The Relationships You Neglect Climbing the Ladder

Somewhere around the mid-career mark a pattern becomes visible that nobody warns you about: the people who knew you before the title no longer know how to reach you. And often the reverse is just as true.

An earlier version of this article opened with two research citations that sat above the argument without connecting to it, and one of them was wrong in a way worth describing before anything else.

The Claim That Had to Go

The sentence was this: that perceived social isolation activates the same threat-detection systems as physical pain, with measurable effects on cognitive performance and decision-making, attributed to Cacioppo and Patrick in 2008.

Three things are wrong with it. The 2008 source is a book written for a general readership, not a study. The brain-imaging work behind the pain comparison is Eisenberger’s, and she states the limits herself: the region involved “has also been implicated in other processes such as cognitive conflict detection”, whether the overlapping activation indicates “pain per se, or some other underlying process” remains open, and “these experiences and processes certainly do not overlap completely”. And the effect on decision-making appears in none of the sources checked.

The same sentence appeared in another article here and was corrected on 4 October. It survived in this one because that correction was made article by article rather than by searching the archive for the sentence. Both are now fixed.

What the Research Actually Says

Hawkley and Cacioppo published a review in Annals of Behavioral Medicine in 2010 which corrects this article’s own premise before it gets started.

Their definition: “Loneliness is synonymous with perceived social isolation, not with objective social isolation. People can live relatively solitary lives and not feel lonely, and conversely, they can live an ostensibly rich social life and feel lonely.”

Which means a thinned-out calendar proves nothing on its own. Someone with three close friendships and no social diary may be fine. Someone with a full week of dinners, every one of them with people who want something, may not be. The question is what the contact consists of, and the number of appointments does not answer it.

Where loneliness is present, the review reports associations with “diminished executive control” and “impaired cognitive performance and cognitive decline over time”, and in one task “the lonely group performed significantly worse than the nonlonely group when directed to shift attention”. It also reports a perceptual tilt: lonely individuals “see the social world as a more threatening place, expect more negative social interactions” and “remember more negative social information”.

On the direction of causation, which usually gets assumed, the authors are careful and report one asymmetry: “loneliness predicts increases in depressive symptoms over 1-year intervals, but depressive symptoms do not predict increases in loneliness.”

What the Working Week Supplies Less Of

There is a second finding that fits this subject precisely, and an earlier version of this article gestured at it with a citation to Deci and Ryan plus a claim that motivation collapses when basic needs go unmet. That claim is not in the sources checked. What is in them is more specific.

Ryan, Bernstein and Brown ran a diary study published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2010 with “a sample of 74 men and women employed in a wide variety of occupations”. Non-work time was associated with better mood and vitality, and the relationship ran through two of the three basic needs: autonomy and relatedness. Competence did not carry it. Drawing on earlier work, they note that “competence satisfaction was relatively stable throughout the week”.

That is the useful shape of it. A senior role is not usually short on competence. What it supplies less of is freely chosen time and the company of people who are not stakeholders. Trading relationships for the role trades away the scarce things to get more of the plentiful one.

The limits, as ever: 74 participants, no executives among them, and the authors note that “weekdays were also workdays for many participants”, which makes the day and the work hard to separate.

The Drift

Nothing measured here describes how this happens, so what follows is a reading.

It arrives incrementally. A dinner cancelled, a call moved, a friendship going quietly from active to dormant because both people stopped reaching at roughly the same time. No decision is ever made.

And in each individual instance the logic holds. The quarter is urgent and the friendship is durable, so the friendship absorbs the delay. Repeated for a few years, the arithmetic turns: the thing being treated as durable was durable mainly because it was being maintained.

The Part About Leadership

An earlier version of this article claimed that chronic relational underinvestment shows up as leadership that “feels thin”, and that sustained human connection builds the internal resources leadership draws on. That is a causal claim with nothing behind it, and it has been removed.

What can be said is narrower and comes from the first study above. If loneliness is present, the associated findings concern executive control and attention shifting, which are not unrelated to the work of a senior role. The relationship is correlational and the review says so.

One further point, offered as a structural observation rather than a finding. When most meaningful contact with other people happens inside the professional sphere, the role becomes load-bearing for something it was not designed to hold. Roles change. A load-bearing role changing is a different event from a job changing.

The Harder Question

The obvious response is to schedule more. That instruction tends not to hold, which is the common experience and not something this article can explain with evidence.

Here is a mechanism worth considering, and it is the one piece of theory that applies directly. Crocker and Wolfe described contingencies of self-worth in Psychological Review in 2001: the specific domains in which a sense of being worthwhile is staked on how things turn out. In those domains, they write, “people typically have the goal to prove themselves rather than the goal to learn, grow, or improve themselves”, and they describe the arrangement as “a trade-off between increased motivation and increased emotional vulnerability”.

If worth is staked on professional output, then time spent on a friendship is time not spent establishing worth. The dinners get scheduled and then they get cancelled, and the cancellation feels like the responsible choice every single time.

An earlier version asserted this as the explanation for most executives. It is offered here as a mechanism to test against your own last three cancellations, which is all the evidence supports.

And if the isolation has stopped looking like a question about scheduling and is affecting how you sleep or function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here substitutes for one, including the assessment below.

Where Your Worth Is Currently Resting

If the people around you have quietly become the part of the week that gets cut, the question is what the cutting is in service of. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes, and it opens a conversation rather than closing one. Begin your profile here.

References

Hawkley, L. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2010). Loneliness matters: A theoretical and empirical review of consequences and mechanisms. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 40(2).
Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The neural bases of social pain: Evidence for shared representations with physical pain. Psychosomatic Medicine, 74(2), 126–135.
Ryan, R. M., Bernstein, J. H., & Brown, K. W. (2010). Weekends, work, and well-being: Psychological need satisfactions and day of the week effects on mood, vitality, and physical symptoms. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 29(1), 95–122.
Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108, 593–623.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum.

The Relationships You Neglect on the Way Up — And What It Costs You