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What does it mean to be lonely? It’s tempting to equate the feeling with a dearth of social interaction, but some people are now saying that it’s more complicated than that — and that true loneliness might be dangerous.

In a story at Medium, Robin Marantz Henig busts some common loneliness myths. Lonely people aren’t necessarily weird or uncool: Ms. Henig cites a study of Ohio State undergrads showing that “those who called themselves lonely had just as much ‘social capital’ — defined by physical attractiveness, height, weight, socioeconomic status, and academic achievement — as their non-lonely peers.” And they may not be actually alone:

“The students at Ohio State who were lonely belonged to as many clubs and had as many roommates as those who were ‘socially embedded.’ And while some studies indicate that living alone puts people at greater risk for loneliness, living with a spouse is not necessarily any protection.”

Rather, loneliness may be psychological. The lonely, writes Ms. Henig, are more likely than others “to feel put upon and misunderstood” in social situations, to see “social danger even where none might exist.” She writes:

“People grow lonely because of the gloomy stories they tell themselves. And, in a cruel twist, the loneliness itself can further distort their thinking, making them misread other people’s good intentions, which in turn causes them to withdraw to protect themselves from further rejection — and causes other people to keep them at arm’s length.”

This distancing can have a physical impact; Ms. Henig argues that loneliness deserves further study, in part because it may increase the risk of high blood pressure, sleep problems and Alzheimer’s disease.

Though it still gets less coverage than other psychic ills (Ms. Henig notes that a search for “depression” at the National Institute for Health’s website turns up far more hits than searches for “loneliness” or “lonely”), the last few years have seen rising attention to loneliness and its risks. At The Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Bernstein writes that the share of lonely Americans has doubled since the 1980s, to 40 percent, perhaps because we’re now more likely to live alone (though as Ms. Henig points out, living with someone isn’t necessarily protective).

Natalie Gil of The Guardian reports on a recent survey finding that Britons are the loneliest Europeans and writes that young people may be most at risk. She quotes Nicky Forsythe, a psychotherapist: “We treat the networks we have as incidental, but they’re fundamental to our wellbeing. The most important thing is to have a regular time and place to reflect on your life and to have an empathic listener.” And in a 2013 story in The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz surveys the current research on loneliness and offers this disturbing formulation of its dangers:

“Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you.”

Other people are offering accounts of what loneliness feels like from the inside. In her 2010 memoir “Lonely,” Emily White takes stock of what we know about loneliness through the lens of her own struggles with it. Of a time when she’d been feeling lonely for about a year, she writes:

“I no longer had periods of not needing others. Rather, my sense of need was present and piercing much of the time. It was also the case that, during that winter, my dreams began to change. I stopped dreaming of warmth and close connection, and began to dream of loneliness. I’d be at a pay phone, trying to call around to find the location of a party, but wouldn’t be able to reach anyone who could tell me how to get there. Or I’d be lying in bed and waiting for someone to join me, but hour after hour would go by, and I’d wind up alone on the mattress in the weak dawn light. It was as though, after more than a year of battling loneliness, my mind had temporarily run out of gimmicks and resources.”

Ms. Henig, too, speaks of loneliness from experience. She writes:

“There are many days when I don’t utter a single word to anyone but my husband. On these days I think of Leo Gursky, the solitary old man from Nicole Krauss’s ‘The History of Love,’ who goes out for a glass of juice when he’s not thirsty or shops for shoes he has no intention of buying, just for the human interaction. ‘All I want,’ he says, ‘is not to die on a day when I went unseen.’”

However, she says, she’s working on getting better. She notes that John Cacioppo, a neuroscience professor and widely cited expert on loneliness, believes “that if we’re aware of our tendency to feel aggrieved and unappreciated, the awareness itself is an important first step in conquering loneliness, allowing us to grab hold of our negative thinking and turn ourselves into someone that others will want to have around.” Ms. Shulevitz sounds a similar note: “Teach a lonely person to respond to others without fear and paranoia, and over time, her body will make fewer stress hormones and get less sick from them.”

For those dealing with loneliness, the recent attention to the condition may be helpful. As Ms. Henig notes, changing the way your mind works is easier said than done. But knowing that loneliness may be a relatively common psychological problem — and not a sign that you’re strange or unlovable — may make it a little easier to combat.