It’s possible to be by yourself and feel perfectly fine. It’s also possible to be surrounded by people and feel profoundly alone. Those two experiences—being alone and feeling lonely—are often treated as the same thing, but science tells us they’re very different.

Being alone is a physical state: you’re by yourself, perhaps working, resting, or intentionally choosing solitude. Loneliness, on the other hand, is a psychological experience. It’s the feeling that your relationships aren’t meeting your need for connection. You can be alone without being lonely, and lonely without being alone.

This distinction matters more than we might think.

Loneliness isn’t just an emotion; it’s a signal. Social psychologists often describe it as similar to hunger or thirst: an internal cue that something essential is missing. From an evolutionary perspective, humans survived by staying connected to others. Feeling lonely was a prompt to reconnect, to move back toward the group. Loneliness........

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