Sugar, Alcohol, And Loneliness in Your Brain

And here's an interesting bit of trivia: Loneliness is the number one contributor to suicide and attempted suicide.

Why? Because it's not enough to know your brain is broken. You also have to know how to fix it.

The small study, conducted by a team of researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles and published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry, analyzed the blood samples of 82 people who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The researchers found that blood levels of the stress hormone cortisol were significantly higher in those who were lonely and who reported being depressed.

High levels of cortisol, the researchers noted, are often associated with alcoholism and drug abuse, and people with bipolar disorder are at high risk of abusing alcohol and drugs. So the researchers thought loneliness and depression might be linked, and decided to explore that.

Subjects were first asked to rate their loneliness on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being "I rarely feel lonely" and 7 being "I often feel lonely." They were then asked to rate how much they consumed alcohol on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being "Not at all" and 7 being "A lot."

Loneliness and alcohol consumption were both found to be closely linked to elevated levels of cortisol. The study's authors said the findings suggest that people who drink more and feel lonely may have a biological vulnerability to depression.

So let's look at the study results in more detail. In the first part of the study, the researchers asked the participants to rate their loneliness, and then asked them to rate how much they consumed alcohol. The participants were then given a blood test and asked to drink a drink of vodka.

The researchers found that participants who reported being lonely had higher levels of cortisol when they drank the vodka. They also found that as the level of loneliness increased, the participants' blood levels of cortisol increased.

But the researchers noted that the connection between loneliness and cortisol levels was not as strong as the correlation between loneliness and alcohol consumption.

"This finding suggests that high loneliness may be a significant risk factor for depression, and that loneliness and depression may have a common biological basis," said lead author Michael Thase, a professor of psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

"But the findings also suggest that loneliness and depression may have different biological underpinnings," he said. "The association between loneliness and cortisol was particularly strong in those who reported being depressed. This suggests that loneliness may be associated with depression through multiple mechanisms, including the stress response."

The study authors also found that the more alcohol the participants consumed, the higher their cortisol levels.

It should be noted that the study was not designed to determine what causes loneliness, or whether loneliness causes depression.

"We did not measure the types of loneliness that people are experiencing," said Thase. "We were not interested in whether some people are more lonely than others. Loneliness is a subjective experience, and our goal was to see if there is a biological basis to loneliness. We were able to find a biological basis to loneliness, but we don't know whether the biology is the cause or the effect of loneliness."

It should be noted that the UCLA researchers did not find the same relationship between loneliness and cortisol in people who were not depressed. This suggests that loneliness may be more closely linked to depression than to other mental illness.

"It is often reported that people who are lonely tend to experience more depression," said Thase. "But it is possible that loneliness is associated with other mental illnesses, like anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. We didn't find that loneliness was associated with cortisol in those without depression."

Loneliness and depression are not the only problems associated with alcohol and sugar. The National"