April 14th 2020

What is the Covid-19 Isolation program doing to you?

It is sometimes difficult to understand why this detachment from social contact is so difficult. The answer is pretty simple. We are hard wired to act as social beings. From the beginning of time humans found that sticking together in small groups was the key to survival. As infants, the social programming begins with families and communities that protect and program you. Without this community of social interaction, we will falter.

The few excerpts below may give you a greater understanding of that “old horse” about wellness and its connection to your longevity.

Social Isolation & Physical Health

(an excerpt from “The Lonely American – Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century” by Olds MD and Schwartz MD)

Social support is an important and independent determinant of overall health. The degree of social connection has significant effects on longevity, on an individual’s response to stress, on the robustness of immune functions, and in the incidence and course of a variety of specific illnesses. In diseases as varied as heart attacks and dementia, medical research has repeatedly found that social networks and social activity have a protective effect. Isolated individuals are nearly twice as likely to die in a ten-year period as their more socially involved neighbours. That increase in mortality is above and beyond the effects of the bad lifestyle choices that are more common with socialization, such as smoking, lack of exercise, poor diet, and obesity. Social connection itself appears to have direct effects on human biology. A report from the 2003 Dahlem Workshop on Attachment and Bonding offers a succinct summary of vast body of research: “Positive social relationships are second only to genetics in predicting health and longevity in humans.”

A New study adds a dramatic piece to the puzzle. Subjective social isolation (more simply described as loneliness) alters the suppression of more than two hundred genes that control immune response. Steve Cole, the leader of the study, offers his own commentary on it: “What this shows us it the biological impact of social isolation reaches down into our most important basic internal processes – the activity of our genes.

This is why it is very important to stay in touch. If you haven’t pushed yourself to make calls to Club Members yet, please do so. This a key to staying healthy during this period in time.

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Here are a few other observations made by “anonymous” since I don’t have their names at this time.

- One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

- Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one”

- Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive. It is only by this meeting that a new world is bor