The dangers of staying at home all day

The term "otaku" was very popular a few years ago. It was used to describe people who were unwilling to go out of the house. Some people could insist on staying at home for up to several months, eating and drinking at home. Being in a closed environment for a long time puts a lot of pressure on the human body's mental level, and it will make people lose touch with society and unwilling to communicate. This article mentions the dangers of staying at home all day. Stay-at-home guys and girls, come and learn about it.

First of all, appropriate time alone is beneficial to one’s physical and mental development, which is worth affirming. We live in a world full of people, especially those living in big cities, who have to come into contact with different people almost every moment and are forced to accept information from the outside environment. In the long run, this will cause a great loss of personal energy, form a physical and mental burden, and even lead to the occurrence of disease. Appropriate time alone is conducive to improving one's independent thinking ability, improving one's concentration, and gaining inner peace and stability.

But prolonged periods of solitude can take a toll on your physical health. First of all, being alone for a long time may cause certain harm to your physical health. People who are lonely for a long time generally have high blood pressure and lower immunity, and have a higher chance of suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Loneliness may also affect an individual's sleep patterns, attention levels, and logical reasoning, among other functions. However, scientists have discovered that social isolation can trigger an extreme immune response, leading to a surge in stress hormones in the body.

Secondly, social isolation affects people on a spiritual level. In the 1990s, Romanian researchers discovered that children raised in orphanages lacked close social contact and often had serious behavioral, emotional, and even mental problems. The same thing is that the "wolf children" reported before were far away from the human world and lacked basic communication with humans during their growth process. When they were discovered, they could only live like wolves, and their IQ was only close to that of children with 4 to 5.

The meaning of emotions can only be realized through communication among people of the same kind. Biologists believe that the evolutionary motivation for human emotions is that group living was important to our distant ancestors, and advanced emotions facilitate cooperation within groups. If our joys, sorrows, anger and happiness are not participated in by others, and our emotional expression process does not receive enough feedback, we will be subverted by distorted self-perception and market emotions. This may lead to the occurrence of autism.

To be honest, I don’t think there is any scientific conclusion about the psychological problems that may arise from being alone for a long time. Because scientific hypotheses need to be verified by experiments, and being alone for a long time is difficult to implement both experimentally and from an ethical perspective. In other words, to study this issue reliably, psychologists need to find two groups of people, who are similar in gender, age, education level, marital status, intimate relationships, etc., and then one group is detained in a single room for a certain "long" period of time (such as 5-10 years), and the other group returns to normal society and life. Then, 10 years later, we conducted various psychological assessments on these two groups of people and came to a more "scientific" conclusion. Who would be willing to be a subject in this experiment?

Therefore, most of the psychological problems that may occur when a person is alone for a long time are "speculation" or even "conjecture." People in prison cannot be used to answer this question because, first of all, people who enter prison are due to specific antisocial reasons. These people may have specific psychological traits and are not representative of the general public. Secondly, prison is a special environment, a living environment and life events that are controlled by strict discipline and do not allow for personal freedom. This is different from our normal life where we have personal freedom and are alone for a long time. We cannot attribute any phenomenon that occurs to different people in such completely different environments to long-term solitude.

But is there no more reliable answer to this question? My personal opinion is that there is no need to worry too much about the act of being alone for a long time. Some people may still enjoy being alone for a long time, while others may be on the verge of collapse. If you think about it, it depends on the individual. The key is whether long-term solitude is accompanied by certain psychological events, such as whether a sense of loneliness occurs. Professor John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago has long been engaged in research on the impact of loneliness on people's psychology and health. His research uses loneliness questionnaires as a measurement indicator to interview and survey thousands of people, and also conducts long-term follow-up assessments of these people's psychological and health indicators. Their series of long-term studies found that loneliness can cause people to develop depressive symptoms, sleep disorders, and dysfunction of daytime activities, and can impair mental health and cognition. It needs to be emphasized again that loneliness is not the same as being alone for a long time. It is a psychological feeling caused by the difference between the social relationships people expect and the actual social relationships. That is: being alone for a long time may cause a person to feel lonely, leading to a series of psychological and physiological changes, but it does not mean that all people who are alone for a long time will feel lonely. Please keep this in mind.

In addition, autism is a developmental disorder and, simply put, it will not be caused by long-term solitude.