Living with loneliness as COVID-19 pandemic rages on
Loneliness has been a pernicious side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world approaches a new year of social distancing and isolation, public health experts are exploring the long-term mental and physical health consequences of loneliness, and offering strategies to help people stay more connected.
Early in the pandemic, Jeremy Nobel, a lecturer at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, launched the Stuck at Home (Together) initiative through his Foundation for Art & Healing. The project encourages people to participate in creative activities and share them with others.
“People are typically embarrassed or ashamed about loneliness because they think it ties to some kind of inadequacy or deficiency on their part,” Nobel said in an article in the January-February 2021 Harvard Magazine. He noted that the collective experience of isolating during COVID-19 may change this perception. “So what’s different about this
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Bradley Riew ’18 had a calendar reliably packed from 9 a.m. to midnight. To him, that didn’t seem so bad. “You know,” he says, “you have nine hours to sleep.”
On top of his schoolwork and various extracurriculars, he spent about 20 hours a week volunteering at local homeless shelters. He acknowledges now how well he fit the “overworked Harvard student” stereotype, but during sophomore year the commitments didn’t strike him as unusual. “I was just doing what everyone else was doing,” he says. “I was just absorbed in that culture of go, go, go, go, go.”