Study: Smoking drives loneliness, contradicting 'social' myth
A large-scale European study presented at the European Respiratory Society Congress finds that smoking is associated with increased loneliness, challenging the notion that it is a social activity. Analyzing data from over 50,000 participants across 15 countries, researchers observed that current smokers reported higher levels of isolation and experienced greater increases in loneliness over time compared to non-smokers. The findings suggest that smoking damages psychosocial health in addition to physical health, potentially due to mobility restrictions from illness and social norms limiting interaction spaces.