In 2010, a Brigham Young University psychologist named Julianne Holt-Lunstad analyzed 148 separate studies of 300,000 people to compare the mortality risks of various lifestyle factors — and found that chronic loneliness increases a person’s risk of dying early by the same amount as smoking 15 cigarettes a day
In July 2010, three American psychology researchers — Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy B. Smith of the Brigham Young University Department of Psychology in Provo, Utah, and J. Bradley Layton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Epidemiology — publishe…