The Biological Consequences Of Isolation

It’s something that we need once in awhile when we’re overwhelmed, time for ourselves. It’s calming to separate yourself from the world for a bit, but what happens if you do it for too long? Loneliness is being alone for a short amount of time to eventually return to human contact. Isolation is when you don’t want contact physically and emotionally, including the disconnect from the world. This state of prolonged loneliness leads to social, psychological, and biological damage. Plus, the longer it is kept, the sooner you’ll die.

But why does the body act so violently towards isolation? The roots of the biological trigger ties into the time when humans depended so much on each other in groups. Being alone meant you were more vulnerable to nature

It isn’t too bad on the body, right? It’s probably just a mind illusion, right? Wrong. Many people have gone crazy from being isolated to the point they saw hallucinations and loss control of their personality.

Socially, the relationship between friends and family is destroyed. It all starts as a direct result of anxiety, depression, low self esteem, and/or trauma. The victim cuts off all contact, going to the point of blocking and deleting numbers. They cut off all their presence on social media and lurk around without posting or liking anything. At the same time, their mental illness is slowly getting worse. Victims feel a sense of emotional numbness, something usually associated with those depressed. Their stress hormones are out of control due to their anxiety. This continues in their brain as psychological damage.

In an isolated brain, many parts become less active when compared to a healthy brain. The ventral striatum, a part of the brain’s reward and learning center, is incredibly less responsive. Those affected see rewards as less valuable and have trouble with learning new concepts. The temporoparietal junction, the empathy center, is less active as well. Those affected don’t empathize well with others and have less of an emotional response with

Our senses become completely uncoordinated with each other and misfire. Effects include: lights flashing from nowhere, itchiness and phantom touches, the loss of scent and taste, and imagining sounds. Everyday habits are also affected with sleep patterns being broken, defective reasoning, and lowered attention span. Time is also slowed, as Maurizio Montalbini said ( Bond, “Future”). These effects are more dramatic in animals, as they start to zone out and hurt themselves as a response to