Isolation Warps The Mind Analysis

In the words of Jeanne Marie Laskas “Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment.” Nobody enjoys being completely shut off from everything but just how bad is it? It turns out that it is worse than we would think. Isolation can have many awful effects on the human body and mind, ranging from an increase in suicidal thoughts and actions, problems of patterns of sleep and attention, to an increase in aging effects. Today I will go over a few sources that show that isolation can hurt anyone.
As BBC concluded in their study “How extreme Isolation Warps the Mind” isolation has shown to cause many lousy effects. After spending nearly 10,000 hours with little human contact in a jail cell Sarah Shourd started to do things

like crouch on the floor on all fours and listen through a crack on a wall. For over one and a third of a year she was trapped in a jail cell with no one and it had started to affect her in a terrible way. “At one point, I heard someone screaming, and it wasn’t until I felt the hands of one of the friendlier guards on my face, trying to revive me, that I realized the screams were my own.” she said in a New York Times article. She was going so far into insanity that she didn't even know that she was screaming. Loneliness can also interfere with a wide range of everyday functioning, such as patterns of sleep, attention, and logical and verbal reasoning. None of these things are things that are good to humans, but all of them happen because of isolation. While French geologist Michel Siffre was conducting tests with his team on the surface, they discovered it took him five minutes to count to what he thought was 120 seconds. Isolation to this degree and in the other example can do horrible things ranging from depression and insanity to a loss of understanding of time.
Another article, written by Gary J. Kennedy for the Einstein Blog titled “How Loneliness Affects the Mind and Body”, shows some more severe effects including symptoms that can lead to death or cause long term damage to your body. One of the main points of the article is that constant loneliness can cause acceleration of aging with multiple health consequences, including conditions that lead to death. “Studies, including one published in March by Brigham Young University researchers, suggest that loneliness, isolation and living alone can be as threatening to health as cigarettes, excess alcohol and obesity.” This means that the simple act of getting forced away from people for a long period of time has the same consequences as things like cigarettes or obesity. Another challenge that arises from extreme isolation is that it can weaken us in more than one way.In the article it says that loneliness can be associated with very problematic changes in the heart along with causing hormonal and immune system to weaken. One of the final points from the article is that loneliness, social isolation and living alone are a greater threat to health and well-being than the other way around. This means that most people would believe that health and well-being would affect loneliness while it is quite the opposite. These pieces of information should show that isolation can have effects as serious as smoking or excessive drinking.