Why Your Social Circle Shrinks During a Crisis — and How to Fight It

When Things Get Hard, We Pull Away

There is a cruel irony at the heart of human behaviour. When life gets difficult — when the economy wobbles, when the news feels relentless, when personal stress piles up — the thing most of us do instinctively is retreat. We cancel plans. We stop replying to messages. We tell ourselves we will catch up with people when things settle down.

Things rarely settle down.

If you have noticed your social circle getting smaller over the past few years, you are not alone, and you are not imagining it. The UK has been through an extraordinary run of crises — a global pandemic, a cost of living emergency, geopolitical instability, and a mental health crisis that shows no sign of easing. Each of these has pushed people further into their own corners, and the cumulative effect on our social lives has been devastating.

This is the story of why we withdraw when we most need connection, what it costs us, and how to fight back. If you have been struggling to keep friendships alive when the world feels overwhelming, the psychology behind it may help explain why.

The Psychology of Hunkering Down

When we feel threatened — whether the threat is a virus, a mounting energy bill, or the general sense that the world is coming apart — our nervous system kicks into survival mode. The amygdala, the brain's threat detection centre, floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline. We become hypervigilant, anxious, and focused on self-preservation.

In this state, socialising feels like a luxury we cannot afford. The energy required to make conversation, to be present with other people, to navigate the emotional labour of friendship — it all feels like too much when you are already running on empty.

Psychologists call this "conservation withdrawal." It is the brain's way of rationing resources during perceived threat. In a genuine short-term emergency, it makes sense: hunker down, conserve energy, wait for the danger to pass. But modern crises are not short-term. They overlap, they compound, and they drag on for years. And so the withdrawal becomes chronic.

The pandemic made this visible in ways that are hard to ignore. The COVID-19 Psychological Wellbeing Study, published in PLOS ONE in September 2020, surveyed 1,964 UK adults in the first weeks of lockdown and found 27% of them were lonely. But here is the thing that catches people off guard — the isolation did not end when the restrictions did. Many people had spent so long in withdrawal mode that returning to normal social patterns felt overwhelming. The habit of staying in had calcified into something harder to shift.

The Numbers Tell a Grim Story

England's Community Life Survey for 2024/25 found that 6.6% of adults — roughly three million people — report feeling lonely often or always. That is down a little from 7.1% the year before, but it sits above where chronic loneliness ran before the pandemic, when the same survey put it around 5%.

And chronic loneliness is only part of the picture. Only 21% of adults say they never feel lonely at all. For everyone else it is a question of how often, not whether.

The Cost of Living Made It Worse

If the pandemic was the earthquake, the cost of living crisis was the aftershock that stopped people recovering. When money gets tight, socialising is one of the first things to go. It is not hard to see why — a night out, a meal with friends, even a round of drinks adds up when you are watching every penny.

In a YouGov survey for the charity FareShare in December 2023, 42% of 18 to 24 year olds in the UK said they were cutting back on socialising with friends because of the cost of living. Among 25 to 34 year olds, 52% said they would avoid meeting friends. Six in ten of everyone surveyed agreed that people in the UK were at greater risk of loneliness because of rising costs.

This creates a vicious cycle. Financial stress makes you anxious. Anxiety makes you withdraw. Withdrawal makes you lonelier. Loneliness makes everything feel harder. And so the spiral continues.

Geopolitical Anxiety Adds Another Layer

It is not just personal financial pressure. The background hum of global instability — wars, climate anxiety, political division — creates what psychologists call "ambient stress." You might not be directly affected by a conflict thousands of miles away, but the relentless news cycle keeps your nervous system on alert.

The government's own DESNZ Public Attitudes Tracker found in summer 2024 that 80% of UK adults were very or fairly concerned about climate change, with 37% very concerned. Add the general drumbeat of the news to that, and anxiety stops being an event and becomes a background condition. When it is embedded in everyday life, the energy for social connection evaporates.

Why Withdrawal Is So Dangerous

Here is what makes all of this so concerning: the very thing we sacrifice during a crisis — social connection — is the thing that would most help us get through it.

The research points one way. Julianne Holt-Lunstad's 2010 meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine, pooling 148 studies and around 308,000 people, found that those with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the study periods. Her 2015 follow-up, a separate analysis of 70 studies, put the increase in mortality risk at 26% for loneliness and 29% for social isolation. The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory drew on this work to benchmark the mortality effect against smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day — a comparison of effect sizes rather than a claim that the two are the same thing.

A 2016 meta-analysis in Heart found loneliness and isolation associated with a 29% increase in coronary heart disease risk and a 32% increase in stroke risk.

And yet, when the going gets tough, we pull further away from the very relationships that could buffer us against the worst of it. The science of social resilience shows just how powerfully connection protects us — and how costly it is to go without.

Why We Keep Making the Same Mistake

Understanding why we withdraw is useful, but it is worth asking why we keep doing it even when we know it is harmful. Several psychological mechanisms are at play.

The Energy Paradox

When you are stressed, depleted, or anxious, socialising feels like it will drain you further. And for the first few minutes of any social interaction — especially one you have been dreading — it often does. You have to make small talk, put on a face, navigate the emotional demands of being around other people.

But research consistently shows that people almost always feel better after social contact than they expected to. We overestimate the energy cost and underestimate the energy return. The paradox is that connection restores the very energy you thought you did not have.

The Shame Factor

Crises often come with shame. Financial shame, health shame, the shame of not coping as well as you think everyone else is. And shame makes us hide. We do not want people to see us struggling, so we withdraw precisely when we most need support.

This is especially pronounced among men, who are markedly less likely to seek out support during difficult periods, and who tend to frame it as not wanting to burden anyone. We explored this dynamic in depth in the men's friendship crisis.

The Illusion of Temporary Withdrawal

We tell ourselves the withdrawal is temporary. "I will see people when things calm down." "I just need to get through this month." "I will be more sociable once I sort myself out." But crises have a way of bleeding into one another, and each period of withdrawal makes the next one easier to justify. Before you know it, months have passed, and the friends you were going to call have stopped reaching out.

How to Fight the Urge to Retreat

None of this is inevitable. Social withdrawal during a crisis is a default, not a destiny. Here are practical ways to push back against it.

Lower the Bar Dramatically

You do not need to host a dinner party or organise a weekend away. During difficult periods, the goal is simply contact. A ten-minute phone call. A walk around the block with a neighbour. A text that says something more than "Hope you're well." Even a simple midweek catch-up over coffee counts. Lower the bar until it feels almost too easy to step over, and then step over it.

Build Structure Into Your Social Life

One of the most effective findings from friendship research is that proximity and repetition matter more than intensity. Seeing the same people regularly in a low-pressure setting — a weekly class, a monthly dinner, a standing Thursday coffee — creates the conditions for connection without requiring you to summon enthusiasm from scratch each time.

This is why regular social events work so well during difficult periods. You do not have to decide whether you feel like going. You just show up because it is Tuesday and that is what happens on Tuesdays.

Be Honest About Where You Are

You do not have to perform wellness to be around other people. Some of the most meaningful social connections happen when someone says, "Actually, I am having a really hard time." Vulnerability is not a social liability — it is often the thing that deepens a relationship from pleasant to real.

Recognise the Withdrawal Pattern

Simply being aware of the pattern is powerful. When you notice yourself cancelling plans, letting messages go unanswered, or telling yourself you will be more sociable "when things improve" — pause. Ask yourself whether you are making a genuine decision or simply following the stress response on autopilot. Sometimes turning worry into community is as simple as recognising that moment and choosing differently.

Invest in Low-Cost Connection

If money is part of the barrier, strip socialising back to its essentials. A cup of tea in someone's kitchen. A walk in the park. A shared meal where everyone brings something. Connection does not require a restaurant bill. Some of the best conversations happen over the simplest settings. What matters is building a support network, not just a social circle — the kind of relationships that hold up when life gets hard.

The Compounding Crisis: 2025 and Beyond

The data from 2025 paints a picture of a country where multiple overlapping crises have left lasting marks on social life. The OECD's 2025 report on Social Connections and Loneliness found that the UK saw sustained, elevated rates of loneliness in the years after the pandemic, and that in England the largest increases were among adults in their late twenties, thirties and forties — not, as you might assume, the very old or the very young.

It is worth being precise about the scale, because the numbers that circulate online are often much larger than the ones the official surveys support. On the OECD's comparison, 7% of people in England said they felt lonely often or always in 2023-24 — high, and stubbornly so, but lower than the United States at 12% or Canada at 14%. Britain's problem is not that it is the loneliest country in the developed world. It is that the figure has not shifted in a decade of trying.

And the social infrastructure that might help reverse these trends is crumbling. An average of one pub a day closed permanently across England and Wales in 2025 — 366 in the year, with almost 2,000 gone in five. The Night Time Industries Association counts a 26.4% fall in late-night venues since 2020, nearly 800 closures leaving 2,424 still trading, and warns of "night-time deserts" — entire areas where there is simply nowhere left to go out in the evening. When the physical spaces for socialising disappear, the withdrawal becomes self-reinforcing: there are fewer reasons to leave the house, which makes leaving the house feel harder, which makes the isolation deepen.

Scotland's response has been instructive. The Scottish Government's Recovering our Connections delivery plan for 2023–2026 frames social isolation and loneliness explicitly as a public health issue that can affect anyone at any stage of life, and organises its work around four priorities: empowering communities, tackling stigma, creating opportunities to connect, and supporting the infrastructure that makes connection possible. It is one of the few examples of a government treating isolation as a structural problem rather than a personal failing.

The cost of living crisis has added yet another layer. As we have explored in staying connected on a budget, financial pressure makes people withdraw from exactly the social activities that would help them cope with that pressure. The term "friendflation" — the rising cost of maintaining a social life — has entered the lexicon because the problem is now so widespread. ONS figures show restaurant and café prices rose by more than 50% between July 2015 and July 2025, well ahead of general inflation, and an Opinium survey found 39% of women in the UK now name money as the reason they do not see friends as often as they would like, rising to 50% in London. When the sums stop working, many people simply cannot justify the expense, even when they know the connection would do them good.

The compounding nature of these crises is what makes them so dangerous. A pandemic erodes social habits. A cost of living crisis removes the means to rebuild them. Geopolitical anxiety saps the emotional energy to try. Each layer makes the next one harder to overcome — and before you know it, withdrawal has become your default state.

The Counter-Intuitive Truth About Crises

Here is perhaps the most important thing to understand: crises do not have to shrink your social world. Throughout history, some of the strongest community bonds have been forged during the most difficult periods.

During the pandemic, an estimated 4,300 mutual aid groups sprang up across the UK, with around three million people volunteering to help their neighbours. The Together Initiative counted 12.4 million adults volunteering over that period, 4.6 million of them for the first time. When the crisis hit, many people did not retreat. They reached out.

The difference between those who withdrew and those who connected was not personality or temperament. It was often simply whether there was a structure to connect through — a group, a neighbourhood network, a regular gathering that made showing up the path of least resistance.

That is why, at Dinners With Friends, we believe so strongly in the power of regular, structured social events. When the world feels uncertain, having a standing invitation to sit down with good people over good food is not a luxury. It is a lifeline. Browse our upcoming events and see what is happening near you.

You do not have to fight every crisis alone. You just have to keep showing up.