And academic research has shown that people in the UK who lose their jobs are more likely to be affected by the damaging experience of loneliness, which was described as a public health epidemic by the Royal College of GPs in 2018.

It is probably more natural to expect that unemployment causes loneliness, rather than the other way around. Losing your job could lead to fewer social interactions; less money to spend on activities with friends and family, and mental health problems.

But our research team decided to find out whether the opposite was also true. Could feeling lonely cause people to lose their jobs?

Our study looked at whether working people aged 16 to 65 who describe themselves as feeling lonely are at greater risk of becoming unemployed one or two years later.

We found that often lonely people do go on to find themselves out of work.

This research is important because it replicates similar results in young middle age adults and extends the evidence on the negative effects of loneliness to the wider working-age population of an advanced Western society.

My colleagues, Nia Morrish and Antonieta Medina Lara, at Exeter University, and I wanted to understand whether feeling lonely put people at more risk of losing their jobs.

We expected that in some cases it did but when the full results appeared, I was surprised to see that lonely people of all ages were at increased risk of unemployment after one year.

We found that for every 100 people, nine more would be unemployed a year later among those who feel lonely at least sometimes, than among those who do not.

It was also very clear that the effect was larger than that shown in previous studies of unemployment leading to loneliness. Our findings indicated a problem that was not limited to a particular age group but affected all of us who participate in the labour market.

It also highlighted a broad variety of new questions, the most immediate being why does loneliness cause unemployment?

Although we did not set out to answer this question, our study explored whether work-limiting physical health had anything to do with it. We found that it explains some but not all the risk of unemployment arising from loneliness. As suggested by previous research, other factors resulting from loneliness, such as less motivation to search for jobs, or reduced performance in the workplace, may also explain our findings.

Identifying what makes people more susceptible to loneliness will allow us to find the most effective ways to combat it. This will help us break the downward spiral from unemployment leading to loneliness, which in turn increases the risk of being unemployed later.

Other questions are as, if not more, challenging. What do we mean by “loneliness”?

Our research did not seek to answer this question, but previous studies suggest that individuals define loneliness as the lack of quality or meaningful interactions with other people. This clearly is quite distinct from social isolation. People may have very frequent social contact but may still feel lonely, for example.

Furthermore, our study covers the period just before and a few weeks into the Covid-19 pandemic.

How our findings translate to the period during and after the public health crisis is not obvious, although our guess is that the net effect is likely to be that the pandemic has made lonely people even more susceptible to the risk of unemployment.

What can society do to reduce the problem our study uncovered?

This question is yet to be investigated, but it is clear that we could immerse ourselves in day-to-day activities, without considering that we are not investing in quality interactions with people.

Personally, our research has taught me about the importance of investing in the quality of interactions with people around me, including my colleagues at work, as a way to foster our collective wellbeing.

- Dr Ruben Mujica-Mota is Associate Professor of Health Economics in the University of Leeds’s School of Medicine.

Yorkshire research shows lonely people find themselves out of work - Ruben Mujica-Mota