Smoking Doesn't Make You More Social — It Makes You Lonelier, 50,000-Person Study Finds

Smoking is not a social activity and instead leads to increased loneliness, according to a study presented at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The research was presented by Dr. Keir Philip, a clinical lecturer in respiratory medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.

"Although we know smoking is bad for your physical health, we don't know what it does to our social health," Philip told the Congress. "Smoking has been considered a 'social activity,' but we regularly see people with smoking-related illnesses becoming increasingly socially isolated and lonely." An earlier study in England had suggested smokers became lonelier than non-smokers, but the team wanted to check whether the pattern held beyond one country's culture and social norms.

The researchers analyzed data from more than 50,000 people across 15 countries in the Survey of Health and Ageing in Europe (SHARE), measuring loneliness with the UCLA loneliness scale and comparing current smokers with non-smokers two years later using the same questionnaire. The average participant age was 67; 22% were smokers at the start, and 48.5% had more than two chronic illnesses. Current smokers were found to be lonelier than non-smokers even after accounting for age and gender, and they experienced larger increases in loneliness over time, with only slight variation between European regions.

Philip suggested one likely mechanism is that smoking-related illnesses limit mobility, making it harder to take part in social activities, while smoking bans in public places and smoke-free homes may also reduce opportunities for smokers to socialize. Professor Des Cox of the ERS Advocacy Council, who was not involved in the research, said the findings show that smoking damages psychosocial health in addition to physical health, and that effective treatments exist to help people quit.