiences, most college students’ first experiences in college are filled with a dizzying mix of excitement, confusion, happiness , anxiety — and loneliness.

Deciding Your Major Or Deciding To Change Majors Or Schools

Transitioning from high school to college is one of the biggest changes in many young adults’ lives, but deciding upon a major, and changing majors — or even schools — can also trigger feelings of loneliness for students.

Though changing your major isn’t uncommon — approximately one-third of college students have changed majors by their third year — this environmental and academic shift can leave students feeling alone and inept.

My younger brother, Jacob, who is in his third year at the University of Virginia, experienced the stress and loneliness that came along from changing his major during his first year of college.

Initially majoring in engineering, he struggled with making the decision to change majors, especially since everyone around him seemed to be doing so well.

He tells me:

“During my first year of college, I felt really anxious because the engineering classes I was taking were extremely difficult, and it seemed like it took nearly every hour of every day just to stay afloat.

It also made me feel lonely because it seemed, from the outside, that everyone else was doing fine and that I was the only one struggling to that degree.

Before I had made the final decision to switch, I was worried about whether it would be the correct decision, since the decision was so final. I didn’t know if I should “tough it out” or if what I was doing at the time just wasn’t for me. It was hard to know for sure.”

For students who don’t necessarily know what major to choose, the possibilities and the pressure to choose the right major can be overwhelming.

Lindsey, who attended Brigham Young University, struggled to choose her major, an experience that caused frustration and loneliness at times.

Though she ultimately majored in marketing, making the decision wasn’t easy.

“I loved every class I took and wanted to do [everything],” Lindsey explains to me. “It was really hard deciding, especially because once I started my junior year, there was no more switching [majors].”

“The semester before my junior year, I applied to marketing, recreational therapy, and experience design management. I figured I would major in the choice that I was admitted for. In the end, I was admitted to all three, and this is where I had to make the ultimate decision. I had to decide what exactly I wanted to do after college, and that was a hard thing because I had no idea.”

In addition to the academic stress that can come with changing majors or schools, many students also worry about losing their established group of friends.

A childhood friend of mine, Christina, transferred from Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois to Regent University in our home state of Virginia after her freshman year.

She had initially studied zoology at Olivet, but after two semesters in Illinois, she decided to return to Virginia to study English.

Though she was certain transferring schools was the right choice for her, she was worried about starting over again at a new school.

She told me:

“My biggest concern [when transferring schools] was that I wouldn’t make any friends. I’m a stereotypical English major, shy and at least a little awkward, so making new friends has never been my strong suit.

However, I became really close friends with one of my roommates right away. She was a transfer student too, so we essentially got to start out at Regent together.”

Having No Friends In College

Having a supportive network of people is important, especially for college students.

In addition to obvious social and emotional benefits, research suggests that friendships can also benefit students academically .

Despite being surrounded by hundreds, or even thousands, of people in college, however, making friends is often much harder than it was in high school .

For many students, their newfound freedom — and the lack of structure that accompanies it — is jarring, and makes it hard to make new friends.

Sara, who attended Portland State University, said that she struggled to make new connections when she was working towards her bachelor’s degree — and the people she did befriend didn’t stick around.

She tells me:

“I struggled to make lasting connections with anyone at my school [as an undergraduate]. The person I felt I had fostered a true friendship with moved away and the boyfriend I had been seeing cheated on me. It wasn’t a pretty time and took a toll on my self-esteem.”

When you struggle to make friends with other students, the absence of friends can be particularly upsetting when something major happens in your life.

Jeb, a sophomore at Ohio State University, was immensely lonely after a breakup with his girlfriend. Surrounded by other students he didn’t know, he realized how lonely he felt.

“A week after my girlfriend and I started taking a break, I tried to finalize the breakup but she was too busy to talk,” Jeb tells me.

“I felt extreme loneliness and sadness. I started crying in the dining hall, surrounded by strangers I didn’t know and who didn’t seem to care. I tried to think of who I could call so I could be around someone else. My mind drew a blank — I [realized that I] only had about two friends to contact.”

For introverted students like myself, making friends can be even more difficult. Crowded, loud parties never really appealed to me, and with limited energy, it was hard to make connections.

Kaila, a peer and friend of mine who also went to James Madison University, also felt that making friends as an introvert in college was difficult at times.

“I have a quiet and introverted personality, and always felt generally bad at making friends,” Kaila tells me.

“I usually felt overshadowed by the more outgoing people. I also didn’t always want to do the typical “college” shenanigans like partying and binge drinking. I was more happy doing laid-back, less exhilarating — at least to other people — activities.”

Dr. Ryan Roemer , PsyD (Doctor of Psychology), is the Manager of Adolescent Mental Health and Psychiatric Emergency Triage Services at Mission Hospital in Southern California.

A common reason college students struggle with loneliness, he says, has to do with connecting with others.

“I have found with my patients that loneliness can present itself in a lot of different ways,” he explains to me.

“I most commonly see it in young adults struggling to create a new social life now that they have left their high school groups, especially those far from home trying to find their place in an environment.”

Even though having no friends in college, especially when you first start out, is normal, that doesn’t mean the experience isn’t difficult.

How Do College Students Overcome And Cope With Loneliness?

As common as loneliness is for people throughout college, it’s important for all students to learn how to cope.

Just as is the case with other types of loneliness, connecting with others is often a crucial step to mitigating feelings of loneliness.

Sara, who studied editing and publishing at Portland State University, says that taking the time to take care of herself helped her to feel less alone, as did reaching out to others.

“I worked all the way through my college years, so I was able to meet and connect with fellow employees. One of them is my current roommate, and the other is still a close friend to this day.

My aunt and uncle were also incredible support systems for me and were always there to give advice or just listen to my sleep-deprived, stress-induced ramblings.

Taking physical education classes also helped me immensely, as these required frequent interaction with others and opened up opportunities for communication that weren’t coursework-related.”

As a college student, I found that making a point to talk to my friends and spending time with others made a huge difference in my overall well-being.

Sometimes, this just meant taking the time to get to know a classmate. Having a friend in my class made any subject more enjoyable, and on days when I couldn’t spend time with others outside of class, I had built-in time to socialize.

Otherwise, I made an effort to do something social that was unrelated to my classes at least once a week.

Even if I felt tired or anxious and wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend time with others, it was rare that I ever regretted taking the chance to socialize.

Be Aware Of Potential Symptoms Of Mental Illness And Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help

For college students, it’s also important to understand that there’s a difference between normal feelings of loneliness and more serious mental conditions, many of which are likely to occur in college-aged individuals .

In retrospect, I wish I had been more willing to reach out when I was struggling and feeling lonely ; I was so hesitant and anxious to express how lonely I was, and being lonely in college sounded like a weird, if not silly, complaint.

Whenever I talk to college students now, I make sure to recommend that students take advantage of the resources they have and talk to counselors, friends, and family if they are feeling sad or anxious, or dealing with depression-related loneliness .

Nichole Proulx-King works with college students as a mental health therapist. She advises students to pay attention to their feelings rather than ignore their loneliness in order to discern if their feelings are situational or part of a larger issue.

“Because all issues pertaining to mental health, physical health, and wellness are intertwined, it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate between loneliness and larger mental health issues,” Proulx-King explains to me.

“Since feelings of loneliness often occur along with symptoms like anxiety and depression, it is important to weigh whether or not they experience these feelings persistently, in certain situations, or across all settings.”

Know That You’re Not The Only One Who Is Lonely

Even though it may seem easier to keep feelings of loneliness private, talking about feeling lonely can actually help you connect with others.

Throughout college, I felt as if no one else understood my loneliness. Now, however, I’m both surprised and comforted to know that feeling lonely isn’t and wasn’t unusual.

Kaila, a friend of mine from college, agrees that realizing how normal loneliness is for college students can be reassuring.

“[Students should] know that it’s totally normal to be lonely and to just be honest with yourself and others about it. Don’t force yourself to fit into a certain mold or clique.

And don’t keep all of your emotions bottled up. Find a good person to talk to and just have faith that there are people, activities, and support groups made just for you.”

As a college student, you will have days when you’re excited to learn and feel surrounded by people who care about you.

You’ll also have lonely days, too — days you miss your mom’s cooking or your high school friends.

Even though most people talk about their good days, the lonely days are normal, too, at least every once in a while.

On days when you feel lonely, know that even if everyone around you seems as if they’re fitting in and adjusting easily, you’re not the only person who is lonely.

And on the days when you feel like you’re exactly where you belong, reach out to others — you’ll be surprised to find that so many other students are lonely, and the simple act of reaching out can help someone else who’s also lonely feel like they, too, belong.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of The Roots Of Loneliness Project, the first-of-its-kind resource that comprehensively explores the phenomenon of loneliness  and  over 100 types we might experience during our lives.

If you’re struggling with college loneliness, we’ve put together resources to meet you wherever you are — whether you want someone to talk to right now, or are looking for longer-term ways to help ease your loneliness.

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Why we feel lonely in college: The reasons behind it and how to conquer it

Missing your loved ones is typically the hardest part about attending college or even being away from home. Many of us also feel like we want more out of our relationships to make starting in a new, unfamiliar state, or even country, more comfortable. On the contrary, leaving a partner behind and still being committed to them is generally incredibly difficult. Loneliness is a science, but it is one that can be conquered with simple steps. 

To understand why you miss or want more from the people in your life, it is important to understand the different types of loneliness. According to Dr. Robert S. Weiss of the University of Cambridge , who did a joint research project about mental health with the U.S. government, there are three types of loneliness: intimate, relational and collective . 

Intimate loneliness is the feeling that a person in your life, such as a significant other or parent, is not living up to your expectations of emotional support. This is why it’s important to gauge whether a partner who perhaps is not with you in college is still able to support you despite the distance between yourself and them. 

Relational loneliness is similar to intimacy, but it is with friends instead of a partner or family member. Friends, especially in college, are extremely important as, besides company, they provide benefits such as improved self-confidence, a sense of belonging and even teaching you more about yourself and your interests. If you feel like your friend may not be helping you in ways such as these, you might be feeling relational loneliness.

The final type of loneliness is collective loneliness, which occurs when one does not feel as if they are in a group they belong in. For example, you might be in the robotics club but feel like everyone else does not pay attention to you or what you have to say. People naturally like being part of a group, so it’s completely normal to feel as if you’re not being heard.

So, how do you actually alleviate these feelings? Well, it’s important to have a mindset where you respect how you feel but are able to talk with others about it respectfully. For family and romantic relationships, these feelings should be communicated with the other person. Keira Douglas is a freshman at Pima Community College who is planning to attend the University of Arizona soon to finish her bachelor’s degree in nursing. She’s been in a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend for three years and had some words of advice when it came to having a partner.

“Definitely have good communication with your partner. It can be the make or break of the relationship. Talk about your wants and needs so that both of you can be on the same page. Keep making time for each other on FaceTime , so you know they love and care about you,” Douglas said. “As for family, just talk to them, make sure they know you’re there for them, and visit them when you’re on breaks as well.”

It’s also important to consider how each of your friends improves your life and makes you happier. If they don’t, however, it may be time to consider rethinking the friendship. Keelan Gardner is a freshman at UA who has made many new friends since starting college, but he’s also had to rethink some of his older friends.

“I feel that if your friends or club isn’t paying attention to you, even after you talk to them about it, it’s more likely they don’t care about you,” Gardner said. “Real friends or real clubs would interact with each other if they were real. It just means that they aren’t your real friends and that you shouldn’t look at them as such either.”

If you feel as if you need more advice regarding loneliness, feel free to make an appointment on the UA Counseling & Psych Services website or by calling 520-621-3334 .

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Your chance of acceptance, your chancing factors, extracurriculars, thoughts on discussing loneliness and the lack of a social life in my college essay.

I've often struggled with making friends and have felt pretty isolated during high school. Would admissions officers empathize with an essay about coping with loneliness, or does it risk portraying me in a negative light?

Discussing personal challenges, including coping with loneliness, in your college essay can be a powerful way to show growth, maturity, and resilience, by highlighting a deeply human experience that many students would shy away from talking about openly. Admissions officers are people too, and they understand that students come from a wide array of backgrounds and face different challenges.

However, the key to a successful essay is in how you frame your experience. You'll want to focus on the positive aspects of your journey, like how you've overcome loneliness, or what you've learned about yourself in the process of trying. Make sure your story is one of personal triumph or self-discovery rather than a narrative that leaves the reader concerned about your ability to thrive in a new and possibly more challenging environment. For example, if you you sought out a mentor and that changed your perspective, or joined an activity that bolstered your sense of self, those details can show your ability to adapt and grow from your experiences.

I hope this helps, and good luck with your essay!

About CollegeVine’s Expert FAQ

CollegeVine’s Q&A seeks to offer informed perspectives on commonly asked admissions questions. Every answer is refined and validated by our team of admissions experts to ensure it resonates with trusted knowledge in the field.

Depression, Anxiety, Loneliness Are Peaking in College Students

Photo by Cydney Scott 

Nationwide study, co-led by BU researcher Sarah Ketchen Lipson, reveals a majority of students say mental health has impacted their academic performance

Kat j. mcalpine.

A survey by a Boston University researcher of nearly 33,000 college students across the country reveals the prevalence of depression and anxiety in young people continues to increase, now reaching its highest levels, a sign of the mounting stress factors due to the coronavirus pandemic, political unrest, and systemic racism and inequality. 

“Half of students in fall 2020 screened positive for depression and/or anxiety,” says Sarah Ketchen Lipson , a Boston University mental health researcher and a co–principal investigator of the nationwide survey , which was administered online during the fall 2020 semester through the Healthy Minds Network. The survey further reveals that 83 percent of students said their mental health had negatively impacted their academic performance within the past month, and that two-thirds of college students are struggling with loneliness and feeling isolated—an all-time high prevalence that reflects the toll of the pandemic and the social distancing necessary to control it.

Lipson, a BU School of Public Health assistant professor of health law, policy, and management, says the survey’s findings underscore the need for university teaching staff and faculty to put mechanisms in place that can accommodate students’ mental health needs.

“Faculty need to be flexible with deadlines and remind students that their talent is not solely demonstrated by their ability to get a top grade during one challenging semester,” Lipson says.

She adds that instructors can protect students’ mental health by having class assignments due at 5 pm, rather than midnight or 9 am, times that Lipson says can encourage students to go to bed later and lose valuable sleep to meet those deadlines.

Especially in smaller classroom settings, where a student’s absence may be more noticeable than in larger lectures, instructors who notice someone missing classes should reach out to that student directly to ask how they are doing. 

“Even in larger classes, where 1:1 outreach is more difficult, instructors can send classwide emails reinforcing the idea that they care about their students not just as learners but as people, and circulating information about campus resources for mental health and wellness,” Lipson says. 

And, crucially, she says, instructors must bear in mind that the burden of mental health is not the same across all student demographics. “Students of color and low-income students are more likely to be grieving the loss of a loved one due to COVID,” Lipson says. They are also “more likely to be facing financial stress.” All of these factors can negatively impact mental health and academic performance in “profound ways,” she says.

At a higher level within colleges and universities, Lipson says, administrators should focus on providing students with mental health services that emphasize prevention, coping, and resilience. The fall 2020 survey data revealed a significant “treatment gap,” meaning that many students who screen positive for depression or anxiety are not receiving mental health services.

“Often students will only seek help when they find themselves in a mental health crisis, requiring more urgent resources,” Lipson says. “But how can we create systems to foster wellness before they reach that point?” She has a suggestion: “All students should receive mental health education, ideally as part of the required curriculum.”

It’s also important to note, she says, that rising mental health challenges are not unique to the college setting—instead, the survey findings are consistent with a broader trend of declining mental health in adolescents and young adults. “I think mental health is getting worse [across the US population], and on top of that we are now gathering more data on these trends than ever before,” Lipson says. “We know mental health stigma is going down, and that’s one of the biggest reasons we are able to collect better data. People are being more open, having more dialogue about it, and we’re able to better identify that people are struggling.”

The worsening mental health of Americans, more broadly, Lipson says, could be due to a confluence of factors: the pandemic, the impact of social media, and shifting societal values that are becoming more extrinsically motivated (a successful career, making more money, getting more followers and likes), rather than intrinsically motivated (being a good member of the community). 

The crushing weight of historic financial pressures is an added burden. “Student debt is so stressful,” Lipson says. “You’re more predisposed to experiencing anxiety the more debt you have. And research indicates that suicidality is directly connected to financial well-being.” 

With more than 22 million young people enrolled in US colleges and universities, “and with the traditional college years of life coinciding with the age of onset for lifetime mental illnesses,” Lipson stresses that higher education is a crucial setting where prevention and treatment can make a difference.

One potential bright spot from the survey was that the stigma around mental health continues to fade. The results reveal that 94 percent of students say that they wouldn’t judge someone for seeking out help for mental health, which Lipson says is an indicator that also correlates with those students being likely to seek out help themselves during a personal crisis (although, paradoxically, almost half of students say they perceive that others may think more poorly of them if they did seek help).

“We’re harsher on ourselves and more critical of ourselves than we are with other people—we call that perceived versus personal stigma,” Lipson says. “Students need to realize, your peers are not judging you.”

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There are 25 comments on Depression, Anxiety, Loneliness Are Peaking in College Students

first of all, excellent writing! This report is extremely triggering for a few reasons. Obviously students are NOT okay at the moment, now confirmed by the student. But what does the university do about it? They micro-manage EVERY aspect of students’ life to mitigate Covid risk. Here, tell me why the university took away household table seating in the dining hall? That was one of the ONLY places on campus where students can eat with each other and actually see their friends’ faces. What type of modeling was used to make this decision and its impact on covid spread on campus. Same thing for the green badge, was there a statistical difference in case before and after students have to walk around showing that? The university’s policies are simply incentivizing off-campus, more dangerous gatherings because the university won’t facilitate anything like that on campus. Oh, and the university response? ‘you’re doing great sweetie’ type of deal – absolutely ridiculous. I know BU can’t keep this up much longer, they are losing far too much money because of Covid and less students on campus – there will be a reckoning. Students, stand up.

BU will acknowledge this but then still won’t do anything to actually help.

Great, but this school is doing absolutely nothing to help it

I appreciate this article because I feel that the issue of mental health isn’t talked about enough amongst students and just college culture in general. I don’t see any concerns coming from college faculty, at least clearly. It’s so important to talk about mental health, especially during a pandemic.

This article is definitely going in the right direction. That being said, as the other comments have also mentioned, BU needs to do MUCH more than just publishing an article telling students, “well, at least you aren’t alone.” If 83% of your student body reports their mental health affects their school work, then if not for them, at least change something for the benefit of the school’s name. To put it bluntly, this does not look good. Also referencing BU’s response to sexual harassment, BU now has a track record of acknowledging issues that significantly impact its students in an article or maybe a speech to only do NOTHING about it. Please, I implore the school to act. Act or we will.

We know mental health stigma is going down

Actually, we know support for those taught and teaching that prejudice is diminishing, though that does not mean by any stretch of the imagination it is not still being taught. It continues to be taught (often resolutely) at Boston University. The above sentence is one manner in which it continues to be taught, Passive Reference. It is also actively taught.  “Perceived stigma” is another interesting Passive Reference, directed prejudices are intended by their directors to be perceived. “perceived” stigma is an obfuscation of the process whereby it is perceived.  It surprises me, that so many women, eschewing “the stigma” of rape, continue to declare “the stigma” of mental illnesses. Sometimes history does not inform us. A few years ago 5 students died by suicide at a Canadian college, blamed was “the stigma” of mental illnesses, not those conveying it. When a young man at U Penn died by suicide it prompted his sister to set up a now national organization protesting “the stigma” of mental illnesses, not those conveying it. National organizations abound conveying “the stigma” of mental illnesses to eagerly awaiting audiences. Publications abound, but to my knowledge not one single publication directly addresses how it is taught or who teaches it.  Nor, to my knowledge is there a campus in the US, or any English speaking country, where someone is given guidance on how to address those directing it. Whom to approach. How to resolve it. [email protected] offers no such guidance. I invite each of you to return to 1972, when a small group of personally empowered women said, “Stop directing the term stigma at rape, you have done enough harm” and take that lesson to heart: We stopped.

And I invite [email protected] to take a role in bringing about that change. 

Harold A Maio, retired mental health editor

Wow – so what is BU doing about this when we have pleaded with admin and offered so many ideas and solutions to helping here since September 2020?

The silence is deafening BU.

The Well Being Project is stagnate.

The Dean is silent.

The provost says students are happy based on some survey they did just before holidays when students knew they were going home.

The Director of Mental Health says appts for mental health are down – that’s the sign everything is fine?

We are hearing the opposite and many students have just lost their faith in support from BU as well as just returning home for LFA where they have a support system.

Where are the social in person safe activities outside and inside?

Where are the RAs and their weekly activities and support of their residents or are they just there to write students up?

Where are the self-care tips and resources offered daily to students?

Where in the daily MANDATORY self-check survey of their health – are any questions about their emotional well being including their mood, stress levels, sleep and appetite?

Where is the support for faculty who are seeing these issues and trying to reach out?

Where are the therapy dogs from pre-pandemic we asked for weekly or biweekly to come outside and offer unconditional emotional support during this tough time?

Where are some campus wide concerts or comedy relief concert paid for by BU – virtually or outside so students have anything to look forward to? If it’s down to money / the $70,000 Tuition or should cover some of it or funds from housing since many were not reimbursed when they returned home for support.

Where is any work with this amazing wise resource Dr. Lipson to take any of her guidance since last summer instead of just posting it here?

Is anyone listening to the isolation and pain of so many terriers? I have heard troubling stories for months since we began our BU Parent group that is NOT monitored by the Deans office unlike others. I have helped refer and counsel families worried if they speak up there might be some retaliation. There is no retaliation just a deaf ear to making any changes to improve morale and well being of our terriers during a pandemic. And then posting this article is the ultimate hutzpah when no one has listened to Dr.Lipson / your own shining star about these issues.

Why not shine as you have with COVID testing? What if this were your family member feeling isolated and disillusioned with their dreams at BU with no outreach from BU except an occasional ZOOM message.

BU can do so much better and be the example for the rest of the nation. Why test so stringently if you will not allow any safe activities except for favorites like sports teams and band members?

Terriers are ZOOMED OUT. Don’t wait for a suicide or more depression to appear in students. It’s almost too late to be proactive / but you can try and we ask that you try hard. Be an example for other colleges.

We are not giving up on being heard. We are parents who care and love BU and know it can do better.

A lot of good points made – I wanted to touch upon when you mentioned that appointments for mental health are apparently down. As a student actively seeking mental health resources, my experience is that it has been extremely difficult to even schedule any sort of mental health appointments or counseling; we are unable to make an appointment online or in-person anymore, and the only information we are given is a phone number to call (the Behavioral Medicine number). I find this frustrating as many of us need more than just a phone conversation to help – even a zoom meeting would be helpful, but why aren’t there zoom appointments for SHS like there are for almost every other service on campus (e.g., pre-professional advising, financial aid, etc.)? I’ve noticed that the loneliness and isolation is affecting not only me but my roommates as well, who have stronger support systems and more friends on campus than I do – we’ve all been lacking motivation to do any of our work and they’ve mentioned that they feel like they need a break (spring break canceled due to pandemic concerns). Even some of my professors seem burnt out – forgetting class, getting behind on their syllabus, etc. In my opinion, BU should be more proactive in giving students resources instead of making it difficult to find said resources. Lastly, I wanted to add that I understand a lot of services are probably very different now due to the pandemic, but a single “wellness week” and emails about it do not do much to actually help students – I find it comparable to “self care” where the self care is just drinking wine and putting on a skincare mask and pushing all your real problems aside.

I agree with those who are asking for BU to do more to support students. I’m a faculty member who is trying to do my best to support my students. I’m more than willing to give extensions, modify assignments, and lower my expectations this semester. I’m checking in on students who miss class to make sure they’re okay. I’m trying to cut as much material as I can while still meeting my course learning objectives. At the same time, I don’t think it’s fair to expect faculty to do everything when it comes to students’ wellbeing. I’ve been in meetings where faculty were asked (both implicitly and explicitly) to help students make friends and socialize during class. I know faculty who are doing this in their courses (and I applaud them for their efforts), but shouldn’t Res Life and other staff at BU be providing opportunities for students to safely socialize? Sure, it’s cold, but certainly BU can be creative and think of ways to encourage students to get out of their dorms and make friends. Faculty are struggling too, and BU’s administration can help us by helping our students.

This is an excellent article, and though not surprising, it is shocking that the BU administration has not done anything to remedy this mental health crises. This is a mental health pandemic happening and it should be as high of a priority for BU as the trying to control the virus. If BU doesn’t step up and come up with a plan to address this then our students will suffer for years to come. This should have happened months ago. You can’t have a healthy individual/society if you are only concerned with physical health. It has to be a holistic approach.

Nice article I hope all instructors read this article I am one of the students sometimes fell a depression and live in the anxiety that is effectives on my life and do not have the energy to do anything particularly during what we live now

First, I would like to focus on the positive and thank BU mental health staff for being there for my son when he was in urgent need of mental health support back in the Fall semester. My call was answered right away and my son was able to speak with a professional with in 15 minutes. I was very impressed and relieved. They were there when we needed them.

On the other hand, I’m hearing from my son and all of his friends that the academic culture of rigor for the sake of rigor, grade deflation and the purposeful weeding out of students from core classes rather than supporting and helping each student succeed, not only continues but has been increased during COVID. These students have a sense that professors are concerned about online cheating so have ramped the rigor to address this. Not sure if this is real or perceived and I’m sure this is not going on in all classes as I also heard examples of supportive professors, but this is definitely a theme I am hearing from students. This style of academics is known to be outdated and ineffective, yet it continues, even at a higher level, during a pandemic.

I’m hoping this feedback can serve helpful to administration.

THANK YOU!!!! As a college student, who has survived the past year with a 4.0, attending full-time to obtain my degree in IT. I am struggling for the first time. After technology issues that set me behind four days, I really thought my instructors would understand. One of my instructors couldn’t care less. The workload is beyond overwhelming, her curriculum seems almost cruel. I graduate next month and I feel like I am losing my mind. I already suffer from severe anxiety, so the level I’m at now is almost debilitating. I have been obtaining degrees since 1998, and familiar with online learning. I’ve never had issues. This morning I received an email from her reminding me of the due date, in all bold caps, followed by some !!!! … She made it clear she is not available on the weekend, but expects us to be flexible. So my dilemma is this, I am failing my coding class now, but I don’t feel that I should be financially responsible to pay for having to retake it, as well as have it impact my financial aid and scholarships I receive for my academic performance.

Hi. I’m a BU alumna, a college professor, and mom to 4 college-aged sons. WONDERING… Do students feel there is explicit and implicit prejudice against college students as “purveyors of COVID?” I think this adds to the discomfort or enjoyment of being a college student and part of a university community. Thoughts? Thanks!

I notice that the students like to complain on here. One thing that university researchers on mental health have a difficult time assessing is knowing the familial support system (or lack thereof) students come into university life with. Psychologists will affirm that this plays a huge role in the mental health of students, at any age. Just as elementary through high schools today are expected to be the emotional, parental, physical, educational, and social supporter of each student, so too are universities being given this sort of expectation. Don’t get me wrong…I believe in striving for mental health and making resources available on campuses. However, within the communities of students – whether their friends or family – we have to realize that the internal conversation around mental health for many cultures is either non-existent or looked down upon. We can sing mental health from the rooftops all day long and hope that students are listening…..and I hope they do.

ECT/Electroshock use has been on the rise last 5 years or so and not just used for depression nor as a last resort. No FDA testing ever done of devices used or the procedure itself. Increase risk for suicide following as many cannot find help for their repeated brain injuries after consenting to this. Lawsuits taking place in the US and England around these damages covered up. See site ectjustice to learn more. Please speak out on social media so others are made aware of the truth of this practice.

People shouldn’t hesitate to ask for psychological help. I think it’s one of the main problems why people struggle mentally. Maybe, it’s a matter of self-critique, and society says sometimes that we should be strong… But when someone gets in an emotional crisis, only a professional can help. And I also never see when students/educators judge their peers/colleagues if someone contacted mental health support. I looked through the list of different affordable mental health services across English-speaking countries – https://ivypanda.com/blog/mental-health-resources – I was shocked how many problems we can have, and how many professionals exist to help with them. Maybe, it may be helpful to others too. Let’s take care of ourselves.

I tried to find the source for “83 %” of college students say their performance was negatively affected by mental health. Did you just pull that number out of thin air? I tried to go through everything I could and could not find this number anywhere in any actual published writing.

Please see page six of the report, the pie chart listed under Academic Impairment.

I think you just made up certain elements of this article and they actually have 0 foundation whatsoever. It has led me down a rabbit hole of attempting to try to find the published support for some of the claims you make. Including the 83 % figure. If you’re going to write articles that will be heavily referenced (which this is, because other idiots went on to quote this article), you should at least get the facts straight.

Please see page 6 of the report, the pie chart listed under Academic Impairment: https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/HMS-Fall-2020-National-Data-Report.pdf

That is a misrepresentation of the data, in my opinion. Including students who reported mental health impacting their academic performance 1-2 days out of the week is insufficient to be grouped in with 83% of students. The way it is presented in this article makes it seem much more drastic than that. It should say, “28% of students felt 1-2 days out of the week had been negatively impacted by their mental health in the past month..” and report the other percentages. Not combined into one group and twisted in a sensationalistic way. I was attempting to use this information for a research paper of my own and was sent down a rabbit hole trying to find a source. Other people have cited this article, and that is your responsibility as a researcher.

Reading it because to help a friend with his assignment. He studies in FAST, Islamabad, Pakistan. If anyone of his class fellows are here, good luck to you

It is 3:12 in the morning and I just got off the phone with son. He called because he was riddled with anxiety and suffering with loneliness and a seeming inability to form meaningful connections. This is his first year at BU. He loves the University; However, in addition to the rigorous academic challenges, he is crushed by the seeming inability to form connections with others. This, on so many levels, surprises me. He is intelligent, interesting, friendly, handsome and well rounded. Upon my introduction to the University’s logistical layout, I was immediately aware that it not appear easily conducive to meeting people… As opposed to a smaller private college if you will. Clearly, BU had an obligation to address the many challenges brought about as a result of Covid. Understandable, but perhaps a bit extreme, ie: The students not being allowed to eat or congregate. Regardless, what I also observed is that there are few, if any, common rooms.. areas for students to hang out, play board games, ping pong, darts, tell jokes, b.s. and share common concerns. Or My point being, there should be multiple places (Besides sneaking into local clubs, or drinking Alone in your dorm) where kids can go..day or night. Organized events as well, aside from sports. As aforementioned, my son also found it very challenging and frustrating to contact a counselor through your service. When you do, the schedules are booked…… I have been heartbroken. Nonetheless, the consistent voice if encouragement. I want more from the school. I, like all others noted before me. More social emotional support. More access to social opportunities. More professors understanding and working with the challenges our children are struggling to navigate. In closing, it’s not just a BU crisis. I listen to very similar difficulties from many other University families…. PLEASE be more proactive. PLEASE care PLEASE help It is imperative and essential to a successful college experience and outcome. Thank you. And thank you all aforementioned

very very nice

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Why Are College Students Feeling So Lonely?

... and what parents can do to help..

Posted February 26, 2020 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

• Understanding Loneliness
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When I first read Madison’s intake form, she listed her primary symptoms as depression , low energy, sleeplessness , and some anxiety . She was a first-semester freshman and was already feeling like she was drowning. Her parents were worried but optimistic . They’d never seen her in such a rut but assumed it was just her transitioning into the new normal of college.

As weeks turned into months and she slogged through papers and tests, it became clear what was really troubling her: She was lonely.

She had good friends throughout high school and never felt isolated or lonely. Of course there were the normal ups and downs of friends and relationships but nothing chronic. She focused so much on the excitement of starting college she hadn’t thought much about how she would meet a whole new set of friends. She assumed friends would just "happen."

Her depression and most of her other challenges were directly connected to unmet social expectations. Madison, like so many other students and their parents, just assume that friends and social opportunities automatically present themselves. When we feel lonely over long periods of time we start to feel disconnected and maybe even hopeless, like we'll never have friends again. Sounds extreme, but the human brain can often exaggerate the severity of a situation. Temporary problems may feel permanent.

According to a recent survey of 48,000 college students, 64% reported feeling extremely lonely in the last year. Late Fall is when I see this in real life. There is a jump in the number of students, like Madison, beginning to experience overwhelming sadness from loneliness . It’s a tough time since the weather is colder and friend groups seem more established and less accessible. January is also bad, maybe even worse. It’s when kids are back to school and the temporary reprieve of being home for winter break with family and home friends has faded. The cold reality of campus, courses, and the challenges of the last semester come flooding back.

Why Is It So Hard to Find Friends?

With tens of thousands of students on big campuses, how is it possible for a student to struggle connecting with others? Friendships take time, often years, to develop. Friendships are based on common interests, values, and experiences. Friendships are also based on trust. All of this takes time to explore with others. Students are also bringing to campus their own expectations and social norms. What’s fashionable and cool to talk about in New York City is likely very different than what’s cool in Atlanta. This can make it challenging to figure out where someone fits in. Someone who was well-liked and maybe even pretty cool back home may struggle when they’re not accepted at the same social rank.

Why Not Just Join a Frat?

For many students (about 9 million in the United States), greek life is the place to be: They get room, board, friends, and parties all baked-in together. Greek life represents the promise of belonging somewhere. Many students can’t imagine being at school without their frat or sorority. The benefits of being in greek life can be substantial.

But what about students who either don't want to join a frat or sorority or don't get a bid? College can be even more difficult if there is a significant greek presence but they're not part of it. Students might feel compelled to rush even if they’re not really into it. If they do want to rush, which houses should they try to get bids at? If they get multiple bids, how do they choose which house to go with? Just the process of rushing can be stressful . Being accepted can provide a safe place to live with lots of other students to hang with. But if they’re not accepted, they can feel forgotten, ignored, and rejected. For many students, they’ve never experienced that type of rejection before and may not be prepared for being kept out.

Everyone Is Having So Much Fun

No, they're not. At the risk of beating up on everyone's favorite boogeyman, social media can amplify loneliness and, in some cases, be the cause. Seeing other students’ pics of parties, tailgating, and campus events where everyone is smiling and hugging and just loving life creates an unrealistic expectation in many that they're missing out. Everyone else is part of a group! Everyone else is included! Everyone else found their tribe! Why not me? When we have control over what we share, we show the polished, best version of ourselves.

Just Join a Club

Every large school has a thriving club scene and will have all the different options listed on their student life page. Unfortunately, many clubs now conduct interviews, might be limited to a specific number of students, or might be pretty exclusive.

Wait, what? Clubs were the place to go where a student didn’t have to apply, get initiated, and sell themselves. The thing I like about clubs is the self-selection effect: Students who like chess might join the Chess Club. Students who join the Chess Club are more likely to have other common or overlapping interests like the Scrabble Club and Yahtzee Club. Hey, this is starting to sound like a good way to meet new friends with similar interests. I also like clubs for developing friends since the focus is on an activity (eg. playing chess) rather than the non-focus of a frat.

What Can Parents Do?

It’s so hard for parents to know their kids are hurting. It can make them feel powerless and make them do desperate things. I’ve seen parents travel across the country and move in to hotels for weeks to help their college student get help. Universities can’t provide all the proactive support many students need and so it often falls to the parents who are well-intentioned but out of their depth. Here are specific things parents can do:

• Get a release of information signed so that you can talk with and coordinate with the university counseling program, academic advisors, and disability services staff.
• Listen to your son/daughter and reflect what they’re feeling, but don’t try to solve anything: “Sounds like it’s really hard to make deeper connections right now and it seems like it’s easier everyone else.”
• Offer to help brainstorm ... but only after being asked: “When you need some suggestions on how to make new friends, let me know.”
• Don’t accept silence and assume everything is ok. Keep up with regular communication with your son/daughter and the school.
• If the school isn’t able to help, find a therapist close to campus who specializes in working with college students. A good therapist will not only provide counseling but also help parents with their supportive skills.

With some solid communication and a good team, your struggling student can find the space to rebuild confidence , connect with friends, and have a more satisfying college experience.

Rob Danzman is a licensed professional counselor and mental health counselor and founder of Motivate Counseling in Bloomington, Indiana.

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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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I recently graduated college and loneliness is one of the most unexpected parts of post-grad life. It makes it difficult to adjust.

• After graduating from college in 2022, I started to feel lonely.
• Most of my college friends are scattered across the country, so I largely have long-distance pals.
• When we do hang out, we talk about how lonely we are. I'm trying to adjust.

I've reached an age where I've started to resemble the characters on a TV show trying to "find themselves" — the ones that impulsively move to a new city for a new beginning or cut their bangs and say that it's a step forward.

I know I'm an adult because I now have a decent-enough skincare routine . I pay my credit-card bill on time. I buy floss and don't lie to the dentist about how much I use it. Like some good writers in movies, I get my best ideas at night, sit at my desk with my glasses on, and then wake up an hour later in a cold sweat and decide I hate everything I've ever written.

You see, I graduated from college in May 2022 and have entered the "adulting" phase. I just didn't expect loneliness in my postgrad life.

I've learned loneliness is a part of my adulthood

For every good thing about being in my early 20s and for every Girl Scout medal I've given myself for being a semifunctioning adult, there's this curtain that I pull in front of the "bad stuff."

I knew my friends would go here and I would go there, but the actual emotion didn't set in until I hugged my last friend goodbye that summer after I graduated. It was night when I left, and as I drove back home to my family, I realized it felt like a coming-of-age movie montage. Like, this is when things could really start.

Since our disbandment, every conversation I have with friends dances around the topic of loneliness . It's interesting because everyone a couple of years older than me often tells me how tough it can be, but I didn't hear about it until the "good old days" were done and the tassel was turned.

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I felt anticipatory loneliness when some college friends came to town for a weekend — all of them long-distance friends, as many of mine are.

The days were packed with spontaneous detours, surprise guests, and the exchange of information that wasn't relayed over the phone or voice messages. The long drives on narrow canyon roads made everything feel special. But we had several conversations about loneliness. We talked about how it could be lonely in "real life" and how postgrad wasn't exactly what we'd expected.

These days, I often find myself suffering from a serious case of "inability to shut up." I'm on the edge of my seat, ready to spill my opinions, theories, and woes to the friend who picks up the phone. My thoughts are all dammed up until I finally talk to someone, making me feel like a golden retriever waiting by the door. Whenever I meet someone my age in person, they're quick to tell me that they're lonely as well. We're all the golden retriever at the door.

Adjusting to that new normal takes time

I'm not as lonely as I was in my first months out of college. It was a shock to the system then — like being thrown into the cold waters of the deep end of a pool. But it has lessened with time. It has lessened with joining volunteer cohorts, going to yoga classes, and scheduling regular phone calls with those close long-distance friends.

I've also learned there are great parts to being lonely . I have learned more about myself, have gotten to catch up on all the best TV of late, have remembered why I love my loved ones, and have met wonderful new people.

I've come to the realization that this isn't a unique experience. It's one that we all go through, whether we're graduating from a four-year university, entering the workforce straight from high school, going into the military, or doing something else. So much of the world is lonely , but the bright side is that if so many people are lonely, they're likely amenable to making friends.

Of course, there's also something to having those long-distance friends. It's not ideal to have people scattered around the country with different priorities, jobs, and schedules. But there's something to the whole "absence making the heart grow fonder" thing. I've started to appreciate them that much more when I get to see them — virtually or in person.

I don't know who in my life is a prime-time player and who's just first-string for a season, but I know that my heart aches for them. We're all a little sad, but it's still a little beautiful.

Watch: The surprising effects loneliness has on your brain and body

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This routine is not daily, but it is familiar: I realize with a good amount of dread that for the last eight hours, I have had no social interaction with live human beings in my schedule. I’ll reach out to friends and try to set something up, but there will be one snag or another and nothing will end up working out (they’re busy, or not on campus, or they really want to focus on this essay, etc.). So I’ll try to work somewhere other than my room, hoping that just being around other people will be enough to soothe my extrovert cravings for companionship. It doesn’t; I go to sleep with an odd and harrowing feeling of loneliness, unsure if the next day will look the same way.

There’s a myriad of reactions that one can have in this struggle, and I’ve probably cycled through all of them by this point in the year. Because it’s an inexplicable situation to end up in, there’s an endless number of ways to brood over the feeling of loneliness and an endless number of feelings it can inspire. I used to blame myself for how my energy would dwindle the more discouraged I got, wondering why I was sometimes “settling” for this situation by not reaching out to even more people. I wondered where exactly I had gone wrong in my social planning to end up with so many wonderful friends but so little time spent with them. I wondered, too, what was wrong with me that I couldn’t find enjoyment indulging in any one of my many hobbies with that empty time in my day after work and classes.

The biggest feeling that I have about my social life, however, is a feeling of powerlessness. There’s no one to blame or be mad at. No one is snubbing me: people really are stretched thin. Deadlines have crept up on me too, and I know how bad people feel turning down a request to get dinner or hang out. There’s no way to make people less busy, including myself. I’ve had to turn down some of those same requests with the same feeling of dread because of my own mounting workload. The reason the formula feels so familiar is because it is looming and unstoppable; it’s hard to expect consistent companionship in such a rigorous environment.

Not all of this melancholy has been purely negative, at least. I think that realizing my powerlessness in it all has allowed me to smother some of my less helpful thoughts, like the idea that it’s my fault that I’m alone a lot or that I’ve done something to be rejected by Amherst as a place. But all in all, my loneliness here has led me to appreciate the interactions that I do have so much more. When those Val dates do work out or I have a club meeting to attend, I can value the time I’m spending with people as a relaxing respite out of both of our schedules, a time where work has decidedly been set aside for the sake of reconnecting with another human being.

I can’t say how the positivity and negativity coming from this loneliness has resolved itself, nor can I say what my outlook or my solution is. But I do think that sharing a small piece of what the daily grind can be like at this college might be helpful to someone imagining that this situation is something unique to only them. Hopefully, by speaking frankly about this kind of thing, we can be a little less lonely in our loneliness.

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I will base my research paper on the isolation of the aged in the society. The paper will delve deep into the problems that face the elderly in the society today. The research was triggered by my service in an organization that exposed me to elderly people. After interacting with them, I was privileged to observe them and get a subjective view of the issues they undergo in their daily lives. I served in an organization known as ABCD North End, where I got to interact with the aged from Boston community.

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Introductory statement: Many observers have come up with various viewpoints in light of the examination of the two ideas of addiction and loneliness.

Thesis statement: There are similarities and differences between the causes and symptoms of both addiction and loneliness.

First Supporting Idea (Topic Sentence): In terms of similarity, some causes of addiction and loneliness relate to neurobiology. Scientific evidence shows that addictive tendencies occur in the parts of human brains that govern some of the most fundamental and life-sustaining requirements and functions.

Brain develops new circuitry all through the lifespan of people

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First year university students often claim that good academic skills will lead them to academic success. However, research suggests that social skills and personal attributes have a significant influence on how well students cope with the challenges of transition to university.

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Essay Samples on Loneliness

Technology makes us lonely: the negatives of the progress.

There’s food on the table, with many people surrounding it ready to dig into a big family dinner, but wait everyone’s heads are down. What are they doing, are they praying, or are they really invested in a very lengthy book or Epic, like Beowulf?...

• Impact of Technology
• Negative Impact of Technology

Social Media and Technology Makes Us Lonely and Isolated

Technology has been the holy grail that has led to increased connectivity, new frontiers of business and economics and improved lives. On the other hand, it has also led to intense misery and contributed to the destruction of lives. Today, I will present facts and...

Crippling Sense Of Loneliness In Haruki Murakami's Novel Kafka On The Shore

In Haruki Murakami's 'Kafka on the Shore,' loneliness consumes the main character throughout the novel. Kafka Tamura's loneliness is a constant inner battle that not only affects him but the people he meets along his journey through the mountainside town of Takamatsu. Kafka has an...

How Characters in the Novel Of Mice and Men Cope with Their Loneliness

The theme of loneliness is presented in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. In the novel Of Mice and Men, loneliness is an important emotion that often drives the characters to behave in a different manner to usual. Steinbeck uses characters, some of the most...

• Great Depression
• Of Mice and Men

Loneliness And Depression In Social Media And Spider Poem

Social network connects all the people around the world. This connection makes everyone feel together no matter how far they are and this connection is strong like spiders web. The web links the people powerfully ıt provides worldwide connectivity. Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram...

• A Noiseless Patient Spider

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Similarities Between Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Novel Between The World and Me and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: Theme of the Feeling of Alienation

In both Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy contain an underlying theme of feeling as if both J.D. Vance nor Ta-Nehisi Coates do not belong in the place they were raised. However, one is more mental the other is...

• Between The World and Me

Ways and Methods of Alleviating Homesickness

With the recent increase in globalization and international mobility, overseas settlements for work or study are now more common than ever. At the same time, the number of these population is still increasing. However, the process of adapting to the new environment is essential for...

• Homesickness

Alienation and Loneliness in The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Poe like McCarthy does not straight out inform the readers of facts, they leave out details that are deemed unnecessary to the theme and the main idea of the story. However, most ideas can be inferred due to the clues they leave in their language....

The Effect of Loneliness on College Students

Starting college is truly a wonderful time and a unique experience. You meet new people and face new challenges which is very exciting but all these changes can be tough to cope up with. Some students find it extremely hard and challenging to fit in...

The Theme of Loneliness in John Steinbeck Book Of Mice and Men

Loneliness is something that many people experience, surprisingly. Especially in the book, Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck which was written in the 1930’s during the Great Depression when everyone was suffering financially and emotionally. It doesn’t matter who they are, people from all...

• John Steinbeck

How to Deal With Loneliness in a Healthy Way

Everyone gets lonely at one point or another in their lives. Loneliness is a normal emotion we feel when we disconnect ourselves from others either emotionally or physically. Truth be told, even though loneliness is a normal emotion, it is no easy to live with...

• Healthy Lifestyle
• Mental Illness

The Relation of Social Isolation to Crime Commiting

Human beings along with many other species are known to be included in a behavioral group referred to as “social creatures”. The marks of this group include family units, tribes, and friendly communication or interaction with other members- either within the same species or another...

• Criminology
• Social Isolation

Postcolonial elements in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Postcolonial literature deals with various aspects including class differences and the representation of the subaltern or the voiceless. Lack of opportunities, deprivation of basic necessities, loneliness in a crowded world, alienation in one’s own country, subordination at all levels and being silent and resigned to...

• The White Tiger

Iinitial Life of Robinson Crusoe - Great Novel by Daniel Defoe in 1719

Robinson Crusoe was composed by Daniel Defoe in 1719. It recounts the tale of the life of Robinson Crusoe, a man destined to center life society. He spurned along these lines of life and looked to pick up wealth by turning into a mariner, investigating...

• Robinson Crusoe

Loneliness, Mindfulness, and Academic Achievements: A Moderation Effect

Introduction The authors of the article Loneliness, Mindfulness, and Academic Achievements: A Moderation Effect among First-Year College Students are Eyal Rosenstreich and Malka Margalit. Both the authors of this article are professors at Tel-Aviv University. They're both known for the article that this review is...

• Academic Achievements
• Mindfulness

An Analysis of the Literary Techniques Used to Depict Sadness in Bronte's Cold in the Earth

How does Emily Bronte convey a sense of sadness in Cold in the Earth? This poem is about the loss of her husband, and the emotional and physical pain it has inflicted on her. This poem is a lament and therefore has a consistent sense...

Of Mice And Men By John Steinbeck: A Theme Of Loneliness

Loneliness is a human feeling, a state of mind and a place in which some people live. If someone is feeling unhappy, it could be because of his or her lack of friends and socialization. Likely that person experiences loneliness. In the novel Of Mice...

Solitude In Traveling: Being Wanderlust

“Travelling has taught me better. Sometimes it is the delayed flights, flat tires, orthodox Indian families or bumpy bullock cart rides. Every bit of my journey has made me a better person.” Wanderlust - A very popular hashtag now mostly making an appearance on people’s...

Best topics on Loneliness

1. Technology Makes Us Lonely: The Negatives of the Progress

2. Social Media and Technology Makes Us Lonely and Isolated

3. Crippling Sense Of Loneliness In Haruki Murakami’s Novel Kafka On The Shore

4. How Characters in the Novel Of Mice and Men Cope with Their Loneliness

5. Loneliness And Depression In Social Media And Spider Poem

6. Similarities Between Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Novel Between The World and Me and J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: Theme of the Feeling of Alienation

7. Ways and Methods of Alleviating Homesickness

8. Alienation and Loneliness in The Road by Cormac McCarthy

9. The Effect of Loneliness on College Students

10. The Theme of Loneliness in John Steinbeck Book Of Mice and Men

11. How to Deal With Loneliness in a Healthy Way

12. The Relation of Social Isolation to Crime Commiting

13. Postcolonial elements in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

14. Iinitial Life of Robinson Crusoe – Great Novel by Daniel Defoe in 1719

15. Loneliness, Mindfulness, and Academic Achievements: A Moderation Effect

• Perseverance
• Personal Experience
• Bad Memories

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Loneliness Essay Example

Loneliness is a feeling that many people experience at one point or another. The impact of it on your life can vary greatly depending on the situation. This sample will explore the different types of loneliness, how to deal with them, and some tips for overcoming loneliness in general.

Essay Example On Loneliness

• Thesis Statement – Loneliness Essay
• Introduction – Loneliness Essay
• Main Body – Loneliness Essay
• Conclusion – Loneliness Essay

Thesis Statement – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a consequence of being robbed of one’s freedom. It can be due to imprisonment, loss of liberty, or being discriminated against. Introduction – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a social phenomenon that has been the subject of much research since time immemorial. Yet there still does not exist any solid explanation as to why some people are more prone to loneliness than others. This paper will seek to analyze this potentially debilitating condition from different perspectives. It will cover the relationship between loneliness and incarceration or loss of liberty; then it will proceed into discussing how emotions play a role in making us feel lonely; finally, it will look at how these feelings can affect our mental stability and overall well-being. Get Non-Plagiarized Custom Essay on Loneliness in USA Order Now Main Body – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a universal feeling which has the ability to create its own culture within different societies. In detention facilities, there is a unique kind of loneliness that prevails between prisoners who are often divided into various categories and population groups. This has been described by Mandela as a consequence of being robbed of one’s freedom. The fact that it can be due to imprisonment, loss of liberty, or being discriminated against makes it even clearer why this isolation from other people occurs so frequently among detainees. In addition, when one spends time incarcerated in solitary confinement, they may become more experienced at coping with feelings of loneliness and despondency; however, these feelings do not tend to dissipate completely because living in an artificial environment cannot be compared with living out in the open. There is also a difference between feeling lonely and actually being alone; many individuals who do not feel social pressure, meaning that they are more than happy spending time on their own without any external stimulation, may still find themselves surrounded by people every day. Yet even this does not guarantee that one will escape feelings of isolation or rejection. Loneliness becomes an issue when it is chronic and experienced frequently, if only fleetingly. It can affect our psychological balance as well as our physical health because it usually initiates stress responses within the body which cause high blood pressure and prompt addiction to drugs or alcohol consumption. All these reasons may lead to decreased productivity and ultimately affect one’s ability to develop or maintain social connections. Buy Customized Essay on Loneliness At Cheapest Price Order Now Conclusion – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a condition that we can’t always avoid, but it is something we should be aware of and try to limit. Thus, while the effects of loneliness on the individual may not be able to stimulate any significant changes in society, at least there will always remain one person more who understands what you are going through. Ultimately, it all comes down to empathy and sharing our own stories so that more people learn how to cope with this potentially dangerous emotional response. Hire USA Experts for Loneliness Essay Order Now

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This essay sample has given you some insights into the psychology of loneliness as well as suggestions for how to combat it in your own life.

Many of us find it hard to start writing an essay on general topics like loneliness. The free essay sample on loneliness is given here by the experts of Students Assignment Help to those who are assigned an essay on loneliness by professors. With the help of this sample, many ideas can easily be gathered by the college graduates to write their coursework essays.

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Op-Ed: There’s a loneliness crisis on college campuses

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When I arrived at USC 11 years ago as dean of religious life, my pastoral conversations with students mostly focused on their quests for meaning and purpose. They were striving to translate values into action, cultivate joy and gratitude, live extraordinary lives.

But over the last several years, these conversations have taken a devastating turn. Whereas students used to ask “ How should I live?” they are now more likely to ask “ Why should I live?” Where they used to talk about hope and meaning; now they grapple with hopelessness and meaninglessness. Every year, it seems, I encounter more stress, anxiety, and depression, and more students in crisis on campus.

My colleagues at other universities say they are seeing the same distressing trend, and research backs up our observations.

I never got the question in my first five years at USC that I now get almost daily from students: “How do I make friends?”

According to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, the increase in utilization rates for counseling centers across the country over the last five years has greatly outpaced the increase in student enrollment, and as a result, schools have trouble hiring enough mental health counselors to keep up with growing demand. The most recent Healthy Minds Survey, an annual report on mental health on college and university campuses, found that one-third of undergraduate students in the United States wrestle with some kind of mental health issue, while more than 10% struggle with thoughts of suicide. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program’s large annual survey of college freshmen has noted a marked and steady downward trend in the self-reported emotional health of students along with a large uptick in self-reported feelings of being overwhelmed.

What I have noticed in my work with students is that many of them face the same hidden root challenge: loneliness. According to a recent survey by the global health service company Cigna, the loneliest generation in the United States today is not the oldest Americans but the youngest, specifically young adults between 18 and 22 years old.

I never got the question in my first five years at USC that I now get almost daily from students: “How do I make friends?” Students may have thousands of friends online, but few in real life; they may be experts at talking with their thumbs, but not so much with their tongues. As a result, many feel as though they don’t have a tribe or a sense of belonging. They feel disconnected from what it means to be human.

While it is now fashionable to refer to this cohort of college and university students as a coddled generation of “snowflakes,” the reality is they face unprecedented challenges and circumstances. They are entering a world in which many of the career paths of their parents’ generation no longer exist or have changed drastically. They face escalating tuition costs with little sense of whether their future opportunities justify the outlay. They have participated in active shooter trainings and campus lockdown drills for most of their lives. And according to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than one-third of young adults are now disaffiliated with religion, marking a dramatic generational shift away from religion and from the comfort and community that it can provide.

The convergence of these factors and realities has directly contributed to a crippling sense of anxiety and alienation in students across the country.

But today’s students are also creative and courageous, engaged and empathetic, diverse and inclusive. They are hardworking and goal-oriented. It needs to be the job of colleges and universities to help students develop resources that enable them to thrive and flourish mentally, emotionally and spiritually, so that they may fulfill their academic aspirations and achieve their professional goals.

Enter the Fray: First takes on the news of the minute »

At USC, we’re trying a variety of things, including a dedicated mindfulness training app and free mindfulness programs that reach more than 7,000 people a year. A new, for-credit freshman course called Thrive focuses on emotional intelligence, healthy relationships, self-care, resiliency and human flourishing. In the fall, we will debut our new artificial intelligence well-being assistant, named Ari , which will guide students to appropriate support resources and communities on campus.

We also offer and host yoga classes, drum circles, friendship courses, community teas, coloring sessions, laughing groups, sleep classes, connection workshops, meditation retreats, campfire conversations and primal scream opportunities. We’ve recently appointed our first director of belonging , while our full-time wellness dog, Professor Beauregard Tirebiter (affectionately known as “Beau”) strolls the campus daily.

Colleges and universities have always had a responsibility to develop the whole student so that our young people are able to make not just a living, but a life. Today, that means examining a new range of challenges that students face and developing a new approach to well-being on campus. By doing so, colleges and universities can help empower students to transform the world by transforming themselves.

Varun Soni is dean of religious life at USC, where he also serves as vice provost of campus wellness and crisis intervention.

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Paris, 1951. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum

Loved, yet lonely

You might have the unconditional love of family and friends and yet feel deep loneliness. can philosophy explain why.

by Kaitlyn Creasy   + BIO

Although one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just arrived back home from a study abroad semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had advanced to the point where I was dreaming in the language. I had also developed intellectual interests in Italian futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism – interests not entirely deriving from a crush on the professor who taught a course on those topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (conceivably also related to that crush). I left my semester abroad feeling as many students likely do: transformed not only intellectually but emotionally. My picture of the world was complicated, my very experience of that world richer, more nuanced.

After that semester, I returned home to a small working-class town in New Jersey. Home proper was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in the process of foreclosure but not yet taken by the bank. Both parents had left to live elsewhere, and they graciously allowed me to stay there with my boyfriend, his sister and her boyfriend during college breaks. While on break from school, I spent most of my time with these de facto roommates and a handful of my dearest childhood friends.

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan so wonderfully captured their power. (‘And every one of them words rang true/and glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/like it was written in my soul …’) In addition to a strongly felt need to share specific parts of my intellectual and emotional lives that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as an acute need for my emotional life in all its depth and richness – for my whole being, this new being – to be appreciated. When I returned home, I felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.

This experience is not uncommon for study-abroad students. Even when one has a caring and supportive network of relationships, one will often experience ‘reverse culture shock’ – what the psychologist Kevin Gaw describes as a ‘process of readjusting, reacculturating, and reassimilating into one’s own home culture after living in a different culture for a significant period of time’ – and feelings of loneliness are characteristic for individuals in the throes of this process.

But there are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of loneliness, even if the individuals undergoing those experiences have loving friends and family: the student who comes home to his family and friends after a transformative first year at college; the adolescent who returns home to her loving but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp; the first-generation woman of colour in graduate school who feels cared for but also perpetually ‘ in-between ’ worlds, misunderstood and not fully seen either by her department members or her family and friends back home; the travel nurse who returns home to her partner and friends after an especially meaningful (or perhaps especially psychologically taxing) work assignment; the man who goes through a difficult breakup with a long-term, live-in partner; the woman who is the first in her group of friends to become a parent; the list goes on.

Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone.

In his recent book Life Is Hard (2022), the philosopher Kieran Setiya characterises loneliness as the ‘pain of social disconnection’. There, he argues for the importance of attending to the nature of loneliness – both why it hurts and what ‘that pain tell[s] us about how to live’ – especially given the contemporary prevalence of loneliness. He rightly notes that loneliness is not just a matter of being isolated from others entirely, since one can be lonely even in a room full of people. Additionally, he notes that, since the negative psychological and physiological effects of loneliness ‘seem to depend on the subjective experience of being lonely’, effectively combatting loneliness requires us to identify the origin of this subjective experience.

S etiya’s proposal is that we are ‘social animals with social needs’ that crucially include needs to be loved and to have our basic worth recognised. When we fail to have these basic needs met, as we do when we are apart from our friends, we suffer loneliness. Without the presence of friends to assure us that we matter, we experience the painful ‘sensation of hollowness, of a hole in oneself that used to be filled and now is not’. This is loneliness in its most elemental form. (Setiya uses the term ‘friends’ broadly, to include close family and romantic partners, and I follow his usage here.)

Imagine a woman who lands a job requiring a long-distance move to an area where she knows no one. Even if there are plenty of new neighbours and colleagues to greet her upon her arrival, Setiya’s claim is that she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness, since she does not yet have close, loving relationships with these people. In other words, she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.

Setiya is not alone in connecting feelings of loneliness to a lack of basic recognition. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), for example, Hannah Arendt also defines loneliness as a feeling that results when one’s human dignity or unconditional worth as a person fails to be recognised and affirmed, a feeling that results when this, one of the ‘basic requirements of the human condition’, fails to be met.

These accounts get a good deal about loneliness right. But they miss something as well. On these views, loving friendships allow us to avoid loneliness because the loving friend provides a form of recognition we require as social beings. Without loving friendships, or when we are apart from our friends, we are unable to secure this recognition. So we become lonely. But notice that the feature affirmed by the friend here – my unconditional value – is radically depersonalised. The property the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise put, the recognition that allegedly mitigates loneliness in Setiya’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal, abstract feature of oneself, a quality one shares with every other human being: her unconditional worth as a human being. (The recognition given by the loving friend is that I ‘[matter] … just like everyone else.’)

Just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends

Since my dignity or worth is disconnected from any particular feature of myself as an individual, however, my friend can recognise and affirm that worth without acknowledging or engaging my particular needs, specific values and so on. If Setiya is calling it right, then that friend can assuage my loneliness without engaging my individuality.

Or can they? Accounts that tie loneliness to a failure of basic recognition (and the alleviation of loneliness to love and acknowledgement of one’s dignity) may be right about the origin of certain forms of loneliness. But it seems to me that this is far from the whole picture, and that accounts like these fail to explain a wide variety of familiar circumstances in which loneliness arises.

When I came home from my study-abroad semester, I returned to a network of robust, loving friendships. I was surrounded daily by a steadfast group of people who persistently acknowledged and affirmed my unconditional value as a person, putting up with my obnoxious pretension (so it must have seemed) and accepting me even though I was alien in crucial ways to the friend they knew before. Yet I still suffered loneliness. In fact, while I had more close friendships than ever before – and was as close with friends and family members as I had ever been – I was lonelier than ever. And this is also true of the familiar scenarios from above: the first-year college student, the new parent, the travel nurse, and so on. All these scenarios are ripe for painful feelings of loneliness even though the individuals undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value.

So, there must be more to loneliness than Setiya’s account (and others like it) let on. Of course, if an individual’s worth goes unrecognised, she will feel awfully lonely. But just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends. What plagues accounts that tie loneliness to an absence of basic recognition is that they fail to do justice to loneliness as a feeling that pops up not only when one lacks sufficiently loving, affirmative relationships, but also when one perceives that the relationships she has (including and perhaps especially loving relationships) lack sufficient quality (for example, lacking depth or a desired feeling of connection). And an individual will perceive such relationships as lacking sufficient quality when her friends and family are not meeting the specific needs she has, or recognising and affirming her as the particular individual that she is.

We see this especially in the midst or aftermath of transitional and transformational life events, when greater-than-usual shifts occur. As the result of going through such experiences, we often develop new values, core needs and centrally motivating desires, losing other values, needs and desires in the process. In other words, after undergoing a particularly transformative experience, we become different people in key respects than we were before. If after such a personal transformation, our friends are unable to meet our newly developed core needs or recognise and affirm our new values and central desires – perhaps in large part because they cannot , because they do not (yet) recognise or understand who we have become – we will suffer loneliness.

This is what happened to me after Italy. By the time I got back, I had developed new core needs – as one example, the need for a certain level and kind of intellectual engagement – which were unmet when I returned home. What’s more, I did not think it particularly fair to expect my friends to meet these needs. After all, they did not possess the conceptual frameworks for discussing Russian absurdism or 13th-century Italian love sonnets; these just weren’t things they had spent time thinking about. And I didn’t blame them; expecting them to develop or care about developing such a conceptual framework seemed to me ridiculous. Even so, without a shared framework, I felt unable to meet my need for intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.

I n addition to developing new needs, I understood myself as having changed in other fundamental respects. While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see and affirm my individuality. I was radically changed; in fact, I felt in certain respects totally unrecognisable even to those who knew me best. After Italy, I inhabited a different, more nuanced perspective on the world; beauty, creativity and intellectual growth had become core values of mine; I had become a serious lover of poetry; I understood myself as a burgeoning philosopher. At the time, my closest friends were not able to see and affirm these parts of me, parts of me with which even relative strangers in my college courses were acquainted (though, of course, those acquaintances neither knew me nor were equipped to meet other of my needs which my friends had long met). When I returned home, I no longer felt truly seen by my friends .

One need not spend a semester abroad to experience this. For example, a nurse who initially chose her profession as a means to professional and financial stability might, after an especially meaningful experience with a patient, find herself newly and centrally motivated by a desire to make a difference in her patients’ lives. Along with the landscape of her desires, her core values may have changed: perhaps she develops a new core value of alleviating suffering whenever possible. And she may find certain features of her job – those that do not involve the alleviation of suffering, or involve the limited alleviation of suffering – not as fulfilling as they once were. In other words, she may have developed a new need for a certain form of meaningful difference-making – a need that, if not met, leaves her feeling flat and deeply dissatisfied.

Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly – and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.

Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness

So, even with loving friends, if we perceive ourselves as unable to be seen and affirmed as the particular people we are, or if certain of our core needs go unmet, we will feel lonely. Setiya is surely right that loneliness will result in the absence of love and recognition. But it can also result from the inability – and sometimes, failure – of those with whom we have loving relationships to share or affirm our values, to endorse desires that we understand as central to our lives, and to satisfy our needs.

Another way to put it is that our social needs go far beyond the impersonal recognition of our unconditional worth as human beings. These needs can be as widespread as a need for reciprocal emotional attachment or as restricted as a need for a certain level of intellectual engagement or creative exchange. But even when the need in question is a restricted or uncommon one, if it is a deep need that requires another person to meet yet goes unmet, we will feel lonely. The fact that we suffer loneliness even when these quite specific needs are unmet shows that understanding and treating this feeling requires attending not just to whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met by those around me.

What’s more, since different people have different needs, the conditions that produce loneliness will vary. Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness. Others with weaker needs for recognition or reciprocal emotional attachment may experience a good deal of social isolation without feeling lonely at all. Some people might alleviate loneliness by cultivating a wide circle of not-especially-close friends, each of whom meets a different need or appreciates a different side of them. Yet others might persist in their loneliness without deep and intimate friendships in which they feel more fully seen and appreciated in their complexity, in the fullness of their being.

Yet, as ever-changing beings with friends and loved ones who are also ever-changing, we are always susceptible to loneliness and the pain of situations in which our needs are unmet. Most of us can recall a friend who once met certain of our core social needs, but who eventually – gradually, perhaps even imperceptibly – ultimately failed to do so. If such needs are not met by others in one’s life, this situation will lead one to feel profoundly, heartbreakingly lonely.

In cases like these, new relationships can offer true succour and light. For example, a lonely new parent might have childless friends who are clueless to the needs and values she develops through the hugely complicated transition to parenthood; as a result, she might cultivate relationships with other new parents or caretakers, people who share her newly developed values and better understand the joys, pains and ambivalences of having a child. To the extent that these new relationships enable her needs to be met and allow her to feel genuinely seen, they will help to alleviate her loneliness. Through seeking relationships with others who might share one’s interests or be better situated to meet one’s specific needs, then, one can attempt to face one’s loneliness head on.

But you don’t need to shed old relationships to cultivate the new. When old friends to whom we remain committed fail to meet our new needs, it’s helpful to ask how to salvage the situation, saving the relationship. In some instances, we might choose to adopt a passive strategy, acknowledging the ebb and flow of relationships and the natural lag time between the development of needs and others’ abilities to meet them. You could ‘wait it out’. But given that it is much more difficult to have your needs met if you don’t articulate them, an active strategy seems more promising. To position your friend to better meet your needs, you might attempt to communicate those needs and articulate ways in which you don’t feel seen.

Of course, such a strategy will be successful only if the unmet needs provoking one’s loneliness are needs one can identify and articulate. But we will so often – perhaps always – have needs, desires and values of which we are unaware or that we cannot articulate, even to ourselves. We are, to some extent, always opaque to ourselves. Given this opacity, some degree of loneliness may be an inevitable part of the human condition. What’s more, if we can’t even grasp or articulate the needs provoking our loneliness, then adopting a more passive strategy may be the only option one has. In cases like this, the only way to recognise your unmet needs or desires is to notice that your loneliness has started to lift once those needs and desires begin to be met by another.

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Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms

Louise c. hawkley.

Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 940 E. 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

John T. Cacioppo

Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

As a social species, humans rely on a safe, secure social surround to survive and thrive. Perceptions of social isolation, or loneliness, increase vigilance for threat and heighten feelings of vulnerability while also raising the desire to reconnect. Implicit hypervigilance for social threat alters psychological processes that influence physiological functioning, diminish sleep quality, and increase morbidity and mortality. The purpose of this paper is to review the features and consequences of loneliness within a comprehensive theoretical framework that informs interventions to reduce loneliness. We review physical and mental health consequences of loneliness, mechanisms for its effects, and effectiveness of extant interventions. Features of a loneliness regulatory loop are employed to explain cognitive, behavioral, and physiological consequences of loneliness and to discuss interventions to reduce loneliness. Loneliness is not simply being alone. Interventions to reduce loneliness and its health consequences may need to take into account its attentional, confirmatory, and memorial biases as well as its social and behavioral effects.

Introduction

Loneliness is a common experience; as many as 80% of those under 18 years of age and 40% of adults over 65 years of age report being lonely at least sometimes [ 1 – 3 ], with levels of loneliness gradually diminishing through the middle adult years, and then increasing in old age (i.e., ≥70 years) [ 2 ]. Loneliness is synonymous with perceived social isolation, not with objective social isolation. People can live relatively solitary lives and not feel lonely, and conversely, they can live an ostensibly rich social life and feel lonely nevertheless. Loneliness is defined as a distressing feeling that accompanies the perception that one’s social needs are not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one’s social relationships [ 2 , 4 – 6 ]. Loneliness is typically measured by asking individuals to respond to items such as those on the frequently used UCLA Loneliness Scale [ 7 ]: “I feel isolated,” “There are people I can talk to,” and “I feel part of a group of friends.” The result is a continuum of scores that range from highly socially connected to highly lonely.

Each of us is capable of feeling lonely, and loneliness is an equal opportunity tenant for good reason. We have posited that loneliness is the social equivalent of physical pain, hunger, and thirst; the pain of social disconnection and the hunger and thirst for social connection motivate the maintenance and formation of social connections necessary for the survival of our genes [ 8 , 9 ]. Feelings of loneliness generally succeed in motivating connection or reconnection with others following geographic relocation or bereavement, for instance, thereby diminishing or abolishing feelings of social isolation. For as many as 15–30% of the general population, however, loneliness is a chronic state [ 10 , 11 ]. Left untended, loneliness has serious consequences for cognition, emotion, behavior, and health. Here, we review physical and mental health consequences of perceived social isolation and then introduce mechanisms for these outcomes in the context of a model that takes into consideration the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics of loneliness.

Loneliness Matters for Physical Health and Mortality

A growing body of longitudinal research indicates that loneliness predicts increased morbidity and mortality [ 12 – 19 ]. The effects of loneliness seem to accrue over time to accelerate physiological aging [ 20 ]. For instance, loneliness has been shown to exhibit a dose–response relationship with cardiovascular health risk in young adulthood [ 12 ]. The greater the number of measurement occasions at which participants were lonely (i.e., childhood, adolescence, and at 26 years of age), the greater their number of cardiovascular health risks (i.e., BMI, systolic blood pressure (SBP), total, and HDL cholesterol levels, glycated hemoglobin concentration, maximum oxygen consumption). Similarly, loneliness was associated with increased systolic blood pressure in a population-based sample of middle-aged adults [ 21 ], and a follow-up study of these same individuals showed that a persistent trait-like aspect of loneliness accelerated the rate of blood pressure increase over a 4-year follow-up period [ 22 ]. Loneliness accrual effects are also evident in a study of mortality in the Health and Retirement Study; all-cause mortality over a 4-year follow-up was predicted by loneliness, and the effect was greater in chronically than situationally lonely adults [ 17 ]. Penninx et al. [ 15 ] showed that loneliness predicted all-cause mortality during a 29-month follow-up after controlling for age, sex, chronic diseases, alcohol use, smoking, self-rated health, and functional limitations. Sugisawa et al. [ 18 ] also found a significant effect of loneliness on mortality over a 3-year period, and this effect was explained by chronic diseases, functional status, and self-rated health. Among women in the National Health and Nutrition Survey, chronic high frequency loneliness (>3 days/week at each of two measurement occasions about 8 years apart) was prospectively associated with incident coronary heart disease (CHD) over a 19-year follow-up in analyses that adjusted for age, race, socioeconomic status, marital status, and cardiovascular risk factors [ 19 ]. Depressive symptoms have been associated with loneliness and with adverse health outcomes, but loneliness continued to predict CHD in these women after also controlling for depressive symptoms. Finally, loneliness has also been shown to increase risk for cardiovascular mortality; individuals who reported often being lonely exhibited significantly greater risk than those who reported never being lonely [ 14 ]. In sum, feelings of loneliness mark increased risk for morbidity and mortality, a phenomenon that arguably reflects the social essence of our species.

Loneliness Matters for Mental Health and Cognitive Functioning

The impact of loneliness on cognition was assessed in a recent review of the literature [ 9 ]. Perhaps, the most striking finding in this literature is the breadth of emotional and cognitive processes and outcomes that seem susceptible to the influence of loneliness. Loneliness has been associated with personality disorders and psychoses [ 23 – 25 ], suicide [ 26 ], impaired cognitive performance and cognitive decline over time [ 27 – 29 ], increased risk of Alzheimer’s Disease [ 29 ], diminished executive control [ 30 , 31 ], and increases in depressive symptoms [ 32 – 35 ]. The causal nature of the association between loneliness and depressive symptoms appears to be reciprocal [ 32 ], but more recent analyses of five consecutive annual assessments of loneliness and depressive symptoms have shown that loneliness predicts increases in depressive symptoms over 1-year intervals, but depressive symptoms do not predict increases in loneliness over those same intervals [ 36 ]. In addition, experimental evidence, in which feelings of loneliness (and social connectedness) were hypnotically induced, indicates that loneliness not only increases depressive symptoms but also increases perceived stress, fear of negative evaluation, anxiety, and anger, and diminishes optimism and self-esteem [ 8 ]. These data suggest that a perceived sense of social connectedness serves as a scaffold for the self—damage the scaffold and the rest of the self begins to crumble.

A particularly devastating consequence of feeling socially isolated is cognitive decline and dementia. Feelings of loneliness at age 79 predicted “lifetime cognitive change” as indicated by lower IQ at age 79 adjusting for IQ at age 11, living arrangements at age 11 and at age 79, sex, marital status, and ideal level of social support [ 27 ]. This finding does not rule out a reverse causal direction; cognitive impairments may hamper social interactions, prompt social withdrawal, and thus lead to loneliness. Other studies, however, have indicated that loneliness is a precursor of cognitive decline. For instance, the cognitive functioning of 75–85-year-olds (as assessed by the Mini-Mental State Examination) did not differ as a function of loneliness at baseline but diminished to a greater extent among those high than low in loneliness over a 10-year follow-up [ 28 ]. In a prospective study by Wilson et al. [ 29 ], loneliness was inversely associated with performance on a battery of cognitive measures in a sample of 823 initially dementia-free older adults. Moreover, loneliness at baseline was associated with a faster decline in cognitive performance on most of these measures over a 4-year follow-up. This was not true of the converse: cognitive status at baseline did not predict changes in loneliness. In addition, incidence of Alzheimer’s disease (76 individuals) was predicted by degree of baseline loneliness after adjusting for age, sex, and education; those in the top decile of loneliness scores were 2.1 times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those in the bottom decile of loneliness scores. Depressive symptoms had a modest effect on Alzheimer’s disease risk, but loneliness continued to exert a significant and much larger influence on Alzheimer’s disease than depressive symptoms when depressive symptoms were included in the model [ 29 ]. Overall, it appears that something about our sense of connectedness with others penetrates the physical organism and compromises the integrity of physical and mental health and well-being. What that “something” might be is the topic to which we next turn.

How Loneliness Matters: Mechanisms

The loneliness model.

Our model of loneliness [ 8 , 9 ] posits that perceived social isolation is tantamount to feeling unsafe, and this sets off implicit hypervigilance for (additional) social threat in the environment. Unconscious surveillance for social threat produces cognitive biases: relative to nonlonely people, lonely individuals see the social world as a more threatening place, expect more negative social interactions, and remember more negative social information. Negative social expectations tend to elicit behaviors from others that confirm the lonely persons’ expectations, thereby setting in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which lonely people actively distance themselves from would-be social partners even as they believe that the cause of the social distance is attributable to others and is beyond their own control [ 37 ]. This self-reinforcing loneliness loop is accompanied by feelings of hostility, stress, pessimism, anxiety, and low self-esteem [ 8 ] and represents a dispositional tendency that activates neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms that contribute to adverse health outcomes.

Health behaviors

One of the consequences of loneliness and implicit vigilance for social threat is a diminished capacity for self-regulation. The ability to regulate one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior is critical to accomplish personal goals or to comply with social norms. Feeling socially isolated impairs the capacity to self-regulate, and these effects are so automatic as to seem outside of awareness. In a dichotic listening task, for instance, right-handed individuals quickly and automatically attend preferentially to the pre-potent right ear. Latency to respond to stimuli presented to the non-dominant ear can be enhanced, however, by instructing participants to attend to their left ear. Among young adults who were administered this task, the lonely and nonlonely groups did not differ in performance when directed to attend to their pre-potent right ear, but the lonely group performed significantly worse than the nonlonely group when directed to shift attention to their non-prepotent left ear [ 30 ]. In other words, automatic attentional processes may be unimpaired, but effortful attentional processes are compromised in lonely relative to socially connected individuals.

Of relevance for health is the capacity for self-regulation in the arena of lifestyle behaviors. Regulation of emotion can enhance the ability to regulate other self-control behaviors [ 38 ], as is evident from research showing that positive affect predicts increased physical activity [ 39 ]. In middle-aged and older adults, greater loneliness was associated with less effort applied to the maintenance and optimization of positive emotions [ 31 ]. Compromised regulation of emotion in lonely individuals explained their diminished likelihood of performing any physical activity, and loneliness also predicted a decrease in physical activity over time [ 31 ]. Physical activity is a well-known protective factor for physical health, mental health, and cognitive functioning [ 40 ], suggesting that poorer self-regulation may contribute to the greater health risk associated with loneliness via diminished likelihood of engaging in health-promoting behaviors. A related literature shows that loneliness is also a risk factor for obesity [ 41 ] and health-compromising behavior, including a greater propensity to abuse alcohol [ 42 ]. To the extent that self-regulation accounts for poorer health behaviors in lonely people, better health behaviors may be more easily accomplished in the actual or perceived company of others. Interestingly, animal research has shown that social isolation dampens the beneficial effects of exercise on neurogenesis [ 43 ], implying that health behaviors may better serve their purpose or have greater effect among those who feel socially connected than those who feel lonely. This hypothesis remains to be tested, but research on the restorative effects of sleep is consistent with this notion.

Countering the physiological effects of the challenge of daily emotional, cognitive, and behavioral experiences, sleep offers physiological restoration. Experimental sleep deprivation has adverse effects on cardiovascular functioning, inflammatory status, and metabolic risk factors [ 44 ]. In addition, short sleep duration has been associated with risk for hypertension [ 45 ], incident coronary artery calcification [ 46 ], and mortality [ 47 ].

What is less appreciated is that sleep quality may also be important in accomplishing sleep’s restorative effects. Nonrestorative sleep (i.e., sleep that is non-refreshing despite normal sleep duration) results in daytime impairments such as physical and intellectual fatigue, role impairments, and cognitive and memory problems [ 48 ]. We have noted that loneliness heightens feelings of vulnerability and unconscious vigilance for social threat, implicit cognitions that are antithetical to relaxation and sound sleep. Indeed, loneliness and poor quality social relationships have been associated with self-reported poor sleep quality and daytime dysfunction (i.e., low energy, fatigue), but not with sleep duration [ 49 – 52 ]. In young adults, greater daytime dysfunction, a marker of poor sleep quality, was accompanied by more nightly micro-awakenings, an objective index of sleep continuity obtained from Sleep-Caps worn by participants during one night in the hospital and seven nights in their own beds at home [ 53 ]. The conjunction of daytime dysfunction and micro-awakenings is consistent with polysomnography studies showing a conjunction, essentially an equivalence, between subjective sleep quality and sleep continuity [ 54 ], and substantiates the hypothesis that loneliness impairs sleep quality.

In an extension of these findings, loneliness was associated with greater daytime dysfunction in a 3-day diary study of middle-age adults, an association that was independent of age, gender, race/ethnicity, household income, health behaviors, BMI, chronic health conditions, daily illness symptom severity, and related feelings of stress, hostility, poor social support, and depressive symptoms. Cross-lagged panel analyses of the three consecutive days indicated potentially reciprocal causal roles for loneliness and daytime dysfunction: lonely feelings predicted daytime dysfunction the following day, and daytime dysfunction exerted a small but significant effect on lonely feelings the following day [ 55 ], effects that were independent of sleep duration. In other words, the same amount of sleep is less salubrious in individuals who feel more socially isolated and, ironically, less salubrious sleep feeds forward to further exacerbate feelings of social isolation. This recursive loop operates outside of consciousness and speaks to the relative impenetrability of loneliness to intervention.

Physiological functioning

The association between loneliness and cardiovascular disease and mortality [ 13 , 14 , 19 ] may have its roots in physiological changes that begin early in life. As noted earlier, chronic social isolation, rejection, and/or feelings of loneliness in early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood cumulated in a dose–response fashion to predict cardiovascular health risk factors in young adulthood (26 years old), including elevated blood pressure [ 12 ]. In our study of young adults, loneliness was associated with elevated levels of total peripheral resistance (TPR [ 49 , 56 ]). TPR is the primary determinant of SBP until at least 50 years of age [ 57 ], which suggests that loneliness-related elevations in TPR in early to middle-adulthood may lead to higher blood pressure in middle and older age. Consistent with this hypothesis, loneliness was associated with elevated SBP in an elderly convenience sample [ 49 ], and in a population-based sample of 50–68-year-old adults in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study [ 21 ]. The association between loneliness and elevated SBP was exaggerated in older relative to younger lonely adults in this sample [ 21 ], suggesting an accelerated physiological decline in lonely relative to nonlonely individuals. Our recent study of loneliness and SBP in these same individuals over five annual assessments supported this hypothesis. Short-term (i.e., 1 year) fluctuations in loneliness were not significant predictors of SBP changes over 1-year intervals, but a trait-like component of loneliness present at study onset contributed to greater increases in SBP over 2-, 3-, and 4-year intervals [ 22 ]. These increases were cumulative such that higher initial levels of loneliness were associated with greater increases in SBP over a 4-year period. The prospective effect of loneliness on SBP was independent of age, gender, race/ethnicity, cardiovascular risk factors, medications, health conditions, and the effects of depressive symptoms, social support, perceived stress, and hostility [ 22 ]. Elevated SBP is a well-known risk factor for chronic cardiovascular disease, and these data suggest that the effects of loneliness accrue to accelerate movement along a trajectory toward serious health consequences [ 20 ].

The physiological determinants responsible for the cumulative effect of loneliness on blood pressure have yet to be elucidated. TPR plays a critical role in determining SBP in early to mid-adulthood, but other mechanisms come into play with increasing age. Candidate mechanisms include age-related changes in vascular physiology, including increased arterial stiffness [ 58 ], diminished endothelial cell release of nitric oxide, enhanced vascular responsivity to endothelial constriction factors, increases in circulating catecholamines, and attenuated vasodilator responses to circulating epinephrine due to decreased beta-adrenergic sensitivity in vascular smooth muscle [ 59 – 61 ]. In turn, many of these mechanisms are influenced by lifestyle factors such as diet, physical inactivity, and obesity—factors that alter blood lipids and inflammatory processes that have known consequences for vascular health and functioning [ 62 , 63 ].

Neuroendocrine Effects

Changes in TPR levels are themselves influenced by a variety of physiological processes, including activity of the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) axis. The sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system plays a major role in maintaining basal vascular tone and TPR [ 64 , 65 ] and elevated sympathetic tone is responsible for the development and maintenance of many forms of hypertension [ 66 ]. To date, loneliness has not been shown to correlate with SNS activity at the myocardium (i.e., pre-ejection period [ 21 , 56 ]) but was associated with a greater concentration of epinephrine in overnight urine samples in a middle-aged and older adult sample [ 21 ]. At high concentrations, circulating epinephrine binds α-1 receptors on vascular smooth muscle cells to elicit vasoconstriction and could thereby serve as a mechanism for increased SBP in lonely individuals.

Activation of the HPA axis involves a cascade of signals that results in release of ACTH from the pituitary and cortisol from the adrenal cortex. Vascular integrity and functioning are beholden, in part, to well-regulated activity of the HPA axis. Dysregulation of the HPA axis contributes to inflammatory processes that play a role in hypertension, atherosclerosis, and coronary heart disease [ 67 – 69 ]. Loneliness has been associated with urinary excretion of significantly higher concentrations of cortisol [ 70 ], and, in more recent studies, with higher levels of salivary or plasma cortisol [ 71 , 72 ]. Pressman et al. [ 72 ] found that loneliness was associated with higher early morning and late night levels of circulating cortisol in young adult university students, and Steptoe et al. [ 71 ] found that chronically high levels of trait loneliness in middle-aged adults (M=52.4 years) predicted greater increases in salivary cortisol during the first 30 min after awakening (i.e., cortisol awakening response) such that the cortisol awakening response in individuals in the highest loneliness tertile was 21% greater than that in the lowest tertile. In our study of middle-aged and older adults, day-today fluctuations in feelings of loneliness were associated with individual differences in the cortisol awakening response. For this study, diary reports of daily psychosocial, emotional, and physical states were completed at bedtime on each of three consecutive days, and salivary cortisol levels were measured at wakeup, 30 min after awakening, and at bedtime each day. Parallel multilevel causal models revealed that prior-day feelings of loneliness and related feelings of sadness, threat, and lack of control were associated with a higher cortisol awakening response the next day, but morning cortisol awakening response did not predict experiences of these psychosocial states later the same day [ 73 ]. Social evaluative threat is known to be a potent elicitor of cortisol [ 74 ], and our theory that loneliness is characterized by chronic threat of and hypervigilance for negative social evaluation [ 9 ] is consistent with the finding that loneliness predicts increased cortisol awakening response. The relevance of the association between loneliness and HPA regulation is particularly noteworthy given recent evidence that loneliness-related alterations in HPA activity may occur at the level of the gene, a topic to which we turn next.

Gene Effects

Cortisol regulates a wide variety of physiological processes via nuclear hormone receptor-mediated control of gene transcription. Cortisol activation of the glucocorticoid receptor, for instance, exerts broad anti-inflammatory effects by inhibiting pro-inflammatory signaling pathways. Given that loneliness is associated with elevated cortisol levels, loneliness might be expected to reduce risk for inflammatory diseases. However, as we have noted above, feelings of loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased risk for inflammatory disease. This finding may be attributable to impaired glucocorticoid receptor-mediated signal transduction; failure of the cellular genome to “hear” the anti-inflammatory signal sent by circulating glucocorticoids permits inflammatory processes to continue relatively unchecked. We found evidence consistent with glucocorticoid insensitivity in our examination of gene expression rates in chronically lonely versus socially connected older adults [ 75 ]. Genome-wide microarray analyses revealed that 209 transcripts, representing 144 distinct genes, were differentially expressed in these two groups. Markers of immune activation and inflammation (e.g., pro-inflammatory cytokines and inflammatory mediators) were over-expressed in genes of the lonely relative to the socially connected group (37% of the 209 differentially expressed transcripts). Markers of cell cycle inhibitors and an inhibitor of the potent pro-inflammatory NF–κB transcript were under-expressed in genes of the lonely relative to the socially connected group (63% of the differentially expressed transcripts). The net functional implication of the differential gene transcription favored increased cell cycling and inflammation in the lonely group [ 75 ].

Subsequent bioinformatic analyses indicated that loneliness-associated differences in gene expression could be attributable to increased activity of the NF–κB transcription factor. NF–κB is known to up-regulate inflammation-related genes, and its activity is antagonized by the glucocorticoid receptor. Bioinformatic analyses also indicated a possible decrease in glucocorticoid receptor-mediated transcription in the lonely group, despite the fact that there were no group differences in circulating glucocorticoid levels. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that adverse social conditions result in functional desensitization of the glucocorticoid receptor, which permits increased NF–κB activity and thereby induces a pro-inflammatory bias in gene expression. Group differences in NF–κB/glucocorticoid receptor-mediated transcription activity were not attributable to objective indices of social isolation, nor were they explained by demographic, psychosocial (i.e., perceived stress, depression, hostility), or medical risk factors [ 75 ]. These results suggest that feelings of loneliness may exert a unique transcriptional influence that has potential relevance for health.

In an extension of this work, a recent study showed that feelings of social isolation were associated with a proxy measure of functional glucocorticoid insensitivity [ 76 ]. The composition of the leukocyte population in circulation is subject to the regulatory influence of glucocorticoids; high cortisol levels increase circulating concentrations of neutrophils and simultaneously decrease concentrations of lymphocytes and monocytes. In a study of older Taiwanese adults, this relationship was reflected in a positive correlation between cortisol levels and the ratio of neutrophil percentages relative to lymphocyte or monocyte percentages. However, in lonely individuals, this correlation was attenuated and nonsignificant, consistent with a diminished effect of cortisol at the level of leukocytes.

The precise molecular site of glucocorticoid insensitivity in the pro-inflammatory transcription cascade has yet to be identified, and additional longitudinal and experimental research are needed to determine the degree to which chronic feelings of social isolation play a causal role in differential gene expression. However, the association between subjective social isolation and gene expression corresponds well to gene expression differences in animal models of social isolation (e.g., [ 77 – 79 ]), suggesting that a subjective sense of social connectedness is important for genomic expression and normal immunoregulation in humans. Impaired transcription of glucocorticoid response genes and increased activity of pro-inflammatory transcription control pathways provide a functional genomic explanation for elevated risk of inflammatory disease in individuals who experience chronically high levels of loneliness.

Immune Functioning

Loneliness differences in immunoregulation extend beyond inflammation processes. Loneliness has been associated with impaired cellular immunity as reflected in lower natural killer (NK) cell activity and higher antibody titers to the Epstein Barr Virus and human herpes viruses [ 70 , 80 – 82 ]. In addition, loneliness among middle-age adults has been associated with a smaller increase in NK cell numbers in response to the acute stress of a Stroop task and a mirror tracing task [ 71 ]. In young adults, loneliness was associated with poorer antibody response to a component of the flu vaccine [ 72 ], suggesting that the humoral immune response may also be impaired in lonely individuals. Among HIV-positive men without AIDS, loneliness was associated with a lower count of CD4 T-lymphocytes in one study [ 83 ] but was not associated with the CD4 count in another study [ 84 ]. However, in the latter study, loneliness predicted a slower rate of decline in levels of CD4 T-lymphocytes over a 3-year period [ 84 ]. These data suggest that loneliness protects against disease progression, but no association was observed between loneliness and time to AIDS diagnosis or AIDS-related mortality [ 84 ]. Additional research is needed to examine the role of loneliness chronicity, age, life stress context, genetic predispositions, and interactions among these factors to determine when and how loneliness operates to impair immune functioning.

Future Loneliness Matters

Interventions for loneliness.

Six qualitative reviews of the loneliness intervention literature have been published since 1984 [ 85 – 90 ], and all explicitly or implicitly addressed four main types of interventions: (1) enhancing social skills, (2) providing social support, (3) increasing opportunities for social interaction, and (4) addressing maladaptive social cognition. All but one of these reviews concluded that loneliness interventions have met with success, particularly interventions which targeted opportunities for social interaction. Findlay [ 87 ] was more cautious in his review, noting that only six of the 17 intervention studies in his review employed a randomized group comparison design, with the remaining 11 studies subject to the shortcomings and flaws of pre-post and nonrandomized group comparison designs.

We recently completed a meta-analysis of loneliness intervention studies published between 1970 and September 2009 to test the magnitude of the intervention effects within each type of study design and to determine whether the intervention target moderated effect sizes (Masi et al., unpublished). Of the 50 studies eligible for inclusion in the meta-analysis, 12 were pre-post studies, 18 were non-randomized group comparison studies, and 20 were randomized group comparison studies. Effect sizes were significantly different from zero within each study design group, but randomized group comparison studies produced the smallest effect overall (pre-post=−0.37, 95% CI −.55, −.18; non-randomized control=−0.46, 95% CI −0.72, −0.20; randomized control=−0.20, 95% CI −0.32, −0.08).

Our model of loneliness holds that implicit hypervigilance for social threat exerts a powerful influence on perceptions, cognitions, and behaviors, and that loneliness may be diminished by reducing automatic perceptual and cognitive biases that favor over-attention to negative social information in the environment. Accordingly, we posited that interventions that targeted maladaptive social cognition (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy that involved training to identify automatic negative thoughts and look for disconfirming evidence, to decrease biased cognitions, and/or to reframe perceptions of loneliness and personal control) would be more effective than interventions that targeted social support, social skills, or social access. Moderational analyses of the randomized group comparison studies supported our hypothesis: the effect size for social cognition interventions (−0.60, 95% CI −0.96, −0.23, N = 4) was significantly larger than the effect size for social support (−0.16, 95% CI −0.27, −0.06, N =12), social skills (0.02, 95% CI −0.24, 0.28, N =2), and social access (−0.06, 95% CI −0.35, 0.22, N =2); the latter three types of interventions did not differ significantly from each other. The results for social cognitive therapy are promising, but this intervention type appears not to have been widely employed to date relative to other types of loneliness therapy. Moreover, existing social cognitive therapies have had a small effect overall (0.20) relative to the meta-analytic mean effect of over 300 other interventions in the social and behavioral domains (0.50) [ 91 ]. A social cognitive approach to loneliness reduction outlined in a recent book [ 92 ] may encourage therapists to develop a treatment that focuses on the specific affective, cognitive, and behavioral propensities that afflict lonely individuals.

Implications for Health

Reducing feelings of loneliness and enhancing a sense of connectedness and social adhesion are laudable goals in their own right, but a critical question is whether modifying perceptions of social isolation or connectedness have any impact on health. VanderWeele et al. (unpublished) recently examined the reduction in depressive symptoms that could be expected if loneliness were successfully reduced and found there would be significant benefits that would accrue for as long as two years following the intervention. Would a successful intervention to lower loneliness produce corresponding benefits in physiological mechanisms and physical health outcomes? The only extant data to address this question comes from a recent study in which 235 lonely home-dwelling older adults (>74 years) were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. In the treatment arm of the study, closed small groups of seven to eight individuals met with two professional facilitators once a week for 3 months to participate in group activities in art, exercise, or therapeutic writing. The control group continued to receive usual community care. Relative to the control group, individuals in the treatment group became more socially active, found new friends, and experienced an increase in feeling needed [ 93 ]. This was accompanied by a significant improvement in self-rated health, fewer health care services and lower costs, and greater survival at 2-year follow-up [ 94 ]. Feelings of loneliness did not differ between the groups, however [ 93 ], indicating that changes in loneliness were not responsible for improvements in health. According to our theory of loneliness, the interventions targeted by the treatment study would not be expected to influence loneliness dramatically because they fail to address the hypervigilance to social threat and the related cognitive biases that characterize lonely individuals. That is, group activities such as those introduced in this intervention provide new social opportunities but do not alter how individuals approach and think about their social relationships more generally. An intervention study of loneliness and health has yet to be designed that addresses the maladaptive social cognitions that make loneliness the health risk factor it increasingly appears to be. Beyond that, additional research is needed to determine the mechanisms through which successful loneliness interventions enhance health and survival, and to examine whether the type of loneliness intervention moderates its health benefits.

Conclusions

Human beings are thoroughly social creatures. Indeed, human survival in difficult physical environments seems to have selected for social group living [ 95 ]. Consider that the reproductive success of the human species hinges on offspring surviving to reproductive age. Social connections with a mate, a family, and a tribe foster social affiliative behaviors (e.g., altruism, cooperation) that enhance the likelihood that utterly dependent offspring reach reproductive age, and connections with others at the individual and collective levels improve our chances of survival in difficult or hostile environments. These behaviors co-evolved with supporting genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms to ensure that humans survived, reproduced, and cared for offspring sufficiently long that they, too, could reproduce [ 96 – 98 ]. Human sociality is prominent even in contemporary individualistic societies. Almost 80% of our waking hours are spent with others, and on average, time spent with friends, relatives, spouse, children, and coworkers is rated more inherently rewarding than time spent alone [ 99 , 100 ]. Humans are such meaning-making creatures that we perceive social relationships where no objectifiable relationship exists (e.g., between author and reader, between an individual and God) or where no reciprocity is possible (e.g., in parasocial relationships with television characters). Conversely, we perceive social isolation when social opportunities and relationships do exist but we lack the capacity to harness the power of social connectedness in everyday life. Chronic perceived isolation (i.e., loneliness) is characterized by impairments in attention, cognition, affect, and behavior that take a toll on morbidity and mortality through their impact on genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms that evolved as part and parcel of what it means to be human. Future interventions to alleviate the health burden of loneliness will do well to take into account our evolutionary design as a social species.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant R01-AG036433-01 and R01-AG034052 from the National Institute on Aging and by the John Templeton Foundation.

Contributor Information

Louise C. Hawkley, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 940 E. 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

John T. Cacioppo, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

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College Essays

If you grow up to be a professional writer, everything you write will first go through an editor before being published. This is because the process of writing is really a process of re-writing —of rethinking and reexamining your work, usually with the help of someone else. So what does this mean for your student writing? And in particular, what does it mean for very important, but nonprofessional writing like your college essay? Should you ask your parents to look at your essay? Pay for an essay service?

If you are wondering what kind of help you can, and should, get with your personal statement, you've come to the right place! In this article, I'll talk about what kind of writing help is useful, ethical, and even expected for your college admission essay . I'll also point out who would make a good editor, what the differences between editing and proofreading are, what to expect from a good editor, and how to spot and stay away from a bad one.

Table of Contents

What Kind of Help for Your Essay Can You Get?

What's Good Editing?

What should an editor do for you, what kind of editing should you avoid, proofreading, what's good proofreading, what kind of proofreading should you avoid.

What Do Colleges Think Of You Getting Help With Your Essay?

Who Can/Should Help You?

Advice for editors.

Should You Pay Money For Essay Editing?

The Bottom Line

What's next, what kind of help with your essay can you get.

Rather than talking in general terms about "help," let's first clarify the two different ways that someone else can improve your writing . There is editing, which is the more intensive kind of assistance that you can use throughout the whole process. And then there's proofreading, which is the last step of really polishing your final product.

Let me go into some more detail about editing and proofreading, and then explain how good editors and proofreaders can help you."

Editing is helping the author (in this case, you) go from a rough draft to a finished work . Editing is the process of asking questions about what you're saying, how you're saying it, and how you're organizing your ideas. But not all editing is good editing . In fact, it's very easy for an editor to cross the line from supportive to overbearing and over-involved.

Ability to clarify assignments. A good editor is usually a good writer, and certainly has to be a good reader. For example, in this case, a good editor should make sure you understand the actual essay prompt you're supposed to be answering.

Open-endedness. Good editing is all about asking questions about your ideas and work, but without providing answers. It's about letting you stick to your story and message, and doesn't alter your point of view.

Think of an editor as a great travel guide. It can show you the many different places your trip could take you. It should explain any parts of the trip that could derail your trip or confuse the traveler. But it never dictates your path, never forces you to go somewhere you don't want to go, and never ignores your interests so that the trip no longer seems like it's your own. So what should good editors do?

Help Brainstorm Topics

Sometimes it's easier to bounce thoughts off of someone else. This doesn't mean that your editor gets to come up with ideas, but they can certainly respond to the various topic options you've come up with. This way, you're less likely to write about the most boring of your ideas, or to write about something that isn't actually important to you.

If you're wondering how to come up with options for your editor to consider, check out our guide to brainstorming topics for your college essay .

Help Revise Your Drafts

Here, your editor can't upset the delicate balance of not intervening too much or too little. It's tricky, but a great way to think about it is to remember: editing is about asking questions, not giving answers .

Revision questions should point out:

• Places where more detail or more description would help the reader connect with your essay
• Places where structure and logic don't flow, losing the reader's attention
• Places where there aren't transitions between paragraphs, confusing the reader
• Moments where your narrative or the arguments you're making are unclear

But pointing to potential problems is not the same as actually rewriting—editors let authors fix the problems themselves.

Bad editing is usually very heavy-handed editing. Instead of helping you find your best voice and ideas, a bad editor changes your writing into their own vision.

You may be dealing with a bad editor if they:

• Add material (examples, descriptions) that doesn't come from you
• Use a thesaurus to make your college essay sound "more mature"
• Add meaning or insight to the essay that doesn't come from you
• Tell you what to say and how to say it
• Write sentences, phrases, and paragraphs for you
• Change your voice in the essay so it no longer sounds like it was written by a teenager

Colleges can tell the difference between a 17-year-old's writing and a 50-year-old's writing. Not only that, they have access to your SAT or ACT Writing section, so they can compare your essay to something else you wrote. Writing that's a little more polished is great and expected. But a totally different voice and style will raise questions.

Where's the Line Between Helpful Editing and Unethical Over-Editing?

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether your college essay editor is doing the right thing. Here are some guidelines for staying on the ethical side of the line.

• An editor should say that the opening paragraph is kind of boring, and explain what exactly is making it drag. But it's overstepping for an editor to tell you exactly how to change it.
• An editor should point out where your prose is unclear or vague. But it's completely inappropriate for the editor to rewrite that section of your essay.
• An editor should let you know that a section is light on detail or description. But giving you similes and metaphors to beef up that description is a no-go.

Proofreading (also called copy-editing) is checking for errors in the last draft of a written work. It happens at the end of the process and is meant as the final polishing touch. Proofreading is meticulous and detail-oriented, focusing on small corrections. It sands off all the surface rough spots that could alienate the reader.

Because proofreading is usually concerned with making fixes on the word or sentence level, this is the only process where someone else can actually add to or take away things from your essay . This is because what they are adding or taking away tends to be one or two misplaced letters.

Laser focus. Proofreading is all about the tiny details, so the ability to really concentrate on finding small slip-ups is a must.

Excellent grammar and spelling skills. Proofreaders need to dot every "i" and cross every "t." Good proofreaders should correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar. They should put foreign words in italics and surround quotations with quotation marks. They should check that you used the correct college's name, and that you adhered to any formatting requirements (name and date at the top of the page, uniform font and size, uniform spacing).

Limited interference. A proofreader needs to make sure that you followed any word limits. But if cuts need to be made to shorten the essay, that's your job and not the proofreader's.

A bad proofreader either tries to turn into an editor, or just lacks the skills and knowledge necessary to do the job.

Some signs that you're working with a bad proofreader are:

• If they suggest making major changes to the final draft of your essay. Proofreading happens when editing is already finished.
• If they aren't particularly good at spelling, or don't know grammar, or aren't detail-oriented enough to find someone else's small mistakes.
• If they start swapping out your words for fancier-sounding synonyms, or changing the voice and sound of your essay in other ways. A proofreader is there to check for errors, not to take the 17-year-old out of your writing.

What Do Colleges Think of Your Getting Help With Your Essay?

Admissions officers agree: light editing and proofreading are good—even required ! But they also want to make sure you're the one doing the work on your essay. They want essays with stories, voice, and themes that come from you. They want to see work that reflects your actual writing ability, and that focuses on what you find important.

On the Importance of Editing

Get feedback. Have a fresh pair of eyes give you some feedback. Don't allow someone else to rewrite your essay, but do take advantage of others' edits and opinions when they seem helpful. ( Bates College )

Read your essay aloud to someone. Reading the essay out loud offers a chance to hear how your essay sounds outside your head. This exercise reveals flaws in the essay's flow, highlights grammatical errors and helps you ensure that you are communicating the exact message you intended. ( Dickinson College )

On the Value of Proofreading

Share your essays with at least one or two people who know you well—such as a parent, teacher, counselor, or friend—and ask for feedback. Remember that you ultimately have control over your essays, and your essays should retain your own voice, but others may be able to catch mistakes that you missed and help suggest areas to cut if you are over the word limit. ( Yale University )

Proofread and then ask someone else to proofread for you. Although we want substance, we also want to be able to see that you can write a paper for our professors and avoid careless mistakes that would drive them crazy. ( Oberlin College )

On Watching Out for Too Much Outside Influence

Limit the number of people who review your essay. Too much input usually means your voice is lost in the writing style. ( Carleton College )

Ask for input (but not too much). Your parents, friends, guidance counselors, coaches, and teachers are great people to bounce ideas off of for your essay. They know how unique and spectacular you are, and they can help you decide how to articulate it. Keep in mind, however, that a 45-year-old lawyer writes quite differently from an 18-year-old student, so if your dad ends up writing the bulk of your essay, we're probably going to notice. ( Vanderbilt University )

Now let's talk about some potential people to approach for your college essay editing and proofreading needs. It's best to start close to home and slowly expand outward. Not only are your family and friends more invested in your success than strangers, but they also have a better handle on your interests and personality. This knowledge is key for judging whether your essay is expressing your true self.

Parents or Close Relatives

Your family may be full of potentially excellent editors! Parents are deeply committed to your well-being, and family members know you and your life well enough to offer details or incidents that can be included in your essay. On the other hand, the rewriting process necessarily involves criticism, which is sometimes hard to hear from someone very close to you.

A parent or close family member is a great choice for an editor if you can answer "yes" to the following questions. Is your parent or close relative a good writer or reader? Do you have a relationship where editing your essay won't create conflict? Are you able to constructively listen to criticism and suggestion from the parent?

One suggestion for defusing face-to-face discussions is to try working on the essay over email. Send your parent a draft, have them write you back some comments, and then you can pick which of their suggestions you want to use and which to discard.

Teachers or Tutors

A humanities teacher that you have a good relationship with is a great choice. I am purposefully saying humanities, and not just English, because teachers of Philosophy, History, Anthropology, and any other classes where you do a lot of writing, are all used to reviewing student work.

Moreover, any teacher or tutor that has been working with you for some time, knows you very well and can vet the essay to make sure it "sounds like you."

If your teacher or tutor has some experience with what college essays are supposed to be like, ask them to be your editor. If not, then ask whether they have time to proofread your final draft.

Guidance or College Counselor at Your School

The best thing about asking your counselor to edit your work is that this is their job. This means that they have a very good sense of what colleges are looking for in an application essay.

At the same time, school counselors tend to have relationships with admissions officers in many colleges, which again gives them insight into what works and which college is focused on what aspect of the application.

Unfortunately, in many schools the guidance counselor tends to be way overextended. If your ratio is 300 students to 1 college counselor, you're unlikely to get that person's undivided attention and focus. It is still useful to ask them for general advice about your potential topics, but don't expect them to be able to stay with your essay from first draft to final version.

Friends, Siblings, or Classmates

Although they most likely don't have much experience with what colleges are hoping to see, your peers are excellent sources for checking that your essay is you .

Friends and siblings are perfect for the read-aloud edit. Read your essay to them so they can listen for words and phrases that are stilted, pompous, or phrases that just don't sound like you.

You can even trade essays and give helpful advice on each other's work.

If your editor hasn't worked with college admissions essays very much, no worries! Any astute and attentive reader can still greatly help with your process. But, as in all things, beginners do better with some preparation.

First, your editor should read our advice about how to write a college essay introduction , how to spot and fix a bad college essay , and get a sense of what other students have written by going through some admissions essays that worked .

Then, as they read your essay, they can work through the following series of questions that will help them to guide you.

Introduction Questions

• Is the first sentence a killer opening line? Why or why not?
• Does the introduction hook the reader? Does it have a colorful, detailed, and interesting narrative? Or does it propose a compelling or surprising idea?
• Can you feel the author's voice in the introduction, or is the tone dry, dull, or overly formal? Show the places where the voice comes through.

Essay Body Questions

• Does the essay have a through-line? Is it built around a central argument, thought, idea, or focus? Can you put this idea into your own words?
• How is the essay organized? By logical progression? Chronologically? Do you feel order when you read it, or are there moments where you are confused or lose the thread of the essay?
• Does the essay have both narratives about the author's life and explanations and insight into what these stories reveal about the author's character, personality, goals, or dreams? If not, which is missing?
• Does the essay flow? Are there smooth transitions/clever links between paragraphs? Between the narrative and moments of insight?

Reader Response Questions

• Does the writer's personality come through? Do we know what the speaker cares about? Do we get a sense of "who he or she is"?
• Where did you feel most connected to the essay? Which parts of the essay gave you a "you are there" sensation by invoking your senses? What moments could you picture in your head well?
• Where are the details and examples vague and not specific enough?
• Did you get an "a-ha!" feeling anywhere in the essay? Is there a moment of insight that connected all the dots for you? Is there a good reveal or "twist" anywhere in the essay?
• What are the strengths of this essay? What needs the most improvement?

Should You Pay Money for Essay Editing?

One alternative to asking someone you know to help you with your college essay is the paid editor route. There are two different ways to pay for essay help: a private essay coach or a less personal editing service , like the many proliferating on the internet.

My advice is to think of these options as a last resort rather than your go-to first choice. I'll first go through the reasons why. Then, if you do decide to go with a paid editor, I'll help you decide between a coach and a service.

When to Consider a Paid Editor

In general, I think hiring someone to work on your essay makes a lot of sense if none of the people I discussed above are a possibility for you.

If you can't ask your parents. For example, if your parents aren't good writers, or if English isn't their first language. Or if you think getting your parents to help is going create unnecessary extra conflict in your relationship with them (applying to college is stressful as it is!)

If you can't ask your teacher or tutor. Maybe you don't have a trusted teacher or tutor that has time to look over your essay with focus. Or, for instance, your favorite humanities teacher has very limited experience with college essays and so won't know what admissions officers want to see.

If you can't ask your guidance counselor. This could be because your guidance counselor is way overwhelmed with other students.

If you can't share your essay with those who know you. It might be that your essay is on a very personal topic that you're unwilling to share with parents, teachers, or peers. Just make sure it doesn't fall into one of the bad-idea topics in our article on bad college essays .

If the cost isn't a consideration. Many of these services are quite expensive, and private coaches even more so. If you have finite resources, I'd say that hiring an SAT or ACT tutor (whether it's PrepScholar or someone else) is better way to spend your money . This is because there's no guarantee that a slightly better essay will sufficiently elevate the rest of your application, but a significantly higher SAT score will definitely raise your applicant profile much more.

Should You Hire an Essay Coach?

On the plus side, essay coaches have read dozens or even hundreds of college essays, so they have experience with the format. Also, because you'll be working closely with a specific person, it's more personal than sending your essay to a service, which will know even less about you.

But, on the minus side, you'll still be bouncing ideas off of someone who doesn't know that much about you . In general, if you can adequately get the help from someone you know, there is no advantage to paying someone to help you.

If you do decide to hire a coach, ask your school counselor, or older students that have used the service for recommendations. If you can't afford the coach's fees, ask whether they can work on a sliding scale —many do. And finally, beware those who guarantee admission to your school of choice—essay coaches don't have any special magic that can back up those promises.

Should You Send Your Essay to a Service?

On the plus side, essay editing services provide a similar product to essay coaches, and they cost significantly less . If you have some assurance that you'll be working with a good editor, the lack of face-to-face interaction won't prevent great results.

On the minus side, however, it can be difficult to gauge the quality of the service before working with them . If they are churning through many application essays without getting to know the students they are helping, you could end up with an over-edited essay that sounds just like everyone else's. In the worst case scenario, an unscrupulous service could send you back a plagiarized essay.

Getting recommendations from friends or a school counselor for reputable services is key to avoiding heavy-handed editing that writes essays for you or does too much to change your essay. Including a badly-edited essay like this in your application could cause problems if there are inconsistencies. For example, in interviews it might be clear you didn't write the essay, or the skill of the essay might not be reflected in your schoolwork and test scores.

Should You Buy an Essay Written by Someone Else?

Let me elaborate. There are super sketchy places on the internet where you can simply buy a pre-written essay. Don't do this!

For one thing, you'll be lying on an official, signed document. All college applications make you sign a statement saying something like this:

I certify that all information submitted in the admission process—including the application, the personal essay, any supplements, and any other supporting materials—is my own work, factually true, and honestly presented... I understand that I may be subject to a range of possible disciplinary actions, including admission revocation, expulsion, or revocation of course credit, grades, and degree, should the information I have certified be false. (From the Common Application )

For another thing, if your academic record doesn't match the essay's quality, the admissions officer will start thinking your whole application is riddled with lies.

Admission officers have full access to your writing portion of the SAT or ACT so that they can compare work that was done in proctored conditions with that done at home. They can tell if these were written by different people. Not only that, but there are now a number of search engines that faculty and admission officers can use to see if an essay contains strings of words that have appeared in other essays—you have no guarantee that the essay you bought wasn't also bought by 50 other students.

• You should get college essay help with both editing and proofreading
• A good editor will ask questions about your idea, logic, and structure, and will point out places where clarity is needed
• A good editor will absolutely not answer these questions, give you their own ideas, or write the essay or parts of the essay for you
• A good proofreader will find typos and check your formatting
• All of them agree that getting light editing and proofreading is necessary
• Parents, teachers, guidance or college counselor, and peers or siblings
• If you can't ask any of those, you can pay for college essay help, but watch out for services or coaches who over-edit you work
• Don't buy a pre-written essay! Colleges can tell, and it'll make your whole application sound false.

Ready to start working on your essay? Check out our explanation of the point of the personal essay and the role it plays on your applications and then explore our step-by-step guide to writing a great college essay .

Using the Common Application for your college applications? We have an excellent guide to the Common App essay prompts and useful advice on how to pick the Common App prompt that's right for you . Wondering how other people tackled these prompts? Then work through our roundup of over 130 real college essay examples published by colleges .

Stressed about whether to take the SAT again before submitting your application? Let us help you decide how many times to take this test . If you choose to go for it, we have the ultimate guide to studying for the SAT to give you the ins and outs of the best ways to study.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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This freshman's video nails what loneliness in college feels like

A video made by a Cornell freshman holds a powerful message for anyone who is struggling with the first few months of college .

Emery Bergmann made the video in 2017 for a digital media class homework assignment. It resonated with students across the country — and might point to an area in which parents can help their children prepare better for the transition from home to college .

Bergmann, then 17 and a Fine Arts major from Montclair, New Jersey, was given the challenge to depict a "transformation" for her class. "I knew I would only enjoy making the video if the subject I was showing was something I had strong feelings about," Bergmann told TODAY Parents.

"I had just been talking to an acquaintance about how the college experience we see on the media or understand through stories from friends and family seemed to be a bit of a garnished reality." Bergmann decided to show the truth about her own transition to college, which was not as rosy as she expected. "I thought that my shifting point of view was enough of a transformation, and ran with it from there," she said.

In her resulting video, Bergmann talks about how she assumed that college would mean "I was going to have a million friends, that I was going to be going to parties all the time," but that hasn't been her reality. Instead, she said, she spends a lot of time in her dorm room, and despite everyone telling her "You're going to find your people," she hasn't yet. "Like, where are they?" she asks in the video.

"So often you hear people say that college is the 'best four years of your life,'" Bergmann explained to TODAY Parents. "Whether it be movies, television, or simply just friends and family rehashing old memories, there's this constant impression that once you get to college that you were going to meet some of your best friends, party all the time, and figure out what you want to do for the rest of your life."

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But that is a tall order, Bergmann discovered. "Unfortunately, I didn't realize how all of that comes with time, and it isn't just a switch that flips as soon as I step on campus," she said. "Everyone is figuring themselves out and their place, dealing with the same transition you are. Finding your 'people' is an active process, not something immediate, as I expected it to be."

Social media compounds the feelings of loneliness, Bergmann said in the video, because even though she "knows it is fake," it still looks like everyone is having a great time at college... except her.

The turning point for Bergmann came when her mother, Meredith, wrote her a letter saying Emery has nothing to fear because everyone goes through what she is going through now, and she herself thought about transferring from her college when she was in her first semester. That helped her feel less alone, Bergmann said.

"After receiving the letter from my mom, I had my mini-epiphany and realized how unfair I was being to myself and others, expecting everything to work out perfectly in the first two months," said Bergmann. She believes other parents could help their college-bound children by following her mother's example and telling them about their own experiences and encouraging them to reach out to friends and ask if they feel the same way.

"My mother's letter made me so much more comfortable with being uncomfortable," Bergmann said. "College has a big learning curve, so just being willing to talk openly about your experiences can only help."

Another adjustment to college life Bergmann did not expect was all the unstructured time that comes along with being a full-time college student away from home. "Some days, I only have one class, so whatever happens the rest of the day is completely up to me," she said. "Super strange considering every second of my day during high school had been organized and planned. Sometimes I get out of class and just sit in the quad burning time. It's a really strange feeling."

But despite these feelings, Bergmann said she loves her college classes. "The workload is definitely a struggle, but it's the first time I've been able to take classes I want to take and learn about subjects I'm interested in," she said. "That's a huge change from high school, where the curriculum is planned out and the classes are mandatory. I legitimately get excited for class — so dorky, I know — but that's a really different feeling than what I've had in the past."

And the overwhelming response from friends and fellow students who have told Bergmann they identified with the video has brought her a lot of comfort. In this case, social media has been able to help her feel less alone in the end.

This story was originally published in 2017.

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Home — Application Essay — Liberal Arts Schools — A Picture about Loneliness: Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”

A Picture about Loneliness: Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks"

• University: University of Chicago

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Words: 877 |

Updated: Nov 30, 2023

Words: 877 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

From my earliest memories, visiting the Art Institute in downtown Chicago was always a highlight, a place where my enthusiasm for art flourished despite my lack of talent in drawing or painting. Amidst the endless display of art, Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" invariably captured my attention, resonating deeply with a sense of profound loneliness, even as a child. This renowned American painting, nestled in a bustling museum, created a unique world for me, where all else faded into the background, leaving me in solitude with just this one masterpiece.

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The room depicted in "Nighthawks" is starkly lit, clinical, and bare, a vivid portrayal of urban loneliness. The figures are frozen in their own worlds, separated by an almost unbridgeable space of emotional isolation. A wall of glass intensifies this separation, placing us, the viewers, on the outside looking in. The painting presents an uncommon scene: four individuals in a small diner, physically together yet emotionally worlds apart, each engulfed in their own sphere of solitude.

The brightness of the diner's light draws the eye, contrasting sharply with the dark, empty streets outside, compelling the viewer to consider the loneliness of its occupants. The painting’s vastness demands attention, inviting one to wonder about the narratives of these isolated figures. Hopper's "Nighthawks" doesn't just tell a story; it invites interpretation and pondering. It's about the loneliness inherent in urban life, a theme that becomes even more pertinent in our digitally connected yet emotionally isolated world.

My reinterpretation of "Nighthawks" in the context of international relations emerged from seeing the diner as a metaphor for America's global influence, isolated yet scrutinized. The patrons, absorbed in their concerns, mirror the loneliness and disconnectedness in international dialogue, where nations, much like individuals in the painting, can be surrounded yet entrenched in their own agendas.

Reflecting on my childhood fascination with "Nighthawks," I understand now that it was Hopper's exploration of loneliness that drew me in. As I grew and delved into international politics and public policy, my connection to the painting deepened, allowing me to see it in a new light. The painting’s depiction of urban solitude, once just a source of mysterious allure, now evokes connections and meanings I hadn't seen before.

Today, as I revisit the Art Institute and stand before "Nighthawks," I’m struck by the timelessness of its theme. The painting continues to speak to the loneliness of the modern city, challenging us to question the quality of our connections in a world where physical presence is often supplanted by digital interaction. Hopper's work, a poignant portrayal of solitude in an urban setting, remains as relevant and compelling as ever, a testament to the enduring power of art to resonate across generations and spark continuous reinterpretation.

In this revisitation of "Nighthawks," the painting seems to extend beyond its frame, becoming a lens through which I view the world around me. The loneliness it portrays is not confined to the canvas but spills into the realm of personal and global experiences. The solitary figures in the diner, each lost in thought, serve as a metaphor for the isolation that can pervade even the most crowded of places, reflecting the paradox of modern connectivity where physical proximity doesn't necessarily translate to emotional closeness.

As I delve deeper into the painting, I begin to see it as a mirror reflecting the societal changes over the decades. In Hopper's era, the painting might have represented the alienation brought by the rapid urbanization and industrialization of America. Today, it echoes the loneliness in an age dominated by screens and virtual interactions, where the physical act of gathering, much like the patrons in the diner, does not guarantee a genuine connection.

Moreover, "Nighthawks" has taken on new layers of meaning in the context of recent global events. The isolation felt by the characters in the diner seems to prefigure the social distancing and separation experienced worldwide. It's as though Hopper anticipated the profound sense of disconnection that would come to define a significant part of the 21st century.

In my personal journey, "Nighthawks" has evolved from a painting of mere aesthetic interest to a profound commentary on human existence. It’s fascinating how a single piece of art can encapsulate such vast, complex emotions and societal dynamics. The more I reflect on it, the more I appreciate its subtlety and depth. It's not just a painting; it's a conversation that Hopper started in the 1940s, one that continues to evolve and resonate to this day.

As I stand before "Nighthawks," I am reminded of the power of art to connect, to evoke, and to reflect. This painting, which once seemed just a depiction of a simple moment in a diner, now holds a multitude of meanings and interpretations, each viewing adding a new layer to my understanding. It's a reminder that art is not static; it grows and changes with us, providing endless opportunities for exploration and discovery.

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"Nighthawks" will always hold a special place in my heart and mind. It's a painting that has not only illuminated the concept of loneliness in an urban setting but also enriched my understanding of the human condition. Each visit to the Art Institute, each glance at this masterpiece, brings new insights and reaffirms the timeless relevance of Hopper's work.

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National project to tackle loneliness among young people

29 May 2024

Read: The Telegraph (£) ; More: The Times (1) (£) , The Times (2) (£) , Evening Standard , The Herald , Daily Mail ,  The National , Listen: BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ (from 1 hr, 42 min, 35 sec) , UCL News

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In the ‘Demandingly Joyful Company’ of Socrates and Plato

More from our inbox:, wrong, tim scott, political violence: lessons from northern ireland, saving marilyn monroe’s house, fafsa mishap.

To the Editor:

Re “ Higher Education Needs More Socrates and Plato ,” by Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Harun Küçük (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, May 19):

I applaud Professors Emanuel and Küçük and their call for “more Socrates and Plato” in higher education. I add only that their proposals have long been followed at St. John’s College, which I had hoped would merit a mention, since our practices are uncannily similar to what the professors suggest.

To borrow the words of the professors, we offer a “broad-based” education that spans disciplines and is rooted in Great Books. We do so as preparation for “democratic citizenship,” which we embody in “small seminar discussions” led by teachers who function as guides, not experts.

We even give our students, before their first class, a document that outlines the virtues of brevity, “listening at length” and “being willing to go where the argument leads.” That document, “Notes on Dialogue,” was written by Stringfellow Barr, whose close reading of Plato led him to create the unique program of instruction St. John’s College has offered the American republic for nearly 100 years.

We welcome more Socrates and Plato, but our students have been learning in their demandingly joyful company for quite some time.

Brendan Boyle Annapolis, Md. The writer is associate dean for graduate programs at St. John’s College.

What Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Harun Küçük should have highlighted in their otherwise thoughtful argument for renewing higher education’s commitment to “the liberal arts ideals that have made them great” is a more directed focus on what it means to educate students to be intellectuals.

What Socrates, Plato and all the other philosophers and writers whom the authors mention represent are examples of what is historically called “the intellectual.”

Different in form, yet consistent in their desire to know, to learn, to understand, to engage with the hard problems of their day, to discuss, to challenge, to inquire, to provoke, to awaken, to read, to analyze, to reflect: These are the qualities of the intellectual, and we should be educating our college students to embody and practice these dispositions and habits of mind and body from Day 1.

Civic education, as the authors discuss it, should start in early childhood. But anti-intellectualism has so rooted itself in the fibers of higher education that to argue for a liberal arts education is controversial. To argue for educating students to be intellectuals is radical.

Eric J. Weiner East Hampton, N.Y. The writer is a professor of education at Montclair State University.

As a lifelong educator, I think the great books and the great debates over the great questions should be done in high school or even earlier. Why wait until college to engage young people in citizenship? This way when students graduate the foundation is there already, no matter what path they decide on — college or no.

Wasn’t that the idea of public schooling to begin with? Don’t we want to teach to the imagination of students and not just equip them with functional skills?

Julianne Sumner Lenox, Mass.

Re “ Election Updates: Tim Scott Says That Black Americans Would Be Better Off Under Trump ” (nytimes.com, May 26):

I want Senator Tim Scott to explain how Black Americans would be better off under another Trump administration. Mr. Trump has said that he wants to cut back on federal programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that a large number of Black Americans rely on. He wants to replace Obamacare — again a program that many Black Americans rely on — with what is not exactly clear. He wants to end diversity and inclusion programs.

The White House Office of Environmental Justice will surely be closed. I can’t even begin to list examples of Mr. Trump’s history of racism, starting with refusing to rent to Black tenants , wanting the death penalty for the Central Park Five , etc., etc.

What is good for Black Americans about this? Does Senator Scott think they are as gullible as he is?

Daniel Fink Beverly Hills, Calif.

“ Threats and Fear Are Transforming U.S. Politics ” (front page, May 20) does an important job of highlighting the “steady undercurrent of violence and political risk that has become the new normal” for our public officials.

I just returned from Northern Ireland, a place that experienced decades of civil war; this spring marks 26 years of peace. I was there with a cross-partisan group of U.S. faith leaders and former politicians to learn how Northern Ireland overcame seemingly intractable, violent, identity-based division.

Three main lessons came through. First, when you hold a mirror to American society, we are much further along the path to normalized violent conflict than we know. Second, prolonged violent conflict leads to immense suffering and destruction. Third, a return to peace is never quick.

And the hopeful lesson is that people who used to hate, bomb and maim one another could find common ground. They found this in exhaustion from the killing and pain, a desire for better lives for their children and a sense of common humanity. By painstaking and determined conversation, they found a way to agree. We, in the U.S., need to do the same.

Tom Crick Atlanta The writer is a project adviser with the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program.

Re “ Homeowners Who Planned to Demolish Marilyn Monroe House Sue Los Angeles ” (news article, nytimes.com, May 8):

Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper once said that her Brentwood home, with its thick beams and walls, made the actress feel safe. It became her refuge, a place where she could go when the world became too much. It was also the place where Marilyn kept her beloved collection of books and other items she treasured.

The house wasn’t fancy by Hollywood standards, but it was solely hers, and she loved it. If her “spirit” resides anywhere today, it’s there. Marilyn herself has become a global symbol of not only glamour and sex, but also personal perseverance and courage in the face of great odds. All good reasons to save her beloved Brentwood home from the wrecking ball.

Joe Elliott Arden, N.C.

Re “ Documents Show Missteps in Overhaul of College Aid ” (news article, May 21):

I’m grateful for The Times’s investigation into the yearslong struggle to update the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

I serve as the vice president of programs at Chicago Scholars , a nonprofit that serves students from low-income households or who will be first-generation students and want to attend a four-year college. The FAFSA mishap upended the college decision season for everyone in our organization, and finding workarounds has unfairly fallen to our students and counselors.

Roadblocks like this forced students to choose between a provisional financial aid package and a gap year. Unfortunately, we find that Chicago Scholars students who take a gap year are far less likely to earn a degree. For many of our students, a college degree is the most attainable path to economic mobility, and it is a path they have worked hard to access.

Our students deserve more than they’ve been given in this situation. This latest misstep is only further evidence that they continue to be left behind.

Tamara Hoff Pope Chicago

Having Anger Issues? Try “Shredding” Your Feelings

T oddlers may be onto something: Destruction really does help relieve feelings of anger in a meaningful way, a new study published in Scientific Reports finds. But before you book an appointment at your nearest rage room , some reflection is necessary.

People have been looking for healthy outlets for their angry feelings for millennia . To test the rage-reducing effects of writing down one’s thoughts and then throwing them away, researchers in Japan experimented with two different exercises . First, they had college students write a short essay about how to solve a common social problem, such as smoking in public. They then told the participants that their essays would be returned to them graded. But instead of personalizing the essay feedback, the researchers automatically gave every participant low ratings in all of these categories: intelligence, interest, friendliness, logic, respectability, and rationality.

To rub salt in the wound, they even wrote the following on each paper: “I cannot believe an educated person would think like this. I hope this person learns something while at the university.”

Each participant was told to sit and silently absorb their grade for two minutes. Researchers then instructed them to write down every thought they had about receiving the feedback, paying special attention to how it made them feel, with assurance that no one would read the paper.

Here comes the interesting part: Some participants were told to put their reflections through a shredder, some were told to throw them in the trash can, and some were told to keep them. Researchers observed that those who shredded or threw away the paper found it much easier to let go of their self-reported feelings of anger. Those who were told to hold onto their notes held onto their anger as well; the journaling exercise helped this group, but not nearly as much . And there was no meaningful difference between throwing the paper away and shredding it, either. The mental benefit seems to have come from the person ridding themselves of the physical object embodying their feelings.

This impact seems to be a reversal of the “magical contagion” or “celebrity contagion” effect: the psychological belief that “objects contain some remnants of their previous owners.” Here, after the person imbues the paper with their emotions, the thinking goes, destroying the paper has a reverse impact by ridding them of the emotion as well.

People have used this method throughout history. The researchers in the study reference the Japanese festival of hakidashisara at the Hiyoshi shrine in Kiyosu, where visitors smash small plates representing things that make them angry. And writing a letter just to burn it is a well-known spiritual and therapeutic practice for letting go of complicated feelings.

The applications of these findings are immediately apparent. After all, this is a trick that anyone can try, and its impact goes beyond the individual. Equipping people to process their anger in a productive way can reduce cases of violence [ PDF ] and improve the mental and physical health —not to mention the relationships —of those who suffer from anger management issues. 

The study has implications for other emotions as well. It’s not unreasonable to think that other difficult feelings like sadness, envy, loneliness, or anxiety may be alleviated through a similar exercise. At the very least, we know that journaling [ PDF ] alone is usually a good first step. If you prefer to vent digitally, it remains to be seen if using the virtual recycling bin has the same benefits.

This article was originally published on mentalfloss.com as Having Anger Issues? Try “Shredding” Your Feelings .

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Taubman College Students Honored in 2024 Saarinen Swanson Essay Competition

Several Taubman College students have been recognized in the annual Saarinen Swanson Essay Competition. Their work explores themes such as the true meaning of home and the deeper responsibilities of today’s architects.

Established in 1994, the contest encourages the use of writing to generate and disseminate ideas about architecture and planning. It is open to all students at Taubman College, at any level, in any program.

The competition seeks 1,000- to 1,500-word essays addressing contemporary issues in architecture, planning, and related topics. The essay can be a new text or work produced for a course.

Here are the winners of the 2024 competition and an excerpt from each of their essays:

First Place

Natalie DeLiso , M.Arch ’24, for “ Two-Alarm Fire ” ($5,000)

Excerpt: “One morning I received a call from a friend asking me, ‘Am I to blame for the death of these two men?’ Over a year ago she had completed her first built project, a small single-family home on Desire Street in New Orleans. The owners had planned to build several affordable homes for rent, this being the first of more to come. That morning she was informed the two men had been caught in a housefire, leading to their death.”

Special Recognition

Nicole Tooley , B.S. Arch ’24, B.A. English, Language and Literature, ’24, “ Architecture is the Boy is the Buoy and the Pier and the Peering ” ($2,000) Excerpt: “The pier as a place where land extends its body, a body which is tectonic and governed by economies and labor — trash and an inner tube. But also a body that is plainly soft and lucid. The pier is a place where all of this meets the water. And the water says, ‘Just fine — come on in.’”

Irene Wei , M.Arch ’25, “ What a Home Looks Like ” ($2,000) Excerpt: “As a second-generation Taiwanese immigrant, my New American experience is akin to grieving a version of my life that never existed, while still trying to simulate it the best I can in a seemingly parallel universe.”

Taubman faculty members Rob Goodspeed, chair of the urban and regional planning program, and John McMorrough, interim chair of the architecture program, judged the essay contest.

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