Everybody feels lonely from time to time.
无时无刻，大家都会感到某种程度上的孤单。
When we have no one to sit next to at lunch, when we move to a new city, or when nobody has time for us at the weekend.
例如在人山人海的食堂里独自用餐，刚抵达一个完全陌生的地方，又或者是孤伶伶地度过漫长的周末。
But over the last few decades, this occasional feeling has become chronic for millions.
但在近十几年来，这问题困扰着数以百万，并以逐年上升的趋势增加中。
In the UK,60% of 18 to 34-year-olds say they often feel lonely.
就英国调查统计，有60%（18岁至34岁的）成年人表示他们经常感到孤独。
In the US,46% of the entire population feel lonely regularly.
在美国，占46%的人口表示他们经常感到孤独。
We are living in the most connected time in human history.
虽然我们正处于人类史上网络涵盖的全盛期。
And yet, an unprecedented number of us feel isolated.
可在其中仍有巨量的人们时时刻刻感到孤独。
Being lonely and being alone are not the same thing.
感到孤独与独自一人是不同的事。
You can be filled with bliss by yourself and hate every second surrounded by friends.
你可以用幸福感填满自己，或者在朋友围绕者你的时候厌烦着每一秒。
Loneliness is a purely subjective, individual experience.
孤独是一种纯粹的主观体验。
If you feel lonely, you are lonely.
如果你感到孤独，你就是孤独着。
A common stereotype is that loneliness only happens to people who don't know how to talk to people, or how to behave around others.
一种常见的刻板印象是，孤独只会发生在不知道怎么跟别人沟通，或者不知道怎么与人互动。
But population-based studies have shown that social skills make practically no difference for adults when it comes to social connections.
但是以人口数为基底的研究发现社交技能在成人的社交系上并没有太多的影响，每个人都会感到孤独。
Loneliness can affect everybody: money, fame, power, beauty, social skills, a great personality;
孤独会影响每个人：钱、名声、能力、 外表、社交技能、好的品格。
Nothing can protect you against loneliness because it's part of your biology.
但没有一项可以保护你对抗孤独，因为这是你生物学的一部分。
Loneliness is a bodily function, like hunger.
孤独是一种身体机能，就像饥饿。
Hunger makes you pay attention to your physical needs.
饥饿让你知道你物理上的需求(食物)。
Loneliness makes you pay attention to your social needs.
孤独则让你知道你社交上的需求。
Your body cares about your social needs, because millions of years ago it was a great indicator of how likely you were to survive.
身体对于你的社交需求非常在乎，因为几百万年以来，这是一个关系到你怎么生存下来的指标。
Natural selection rewarded our ancestors for collaboration, and for forming connections with each other.
在物竞天择中，我们的祖先互相合作，并且建立彼此的关系而存活下来。
Our brains grew and became more and more fine-tuned to recognize what others thought and felt, and to form and sustain social bonds.
我们的大脑成长，越来越能精细的体会到他人的想法跟感受，并且进一步的形成且维持社交联系。
Being social became part of our biology.
「进行社交行为」成为我们生物学的一部分。
You were born into groups of 50 to 150 people which you usually stayed with for the rest of your life.
你这一辈子中大概会在一个50人到150人的群体中度过一生。
Getting enough calories, staying safe and warm, or caring for offspring was practically impossible alone.
取得足够的热量、在温暖又安全的地方待着、照料着后代，这些都不可能独自完成。
Being together meant survival.
群聚意味着生存。
Being alone meant death.
独自一人意味着死亡。
So it was crucial that you got along with others.
所以，与他人相处极其重要。
For your ancestors, the most dangerous threat to survival was not being eaten by a lion, but not getting the social vibe of your group and being excluded.
对于我们的祖先最危险的生命威胁并不是被其他生物捕食，而是不在社交群内，被排除在外。
To avoid that, your body came up with 'social pain'.
我们的身体为了阻止这一切而发展出了「社交痛苦」。
Pain of this kind is an evolutionary adaptation to rejection: a sort of early warning system to make sure you stop behavior that would isolate you.
这种痛苦是一种演化中为了适应的预警系统，以确保你停止做出孤立自己的行为。
Your ancestors who experienced rejection as more painful were more likely to change their behavior when they got rejected and thus stayed in the tribe, while those who did not got kicked out and most likely died.
那些体认被拒绝的经验比他人更痛苦的祖先，更有可能在被拒绝时改变他们的行为，因此能留在部落里，而那些不改变行为者则被踢出部落并很可能都已经死亡。
That's why rejections hurt.
这就是被排除在外会感觉难受。
And even more so, why loneliness is so painful.
甚至、孤独是会令人感到痛苦的。
These mechanisms for keeping us connected worked great for most of our history,
这些机制让人们在历史上互相连结着彼此，并且良好的合作着。
until humans began building a new world for themselves.
直到人们为自己建造了新的世界。
The loneliness epidemic we see today really only started in the late Renaissance.
我们现在看到的「孤独流行病」其实起于文艺复兴晚期。
Western culture began to focus on the individual.
西方文化开始重视各人个体。
Intellectuals moved away from the collectivism of the Middle Ages, while the young Protestant theology stressed individual responsibility.
于年轻的基督新教中开始强调个人的责任，知识分子开始从中世纪的集体主义中分离出来。
This trend accelerated during the Industrial Revolution.
而这趋势在工业革命中越演越烈。
People left their villages and fields to enter factories.
人们离开了他们的村庄和田地，开始进入工厂。
Communities that had existed for hundreds of years began to dissolve, while cities grew.
存在几百年以来的社区开始瓦解，而城市开始兴起。
As our world rapidly became modern, this trend sped up more and more.
在我们的世界越快速的现代化过程中，这种趋势也越来越快。
Today, we move vast distances for new jobs, love and education, and leave our social net behind.
现今，我们为了工作、爱情或教育移动了很长的距离，并将我们的人际网络抛在脑后。
We meet fewer people in person, and we meet them less often than in the past.
我们越来越少面对面的遇见人们，甚至比以前更少。
In the US, the mean number of close friends dropped from 3 in 1985 to 2 in 2011.
在美国，平均亲密的朋友从1958年的3人下降至2011年的2人。
Most people stumble into chronic loneliness by accident.
大部分的人渐渐地产生了慢性的孤独感。
You reach adulthood and become busy with work, university, romance, kids and Netflix.
随着年龄成长，忙于作业、学业、爱情、小孩以及Netflix影集。
There's just not enough time.
时间根本不够用。
The most convenient and easy thing to sacrifice is time with friends.
最便利也最容易被牺牲掉的是与朋友相处的时间。
Until you wake up one day and realize that you feel isolated; that you yearn for close relationships.
直到有一天起醒来，并且发现你感到被孤立；你开始渴望更紧密的关系。
But it's hard to find close connections as adults and so, loneliness can become chronic.
但成年人之间很难找到紧密关系，所以渐渐地发生慢性「孤独症」。
While humans feel pretty great about things like iPhones and spaceships, our bodies and minds are fundamentally the same they were 50,000 years ago.
虽然人们对iPhones或宇宙飞船的事情相当感兴趣，但我们的身体与心智基本上跟5万年以前没什么不同。
We are still biologically fine-tuned to being with each other.
我们在生物学上仍然是那个，为了相处而精细调整的自我。
Large scale studies have shown that the stress that comes from chronic loneliness is among the most unhealthy things we can experience as humans.
大量的研究显示出慢性的孤独感所带来的压力是人类能体会到最不健康的事情之一了。
It makes you age quicker, it makes cancer deadlier, Alzheimer's advance faster, your immune systems weaker.
它使人快速老化、癌症更加致命、阿兹海默症恶化更快、免疫系统也会变弱。
Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity and as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.
孤独症的致死率是肥胖的两倍，与瘾君子每天抽一包菸一样致死率。
The most dangerous thing about it is that once it becomes chronic, it can become self-sustaining.
而最危险的事情当孤独症慢性的发生，它将会在脑中自我维持着这样的感觉。
Physical and social pain use common mechanisms in your brain.
物理上的疼痛与社交痛苦都使用大脑常见的机制。
Both feel like a threat, and so,
两者都会让大脑感受到威胁，所以，
social pain leads to immediate and defensive behaviour when it's inflicted on you.
当社交痛苦发生的时候，身体会立刻产生防御反应。
When loneliness becomes chronic, your brain goes into self-preservation mode.
当孤独症开始慢性发生的时候，你的大脑将会进入自我防御的状态。
It starts to see danger and hostility everywhere.
它会使你开始时常在各种地方感觉到危险或敌意。
But that's not all.
但还不只这些。
Some studies found that when you're lonely, your brain is much more receptive and alert to social signals, while at the same time, it gets worse at interpreting them correctly.
有些研究发现当你感受到孤独，你的大脑将更容易警觉地接收到来自社交的信息，在这个时候，错误的解读将会使事情更糟。
You pay more attention to others but you understand them less.
你花费了更多的关注在他人身上，但了解的更少。
The part of your brain that recognises faces gets out of tune and becomes more likely to categorize neutral faces as hostile, which makes it distrustful of others.
大脑中识别脸孔的机能将会失调，开始会将中性的他人面容识别为具敌对性，这让其他人感到苦难重重。
Loneliness makes you assume the worst about others' intentions towards you.
孤独症会让你对任何接近的行为都做最坏的打算。
Because of this perceived hostile world, you can become up more self-centered to protect yourself, which can make you appear more cold, unfriendly and socially awkward than you really are.
由于开始认定这个世界充满敌意，你会变得更加以自我为中心来保护自己，这会让你变得比原本的个性更加冷漠、不友善且容易社交尴尬。
If loneliness has become a strong presence in your life, the first thing you can do is to try to recognise the vicious cycle you may be trapped in.
如果孤独症已经在你生命中严重的存在，第一件你能做的事，就是要试着认识到你会落入怎样的「恶性循环」中。
It usually goes something like this: An initial feeling of isolation leads to feelings of tension and sadness, which makes you focus your attention selectively on negative interactions with others.
通常是像这样：最早发生孤立感的时候通常会引发紧张与悲伤的感觉。
This makes your thoughts about yourself and others more negative, which then changes your behavior.
这会让你太专注在与他人的负面互动上，这会让你对自己与他人的想法更加消极，接着你就会开始改变你的行为。
You begin to avoid social interaction, which leads to more feelings of isolation.
你会开始避免社交互动，这将会导致感受到更多的孤立感。
This cycle becomes more severe and harder to escape each time.
这样的循环会越来越严重，而且更加困难逃离这样的状况。
Loneliness makes you sit far away from others in class, not answer the phone when friends call, decline invitations until the invitations stop.
孤独症让你在教室中远离其他人，朋友来电时不接听、拒绝各种邀请直到不再有人愿意邀请你。
Each and every one of us has a story about ourselves, and if your story becomes that people exclude you, others pick up on that, and so the outside world can become the way you feel about it.
我们每个人都有属于自己的故事，如果你的故事是人们开始排斥你，其他人也认同这点的话，那么你也会这样的体会着外面的世界。
This is often a slow creeping process that takes years, and can end in depression and a mental state that prevents connections, even if you yearn for them.
这通常是一个需要数年的缓慢过程，并且最终迎来抑郁的情绪，即使渴望与他人联系，你的精神状况也会阻止你这么做。
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