Hoarding Is an Attempt To Compensate Unmet Related Needs; Severity Associated With Loneliness [Study]

Hoarding is associated with loneliness, according to a new study. Addressing loneliness may help with hoarding problems.

Hoarding and Loneliness

According to attachment theory, hoarding is an effort to satisfy unfulfilled desires. As a result, the researchers anticipate increased degrees of loneliness in hoarding disorder (HD).

Few studies have looked at levels of loneliness in clinical HD samples, despite earlier research showing a positive correlation between hoarding and loneliness in non-clinical samples. The current research did two studies to check the relationship between loneliness and hoarding, ScienceDirect reported.

In Study 1, they looked at loneliness in a sample of 39 HD patients seeking therapy. The findings revealed that 87.2% of HD patients reported experiencing high degrees of loneliness, substantially more significant than the prevalence of loneliness in population samples. Even after controlling for sadness, loneliness strongly correlated with hoarding severity.

After adjusting for age, gender, marital status, and depression, the positive correlation between loneliness and hoarding remained substantial. The findings highlight the significance of identifying and treating loneliness in HD treatment.

The current study investigates loneliness in clinical HD, MTurk, and depression-matched samples. According to the findings, hoarding problem patients had high degrees of loneliness, and loneliness was strongly and favorably correlated with the severity of the hoarding.

The researchers advise that future studies look into practical ways to enhance interpersonal interactions and that loneliness should be routinely assessed in HD patients seeking treatment.

The study was published in the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders.

Exploring Your Mind also discussed the relationship between loneliness and hoarding. The outlet noted that research indicates that some people compensate for their lack of social ties by collecting, accumulating, or growing attached to objects. As a result, it might be useful to them at any time.

However, this is unhealthy, and one should get help to learn how to create and maintain meaningful human connections. The study's findings indicate that tackling anthropomorphism and intolerance for anxiety is an excellent place to start if you want to fight a tendency toward excessive accumulation.

Why Loneliness Leads to Hoarding?

A study conducted in 2018 provides some key concepts about the relationship between loneliness and hoarding. Among the possible reason is anthropomorphism - the propensity to attach human traits and features to non-human entities.

For example, the youngster who insists that their doll has emotions or the main character in the film "Castaway," who develops a bond with a ball he names Wilson.

Lonely people may anthropomorphize objects and animals because they yearn for love and companionship. It compensates for the absence of warmth they experience from interpersonal interactions.

There are numerous ways we unintentionally assign will, ideas, or feelings to objects, from turning to a pet animal for comfort to naming their technical devices. The most lonely persons have been shown to do it most frequently.

Other possible reasons are anxiety intolerance and anxiety attachment. Both could lead one to hoard.

It would appear that people who have more trouble coping with worry are more likely to acquire and gather stuff. The absence of adequate coping systems is the cause of this intolerance for distress.

In these situations, when faced with hardship, the person turns to guilt or rumination and feels overwhelmed or underwhelmed. In order to cope with overwhelming and uncontrollable unpleasant feelings, they turn to objects (and their acquisition) for solace.

People with anxious attachment styles also tend to have an overwhelming need to acquire and collect things. These people feel less able to cope and experience negative feelings more frequently and intensely.

Additionally, they frequently lack emotional stability and need to connect with others. To address their unmet social demands, they assign human attributes to objects. They might even discover the sense of belonging they desperately seek in binge buying and hoarding.

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