ScienceDaily: Loneliness leads to higher risk of future unemployment

“Previous research has established that being unemployed can cause loneliness, however the new study from the University of Exeter is the first to directly explore whether the opposite also applies across the working age population. Published in BMC Public Health, the study found that people who reported "feeling lonely often" were significantly more likely to encounter unemployment later. Their analysis also confirmed previous findings that the reverse is true -- people who were unemployed were more likely to experience loneliness later.

Lead author Nia Morrish, of the University of Exeter, said: "Given the persisting and potentially scarring effects of both loneliness and unemployment on health and the economy, prevention of both experiences is key. Decreased loneliness could mitigate unemployment, and employment abates loneliness, which may in turn relate positively to other factors including health and quality of life. Thus, particular attention should be paid to loneliness with additional support from employers and government to improve health and wellbeing. Our research was largely conducted pre-pandemic, however we suspect this issue may be even more pressing, with more people working from home and potentially experiencing isolation because of anxieties around covid."

Senior author Professor Antonieta Medina-Lara said: "Loneliness is an incredibly important societal problem, which is often thought about in terms of the impact on mental health and wellbeing only. Our findings indicate that there may also be wider implications, which could have negative impacts for individuals and the economy. We need to explore this further, and it could lay the foundations for employers or policy makers to tackle loneliness with a view to keeping more people in work."”

My Takeaways From This Article

1. According to the article, people who describe themselves as suffering from loneliness are more likely to find themselves unemployed in comparison to people who say they are not.

2. This may be very correlational as in general lonely people are less likely to have proper connections or have high comorbidity with other debilitating mental issues such as depression and anxiety disorders that prevent them from successfully landing a job.

3. However, even in understanding correlation it’s important that we understand that there are more drastic effects of loneliness that we may not be able to see right away, this article being a good example of such.

Full article is here!

What are your takeaways from your article? What do you think about the relationship between loneliness and future job prospects in terms of employment?

#Employment #Loneliness #Anxiety