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Managing and understanding loneliness
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Loneliness
Being lonely can mean not feeling part of the world despite having a great deal of social contact with others, or being in a relationship.
Loneliness can have a significant impact on your mental health and your emotional and physical well-being. It can be a contributing factor in anxiety, depression and can lead to prolonged isolation.
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Why we become lonely
Personal Circumstances:
Experiencing the break down of a relationship.
Comparing yourself to the apparently ‘happy’ lives of others - seeing only their positives and ignoring the negatives.
- Not having as much social contact.
Losing someone close to you.
Internal Loneliness:
You may find it difficult to like yourself or feel others do not like you.
Experiencing low self-confidence.
Mental Health Conditions:
Experiencing a mental health condition can contribute to feelings of loneliness.
Social contact may be difficult and create high levels of anxiety.
You may find yourself unconsciously or consciously avoiding meeting people.
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Practical ways of managing loneliness
- Reconnect with the world around you - Making the most out of social contact
- Spend meaningful time alone - this will develop your ability to manage time spent on your own.
- Do regular physical activity.
- Join a club, group or voluntary organization.
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Moving forward from loneliness
We will all at some point face loneliness, isolation and a deep sense of sadness. To move forward from these feelings, we must first look directly at our lonely thoughts and understand what they mean and where they come from.
Realize that you are not alone in your loneliness. We all experience these feelings at some point. Over time, you will feel less lonely and will manage and cope, and find the light at the end of the tunnel.
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Loneliness is a perception issue
Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have: it is just as possible to feel very lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact.
Dealing with loneliness through creativity
One way people have always dealt with loneliness is through creativity. By metamorphosing their reality into art, lonely people throughout history have managed to interchange the sense of community relationships could foster with their creative outputs.
The artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is known for his paintings of American cityscapes inhabited by closed-off figures who seem to embody a vision of modern loneliness.
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A public health problem
Most people consider loneliness a personal problem to be figured out by individuals.
However, a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health identi...
Don’t blame social media
Among the theories on why there is more loneliness today is more time online and less time in front of people.
However, levels of in-person interactions, physical and mental wellness and life balance are more likely to predict loneliness than social media usage.
Young and lonely
Generation Z (ages 18-22) had the highest loneliness scores, followed by the millennials (ages 23-37). The Greatest Generation (adults ages 72 and older) were the least lonely.
Lonely people are less able to pick up on positive social stimuli, like others’ attention and commitment signals, so they withdraw prematurely – in many cases before they’re actually socially isolated.
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Losing Your Identity
Humans are social creatures, interdependent on one another. Socializing is at its core, a mental workout, and an essential part of brain development.
Being alone, one can start to lose ...
Being Alone Affects The Brain
Human beings form social circles averaging to 150 individuals; this is called the Dunbar’s Number.
A lack of people around us can actually make our brain shrink. The region known for formation of new memories, called the 'dentate gyrus', reduces in size if there is no human interaction. There is also a reduction in spatial processing (locating objects in a given space) and focus.
Solitude, Loneliness And Isolation
Positive solitude is a state of being alone without being lonely, in a contented manner.
Loneliness, on the other hand, is isolation with a hunger for social contact, something that distorts one’s perceptions, damaging the ability to interact in a normal way with others. It also lowers one’s self-esteem leading to a loneliness loop, characterized by social withdrawal and depression.