Two Minds Blog

Nobody likes to feel lonely, but new research is showing that it can also be bad for your long-term health. People who are chronically lonely have been shown to experience higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, neurological disorders, and even premature death. Some common problems linked to loneliness include stress, cardiovascular disease (high blood pressure, stroke, heart attack), anxiety, depression, Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia, obesity, and substance use. These risks are great enough that the Surgeon General issued a recent advisory statement about loneliness as a risk to health, titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation . The Surgeon General issues advisories when there is an "urgent public health issue" for the American people to consider and address; often these have been on mental health topics (e.g., social media  and mental health, health worker burnout , or youth mental health ).  Across all age groups, 10-35% of people say that th

  Sensor devices such as activity monitors, heart rate monitors , sleep trackers, continuous glucose monitors , and even noise or light sensors, are increasingly becoming part of routine health care. There are of course still significant technical challenges: How does a continuous stream of everyday observations get integrated into one's electronic medical record? How does it get processed into a form that clinicians can use? What are the algorithms that turn data into information for the end users of these devices, and are they accurate? Is advice based on these observations reliable? Does it ultimately help to treat or prevent health problems for the people who use the devices?  Despite these open questions, monitoring devices are becoming more varied and feature-rich every day, and we can expect their use to continue growing. In the current blog post, then, I will consider monitoring devices from a psychological perspective. My question of interest is not whether the devices he