You glance over to the other table, quick to shift your eyesight to look. As you try to sneak a look, the eyes meet, and the feelings pour in. Unexplainable, but exists. The person comes over to the table and holds your hands. This feeling of touch lets the flutter of butterflies intensify. Human connection is one of the most important feelings, and in this pandemic, it has challenged the way we look at it.
Humans are, after all, inherently social beings. The roots of our human impulse for social connection run so deep that feeling isolated can undermine our ability to think clearly - an effect that has a certain poetic justice to it, given the role of social connection in shaping our intelligence.
We are psychologically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually hard-wired for connection, love, and belonging. These connections build over time, along with openness, curiosity, empathy, and generosity. Love and belonging, which are two expressions of connection, give purpose and meaning to our lives.
As noted by John T Cacippo and William Patrick, one of the primary benefits of having satisfactory social connections is that it allows us to find self-regulatory behaviors promoting resonance with others. This is in contrast to behaviors that are put in awkward or dangerous situations. Self-regulation is essential, as it plays a considerable role to make us human.
Our brain practices to think socially from infancy. This finding was elaborated by a study conducted by Wei Gao and others. This study looked at which brain regions were engaged in highly coordinated activity in two-week-old babies and found that the default network was chugging away just as it does in adults. Another group, composed of Christopher D Smyser and others, found evidence of a functional default network in two-day-old infants. However, the same pattern was not seen in infants born prematurely, suggesting that this mechanism is engaged and set to turn on when we are most likely to enter the social world.
In 1943, Abraham Maslow, a famous New England psychologist, published a paper in a prestigious journal describing a hierarchy of human needs. Maslow suggested that we work our way up the pyramid of needs, where we satisfy the most basic needs then climb the ladder to the next set of needs. The next level of the pyramid focuses on our safety needs, such as physical shelter and bodily health. The third rung focuses on the need for love and belonging, focusing on friendship, family, and sexual intimacy. Above these needs are feelings of self-esteem and self-actualization, focusing on morality, creativity, and problem-solving skills.
But when the social connection is amiss, social pain arises, which is known to us as loneliness. This evolved to protect the individual from the dangers of remaining isolated. More socially isolated or less socially integrated individuals are less healthy, psychologically and physically, and more likely to die. Our forebears depended on social bonds for safety and the successful replication of their genes in the form of offspring.
However, one cannot be safeguarded from that feeling of disconnection and loneliness. When we are lonely, we react more intensely to the negatives; we also experience less of a soothing uplift from the positives. The feeling of loneliness tends to perceive support from a friend to be less fulfilling than the expectations.
When we do not feel valued, when we feel insufficient, we fear being disconnected and alone. The feeling of shame emanates, which pushes us into our cocoon, and we stop putting ourselves out there. This, in turn, accelerates the feeling of loneliness.
Over the pandemic, the concept of human connection was redefined. We see technology create opportunities for people to connect across the globe. However, the downside is that technology can cause alienation and real pain as well.
According to a nationwide survey commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation, 48% of British adults believe that people in the UK are getting lonelier as time progresses, 45% report feeling lonely at least some of the time, and 42% report having felt depressed due to being alone.
We found ways to decrease the psychological distance created during the pandemic by humanizing our interactions with people. This includes virtual coffee breaks, lunches, social hours, among others. Even amidst the pandemic, we try to keep the connections we make alive and find more people to connect with. While we are at the risk of loneliness, the fundamental feature of humans keeps moving forward.
Parvathi Sajiv
