Feeling Lonely

Addressing Loneliness

A teenager, heavily involved in sports, debate club, music and her small, seemingly cohesive country school suffers daily with feeling lonely.

In contrast, a single woman in her thirties, lives alone, works from home and especially likes to sleep alone, but is far from lonely. How can this be? How can the objectively more connected teen suffer from the pain of loneliness while the isolated woman feels quite connected?

Feeling Lonely: Perception

Because loneliness is measured by one’s perception. In other words, regardless of how many people a person is engaged with, that person can still experience her life as lonely.

Take the teen, for example. She may think that others understand each other more or like each other more or talk with each other more than they do with her. She can find conversation topics among her peers hard to relate to and suffer from stout self-consciousness when her jokes aren’t gotten.

She can go home to available parents and lively siblings, but because she knows her that peers have plans with one another and haven’t included her, she suffers quietly.

On the flip side, the alone, but not lonely woman in her thirties spends her day making music for her next album. She feels deeply connected to the work and is filled up with a twenty-minute phone conversation with her friend in New Zealand. She knows others hold her in mind when she’s not around. She feels loved, liked and admired just as she loves, likes and admires the relatively few people she’s close to.

Feeling lonely: Emotional Repercussions

Researchers Louise Hawkley, PhD and John Cacioppo, PhD found that loneliness increases depressive symptoms, perceived stress, anxiety, and anger and decreases optimism, self-esteem and self-regulation (meaning the ability to understand and regulate emotion and speech, resulting in poor self-control.)

These are just the emotional repercussions of loneliness. The physical repercussions are many, most notably, cognitive impairment, high blood pressure and heart disease (Hawkley and Cacioppo, 2010).

The fact is, loneliness is said to be worse for you than smoking and shortens your life. Loneliness is equal to stress because it taxes the immune system, causes inflammation in the body and keeps people in a state of hypervigilance which is essentially unsustainable.

Tara Brach, PhD, psychologist, author and meditation teacher says, “when we’re stressed out, we survey others as an object that can give us something or is in the way of something.”

She talks about the fact that in our American society there are many standards for competition and belonging. Think grades, auditions, try-outs, job interviews and status symbols, such as having money, being partnered or being well-known.

If we lose or get ousted or simply not invited to the “show,” we feel stupid, unimportant and even worthless. The latter leave us in a perpetual state of not belonging and a perpetual experience of seeing the world as dangerous. We develop the urgency to get somewhere different than where we are now.

As a meditation teacher, Tara’s solution is to interrupt the self-judgment by “pausing and listening compassionately to the vulnerability that’s underneath.” She means both in ourselves and in others.

Social Media

It is not inconsequential that the rise in loneliness correlates with the origin of social media and the amount of time we spend on it.

Social media gives people the illusion they are connected, but lacks the ability to give us the intimate exchanges we need in order to truly be connected—to thrive.

Ironically, the lonelier people are, the more they use social media which serves to only make them lonelier in the long run. Perhaps this is why our adolescent population is now exceeding our elderly population in being the most lonely age group today.

Feeling Lonely: Start With Hope

The solution: Start with hope. The poet John O’Donahue said, “prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging.”

This doesn’t mean you have to embrace religion to reduce your loneliness. It means you have to embrace hope. You have to believe in a less lonely existence in order to realize it. And, you have to believe in yourself.

Next, practice self-compassion. This is not feeling sorry for yourself. This is true presence for yourself—an awareness and respect for your suffering and a being there for yourself as you would be there for any vulnerable being that you love (a parent, a child, a pet.)

Last, practice non-judgment. When we are critical of ourselves, telling ourselves we’re less intelligent, less pretty, less fun, less interesting than others and that’s why we feel lonely, we’re missing the mark. We’re not listening to our true selves and all the beauty and life we embody.

Tune in to vs simply comment on yourself. In turn, we can choose to see the goodness in others. That doesn’t mean we can’t have boundaries. Instead, it means to not push others away with criticisms or blame, but to see the vulnerability in them as well and to have compassion for their suffering.

Conclusion

Simply practicing the above will begin to melt loneliness as you will be more connected to yourself. In addition, you will feel more connected to others because you won’t fear them or blame them. If you begin to see that we’re all in the same boat, sharing the same planet and experiencing suffering in one way or another, you will begin to feel equal instead of less than or more than. Look for the barriers to loving yourself and others and as the poet, Rumi, says, “raise them” through hope, self-compassion and non-judgment.