Is loneliness becoming the next global health crisis?

A person can be surrounded by friends, classmates, colleagues, or family and still feel completely lonely.

For Paras Rathi, 28, a media director in Canada, loneliness felt like “sinking deep in the chest.”

For the 28-year-old, loneliness has not always meant wanting to be surrounded by people. “It’s always nice to have at least one person you feel comfortable with and it took me a long time to realize that that person could be myself if it needed to be.”

Meanwhile, for Hashim, 22, a student in Waterloo, it meant feeling as though there was "absolutely no one or nothing to turn to” when he needed it.

One respondent described loneliness as “feeling like there’s no one to turn to or express yourself to.” Another said it meant “not having anyone to talk to when you need the most, or feeling lonely even when you're filled with a room full of people.”

Beyond Being Alone:

Loneliness is a normal part of human life. But Dr. Luzia Heu of Utrecht University says that the important distinction is whether loneliness is temporary or persistent. She described loneliness as a negative, subjective experience that emerges when there is a gap between the relationships people have and the relationships they want.

Hashim, 22, described being alone as “physical” while loneliness was “emotional.”

For another respondent, the distinction was tied to choice. “Being alone is usually a choice and if anything can make you feel really good if you want it to and feeling lonely usually isn’t a choice,” they said. “Feeling lonely makes you get in your head that something is deeply wrong with YOU while being alone is usually a sign of growth.”

That is where psychologist Gordon L. Flett’s research offers another way of understanding loneliness.

Flett and his colleagues have examined loneliness through the concept of mattering, the feeling that one is significant, valued and important to other people.

One respondent said loneliness could make them feel as though “something is deeply wrong with YOU”. Another said extreme loneliness had made them more subdued and insecure, drained their energy and affected their motivation at work and ability to maintain relationships.

“I haven’t had my energy to be myself when I’m feeling extreme loneliness,” the respondent said. “At work my motivation tanks and generally it gets quite harder to get out of bed.”

Loneliness can therefore become more than “I am by myself.” Or it can become: “I am not important to anyone.”

A Global Experience, Different Pressures:

For Rohan, 22, moving from Pakistan to Belfast for a work placement as a data analyst meant stepping into a city where almost everything initially felt unfamiliar. The people were new, the environment was new, and the relationships he had relied on at home were suddenly far away.

“When I moved to Belfast for the first time. Unfamiliar places and people, it was a scary feeling but with time things got better and I learned a few things along the way,” Rohan said.

One respondent described moving to another country and realising they had “started from 0” because they did not have a single friend there. “Obviously this didn’t help,” they said, describing how the difference between life in their new country and life back home-made forming connections harder.

Some respondents recalled arriving somewhere new and finding the experience frightening because both the place and the people were unfamiliar.

Grace, a 21-year-old from Dallas, is currently working at Gallo in Modesto, California, while studying at California Polytechnic State University. Lamya, a 23-year-old living in Modesto, is working as a process engineer at a wine and spirits’ company, and in Chicago, a 27-year-old insurance agent, David, is going through the demands of working life. Their circumstances differ, but each is moving through the kinds of transitions that can quietly reshape a person's social world.

In terms of reasons, the previously mentioned expert, Dr. Heu claimed migration can increase the risk of loneliness because it separates people from those they are close to.

For one respondent, moving abroad meant having to rebuild their social life from the beginning. “I started from 0 when I moved here, I did not have a single friend here and obviously this didn’t help,” they said.

Research by communication researcher Jeffrey A Hall and colleagues describes emerging adulthood as a period in which people can experience instability in their relationships and routines as they move between education, employment and other stages of adult life.

For one respondent, the end of a long-distance relationship exposed how much of their support system was still back home. “I was so invested in her and whatever was going on in Pakistan, I couldn’t focus and put in anything in my life in Canada and when I had left that relationship, I realized I didn’t have a lot of people over here to lean on,” they said. “Everyone was back home.”

Dr. Heu also offered another possibility and said, financial hardship is consistently associated with greater loneliness. People dealing with financial insecurity may feel isolated with their problems, while working longer hours or having less money can reduce the time for socialising.

The Social Media Question:

When loneliness among young people is discussed, social media is often treated as the obvious culprit.

One person described seeing friends back home meeting without them and wondering why their own life no longer looked the same. “I do feel bad that why isn’t my life like that because it used to be like that at a certain time before,” they said.

Jeffrey A. Hall’s 2025 narrative review found that social media use is associated with long-term loneliness and explains relatively little variation in loneliness compared with other factors. It also found that social media usage does not explain changes in loneliness over time. Overall, the review found no evidence that social media use itself causes loneliness.

Some respondents said that social media and messaging could be useful precisely because they allowed people to maintain relationships without being physically together.

One said, “stuff like sharing memes, Spotify jams, Netflix watch parties, these are all ways to stay connected while possibilities of necessarily having to say much. So in that sense it’s a great way to connect.”

But the same respondent described the difficulty of turning those online connections into deeper relationships. “When making friends or forming relationships here, it sometimes does get trickier to move past the initial stage of it being online because a lot of people just feel more comfortable keeping stuff online because there’s not a lot of energy/commitment required so it has its pros and cons.”

Hall argues that social media can therefore satisfy some aspects of belonging without necessarily satisfying deeper social needs. The research also has a major limitation: much of the older evidence was developed around Facebook-era social networking, before the dominance of short-form video and the integration of messaging into platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

When Loneliness Becomes A Health Concern:

The question is “when it becomes serious enough to require intervention?”

Psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad has spent years studying social connection as a public-health issue. Her research argues that social connection should be treated alongside other social determinants of health rather than remaining largely absent from public-health policy.

Holt-Lunstad and Andrew Steptoe have argued that objective social isolation itself can be an important predictor of health and mortality, rather than simply a substitute measure for loneliness.

More recent work by Psychologist Holt-Lunstad also cautions against reducing the entire issue to loneliness alone. She argues that public-health responses should therefore focus on social connection more broadly.

One respondent even shared just how far the feeling could spread beyond their social life. “It’s carried over in so many other shapes and forms. I’ve been a more subdued and insecure person because of it. Even in relationships, I feel quite exhausted trying to try and maintain those connections which require effort.”

Another said loneliness affected them because they kept too much to themselves and said, “keeping in a lot of burdens to myself can make me feel more down. Sometimes I keep it to myself because I also don’t want to burden people with my problems.”

“I usually turn to someone in my family or a close friend who I feel comfortable with,” one respondent said. “Sometimes I also find it helpful to talk to someone professionally. What makes asking for help difficult is the fear that people won't understand what you're feeling or that they might minimize it.”

Another admitted that they struggled to ask for help at all, even when they were struggling. Instead, their friends often noticed before they had to say anything was wrong.

What Would Actually Help?

If loneliness is a public-health issue, the solution cannot simply be telling lonely people to “go out more”. Psychological interventions may help some people, particularly when loneliness is connected with negative expectations about relationships, social anxiety or withdrawal.

However, Holt-Lunstad has called for social connection to be addressed across sectors, including health, education, workplaces and communities. For students, that could begin with making it easier to form relationships in the places where they already spend their time.

“I wish they would put more of an effort to integrate students into the university and mingle with one another,” one respondent said. “It should start from classes where professors are encouraged to make an effort to help students with interactions in class and unis should dedicate counselors that act more like a support for how you can get the best from uni socially.”

One respondent even argued that awareness itself mattered: “Provide more awareness around this and let people know it’s ok to feel what they feel and they know where or who to approach when they feel this way again.”

So, is Loneliness the Next Global Public-Health Crisis?

Researchers have found different patterns across countries and age groups, and the evidence is complicated by differences in how loneliness is defined and measured.

The evidence already shows that inadequate social connection is associated with significant health consequences, while researchers such as Holt-Lunstad argue that social connection deserves a much larger place in public-health thinking.

Social media can intensify exclusion and comparison, but it can also maintain friendships and create communities.

The emerging question is therefore not simply how many people someone knows. It is whether they have meaningful relationships. Whether they feel understood. Whether they have someone to turn to. And whether they believe they matter.

It is: “If you needed someone, would you believe that you mattered enough for them to show up?”