fear of loneliness essay

My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone Essay

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Introduction

Fighting my monster, comparison with literature, works cited.

The fear of being alone is a psychological attitude that is very difficult to recognize. A person can suffer from it all their life but not even understand it. They explain the desire to constantly be in the company to themselves by character traits, for example, sociability. At the same time, they do not even suspect that, in fact, their life is controlled by an evil creature. Sometimes the fear of loneliness turns into a monster, becoming so strong that its destructive nature prevents a person from living a full life.

The monster blurs the line between the natural human unwillingness to become an outcast and a disease, subjugating all spheres of life, and gradually absorbing the thirst for life. Thus, my monster is the fear of being alone, and it is similar to several literary characters at once: Grendel’s mother, the Demon Lover, and the fear of a couple from Once Upon a Time.

When the monster of the fear of loneliness appeared in my life, I tried to fight it, but sooner or later, my strength ran out, and I could not resist its attacks. Now it is smaller than before because I realized that I need to try to be friends with it. When I am overcome with anxiety, I do meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises. I try to feel my body, to be alone with myself, without being distracted by external stimuli, to feel what a blessing it is to be myself here and now. When I find the strength to approach the monster and look it straight in the eyes, it no longer seems so scary; this way, I manage to keep my monster at bay.

My monster is more like Grendel’s mother than Grendel himself or the dragon. After a glorious and difficult victory over Grendel, Beowulf receives well-deserved praise, rich gifts, and gratitude from Hrothgar and all Danish warriors. Everyone sits down to feast and celebrate and does not expect the arrival of Grendel’s furious mother, who bursts into the hall and grabs Hrothgar’s closest friend and adviser (Mittman and Hensel 78). Being weaker and more cautious than her son, she immediately runs away to her swamp, dragging the victim with her.

My “Grendel,” whom I killed under the cheers of society, was self-love. Since childhood, I have heard that praising myself and rejoicing in my successes is bad and is called selfishness and arrogance. Therefore, I gradually began to think that I was worse than others. Because of this, I had a feeling that no one wanted me in their life, started to feel suspicion towards relatives, friends, and family, and the need for constant confirmation of feelings. And then, unexpectedly, like Grendel’s mother, the monster of loneliness appeared: after all, I killed my love for myself.

Once Upon a Time

My fear is more like the fear of a white married couple from “Once Upon a Time” than the fear from “The Thing in The Forest” since it is purely internal. The heroes are convinced that blacks are guilty of all the crimes taking place in their neighborhood (Rizzardi 792). They have a prejudice, which in this case is not supported by external facts; therefore, their fear is purely internal and irrational.

My fear of being left alone also has no external evidence. My parents were never cold to me: they always paid attention to me, kissed and hugged me, and paid a lot of attention to my feelings and desires. My friends also always say that I am a wonderful friend, that they appreciate me, and I am dear to them without any conditions. Nevertheless, it still seems to me that I can be left alone; in any criticism, I find confirmation of my words, even if the remark made was fair.

The Demon Lover

My monster is somewhat similar to the demon from “The Demon Lover”; first of all, he is a magical creature from the fantasy world, not belonging to the human world. In addition, at the end of the novel, Callie realizes that she needs a demon; she is drawn to darkness. The heroine falls in love with her demon, and this love turns out to be mutual (Fan 103). The demon himself tells her that a lie told out of love is a lie for good.

My monster is also an unreal creature: there are many people around me who love and appreciate me. My demon is necessary for me to love myself again; like Callie, I will be able to overcome it only when I become friends with it. Thus, despite the fact that my monster is lying to me, it is doing it for my own good so that I can treat myself better and accept myself.

The only one whom nature has endowed with a sensual form of life is the man. This is both a gift and a curse at the same time: human fears are a dark side of our sensuality. Referring to the works of British classics, a general list of human fears known today can be made. The monsters of each of the characters live not only on the pages of novels but in each of us, so everyone can turn to the heroes for help. Looking at them, the reader learns how to fight their demons, keep them at bay, or, in my case, become friends with them.

Fan, Mengyuan. “A Study on The Traumatic Theme in Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover”. Journal of Contemporary Educational Research , vol. 5, no. 4, 2021, pp. 103-105.

Mittman, Asa Simon, and Marcus Hensel, editors. Primary Sources on Monsters . Amsterdam University Press, 2018.

Rizzardi, Biancamaria. “Once Upon a Time” By Nadine Gordimer: A Fairy Tale for Peace.” Forum Editrice Universitaria Udinese , vol. 5, no. 19, 2019, pp. 782-801. Web.

• Happiness Areas and Goals in Personal Life
• Painfulness and Happiness of Childbirth
• One-Dimensional Monster: Persuasive Post About Grendel
• Beowulf, the Hero of the Epic Poem
• The Poem "Beowulf": Character Analysis
• How Optimism Improves Immunity
• Concepts of Optimism and Hope
• Adolescence and Emotion Relations
• The Unique Feeling of “Home”
• Experiencing Joy and Sadness at the Same Time
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, December 1). My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone. https://ivypanda.com/essays/my-monster-the-fear-of-being-alone/

"My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone." IvyPanda , 1 Dec. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/my-monster-the-fear-of-being-alone/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone'. 1 December.

IvyPanda . 2022. "My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone." December 1, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/my-monster-the-fear-of-being-alone/.

1. IvyPanda . "My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone." December 1, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/my-monster-the-fear-of-being-alone/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "My Monster: The Fear of Being Alone." December 1, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/my-monster-the-fear-of-being-alone/.

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Good Example Of Essay On A Fear Of Loneliness

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Bachelor's Degree , Loneliness , Life , Love , Fear , World , Emotions , Time

Words: 1000

Published: 03/10/2020

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Human’s mind is capable of feeling a wide range of emotions, both positive and negative. Positive emotions are not always influenced by a mere absence of some unpleasant or tragic events, as happy moments can also take place because of events and people which are joyful and positive. On the other hand, negative emotions seem mostly to appear when there are no positive emotions to be make one happy or the pressure and stress have built up to the extent where any positive emotions are either taken for granted or unnoticed. Love, support, friendship, happy memories shared with the dearest ones, sociability, and communication all qualify for positive emotions, while the fear of loneliness is indeed one of the worst feelings there can be. But is it the same for everyone? Take, for example, an inborn introvert who prefers observation to participation, reflects on his inner world rather than pays attention to the world that surrounds him, appears to be more interested in self-reflection than socializing with others and genuinely sees world as a part of himself rather than his own self as a part of this fast-moving world. Naturally, such person is surrounded by family, classmates or coworkers, neighbors and other people which are in one way or another engaged into the introvert’s daily activities. This person might not fear loneliness and, on the contrary, can even desire it as social interactions take up the most of this individual’s energy. Of course it does not mean that this person does not have or need love, they just view the world differently and see their part in it other than extraverts. Thus, a general fear of loneliness cannot be applied to them, as it rather takes the shape of fear of losing someone they allow close to their heart. In this case, fear of loneliness or being left alone is not present in one’s arsenal of emotions as their world perception is drastically different from those deeming loneliness their biggest fear. When it comes to little children, their fear of being alone is justified as their ability to count on their own selves and self-reliance may not yet be developed, therefore, they view a lonely state as a potentially dangerous and life-threatening situation. Their self-defense mechanism, both physical and mental, is not fully formed yet. Thus, being left alone for a long time can be a huge stress for them and may even result in certain delays in their cognitive and early development. In this case, the fear of loneliness does not take place as a thought-out reaction, but rather appears to be an instinct and natural fear. However, if we take, for example, a recently widowed young woman, her fear of loneliness can turn into a serious phobia of being left alone, as the fear of loneliness she might have had prior to a tragic loss of her loved one has transformed into a depressing reality she is now forced to live in. Being left alone, even for a short period of time, can trigger the negative memories and even suicidal thoughts, which is why a constant present of somebody this woman can rely on, trust, feel support and love from and share her thoughts with is crucial for eventually getting over this tragedy. Thus, her fear of loneliness does not take place as craving for attention or inability to spend some quality time on her own, but is realized into her daily life and the fear of being permanently abandoned by the ones she loves constantly persists. In this case, the fear of loneliness and of being left alone is dictated by a recent tragic event which has altered one’s self-perception and reality analysis. As for another aspect of fear of loneliness, many older people say that they are afraid to be left alone because of the two main reasons. Firstly, after having spent a life time interacting with their family and friends, watching their children lead their own life, having the “empty nest syndrome” and watch older friends pass away, old people realize they do not have much time left to enjoy the moments shared with their close ones, and, thus, fear being alone as to not waste valuable time and make the best out of the remainder of their life together with their families. Secondly, older people are likely to develop certain physical and mental disabilities as they age, and, thus, are afraid of loneliness as, left alone, they might no longer be able to keep right track of their actions or perform certain body functions on their own. In this case, this fear is justified due to one’s natural preoccupation of being helpless. Personally, I fear loneliness not because I am an introvert or have had some tragic events in my life that have made me being paranoid of having no one to turn to or being deprived of company. I fear loneliness because I do not wish to take the precious moments spent with my loved ones for granted, and the fear of the possibility to be left alone without a soul I truly love and enjoy spending time with keeps me aloft and makes me appreciate each and every individual I have shared something with throughout my life path. Thus, my fear takes the shape of a constant reminder that unmaterialistic things must be valued more than any material item. Being abandoned by anyone and everyone is final, while the time we have together with our close people offers numerous possibilities that we have to fetch before they slip out of our reach and make us regret the priorities we have once set. After thorough analysis and detailed description of each point, it becomes evident that fear of loneliness is a broad term and has various shapes, which can be altered due to one’s personal background, mentality, physical and mental health, age, views and self-perception. Regardless this fear is or is not present in one’s life, every individual should remember that love, care and support are the blessings which can heal all wounds and remedy all souls.

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Essay About Being Alone: 5 Examples and 8 Prompts

To explore your understanding of this subject, read the following examples of an essay about being alone and prompts to use in your next essay.  

Being alone and lonely are often used interchangeably, but they don’t have the same meaning.

Everyone has a different notion of what being alone means. Some think it’s physically secluding yourself from people, while others regard it as the feeling of serenity or hopelessness even in the middle of a crowd.

Being alone offers various benefits, such as finding peace and solitude to reflect and be creative. However, too much isolation can negatively impact physical and mental health . 

By understanding the contrast between the meaning of being alone and being lonely, you’ll be able to express your thoughts clearly and deliver a great essay. 

1. Why I Love Being Alone by Role Reboot and Chanel Dubofsky

2. why do i like being alone so much [19 possible reasons] by sarah kristenson, 3. things to do by yourself by kendra cherry, 4. the art of being alone, but not lonely by kei hysi, 5.  my biggest fear was being alone by jennifer twardowski, 8 writing prompts on essay about being alone, 1. why you prefer to be alone, 2. things learned from being alone, 3. pros and cons of being alone, 4. being alone vs. being lonely, 5. the difference between being alone vs. being with someone else, 6. the fear of being alone, 7. how to enjoy your own company without being lonely.

“For me, being alone is something I choose, loneliness is the result of being alone, or feeling alone when I haven’t chosen it, but they aren’t the same, and they don’t necessarily lead to one another.”

In this essay, the authors make it clear that being alone is not the same as being lonely. They also mention that it’s a choice to be alone or be lonely with someone. Being alone is something that the authors are comfortable with and crave to find peace and clarity in their minds. For more, see these articles about being lonely .

“It’s important to know why you want to be alone. It can help you make the best of that time and appreciate this self-quality. Or, if you’re alone for negative reasons, it can help you address things in your life that may need to be changed.”

Kristenson’s essay probes the positive and negative reasons a person likes being alone. Positive reasons include creativity, decisiveness, and contentment as they remove themselves from drama.

The negative reasons for being alone are also critical to identify because they lead to unhealthy choices and results such as depression. The negative reasons listed are not being able to separate your emotions from others, thinking the people around you dislike you and being unable to show your authentic self to others because you’re afraid people might not like you.

“Whether you are an introvert who thrives on solitude or a gregarious extrovert who loves socializing, a little high-quality time to yourself can be good for your overall well-being.”

In this essay, Cherry points out the importance of being alone, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert. She also mentions the benefits of allocating time for yourself and advises on how to enjoy your own company. Letting yourself be alone for a while will help you improve your memory, creativity, and attention to detail, making them more productive.

“You learn to love yourself first. You need to explore life, explore yourselves, grow through challenges, learn from mistakes, get out of your comfort zone, know your true potential, and feel comfortable in your own skin. The moment you love yourself, you become immune to loneliness.”

Hysi explores being alone without feeling lonely. He argues that people must learn to love and put themselves first to stop feeling lonely. This can be challenging, especially for those who put themselves last to serve others. He concludes that loving ourselves leads to a better life. 

“We have to be comfortable in our own skin and be willing to be who we truly are, unapologetically. We have to love ourselves unconditionally and, through that love, be willing to seek out what our hearts truly desire — both in our relationships and in our life choices.”

The author discusses why she’s afraid of being alone and how she overcame it. Because she was scared of getting left alone, she always did things to please anyone, even if she wasn’t happy about it.  What was important to her then was that she was not alone. But she realized she would still feel lonely even if she wasn’t alone. 

Learning to be true to herself helped her overcome what she was afraid of. One key to happiness and fulfillment is loving yourself and always being genuine.

Did you finally have ideas about how to convey your thoughts about being alone after reading the samples above? If you’re now looking for ideas on what to talk about in your essay, here are 8 prompts to consider.

Read the best essay writing tips to incorporate them into your writing.

Today, many people assume that individuals who want to be alone are lonely. However, this is not the case for everyone. 

You can talk about a universal situation or feeling your readers will easily understand. Such as wanting to be alone when you’re mad or when you’re burnout from school or work. You can also talk about why you want to be alone after acing a test or graduating – to cherish the moment.

People tend to overthink when they are alone. In this essay, discuss what you learned from spending time alone. Perhaps you have discovered something about yourself, found a new hobby, or connected with your emotions.

Your essay can be an eye-opener for individuals contemplating if they want to take some time off to be alone. Explain how you felt when alone and if there were any benefits from spending this time by yourself.

While being alone has several benefits, such as personal exploration or reflection, time to reboot, etc., too much isolation can also have disadvantages. Conduct research into the pros and cons of alone time, and pick a side to create a compelling argumentative essay . Then, write these in your essay. Knowing the pros and cons of being alone will let others know when being alone is no longer beneficial and they’ll need someone to talk to.

We all have different views and thoughts about being alone and lonely. Write your notion and beliefs about them. You can also give examples using your real-life experiences. Reading different opinions and ideas about the same things broadens your and your readers’ perspectives.

Some people like being with their loved ones or friends rather than spending time alone. In this prompt, you will share what you felt or experienced when you were alone compared to when you were with someone else. For you, what do you prefer more? You can inform your readers about your choice and why you like it over the other.

While being alone can be beneficial and something some people crave, being alone for a long time can be scary for others. Write about the things you are most afraid of, such as, “What if I die alone, would there be people who will mourn for me?”  This will create an emotive and engaging essay for your next writing project.

Learning to be alone and genuinely enjoying it contributes to personal growth. However, being comfortable in your skin can still be challenging. This essay offers the reader tips to help others get started in finding happiness and tranquillity in their own company. Discuss activities that you can do while being alone. Perhaps create a list of hobbies and interests you can enjoy while being alone. 

Interested in learning more? Read our guide on descriptive essay s for more inspiration!

Fear Series: How to Overcome Your Fear of Loneliness

Do you feel overwhelmingly needy at times? Do you sometimes feel you’ve been rejected by just about everyone and fear you’ll be alone for the rest of your life? Do you make long-term decisions based on getting acceptance from others? Is social media standing in for real human connections in your life? If so, a fear of loneliness could be negatively impacting your life.

Or maybe you just feel an existential loneliness you can’t shake? Even though you’re surrounded by friends and loved ones, you still feel, well, lonely. For me, loneliness felt like, “Sure, they say they love me, but will they really be there for me?”

If you’ve experienced loneliness, you’re not alone. Loneliness is a part of being human. In fact, 25% of people experience painful loneliness at least every two weeks, and that percentage is even higher for teens and adolescents.

But as painful as loneliness can feel, there’s actually a gift that loneliness gives us. You heard that right. It's a huge gift to feel lonely.

A few years ago, I went through a major period of loneliness. And I am someone who likes being alone! But even though I have learned to enjoy solitude, it doesn’t mean I don’t ever feel lonely.

I was able to learn so much about myself when I went through this major period of loneliness. Instead of letting the loneliness spiral me out of control, like I would have years ago, I was able to harness that time for incredibly powerful growth.

And that’s what I want for you too. Because if you go the other way and turn that loneliness toward yourself, it can destroy you.

So go ahead and ask yourself: Do you want your fear of being alone to run your life? OR do you want to turn that loneliness into a powerful embrace of solitude and an opportunity for phenomenal growth?

If your answer is the latter, today, I’ll break down the symptoms of a fear of loneliness, what causes this fear, and what you can do to manage and utilize a fear of being alone.

Table of Contents

A Fearless Living Introduction: Overcoming Fear

What does it mean to be afraid? What do you fear most? At first, what comes to mind might be something like snakes, the dark, or heights. But those aren’t the types of fears we focus on at Fearless Living.

At Fearless Living, we focus on emotional fears. The fears that cut deep into our lives and hold us back from living up to our true potential. These emotional fears cause us to make poor decisions, consciously or unconsciously, that drive us further and further away from our goals, dreams, desires, and living the life our soul intended.™

The 10 most common emotional fears are:

• Fear of Failure
• Fear of Success
• Fear of Intimacy
• Fear of the Unknown
• Fear of Loneliness
• Fear of Not Being Good Enough
• Fear of Loss
• Fear of Change
• Fear of Being Judged
• Fear of Rejection

I’m working through all of the most common fears here in the Fearless Living blog, and you can learn even more from my courses inside Fearless You . For a general overview of each type of fear and the difference between common phobias and emotional fears, read: 10 Common Types of Fear and How to Overcome Them .

Do You Have a Fear of Loneliness?

We know that everyone experiences loneliness, but are you afraid of it? Is loneliness a fear that’s running your life, clouding your judgment, and holding you back? What do you do when you feel lonely?

Do you lean into those times of solitude, or do you run from them, become self-destructive, or do everything you can to escape that loneliness, even if it’s just a superficial fix?

Let’s see if you relate to any of the following:

• Do you use social media as a substitute for connection?
• Are you in toxic relationships with dishonest, untrustworthy people?
• In order to avoid being alone, do you accept emotional or physical abuse?
• Do you excuse the inappropriate behavior of others to keep yourself from being alone?
• Do you get involved with unsuitable partners whose values do not align with your own?
• Do you experience overwhelming feelings of isolation and emptiness?
• Do you make long-term decisions that are based on getting acceptance or approval from others?
• Do you experience panic or anxiety attacks when you feel alone?
• Do you feel extremely needy around others?
• Do you feel like society has rejected you?
• Do you agree to do something that’s against who you are just to stay connected?
• Do you find yourself bitter, jealous, or resentful (especially when looking at others on social media)?
• Do you feel disconnected, alienated, or cut off from others even when you’re in the room with them?

How many of the previous symptoms do you experience on a regular basis?

Often, our “cure” for feeling this way—doing anything you can so you’re not alone—only makes the situation worse. The more you’re on Facebook to find connections, the more lonely you will feel. The more we use social media as our main form of connection, the more our self-esteem plummets. The more we do anything anyone wants to avoid being alone, the more we feel embarrassed and ashamed.

Here’s the truth: Everyone gets lonely. It’s a fact of life. But a fear of loneliness can really begin to obstruct our lives when we make decisions based on that loneliness. I’m talking about getting involved in relationships with people who don’t share your values and probably don’t treat you very well just to keep from being alone. Or choosing a college all of your friends are going to, even if it’s not the right fit for you. Or staying in a job you hate because at least you know your colleagues there.

A fear of loneliness can mean attaching yourself to people when you're feeling needy and desperate, then getting caught up in making choices based on the other person's needs and wants and not considering your own. In other words, you make yourself invisible. At its extreme, it may feel like you literally can't live without other people. Think of parents still living with a 40-year-old child or spouses who can't go anywhere without each other.

What Happens When You Experience Loneliness?

Let’s first talk about loneliness as a phobia. If you hear scientists talk about loneliness, you might hear terms like autophobia or monophobia.

So, what is the difference between autophobia and monophobia? Well, there’s not actually any difference! Autophobia and monophobia both refer to an irrational and persistent fear of being alone. This is a serious condition that ranges in severity, from being uncomfortable being alone to experiencing panic attacks at the thought of being or ending up alone. Severe anxiety disorders can be overwhelming and can drastically hinder your mental wellbeing.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you experience this extreme anxiety on a regular basis and it results in mental health conditions or physical symptoms like chest palpitations, dizziness, and nausea, you should seek the help of a mental health professional . Borderline personality disorder or related mental illness es can do a lot of harm to a person's life if left undiagnosed and untreated. 

At Fearless Living, we define loneliness as an emotional state when you experience a powerful feeling of emptiness and isolation. It’s much more than wanting company or wanting to be around other people.

This fear of being alone can be a top reason for staying in romantic relationships, even if it’s a very unhealthy one. So many of my clients have had to get over their fear of being alone in order to find the right relationship for them.

Many of us stay in a bad relationship out of a fear of being alone, which means we're not available for the right one when they do come along. So we justify, make things okay, or say the relationship we're in is good enough for now, but we know, deep down, that's a lie.

So, here's the cold, hard truth. If you're in a relationship to avoid feeling alone or lonely—and I bet you already know this—you will still feel lonely inside. The " something is better than nothing " attitude is a very lonely place to be, and it also heaps a lot of shame and disappointment on yourself for not having the courage to leave and make better choices.

When you "settle" for someone you don't have much in common with or overlook someone's bad behavior out of fear of being alone, you never truly heal. You never grow. You miss out on finding that special someone because you're busy sticking with a lackluster or damaging relationship.

Imagine a train station. If a rusting, dilapidated train is already parked in your station, that bright, shiny, healthy train will have to choo-choo right by because your train station is already full.

Even though so many of us spend our whole lives running from being alone, it is necessary to embrace if you want to become authentically you. You’re stifling your growth if you don't spend time alone.

For some being in solitude is their greatest fear, but that is where the gift lies. The good news is that a fear of loneliness is curable, and it’s something you can move beyond so long as you have a willingness and a desire to commit to yourself. Let’s find out how.

How Do I Get Over My Fear of Being Alone?

Choose to heal.

You must decide to heal. No one else can do this for you. Making this decision requires courage and fortitude, and it’s the first step toward overcoming your fears.

You might have been able to put this off for a very long time because you've surrounded yourself with people. You might have a loving spouse and family, but you already know that doesn’t mean you aren’t battling a fear of loneliness.

Before you can begin your journey, the first thing you must do is choose to be willing. Willing to try. Willing to face your fear. Willing to say yes to becoming wholly you.

You must make the decision to be willing to get comfortable in your own skin. You must make the decision to get comfortable learning and growing while in solitude. You must make the decision to show up for yourself every day, especially when it’s hard. And I guarantee it will get tough.

Willingness is the first step and an ongoing theme at Fearless Living.

Pay Attention to Moments of Loneliness

Pay attention to the time in which you feel lonely. When do those feelings pop up for you? When do you feel most alone?

Watch for this when you're with people and without people since loneliness can occur when you are surrounded by others.

What is it you want from the person before you? What is the reason for your feelings of loneliness? What triggered your fear?

Remember—I want you to always have the power of choice. I want you to have the opportunity to decide for yourself. If you refuse to be alone and always have to be with people, your options become limited. I want you to grow to be able to be with people or be alone based on what works for you, not what your fear decides for you.

I want you to be in charge of your life. Don’t make decisions based on avoiding your fear of being alone.

Now, before I go further, does this mean I want you to separate from those you love? Of course not. I have clients who are joined at the hip with the love of their life. But, and it’s a big but, they don’t feel like they can’t breathe if they are separated from their mate. Sure, they love to be with the one they love, but they don’t have to be. They can choose to be together or decide to do something alone. That’s healthy togetherness.

So, start to make note of any time your fear of loneliness takes away your choice—every time fear tells you to find somebody, anybody, to do something with so you’re not alone. Practice asking yourself: What excuses do you make to connect with another? What triggers that desperate feeling? Noticing when you feel a sense of loneliness coming on will give you some space to make another choice, instead of automatically reacting from fear.

As a single person, you may notice that there are times you feel alone when you’re surrounded by couples. That’s normal, especially if your desire is to find a mate—a sexual and loving partner; a partner who has your back, no matter what. Of course, feeling whole and complete before you mate will make you a healthier partner.

Be sure to take the time to deeply consider what you need in a relationship. Do you understand what you’re looking for in a partner? Are you getting involved socially and going to places where you could meet a healthy someone? Are you even available to find love, or are you stuck in a toxic relationship to keep yourself from being alone? Remember the train station.

Continue to pay attention to when you feel lonely and what might trigger that loneliness. These moments are key in helping you understand what your needs are and how to overcome your fear of being alone. And if you’re looking for love, it will help you become a more healthy you, so you can find a love that aligns with who you really are.

Name Your Unmet Needs

Stop and ask yourself: What needs of mine are not being fulfilled?

We all have needs. The need to feel safe, connected, and seen. The need to be touched, understood, and supported. The need to feel loved, satisfied, and creative. According to Abraham Maslow , we have physiological needs, safety needs, love needs, esteem needs, and a need to self-actualize.

Yet, in our society, needs are rarely discussed or addressed. For so many of us, our own needs are something we rarely consider. This is because, if you're like me, we grew up surrounded by people who didn't prioritize their own needs. Our parents and role models, mine included, believed that sacrificing their needs was how to be a good person, and now I understand that couldn't be further from the truth.

In order to be your best, fearless self and be able to be present for other people, your own needs must be met.

I used to believe that it was other people’s responsibility to ensure my needs were met. I’d get deep into a relationship with someone and think, or even say, “If I feel needy, it must mean you don’t love me.”

I still remember the time a man I was dating begged me, “What do you need?” I didn’t have a clue.

I thought the other person should know what I needed. But in reality, I wasn’t willing to take responsibility for my own needs because I had no idea what they were. I never took the time to understand what the word “need” actually meant because it felt so selfish to think about my needs and what I wanted. Boy, how wrong I was.

You and I have a right to have our needs met. But what I know now is that’s not going to magically happen. Identifying and honoring your needs is an important step in claiming your sovereignty. And that is critical to knowing you’re safe to be alone.

By the way, no one can do this for you—not your friends or family or lovers.

Taking the time to understand what your needs are and figuring out how to get them met will empower you to see yourself as someone who cares for themselves. And once you start caring about you and see yourself as valuable and worthy, being alone won’t feel so lonely.

Instead of being stuck in a fear-driven relationship, you will decide to prioritize your needs, whatever they may be. Once you take responsibility for your own needs, and only you can do that, the power dynamic changes in your relationships, giving you equal footing, which means you never have to feel less than again.

Not sure what your needs are? Well, that’s normal, but you can change that. Continue to note any time you are triggered. What absolutely gets under your skin? What sends you spiraling? Chances are, in those moments, one of your needs is not being met.

Research says connection and belonging are the most important needs we have as humans. Do you feel like you belong? Do you have a tribe that makes you feel connected?

Start by identifying and naming your needs. The simple act of naming your unmet needs ensures you are awake and aware of what’s going on inside of you. It’s a critical aspect of feeling safe to love yourself more than you need to be loved by anyone else.

By the way, you and I are ultimately responsible for getting our needs met, but, and here’s the trick, we can’t meet ALL our needs by ourselves. We need each other, but keeping our relationships healthy is vital to feeling respected, capable, and loved, whether we’re in a group, being a couple, or alone.

Want to learn more? Read my guide on How To Love Yourself: 7 Self-Love Tips You’ll Love .

Spend Time Alone With Yourself

What is keeping you from believing you can make it on your own? What is stopping you from claiming your sovereignty? Who told you that being alone means no one wants you? Who said that feeling lonely was to be avoided at all costs?

If you’re like me, you can’t name all the people and situations in your life that added up to believing that being alone meant there was something wrong with you. Loneliness was a curse and proved you were ugly, stupid, or a loser.

I was taught having a man love me was paramount to happiness. I was boy-crazy from the age of four, and I’m not kidding. I was that little girl who would die without love.

I could go on about why I think I felt that way but answering that question never helped me feel okay with being alone, and, in turn, find solace in solitude.

By the way, there’s a big difference between solitude and being alone. It’s okay to be alone. Let’s say that one more time. It’s OKAY to be alone.

In fact, it’s more than just okay—it’s necessary.

Spending time alone is so, so, so important to your wellbeing. Being alone is the only time you can truly reflect and gain awareness because it’s how you learn more about yourself.

Being alone does not have to equate to loneliness. When fully utilized, being alone becomes solitude. It’s a chance to go within, to discover how you work, what you yearn for, and who you are. It’s a chance to become comfortable in your effort to be authentic in the midst of aloneness.

Maybe the idea of spending time by yourself is a lot for you right now. Be sure to take a deep breath. Anchor that breath to your being and feel the breath move through your body. When you do that, I bet you don’t feel lonely even if you’re alone, right?

Because you are in touch with yourself, grounded in your body, anchored to the earth by your breath, reminding you that at the heart of it, you are never alone. If you believe in God, or the Source, or Universal Light, (I don’t care what you call it), you already know this to be true. But that belief may not be soothing you enough to break free from your fear of loneliness.

I invite you to recommit to connecting with whatever higher power you believe in. God is a balm on our deepest fears, reminding us we are enough, we are loved, and we are safe.

Too many of us do everything we can to avoid being alone because we’re scared of what we may find. We keep ourselves surrounded by people, even if those people bring us down, because we don’t want, under any circumstances, to be left alone with ourselves. It may even feel dangerous.

Because what happens when we’re alone with ourselves? We have to answer the tough questions we may not want to face. We are no longer distracted by others, so we hear the voices in our head, the yearnings in our heart, the desires in our body. We cannot avoid ourselves any more.

For many of us, that’s frightening. Yet, I have good news.

Being willing to sit with those voices, whether it’s through mindfulness meditation or journaling, allows those voices to have their say—they are no longer repressed, angry, or ignored. They are set free to express what has been hidden, but in a healthy way.

When we are willing to be with ourselves, we quit being afraid of what we’ll find because we find our heart, our light, our soul.

We connect with the deepest part of ourselves. This allows us to begin to love ourselves exactly as we are, and even decide to enjoy our own company.

Now, maybe you’re thinking, “Rhonda, I do spend a lot of time alone. I’m alone in my car on the way to work. I’m alone in the shower. I’m alone as I cook dinner. I’m alone when I’m washing the dishes and doing laundry.”

Sure, that may, in theory, be true. But let’s check in. Are you alone being present with you? Or are you alone thinking of anything else but yourself?

Because it matters how you’re spending that time. When you’re alone, do you do anything you can to fill the space so that you’re not alone with your own thoughts? Do you keep busy jumping from one task to the next? Do you play music or podcasts to distract yourself?

When are you truly alone, spending time with your own thoughts? When do you take the time to turn off the distractions and stimulation to get to know who you really are, what your fears are, what your needs are, what your dreams are , and more?

Self-reflection is a key part of growth, and it’s critical to your Fearless Living journey.

It may be scary, but spending time alone is important. Start small if the idea makes you uncomfortable. Practice being alone with yourself for five minutes. And then for ten minutes, and continue adding to that until you grow to be comfortable in that solitude.

Because within that solitude is where the gift resides. It’s how you learn from yourself. It’s how you forgive and grow and learn what your needs are. It’s how you make progress on all of those fears that are holding you back—not just a fear of loneliness, but your fear of failure , change , not being good enough, etc.

Make an Effort to Connect With Like-Minded People

True connection and true belonging comes from spending time and building relationships with like-minded people. Because, as I’ve discussed throughout this article, you can still feel completely alone if you aren’t surrounded by kindred spirits. The people you want to have around you are those who support you, understand your boundaries , and build you up instead of pull you down.

Connecting with like-minded people is how you make real connections that aren’t based in fear—that desperate NEED to be surrounded by people.

Stop reaching out to people who are toxic or unhealthy to your growth. It only leads to disappointment and even more loneliness.

How can you do this? First, identify the toxic people in your life. Who are you around when you become triggered by a situation or something someone says? Which people make you feel alone even when you’re spending time with them? Which people continually bring you down? Which people have trouble accepting your clear boundaries? How do you feel after leaving a social situation—did the people you spent time with make you feel good or bad afterward?

On the other hand, which people in your life share common values with you? Who supports you and lifts you up? Who cares about needs and boundaries, both their own and yours?

Make an effort to spend more time with the positive influences in your life. As you assess your relationships, you may realize that too many of them are actually toxic. This is when the gritty, honest work begins.

Admit that you’ve spent so long letting your fears lead you that you’ve attracted all the wrong people, or that you’ve desperately kept them around just to ensure you didn’t have to feel alone. But as we’ve now learned, that’s just another type of loneliness.

So, it’s time to get back out there. It’s time to put in the work to build new, strong, positive relationships that make you feel a sense of belonging. Revisit your values. What values are important to you? What are some places where you could find people who share the same values and interests as your own?

If spirituality is important to you, spend more time getting involved in your local church or fundraising events. If nature and sustainability are important to you, join a community garden, spend time on a farm, or start going on community hikes in your neighborhood. Plus, there’s always the Fearless Living community, which is filled with like-minded individuals just like you who want to live fearlessly and continue on a path of healing, growth, and self-development.

Cracking Your Fear of Loneliness With Fearless Living

Fear is driving you to stay in isolation, but safety will never get you to freedom or fearlessness. Managing your fear of loneliness is only one of the journeys you can take with the community at Fearless Living. I have in-depth courses available inside Fearless You for all 10 of the most common emotional fears, including Fear of Failure, Fear of Not Being Good Enough, Fear of Change, and Fear of Success.

The How to Overcome Fear Series is available to all Fearless You members, and when you become a member, you get access to dozens of other courses, lessons, and live sessions, all designed to help you live the life your soul intended.™ Continue following the Fearless Living blog for free weekly content on everything from how to start living your dream life to how to find and follow your soul purpose .

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From Fear to Freedom

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fearless you

Fearless leader, let’s connect, day 30: let me introduce you to yourself.

It’s time to celebrate. You did it. Oh how good you’ll feel when you’ve practiced the 30 tools laid out for you in Change Your Life in 30 Days. You’ll feel more yourself than you’ve ever felt before. You’ll be more empowered and powerful knowing these tools are at your fingertips. Bottom line: your relationships will be filled with more love, your worth will skyrocket, your confidence will increase and your dreams will have wings. Your toolbox is full. Your mindset is fearless. Now, go on. Live your Fearless Life.

Day 29: Heaven

Take a breath. A nice deep one. We are going to talk about heaven together. Not the one with God sitting on a cloud, but the heaven that exists right where you are. The heaven tat shows up when we live by our commitments. In Day 29, I’ve created a commitment statement that will anchor you as you move forward in living more fearlessly. It will inspire you, and yes, even motivate you. More important, it will remind you who you really are. This is a favorite amongst my students.

Day 28: Beautiful You

Beautiful isn’t a word most people take on easily. They can call other people beautiful but when I ask them to think of themselves that way, they pause, get confused and may even blush. It’s okay. Owning your beauty isn’t something you were probably taught to do. I know I wasn’t. Day 28 is about your beauty within and without and owning it. By the way, you are beautiful and I can’t wait for you to know it. For real.

Day 27: Redefining You

You’ve been on this journey with me for 27 days. And in those 27 days you’ve changed. For the better. You’re more…how do I say it? More YOU! And it’s time to take a moment and reflect on who you are now. It’s time to redefine who you are and how you want to move forward. Take a breath. This is all good.

Day 26: Never Confront Again

Have you ever avoided having a difficult conversation? Me too. Until I learned this surprising simple mindset that eliminates confronting anyone ever again that I will share with you in Day 26. Plus, I’m going to give you a step-by-step script to show you what to do instead. Your new mindset along with the script will make any conversation you’ve been avoiding way easier. Soon, there will be no conversation too scary for you to have. It’s time to speak up.

Day 25: Forget Motivation

If I give you a hyped up pep speech, you might feel motivated. For a while. But I bet not long enough to get the job done. And that’s the problem with motivation created by an outside force. In Day 25, I’m going to show you what to focus on instead that will give you more long-term results and long-term contentment. Sounds nice, right?

Day 24: What’s Love Got To Do With It

Your yearnings and desires come from wanting to share more of who you are. Self love is what helps you do that by giving you the permission (and worth) to push past your fears and reach for your dreams. But often, it’s doesn’t feel okay to love yourself. It’s feels selfish or greedy. No more. In Day 24, you’ll get the permission you need to go after anything that you want because you’ll know how to love yourself (and you have a right to your dreams.)

Day 23: For or Against

Is the world for you or against you? I know you want to believe the world is for you yet, I bet, based on what you discover in Day 23, you’ll soon see how often you get tricked into believing, and reacting, as if the world is against you. When you feel like the world is against you, it becomes a world filled with lack and that’s no way to live. In Day 23, I will give you a tool that will give you eyes to see that the world is, indeed, for you.

Day 22: The Gift of Rejection

Rejection is hard to face. And it’s a part of life. Usually, it isn’t personal, even when it feels personal. On Day 22, I will be asking you to go beyond the normal surface experience and instead, see yourself through heart of your humanity. Yes. You are human. Yes. Things happen. And yes. You will be rejected. And it’s all good. It might be hard to see it now, but soon, being thankful for rejection will be effortless. Let me show you the tools to use to make this so.

Day 21: Luck, Fate and Destiny

I’m going to blow your mind on Day 21 because I’m asking you to give up luck. Yep. No more luck. On Day 21 I will tell you why and more important, what to do instead. This will give you such relief and make you feel so powerful. Success is within your grasp when you give up luck and embody the tools I share here.

Day 20: Momentum

Let’s keep the momentum going. In Day 20, you’ll revisit the last 10 days to give yourself credit for the hard work you’ve been doing plus, remind yourself of what’s ahead. Without momentum, we lose hope and lose our inspired action. When you have momentum, the bumps of life don’t seem so rough.

Day 19: Forgiveness

Is there a part of you stuck in the past? For over 20 years of my life, I couldn’t get past my past because I didn’t know how to forgive so I refused to. Have you refused to forgive someone in your past whose hurt you? Maybe that person is even yourself? If the past is running your present, you’ll create a future that looks a whole lot like the past. In Day 19, I will take you by the hand and show you how to forgive the past for good. There’s freedom here. I promise.

Day 18: Intuition

Do you know the difference between the voice of fear and the voice of your intuition? Not sure? Day 18 is going to make it crystal clear to you so you can take inspired action. When you know you’re guided by something larger than you, it’s easy to be motivated and trust yourself. The ability to follow your intuition is necessary for true happiness. You’ll find out how here.

Day 17: Excuses

Are you so good at making up excuses you’re confusing them with the facts? You’re not alone. Most people want to show me proof that their excuses are real. I let them. But after I share the tools in Day 17, you won’t want to because you’ll see that a fight for your excuses is a fight for a less than fearless life.

Day 16: The Myth of Balance

The search for balance has become epidemic and based on the amount of magazine articles and books written on the subject, we are failing miserably in our quest for the perfect balance. What if you could create the balance you need to achieve your biggest dreams? In Day 16, I’m going to ask you to give up your search for balance and instead, use this new tool to help you reach your goals.

Day 15: Trusting Heart

Do you ever feel like you can’t really trust the people around you? Has someone you love let you down? Has your heart been broken too many times? What would you say if I told you that trusting others isn’t about them at all but about trusting yourself? In Day 15, you’ll learn a whole new way to trust yourself, and others, so you can finally experience a deeper and more authentic intimacy with those that matter.

Day 14: Liar, Liar

Do you ever find yourself lying to make a situation better? Lying seems harmless enough, especially those little white lies. But those lies erode our self-respect and cause us to doubt ourselves. You might be surprised to learn that honesty isn’t always the answer to lying. Day 14 will give you a pathway out of lies and false honesty to create clear conversations that create more connection in all your relationships.

Day 13: The Power of Word

Do your words empower you or disempower you? Words are slippery and unless we become aware of what comes out of our mouths, more than we’d like, the words we use every day are ruining our chances for success. In Day 13, I will show you which words to eliminate and which words will boost your confidence.

Day 12: Ask for What You Want

What do you really want? No, really? It’s hard to ask for what you want from the person you want it from most, isn’t it? So much at stake. It’s scary to ask for something without any guarantee of satisfactory results. But it is necessary for you to be free. In Day 12, I will show you how to ask for what you want without feeling bad, selfish or guilty.

Day 11: Regrets

Regrets are deadly to our self-esteem, stifle our ability to act and keep us stuck in the past. Until we let go of our regrets, there is little hope for a different future. Day 11 is going to give you the tools to let regret go for good.

Day 10: Integration

It’s time to make sure you “got this.” Not just in theory but in practice. Integrating the tools each step of the way guarantees you can use them again and again now and forever. No matter what lies ahead these tools will be in your toolbox at the ready to set you free from any fear. I will put you through a drill to help you own that you’re doing better than you think you are.

Day 9: Shine Your Light

Have you ever secretly wished you could shout from the rafters: this is who I really am? But instead, did you find yourself putting your success down or unable to speak up when you most wanted to? Day 9 will show you how to give up judging yourself and learn how to shine your light. It’s integral to your ability to say YES to you!

Day 8: The Freedom of Discipline

When you use the power of discipline fueled by your true nature, it becomes an act of love. Let me show you the way to access a truer, more loving kind of discipline that will not make you rigid, strict or stuffy. When you access discipline because you want to, not because you have to, you’ll have more ease, grace and freedom.

Day 7: Are You Making It Up or Is It True?

Want more peace of mind? When I want to launch into full-on attack mode or shut myself down and hide or defend myself, this sentence brings me back to center and allows me to respond, instead of react. Your life is about to get a whole lot better.

Day 6: Stretch, Risk, or Die

Have you ever felt utterly stuck? It’s probably because you didn’t take into account the emotional toll it takes to break bad habits. (Logic alone isn’t enough.) My super secret tool guarantees that you will start taking action on the things that have felt insurmountable in the past. It’s easier than you think.

Day 5: Affirmations, Intentions, and Goals

Have you felt like a complete failure when it comes to affirmations? Me too. I’m going to show you why. Oh, and did you know that goals serve intentions, not the other way around? This is where most success gets sidetracked. I will show you when to use which tool and how to maximize your success.

Day 4: Purpose and Passion

Without purpose, passion can feel out of control and even, crazy. Without passion, purpose can seem dull and uninviting. Purpose and Passion must work hand-in-hand to light you up, inspire others and set your life on its Fearless Path. Day 4 will show you how.

Day 3: Building Your Confidence Muscle

Have you ever wanted more confidence? Day 3 will show you to own the confidence you have had in the past and how to create the confidence you need any time you need it. With confidence, all things are possible.

Day 2: Give Credit Where Credit is Due

Can you accept praise? If you have a hard time accepting compliments or giving yourself credit, Day 2 will give you a tool that will allow you to honor your hard work as well as allow you to receive love from others. (Wouldn’t that be nice.)

Day 1: A New Beginning

The truth is you can have it all. You can have the external things you crave while fulfilling your soul’s desires if you can answer ‘yes’ to these five questions.

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Loneliness Essay Example

Loneliness is a feeling that many people experience at one point or another. The impact of it on your life can vary greatly depending on the situation. This sample will explore the different types of loneliness, how to deal with them, and some tips for overcoming loneliness in general.

Essay Example On Loneliness

• Thesis Statement – Loneliness Essay
• Introduction – Loneliness Essay
• Main Body – Loneliness Essay
• Conclusion – Loneliness Essay

Thesis Statement – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a consequence of being robbed of one’s freedom. It can be due to imprisonment, loss of liberty, or being discriminated against. Introduction – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a social phenomenon that has been the subject of much research since time immemorial. Yet there still does not exist any solid explanation as to why some people are more prone to loneliness than others. This paper will seek to analyze this potentially debilitating condition from different perspectives. It will cover the relationship between loneliness and incarceration or loss of liberty; then it will proceed into discussing how emotions play a role in making us feel lonely; finally, it will look at how these feelings can affect our mental stability and overall well-being. Get Non-Plagiarized Custom Essay on Loneliness in USA Order Now Main Body – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a universal feeling which has the ability to create its own culture within different societies. In detention facilities, there is a unique kind of loneliness that prevails between prisoners who are often divided into various categories and population groups. This has been described by Mandela as a consequence of being robbed of one’s freedom. The fact that it can be due to imprisonment, loss of liberty, or being discriminated against makes it even clearer why this isolation from other people occurs so frequently among detainees. In addition, when one spends time incarcerated in solitary confinement, they may become more experienced at coping with feelings of loneliness and despondency; however, these feelings do not tend to dissipate completely because living in an artificial environment cannot be compared with living out in the open. There is also a difference between feeling lonely and actually being alone; many individuals who do not feel social pressure, meaning that they are more than happy spending time on their own without any external stimulation, may still find themselves surrounded by people every day. Yet even this does not guarantee that one will escape feelings of isolation or rejection. Loneliness becomes an issue when it is chronic and experienced frequently, if only fleetingly. It can affect our psychological balance as well as our physical health because it usually initiates stress responses within the body which cause high blood pressure and prompt addiction to drugs or alcohol consumption. All these reasons may lead to decreased productivity and ultimately affect one’s ability to develop or maintain social connections. Buy Customized Essay on Loneliness At Cheapest Price Order Now Conclusion – Loneliness Essay Loneliness is a condition that we can’t always avoid, but it is something we should be aware of and try to limit. Thus, while the effects of loneliness on the individual may not be able to stimulate any significant changes in society, at least there will always remain one person more who understands what you are going through. Ultimately, it all comes down to empathy and sharing our own stories so that more people learn how to cope with this potentially dangerous emotional response. Hire USA Experts for Loneliness Essay Order Now

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This essay sample has given you some insights into the psychology of loneliness as well as suggestions for how to combat it in your own life.

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Paris, 1951. Photo by Elliot Erwitt/Magnum

Loved, yet lonely

You might have the unconditional love of family and friends and yet feel deep loneliness. can philosophy explain why.

by Kaitlyn Creasy   + BIO

Although one of the loneliest moments of my life happened more than 15 years ago, I still remember its uniquely painful sting. I had just arrived back home from a study abroad semester in Italy. During my stay in Florence, my Italian had advanced to the point where I was dreaming in the language. I had also developed intellectual interests in Italian futurism, Dada, and Russian absurdism – interests not entirely deriving from a crush on the professor who taught a course on those topics – as well as the love sonnets of Dante and Petrarch (conceivably also related to that crush). I left my semester abroad feeling as many students likely do: transformed not only intellectually but emotionally. My picture of the world was complicated, my very experience of that world richer, more nuanced.

After that semester, I returned home to a small working-class town in New Jersey. Home proper was my boyfriend’s parents’ home, which was in the process of foreclosure but not yet taken by the bank. Both parents had left to live elsewhere, and they graciously allowed me to stay there with my boyfriend, his sister and her boyfriend during college breaks. While on break from school, I spent most of my time with these de facto roommates and a handful of my dearest childhood friends.

When I returned from Italy, there was so much I wanted to share with them. I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about how aesthetically interesting but intellectually dull I found Italian futurism; I wanted to communicate to my closest friends how deeply those Italian love sonnets moved me, how Bob Dylan so wonderfully captured their power. (‘And every one of them words rang true/and glowed like burning coal/Pouring off of every page/like it was written in my soul …’) In addition to a strongly felt need to share specific parts of my intellectual and emotional lives that had become so central to my self-understanding, I also experienced a dramatically increased need to engage intellectually, as well as an acute need for my emotional life in all its depth and richness – for my whole being, this new being – to be appreciated. When I returned home, I felt not only unable to engage with others in ways that met my newly developed needs, but also unrecognised for who I had become since I left. And I felt deeply, painfully lonely.

This experience is not uncommon for study-abroad students. Even when one has a caring and supportive network of relationships, one will often experience ‘reverse culture shock’ – what the psychologist Kevin Gaw describes as a ‘process of readjusting, reacculturating, and reassimilating into one’s own home culture after living in a different culture for a significant period of time’ – and feelings of loneliness are characteristic for individuals in the throes of this process.

But there are many other familiar life experiences that provoke feelings of loneliness, even if the individuals undergoing those experiences have loving friends and family: the student who comes home to his family and friends after a transformative first year at college; the adolescent who returns home to her loving but repressed parents after a sexual awakening at summer camp; the first-generation woman of colour in graduate school who feels cared for but also perpetually ‘ in-between ’ worlds, misunderstood and not fully seen either by her department members or her family and friends back home; the travel nurse who returns home to her partner and friends after an especially meaningful (or perhaps especially psychologically taxing) work assignment; the man who goes through a difficult breakup with a long-term, live-in partner; the woman who is the first in her group of friends to become a parent; the list goes on.

Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone.

In his recent book Life Is Hard (2022), the philosopher Kieran Setiya characterises loneliness as the ‘pain of social disconnection’. There, he argues for the importance of attending to the nature of loneliness – both why it hurts and what ‘that pain tell[s] us about how to live’ – especially given the contemporary prevalence of loneliness. He rightly notes that loneliness is not just a matter of being isolated from others entirely, since one can be lonely even in a room full of people. Additionally, he notes that, since the negative psychological and physiological effects of loneliness ‘seem to depend on the subjective experience of being lonely’, effectively combatting loneliness requires us to identify the origin of this subjective experience.

S etiya’s proposal is that we are ‘social animals with social needs’ that crucially include needs to be loved and to have our basic worth recognised. When we fail to have these basic needs met, as we do when we are apart from our friends, we suffer loneliness. Without the presence of friends to assure us that we matter, we experience the painful ‘sensation of hollowness, of a hole in oneself that used to be filled and now is not’. This is loneliness in its most elemental form. (Setiya uses the term ‘friends’ broadly, to include close family and romantic partners, and I follow his usage here.)

Imagine a woman who lands a job requiring a long-distance move to an area where she knows no one. Even if there are plenty of new neighbours and colleagues to greet her upon her arrival, Setiya’s claim is that she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness, since she does not yet have close, loving relationships with these people. In other words, she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.

Setiya is not alone in connecting feelings of loneliness to a lack of basic recognition. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), for example, Hannah Arendt also defines loneliness as a feeling that results when one’s human dignity or unconditional worth as a person fails to be recognised and affirmed, a feeling that results when this, one of the ‘basic requirements of the human condition’, fails to be met.

These accounts get a good deal about loneliness right. But they miss something as well. On these views, loving friendships allow us to avoid loneliness because the loving friend provides a form of recognition we require as social beings. Without loving friendships, or when we are apart from our friends, we are unable to secure this recognition. So we become lonely. But notice that the feature affirmed by the friend here – my unconditional value – is radically depersonalised. The property the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and affirms in her other friendships. Otherwise put, the recognition that allegedly mitigates loneliness in Setiya’s view is the friend’s recognition of an impersonal, abstract feature of oneself, a quality one shares with every other human being: her unconditional worth as a human being. (The recognition given by the loving friend is that I ‘[matter] … just like everyone else.’)

Just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends

Since my dignity or worth is disconnected from any particular feature of myself as an individual, however, my friend can recognise and affirm that worth without acknowledging or engaging my particular needs, specific values and so on. If Setiya is calling it right, then that friend can assuage my loneliness without engaging my individuality.

Or can they? Accounts that tie loneliness to a failure of basic recognition (and the alleviation of loneliness to love and acknowledgement of one’s dignity) may be right about the origin of certain forms of loneliness. But it seems to me that this is far from the whole picture, and that accounts like these fail to explain a wide variety of familiar circumstances in which loneliness arises.

When I came home from my study-abroad semester, I returned to a network of robust, loving friendships. I was surrounded daily by a steadfast group of people who persistently acknowledged and affirmed my unconditional value as a person, putting up with my obnoxious pretension (so it must have seemed) and accepting me even though I was alien in crucial ways to the friend they knew before. Yet I still suffered loneliness. In fact, while I had more close friendships than ever before – and was as close with friends and family members as I had ever been – I was lonelier than ever. And this is also true of the familiar scenarios from above: the first-year college student, the new parent, the travel nurse, and so on. All these scenarios are ripe for painful feelings of loneliness even though the individuals undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value.

So, there must be more to loneliness than Setiya’s account (and others like it) let on. Of course, if an individual’s worth goes unrecognised, she will feel awfully lonely. But just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends. What plagues accounts that tie loneliness to an absence of basic recognition is that they fail to do justice to loneliness as a feeling that pops up not only when one lacks sufficiently loving, affirmative relationships, but also when one perceives that the relationships she has (including and perhaps especially loving relationships) lack sufficient quality (for example, lacking depth or a desired feeling of connection). And an individual will perceive such relationships as lacking sufficient quality when her friends and family are not meeting the specific needs she has, or recognising and affirming her as the particular individual that she is.

We see this especially in the midst or aftermath of transitional and transformational life events, when greater-than-usual shifts occur. As the result of going through such experiences, we often develop new values, core needs and centrally motivating desires, losing other values, needs and desires in the process. In other words, after undergoing a particularly transformative experience, we become different people in key respects than we were before. If after such a personal transformation, our friends are unable to meet our newly developed core needs or recognise and affirm our new values and central desires – perhaps in large part because they cannot , because they do not (yet) recognise or understand who we have become – we will suffer loneliness.

This is what happened to me after Italy. By the time I got back, I had developed new core needs – as one example, the need for a certain level and kind of intellectual engagement – which were unmet when I returned home. What’s more, I did not think it particularly fair to expect my friends to meet these needs. After all, they did not possess the conceptual frameworks for discussing Russian absurdism or 13th-century Italian love sonnets; these just weren’t things they had spent time thinking about. And I didn’t blame them; expecting them to develop or care about developing such a conceptual framework seemed to me ridiculous. Even so, without a shared framework, I felt unable to meet my need for intellectual engagement and communicate to my friends the fullness of my inner life, which was overtaken by quite specific aesthetic values, values that shaped how I saw the world. As a result, I felt lonely.

I n addition to developing new needs, I understood myself as having changed in other fundamental respects. While I knew my friends loved me and affirmed my unconditional value, I did not feel upon my return home that they were able to see and affirm my individuality. I was radically changed; in fact, I felt in certain respects totally unrecognisable even to those who knew me best. After Italy, I inhabited a different, more nuanced perspective on the world; beauty, creativity and intellectual growth had become core values of mine; I had become a serious lover of poetry; I understood myself as a burgeoning philosopher. At the time, my closest friends were not able to see and affirm these parts of me, parts of me with which even relative strangers in my college courses were acquainted (though, of course, those acquaintances neither knew me nor were equipped to meet other of my needs which my friends had long met). When I returned home, I no longer felt truly seen by my friends .

One need not spend a semester abroad to experience this. For example, a nurse who initially chose her profession as a means to professional and financial stability might, after an especially meaningful experience with a patient, find herself newly and centrally motivated by a desire to make a difference in her patients’ lives. Along with the landscape of her desires, her core values may have changed: perhaps she develops a new core value of alleviating suffering whenever possible. And she may find certain features of her job – those that do not involve the alleviation of suffering, or involve the limited alleviation of suffering – not as fulfilling as they once were. In other words, she may have developed a new need for a certain form of meaningful difference-making – a need that, if not met, leaves her feeling flat and deeply dissatisfied.

Changes like these – changes to what truly moves you, to what makes you feel deeply fulfilled – are profound ones. To be changed in these respects is to be utterly changed. Even if you have loving friendships, if your friends are unable to recognise and affirm these new features of you, you may fail to feel seen, fail to feel valued as who you really are. At that point, loneliness will ensue. Interestingly – and especially troublesome for Setiya’s account – feelings of loneliness will tend to be especially salient and painful when the people unable to meet these needs are those who already love us and affirm our unconditional value.

Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness

So, even with loving friends, if we perceive ourselves as unable to be seen and affirmed as the particular people we are, or if certain of our core needs go unmet, we will feel lonely. Setiya is surely right that loneliness will result in the absence of love and recognition. But it can also result from the inability – and sometimes, failure – of those with whom we have loving relationships to share or affirm our values, to endorse desires that we understand as central to our lives, and to satisfy our needs.

Another way to put it is that our social needs go far beyond the impersonal recognition of our unconditional worth as human beings. These needs can be as widespread as a need for reciprocal emotional attachment or as restricted as a need for a certain level of intellectual engagement or creative exchange. But even when the need in question is a restricted or uncommon one, if it is a deep need that requires another person to meet yet goes unmet, we will feel lonely. The fact that we suffer loneliness even when these quite specific needs are unmet shows that understanding and treating this feeling requires attending not just to whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met by those around me.

What’s more, since different people have different needs, the conditions that produce loneliness will vary. Those with a strong need for their uniqueness to be recognised may be more disposed to loneliness. Others with weaker needs for recognition or reciprocal emotional attachment may experience a good deal of social isolation without feeling lonely at all. Some people might alleviate loneliness by cultivating a wide circle of not-especially-close friends, each of whom meets a different need or appreciates a different side of them. Yet others might persist in their loneliness without deep and intimate friendships in which they feel more fully seen and appreciated in their complexity, in the fullness of their being.

Yet, as ever-changing beings with friends and loved ones who are also ever-changing, we are always susceptible to loneliness and the pain of situations in which our needs are unmet. Most of us can recall a friend who once met certain of our core social needs, but who eventually – gradually, perhaps even imperceptibly – ultimately failed to do so. If such needs are not met by others in one’s life, this situation will lead one to feel profoundly, heartbreakingly lonely.

In cases like these, new relationships can offer true succour and light. For example, a lonely new parent might have childless friends who are clueless to the needs and values she develops through the hugely complicated transition to parenthood; as a result, she might cultivate relationships with other new parents or caretakers, people who share her newly developed values and better understand the joys, pains and ambivalences of having a child. To the extent that these new relationships enable her needs to be met and allow her to feel genuinely seen, they will help to alleviate her loneliness. Through seeking relationships with others who might share one’s interests or be better situated to meet one’s specific needs, then, one can attempt to face one’s loneliness head on.

But you don’t need to shed old relationships to cultivate the new. When old friends to whom we remain committed fail to meet our new needs, it’s helpful to ask how to salvage the situation, saving the relationship. In some instances, we might choose to adopt a passive strategy, acknowledging the ebb and flow of relationships and the natural lag time between the development of needs and others’ abilities to meet them. You could ‘wait it out’. But given that it is much more difficult to have your needs met if you don’t articulate them, an active strategy seems more promising. To position your friend to better meet your needs, you might attempt to communicate those needs and articulate ways in which you don’t feel seen.

Of course, such a strategy will be successful only if the unmet needs provoking one’s loneliness are needs one can identify and articulate. But we will so often – perhaps always – have needs, desires and values of which we are unaware or that we cannot articulate, even to ourselves. We are, to some extent, always opaque to ourselves. Given this opacity, some degree of loneliness may be an inevitable part of the human condition. What’s more, if we can’t even grasp or articulate the needs provoking our loneliness, then adopting a more passive strategy may be the only option one has. In cases like this, the only way to recognise your unmet needs or desires is to notice that your loneliness has started to lift once those needs and desires begin to be met by another.

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Frank Gerits

Friday essay: ‘like being hungry’ – loneliness afflicts nearly 1 in 3 Australians. It can be devastating, but can spark creativity or change

Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide

Disclosure statement

Carol Lefevre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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My sharpest experience of loneliness was during the New Year period when I turned 22. Following the breakdown of a youthful and doomed marriage, I had landed in a new country, in a city, Wellington, where the only people I had contact with were at the job I’d just started. They were work acquaintances, but not yet friends. Luckily, one of them realised I would be alone over the Christmas break. She invited me to spend it with her family. I couldn’t have been more grateful, yet once Christmas had passed, I found myself alone again, preparing to greet the New Year and my birthday.

My father had died four months earlier, so I was not only alone, but grieving. In the aftermath of his death, my mother and younger brother had left Sydney and returned to South Australia. Their move had left me feeling as if the world I’d been raised in had collapsed behind me. I felt there was no way back.

Even at work, in a busy office, I existed in a bubble of pain and separation. The people around me all had busy lives, complex connections, history with the place they occupied. I was out of my country, a discarded young wife, a bit of an oddity.

On that New Year’s Eve, watching from the kitchen window of my flat as car headlights streamed towards me and away, I felt rootless, forgotten. I had slipped through a crack into a dark vacuum. Knowing I had brought this upon myself was no comfort. Each hour crawled by like ten. I didn’t see anyone to speak to until the third day of January, when I was relieved to return to work. Afterwards, I always volunteered for shifts over long weekends, so as not to repeat the experience.

Loneliness is felt as a profound and painful yearning for connection. In her book The Lonely City , Olivia Laing describes it as

like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated.

Laing has talked about the shame of loneliness , describing it as “a taboo state that will cause others to turn and flee”. People who are lonely often try to keep the fact a secret, fearing it will make them appear weird, or needy. Fear can lead them to become hypervigilant for signs of rejection, which in turn leads to rejecting behaviours. In this way, loneliness forms a persistent cycle.

‘Unloved, unheard, unseen’

“In a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness,” wrote Japanese writer Haruki Murakami . Daunting as this idea may be, many of us will face varying states of loneliness as we age, with the inevitable losses of parents, siblings, partners, and friends.

A recent study shows nearly one in three Australians feel lonely, and one in six experience severe loneliness.

Songwriters have always been sensitive to the emotion of loneliness, though most have sugared its bitterness with a plaint of romance gone awry. In 1949, Hank Williams sang of a night when time crawled by to the whine of a midnight train. Wrapped in the waltz-time that shouts the lack of a dance partner like no other beat, I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry became a country music classic. By 1960, Elvis Presley was crooning Are You Lonesome Tonight? , while in the same decade, The Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby documented lives of haunting emptiness.

Growing up alongside those songs, and a slew of others, few of us believed we could ever be old and sad enough to become the people they were singing about. But loneliness is not exclusively an affliction of age: new mothers are at risk, as well as the recently bereaved, refugees and other people living outside their own culture.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of this hard-to-define, yet devastating emotion is that it can even affect people in the midst of busy lives – and people within families, who for some reason feel misunderstood, unloved, unheard, unseen.

A global public health priority

The World Health Organization has declared loneliness a global public health priority . It links loneliness to depression and suicide, and an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

In the United Kingdom, a joint study commissioned by the British Red Cross and Co-Op, Trapped in a Bubble , found nine million people there (almost a fifth of the population, and more than the population of London) often or always feel lonely. In 2018, the British government introduced a national strategy to tackle the problem, and appointed the world’s first Loneliness Minister . Australia has been urged to do the same.

Japan appointed their own minister in 2021, prodded into action by escalating suicides (particularly of young women) during the pandemic.

Since then, other countries are trialling their own solutions: some good, offbeat ideas include “ chat checkouts ” in a Dutch supermarket, where shoppers can stop and chat rather than be shuffled through as fast as possible.

The Loneliness Project , a research collaboration between the University of South Australia and an Adelaide Hills community centre, is just one Australian initiative. Together with local people, who responded to an advertisement, they will develop strategies to address community loneliness: plans so far include a cafe, regular social activities, a women’s development program and a podcast.

“The health risks of loneliness are thought to be as high as for smoking or obesity,” says Hayley Everuss, the project’s community development officer.

Ending Loneliness Together is a national network of organisations formed to address Australia’s growing loneliness problem. Their 2023 survey found lonely people are more likely to suffer anxiety and depression, and to have worse physical and mental health. Perhaps surprisingly, people over 65 were the least lonely, with 26% of 65-74 year-olds and just 13% of those aged 75+ reporting loneliness.

The highest rates of loneliness were among those aged 18-24, at 38%. With the transition from high school to university, or to first jobs, young people are faced with paths that stream away in many directions. Social media offers the illusion of connection, yet it may be the very thing that makes them feel most isolated.

While frequent social media use isn’t connected to loneliness, according to the survey, social media addiction is: 16% of lonely people reported being addicted to social media, compared to 9% of people who are not lonely.

Loneliness and ‘luminous menace’

Lynne, an artist now in her seventies, tells me as a young woman she was very much a “people person”. She thrived in communal living and was happy in the most chaotic of houses. In those days, her greatest nightmare would have been to find herself living alone. Decades later, she is doing it.

Since the breakup of her marriage, and the move from a family home to an apartment, followed by retirement (and as someone vulnerable to anxiety and depression), Lynne was managing reasonably well. Until the pandemic hit. Pre-COVID, she had more people dropping by, but now they’re out of the habit. “We just broke the pattern,” she says.

COVID-19 pushed all of us apart, with its masks and gloves, and its 24/7 drive-through testing stations, often sited in disused or semi-abandoned spaces. As we waited late at night in the sealed bubbles of our cars to be swabbed, those makeshift outposts – aglow against the urban dark – embodied something of the luminous menace of the painting, Nighthawks , by the American artist Edward Hopper.

Painted in 1942, it shows four people inside a brightly lit New York diner, a capsule of shadowless light set among darkened, empty streets. The lack of an entrance is a troubling detail, and the figures inside appear both exposed and trapped.

Hopper, a man known for his immense reserve, insisted each painting was an expression of his inner life, publicly stating his belief that “the man’s the work” and so the pictures “talk about me”.

A habitual night-walker of New York’s streets, Hopper began Nighthawks late in 1941, after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour propelled America into World War II. Dimmed lights and evening blackouts became the norm in the city; it was a different kind of crisis to the pandemic, but a crisis all the same.

For the viewer, a Hopper painting resembles an exquisite short story, which invites the reader to receive and interpret the elements of place, character and tension according to their own experience. Paintings like Automat (1927), in which a young woman sits alone in a cafe serviced by machines, and New York Movie (1939), with its bored or contemplative usherette standing to one side in a movie theatre while a film plays out on the screen, invariably return me to that lonely time after my father’s death. That is when I first stumbled upon Hopper’s work.

“The loneliness thing is overdone,” Hopper said . And I doubt I would have described his figures as lonely when I first saw them – if they were alone, they had been captured in a moment of typically human solitude. But now, decades later, I see that Hopper’s figures spoke to something deeper in me than the apparent loneliness of a young woman living far from home.

As great works of art have the power to do, they struck a note against my truest self: the part that had chosen the solitary path, despite its perils and pitfalls.

Meanwhile, the pandemic jabbed at us with its vocabulary of punishment: “isolation”, “quarantine”, “lockdown”, “curfew”. Only separation was safe. COVID’s social distancing rules normalised a fear of close contact we may never entirely lose.

For Lynne, travel is a way of offsetting the loneliness of solo living. “I love seeing other places, but also I’m with people around the clock,” she told me. “I’m usually sharing with the friend I travel with, so I wake up in the morning with someone, I go to sleep with someone there. And that’s the bonus on top of the travel.” After a recent month-long trip to India, she is again facing days when she doesn’t see or speak to anyone, unable to re-establish her pre-COVID social connections.

“I hate the fact that I wake up and it takes me so long to remember which day it is. And the thing about it is that it’s of no consequence, whereas once it was important whether it was Saturday or Sunday or Monday.”

Loneliness appears to be less prevalent in some other cultures. Over her many trips to Bali, Lynne has noticed that, despite the challenges of poverty, no one there is much alone. In a local family she’s become friendly with over the years, the grandmother has been cared for within the family, bathed and fed by her grandson when she became very ill.

Across Western society, we have long ago lost the village model of living, though a version of it still prevails in places like Bali. If we are lonely, it is an unwelcome outcome of the way we live now in the first quarter of the 21st century: tuned to the “self” rather than to the family group. (If there is a functioning group.)

Family networks stretch nationwide, or even globally. But families themselves break down, or become so complex in their connections and loyalties, they often cannot provide a safety net for those who encounter serial losses and find themselves alone.

Communal living and finding comfort

The loneliness of our “me” culture is quietly driving change. In Australia, co-housing schemes are creating “intentional communities”. This means either living in a collection of private homes, accompanied by communally owned shared spaces, or in developments of self-contained dwellings, arranged within common areas for shared activities.

Communal living, or co-housing, is a revival of the village model that arguably served our ancestors better than our current individualism is serving us. As we push deeper into the century, and our population ages, co-housing, or versions of it, are likely to become a mainstream housing form.

Not all loneliness is involuntary, and my own suffering at 22 arose because I chose to isolate myself. But for old people, loneliness mostly accrues over time. When combined with grief, it can be hard to break out of the isolating bubble. As a society, we are not skilled at knowing what to say to grieving, lonely people.

Interestingly, a research paper on loneliness by the pioneering German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann refers to the way loneliness following a bereavement is often counteracted by a process of “incorporation and identification”. In this defensive behaviour, a person mourning the loss of a loved one comes to develop a likeness “in looks, personality, and activities” to the lost beloved. In this way, they fight their loneliness.

I read this with a ping of recognition. After my mother’s death, I clung to the things that had belonged to her. On most days, I carried with me one of the soft cotton handkerchiefs she favoured. I wore her hand-knitted jumpers, spritzed her perfume. I found comfort in the steady tick of her wristwatch and bedside clock, and the fact I was so often told how much I look like her.

My mother used to say four days at home alone was about her limit. I like to think we never allowed her to reach the four-day mark. But as her hearing deteriorated, the daily phone calls became more problematic. Visual impairment and impaired hearing are both factors in social isolation for all age groups. Many of the old people I’ve spoken to have mentioned hearing loss as presenting significant difficulties.

Eighty-year-old Philippa, now living voluntarily in aged care following her recovery from a serious stroke, explains how she prefers to watch movies with subtitles. “But sometimes they’ll say that the subtitles can be really confusing for the people with dementia. So [I say] what about doing it for me, or people like me? And there’ll be a little bit of silence there.”

COVID only increased the difficulties for Philippa, and for countless others with diminished hearing, since most care-home staff have English as a second language and mask-wearing inhibits lip-reading. “Deafness is the hidden disability, and people are impatient,” Philippa says. “They get irritated when you ask them to repeat something.”

Blindness is perhaps even more isolating than hearing loss. But any disability or serious illness can set people apart. A diagnosis, such as cancer, leaves you feeling alone with your body, knowing no one can go through it for you.

Of course, we sometimes choose to enter states of constructive loneliness. These are usually temporary, and often looked forward to, such as retreats of various kinds, or creative residencies. Nearly all creative works are begun and finished during periods of productive aloneness. For writers and artists, solitary toil is the norm, but solitude lacks loneliness’s razor edge.

Outsiders in other lands

A side-effect of my loneliness in those far-off days was that it was when I began to write. But although I later returned to Australia, I never again lived in Sydney. I was right to have sensed the collapse of that world, and though I have been back, it was never as someone returning home.

There is a loneliness to these losses of time and place that we can only absorb.

That no one, living or dead, shared my 22nd birthday is a grief with no possibility of resolution. It is related to the way our younger selves are forgotten with the passage of years. And to the fact children will never quite be able to believe in their grey-haired grandmothers’ existence as young women in miniskirts and skinny-rib jumpers, with painted-on “Twiggy” eyelashes and platform shoes. Not even when we show them the photographs.

These are states of irredeemable loneliness, when what we mourn is who we once were.

My second period of great isolation was a long stretch of years from my mid-thirties, when I agreed to move to an island on the other side of the world, into a culture very different to anything I knew. We shared a common language, but the local accent was so strong that every time I opened my mouth I was identified as “foreign”.

In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing, who is British, writes of being misunderstood in New York because of her “different inflection”. Laing quotes Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who she describes as speaking for all exiles: “The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.” As both Laing and I discovered, failing to make those adjustments marks one out as “a non-native, an outsider”.

I described my emotional state during those years as “ homesick ”, but I see now that homesickness is only another facet of loneliness. Like loneliness, which abates with connection, homesickness fades as soon as the sufferer reconnects with home.

But for those who become permanently displaced – through war, or natural disaster – what is lost with their migratory loneliness is not only the familiar faces and places of the past, but the identities that have been evolving over their entire life spans. They have to begin again to create their narratives, and there is acute loneliness in not being known for who we are, and for where we’ve been.

Jean Rhys and art forged in loneliness

Jean Rhys’s autobiographical-leaning novels reek of the migratory loneliness she endured after being sent from Dominica, aged 16, to live with an aunt in England. Rejected from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art after two terms because of her inability to speak “proper English”, Rhys became a sometime chorus girl. She drifted into the same rootless, damaged and damaging existence – eked out in rooming houses and seedy hotels – as the heroines of her novels.

Wide Sargasso Sea , published when Rhys was 76 and all but forgotten in literary circles, was the culmination of her talent. A work both of genius and of long hard labour, it was also a complex fusion of Rhys’s life with literature: a lushly imagined prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre . In it, Rhys channelled her experience of the particular suffering of exile into the character of the young Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway, the first Mrs Rochester.

Following an arranged marriage to an unnamed Englishman who is desperate for her dowry, Antoinette’s journey from post-slavery Jamaica to incarceration in the attic at Thornfield Hall is only marginally more dramatic than Rhys’s own trajectory from Dominica to Devon. It was a route that took her via Paris, London, and latterly Cornwall, with a brief stay in Holloway Prison, charged with assault.

During the writing of her masterpiece, Rhys was living a lonely, poverty-stricken, alcohol-fuelled existence in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine. Continually at odds with her neighbours, she was thought by local children to be a witch. Daily life could hardly have been more bleak.

But as Olivia Laing observes in The Lonely City, “many marvellous things have emerged […] things forged in loneliness, but also things that function to redeem it”. With the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys’s life did change for the better, just when she needed it most, despite her bitter response that success had come too late.

So what measures can we take to shore up our lives against future loneliness? Is forewarned forearmed? By looking ahead and accepting the possibility loneliness might come knocking, we could work harder at building new friendships. We could introduce more sociability into our lives before we even really need it: by volunteering, or embracing a group activity such as a walking club, a choir, or by taking a class.

Recently, delivering a bundle of bedding to the Salvos, I was directed to a receiving area, where all the people in sight within the cavernous warehouse were elderly. A small army of them was receiving and sorting donations. In another part of the building, other elderly volunteers were selling clothing and bric-a-brac. It is the same when I visit the Oxfam secondhand bookshop.

Voluntary labour largely goes unnoticed, but without it, most charities couldn’t function. By doing good for others, we could also be doing good for ourselves.

It helps, too, to remember there are people all around us who doubtless feel the same. We never know what is going on in the background of the lives we brush up against. A greeting and a smile could go a long way towards making someone feel that the world is not an entirely hostile place.

The company of books

I’ve managed my own lonely times by reading. A good book offers a world one can sink into and become part of. Books – and public libraries – can be places for the lonely to shelter. But reading is a solitary pastime. Ideally, if looking to treat loneliness through reading, one would join a book club or discussion group, so the activity can be shared.

Perhaps the surest antidote is to develop, if not a love of solitude, then at least a tolerance for it, and find ways to make our alone-time fruitful. As we age, we’d be wise to cling fiercely to the skills acquired over a lifetime and continue to develop them. We should also consider taking up new ones.

With typical melancholy and pragmatism, Murakami insists

the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It’s true for everyone. That being the case, there’s no reason to complain. And besides, who would we complain to, anyway?

Only ourselves, I suppose. But while recent statistics appear not to support Murukami’s assertion, there exists the possibility that older people are just more stoic, more habituated to their solitude and less comfortable revealing loneliness, even in an anonymous survey.

I ask myself as I write this: Am I ever lonely? The answer is, sometimes. Because writing is a solitary practice. It takes me out of the world for hours and days at a stretch. But I write in a house I live in with two other people, who I can go to at any time for company and conversation.

What if I were to lose them? The dark reality that shadows our small household’s happiness is that one day, I will – or they will lose me. What is to become of the one of us who remains?

Will they be as desolate as Eleanor Rigby? Will they listen through the too-long nights for Hank Williams’s lonesome train? Or will they mourn for a time, and then, sensibly, find ways to forge new connections?

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An Existential View Of Loneliness

By Tim Ruggiero

From an essay by Michele Carter, "Abiding Loneliness: An Existential Perspective," published by the Park Ridge Center for Health, Faith, and Ethics in Illinois.

"Many writers in the Western tradition portray...[the] existential form of loneliness as an unavoidable condition of our humanity. It resides in the innermost being of the self, expanding as each individual becomes aware of and confronts the ultimate experiences of life: change, upheaval, tragedy, joy, the passage of time, and death. Loneliness in this sense is not the same as suffering the loss of a loved one, or a perceived lack of a sense of wholeness or integrity. Further, it is not the unhealthy psychological defense against the threat of being alone, especially if being alone means we must confront the critical questions of life and death. Rather, existential loneliness is a way of being in the world, a way of grasping for and confronting one's own subjective truth. It is the experience of discovering one's own questions regarding human existence, and of confronting the sheer contingencies of the human condition. From an existential perspective, the lonely individual seeks to grasp some meaning in the face of life's impermanence, the angoisse of human freedom, and the inevitability of death. In his beautiful and tragic essay 'God's Lonely Man,' novelist Thomas Wolfe connects the intense loneliness of his own life to this universal aspect of humanity. He writes:

"For Wolfe, the experience of loneliness is neither strange nor curious, but 'inevitable and right' because it is part of the human heart. Just as the experience of joy is heightened by sorrow, loneliness, 'haunted always with the certainty of death,' makes life precious. Loneliness and death are thus inescapable facets of human existence, each ontologically necessary for a coherent human life.

"Loneliness is not the experience of what one lacks, but rather the experience of what one is. In a culture deeply entrenched in the rhetoric of autonomy and rights, the song of God's lonely man so often goes unvoiced and unheeded. It is ironic how much of our freedom we expend on power -- on conquering death, disease, and decay, all the while concealing from each other our carefully buried loneliness, which if shared, would deepen our understanding of each other."

Paul Tillich, in The Courage To Be , devotes many chapters to the issue of aloneness and existential anxiety. He offers this passage from one of Nietzsche's works:

Tillich writes, "These words reveal the other side of Nietzsche, that in him which makes him an Existentialist, the courage to look into the abyss of nonbeing in the complete loneliness of him who accepts the message that 'God is dead.'"

Loneliness, on this view, is an experience to be welcomed rather than banished, for it brings us face to face with two of life's most important questions: What is life really all about, and how should I use my freedom to define myself? The line about God "being dead" is another way of saying that all the pressure and responsibility for leading a meaningful life lie squarely on our shoulders. We, not God, decide what we become. We and we alone are the authors and governors of our moral life. This is what the existentialists mean when they say that existence precedes essence; it is this realization, too, that is the most frightening of all.

Loneliness brings us to the abyss Nietzsche describes, and forces us to make a decision. The temptation to eradicate unpleasant subjectivity is irresistible for perhaps most people, and they seek out any experience that will enable them to forget about it. There is always the sense of belonging that membership in a group can provide. There is an existential safety in living a "relevant" life, being connected to the power center of one's society, having a respectable job, a family, a few material comforts. This path is not in and of itself false: that would depend on the person. Many find meaning and fulfillment in just such a life. But that path may also be chosen as a result of seeing one's own freedom and individuality as a threat: some would rather turn away from a life that holds out the hope of affirmation and creativity than endure the existential insecurity that it requires.

There are those individuals, however, who peer into the abyss and do not cower. We think of Gautama who gave up an opulent life and family in his late twenties to travel the world alone in search of meaning. Or Thoreau who retreated to the woods for a few years so that he might gain a decent perspective upon the world. Or to any number of fictional characters: for instance, Lester Burnham in the movie American Beauty, who comes to grips with the fact that he has spent his adult life in an emotional and moral coma, and who chases what bits of meaning and beauty are still available to him in acts of rebelliousness. Or, still yet, to Christopher Reeve, who knew that the odds of returning to a normal and happy life were slim to nil, but who resolved to turn an awful tragedy into a quest to ferret out scientific solutions to such debilitating diseases as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

So loneliness, on this reading, isn't something to be shunned or afraid of: it is, rather, a possible catalyst for a more purposeful and engaging life, and an avenue for heightened self-awareness.

Further Reading

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Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms

Louise c. hawkley.

Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 940 E. 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

John T. Cacioppo

Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

As a social species, humans rely on a safe, secure social surround to survive and thrive. Perceptions of social isolation, or loneliness, increase vigilance for threat and heighten feelings of vulnerability while also raising the desire to reconnect. Implicit hypervigilance for social threat alters psychological processes that influence physiological functioning, diminish sleep quality, and increase morbidity and mortality. The purpose of this paper is to review the features and consequences of loneliness within a comprehensive theoretical framework that informs interventions to reduce loneliness. We review physical and mental health consequences of loneliness, mechanisms for its effects, and effectiveness of extant interventions. Features of a loneliness regulatory loop are employed to explain cognitive, behavioral, and physiological consequences of loneliness and to discuss interventions to reduce loneliness. Loneliness is not simply being alone. Interventions to reduce loneliness and its health consequences may need to take into account its attentional, confirmatory, and memorial biases as well as its social and behavioral effects.

Introduction

Loneliness is a common experience; as many as 80% of those under 18 years of age and 40% of adults over 65 years of age report being lonely at least sometimes [ 1 – 3 ], with levels of loneliness gradually diminishing through the middle adult years, and then increasing in old age (i.e., ≥70 years) [ 2 ]. 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 nevertheless. Loneliness is defined as a distressing feeling that accompanies the perception that one’s social needs are not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one’s social relationships [ 2 , 4 – 6 ]. Loneliness is typically measured by asking individuals to respond to items such as those on the frequently used UCLA Loneliness Scale [ 7 ]: “I feel isolated,” “There are people I can talk to,” and “I feel part of a group of friends.” The result is a continuum of scores that range from highly socially connected to highly lonely.

Each of us is capable of feeling lonely, and loneliness is an equal opportunity tenant for good reason. We have posited that loneliness is the social equivalent of physical pain, hunger, and thirst; the pain of social disconnection and the hunger and thirst for social connection motivate the maintenance and formation of social connections necessary for the survival of our genes [ 8 , 9 ]. Feelings of loneliness generally succeed in motivating connection or reconnection with others following geographic relocation or bereavement, for instance, thereby diminishing or abolishing feelings of social isolation. For as many as 15–30% of the general population, however, loneliness is a chronic state [ 10 , 11 ]. Left untended, loneliness has serious consequences for cognition, emotion, behavior, and health. Here, we review physical and mental health consequences of perceived social isolation and then introduce mechanisms for these outcomes in the context of a model that takes into consideration the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics of loneliness.

Loneliness Matters for Physical Health and Mortality

A growing body of longitudinal research indicates that loneliness predicts increased morbidity and mortality [ 12 – 19 ]. The effects of loneliness seem to accrue over time to accelerate physiological aging [ 20 ]. For instance, loneliness has been shown to exhibit a dose–response relationship with cardiovascular health risk in young adulthood [ 12 ]. The greater the number of measurement occasions at which participants were lonely (i.e., childhood, adolescence, and at 26 years of age), the greater their number of cardiovascular health risks (i.e., BMI, systolic blood pressure (SBP), total, and HDL cholesterol levels, glycated hemoglobin concentration, maximum oxygen consumption). Similarly, loneliness was associated with increased systolic blood pressure in a population-based sample of middle-aged adults [ 21 ], and a follow-up study of these same individuals showed that a persistent trait-like aspect of loneliness accelerated the rate of blood pressure increase over a 4-year follow-up period [ 22 ]. Loneliness accrual effects are also evident in a study of mortality in the Health and Retirement Study; all-cause mortality over a 4-year follow-up was predicted by loneliness, and the effect was greater in chronically than situationally lonely adults [ 17 ]. Penninx et al. [ 15 ] showed that loneliness predicted all-cause mortality during a 29-month follow-up after controlling for age, sex, chronic diseases, alcohol use, smoking, self-rated health, and functional limitations. Sugisawa et al. [ 18 ] also found a significant effect of loneliness on mortality over a 3-year period, and this effect was explained by chronic diseases, functional status, and self-rated health. Among women in the National Health and Nutrition Survey, chronic high frequency loneliness (>3 days/week at each of two measurement occasions about 8 years apart) was prospectively associated with incident coronary heart disease (CHD) over a 19-year follow-up in analyses that adjusted for age, race, socioeconomic status, marital status, and cardiovascular risk factors [ 19 ]. Depressive symptoms have been associated with loneliness and with adverse health outcomes, but loneliness continued to predict CHD in these women after also controlling for depressive symptoms. Finally, loneliness has also been shown to increase risk for cardiovascular mortality; individuals who reported often being lonely exhibited significantly greater risk than those who reported never being lonely [ 14 ]. In sum, feelings of loneliness mark increased risk for morbidity and mortality, a phenomenon that arguably reflects the social essence of our species.

Loneliness Matters for Mental Health and Cognitive Functioning

The impact of loneliness on cognition was assessed in a recent review of the literature [ 9 ]. Perhaps, the most striking finding in this literature is the breadth of emotional and cognitive processes and outcomes that seem susceptible to the influence of loneliness. Loneliness has been associated with personality disorders and psychoses [ 23 – 25 ], suicide [ 26 ], impaired cognitive performance and cognitive decline over time [ 27 – 29 ], increased risk of Alzheimer’s Disease [ 29 ], diminished executive control [ 30 , 31 ], and increases in depressive symptoms [ 32 – 35 ]. The causal nature of the association between loneliness and depressive symptoms appears to be reciprocal [ 32 ], but more recent analyses of five consecutive annual assessments of loneliness and depressive symptoms have shown that loneliness predicts increases in depressive symptoms over 1-year intervals, but depressive symptoms do not predict increases in loneliness over those same intervals [ 36 ]. In addition, experimental evidence, in which feelings of loneliness (and social connectedness) were hypnotically induced, indicates that loneliness not only increases depressive symptoms but also increases perceived stress, fear of negative evaluation, anxiety, and anger, and diminishes optimism and self-esteem [ 8 ]. These data suggest that a perceived sense of social connectedness serves as a scaffold for the self—damage the scaffold and the rest of the self begins to crumble.

A particularly devastating consequence of feeling socially isolated is cognitive decline and dementia. Feelings of loneliness at age 79 predicted “lifetime cognitive change” as indicated by lower IQ at age 79 adjusting for IQ at age 11, living arrangements at age 11 and at age 79, sex, marital status, and ideal level of social support [ 27 ]. This finding does not rule out a reverse causal direction; cognitive impairments may hamper social interactions, prompt social withdrawal, and thus lead to loneliness. Other studies, however, have indicated that loneliness is a precursor of cognitive decline. For instance, the cognitive functioning of 75–85-year-olds (as assessed by the Mini-Mental State Examination) did not differ as a function of loneliness at baseline but diminished to a greater extent among those high than low in loneliness over a 10-year follow-up [ 28 ]. In a prospective study by Wilson et al. [ 29 ], loneliness was inversely associated with performance on a battery of cognitive measures in a sample of 823 initially dementia-free older adults. Moreover, loneliness at baseline was associated with a faster decline in cognitive performance on most of these measures over a 4-year follow-up. This was not true of the converse: cognitive status at baseline did not predict changes in loneliness. In addition, incidence of Alzheimer’s disease (76 individuals) was predicted by degree of baseline loneliness after adjusting for age, sex, and education; those in the top decile of loneliness scores were 2.1 times as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those in the bottom decile of loneliness scores. Depressive symptoms had a modest effect on Alzheimer’s disease risk, but loneliness continued to exert a significant and much larger influence on Alzheimer’s disease than depressive symptoms when depressive symptoms were included in the model [ 29 ]. Overall, it appears that something about our sense of connectedness with others penetrates the physical organism and compromises the integrity of physical and mental health and well-being. What that “something” might be is the topic to which we next turn.

How Loneliness Matters: Mechanisms

The loneliness model.

Our model of loneliness [ 8 , 9 ] posits that perceived social isolation is tantamount to feeling unsafe, and this sets off implicit hypervigilance for (additional) social threat in the environment. Unconscious surveillance for social threat produces cognitive biases: relative to nonlonely people, lonely individuals see the social world as a more threatening place, expect more negative social interactions, and remember more negative social information. Negative social expectations tend to elicit behaviors from others that confirm the lonely persons’ expectations, thereby setting in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which lonely people actively distance themselves from would-be social partners even as they believe that the cause of the social distance is attributable to others and is beyond their own control [ 37 ]. This self-reinforcing loneliness loop is accompanied by feelings of hostility, stress, pessimism, anxiety, and low self-esteem [ 8 ] and represents a dispositional tendency that activates neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms that contribute to adverse health outcomes.

Health behaviors

One of the consequences of loneliness and implicit vigilance for social threat is a diminished capacity for self-regulation. The ability to regulate one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior is critical to accomplish personal goals or to comply with social norms. Feeling socially isolated impairs the capacity to self-regulate, and these effects are so automatic as to seem outside of awareness. In a dichotic listening task, for instance, right-handed individuals quickly and automatically attend preferentially to the pre-potent right ear. Latency to respond to stimuli presented to the non-dominant ear can be enhanced, however, by instructing participants to attend to their left ear. Among young adults who were administered this task, the lonely and nonlonely groups did not differ in performance when directed to attend to their pre-potent right ear, but the lonely group performed significantly worse than the nonlonely group when directed to shift attention to their non-prepotent left ear [ 30 ]. In other words, automatic attentional processes may be unimpaired, but effortful attentional processes are compromised in lonely relative to socially connected individuals.

Of relevance for health is the capacity for self-regulation in the arena of lifestyle behaviors. Regulation of emotion can enhance the ability to regulate other self-control behaviors [ 38 ], as is evident from research showing that positive affect predicts increased physical activity [ 39 ]. In middle-aged and older adults, greater loneliness was associated with less effort applied to the maintenance and optimization of positive emotions [ 31 ]. Compromised regulation of emotion in lonely individuals explained their diminished likelihood of performing any physical activity, and loneliness also predicted a decrease in physical activity over time [ 31 ]. Physical activity is a well-known protective factor for physical health, mental health, and cognitive functioning [ 40 ], suggesting that poorer self-regulation may contribute to the greater health risk associated with loneliness via diminished likelihood of engaging in health-promoting behaviors. A related literature shows that loneliness is also a risk factor for obesity [ 41 ] and health-compromising behavior, including a greater propensity to abuse alcohol [ 42 ]. To the extent that self-regulation accounts for poorer health behaviors in lonely people, better health behaviors may be more easily accomplished in the actual or perceived company of others. Interestingly, animal research has shown that social isolation dampens the beneficial effects of exercise on neurogenesis [ 43 ], implying that health behaviors may better serve their purpose or have greater effect among those who feel socially connected than those who feel lonely. This hypothesis remains to be tested, but research on the restorative effects of sleep is consistent with this notion.

Countering the physiological effects of the challenge of daily emotional, cognitive, and behavioral experiences, sleep offers physiological restoration. Experimental sleep deprivation has adverse effects on cardiovascular functioning, inflammatory status, and metabolic risk factors [ 44 ]. In addition, short sleep duration has been associated with risk for hypertension [ 45 ], incident coronary artery calcification [ 46 ], and mortality [ 47 ].

What is less appreciated is that sleep quality may also be important in accomplishing sleep’s restorative effects. Nonrestorative sleep (i.e., sleep that is non-refreshing despite normal sleep duration) results in daytime impairments such as physical and intellectual fatigue, role impairments, and cognitive and memory problems [ 48 ]. We have noted that loneliness heightens feelings of vulnerability and unconscious vigilance for social threat, implicit cognitions that are antithetical to relaxation and sound sleep. Indeed, loneliness and poor quality social relationships have been associated with self-reported poor sleep quality and daytime dysfunction (i.e., low energy, fatigue), but not with sleep duration [ 49 – 52 ]. In young adults, greater daytime dysfunction, a marker of poor sleep quality, was accompanied by more nightly micro-awakenings, an objective index of sleep continuity obtained from Sleep-Caps worn by participants during one night in the hospital and seven nights in their own beds at home [ 53 ]. The conjunction of daytime dysfunction and micro-awakenings is consistent with polysomnography studies showing a conjunction, essentially an equivalence, between subjective sleep quality and sleep continuity [ 54 ], and substantiates the hypothesis that loneliness impairs sleep quality.

In an extension of these findings, loneliness was associated with greater daytime dysfunction in a 3-day diary study of middle-age adults, an association that was independent of age, gender, race/ethnicity, household income, health behaviors, BMI, chronic health conditions, daily illness symptom severity, and related feelings of stress, hostility, poor social support, and depressive symptoms. Cross-lagged panel analyses of the three consecutive days indicated potentially reciprocal causal roles for loneliness and daytime dysfunction: lonely feelings predicted daytime dysfunction the following day, and daytime dysfunction exerted a small but significant effect on lonely feelings the following day [ 55 ], effects that were independent of sleep duration. In other words, the same amount of sleep is less salubrious in individuals who feel more socially isolated and, ironically, less salubrious sleep feeds forward to further exacerbate feelings of social isolation. This recursive loop operates outside of consciousness and speaks to the relative impenetrability of loneliness to intervention.

Physiological functioning

The association between loneliness and cardiovascular disease and mortality [ 13 , 14 , 19 ] may have its roots in physiological changes that begin early in life. As noted earlier, chronic social isolation, rejection, and/or feelings of loneliness in early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood cumulated in a dose–response fashion to predict cardiovascular health risk factors in young adulthood (26 years old), including elevated blood pressure [ 12 ]. In our study of young adults, loneliness was associated with elevated levels of total peripheral resistance (TPR [ 49 , 56 ]). TPR is the primary determinant of SBP until at least 50 years of age [ 57 ], which suggests that loneliness-related elevations in TPR in early to middle-adulthood may lead to higher blood pressure in middle and older age. Consistent with this hypothesis, loneliness was associated with elevated SBP in an elderly convenience sample [ 49 ], and in a population-based sample of 50–68-year-old adults in the Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study [ 21 ]. The association between loneliness and elevated SBP was exaggerated in older relative to younger lonely adults in this sample [ 21 ], suggesting an accelerated physiological decline in lonely relative to nonlonely individuals. Our recent study of loneliness and SBP in these same individuals over five annual assessments supported this hypothesis. Short-term (i.e., 1 year) fluctuations in loneliness were not significant predictors of SBP changes over 1-year intervals, but a trait-like component of loneliness present at study onset contributed to greater increases in SBP over 2-, 3-, and 4-year intervals [ 22 ]. These increases were cumulative such that higher initial levels of loneliness were associated with greater increases in SBP over a 4-year period. The prospective effect of loneliness on SBP was independent of age, gender, race/ethnicity, cardiovascular risk factors, medications, health conditions, and the effects of depressive symptoms, social support, perceived stress, and hostility [ 22 ]. Elevated SBP is a well-known risk factor for chronic cardiovascular disease, and these data suggest that the effects of loneliness accrue to accelerate movement along a trajectory toward serious health consequences [ 20 ].

The physiological determinants responsible for the cumulative effect of loneliness on blood pressure have yet to be elucidated. TPR plays a critical role in determining SBP in early to mid-adulthood, but other mechanisms come into play with increasing age. Candidate mechanisms include age-related changes in vascular physiology, including increased arterial stiffness [ 58 ], diminished endothelial cell release of nitric oxide, enhanced vascular responsivity to endothelial constriction factors, increases in circulating catecholamines, and attenuated vasodilator responses to circulating epinephrine due to decreased beta-adrenergic sensitivity in vascular smooth muscle [ 59 – 61 ]. In turn, many of these mechanisms are influenced by lifestyle factors such as diet, physical inactivity, and obesity—factors that alter blood lipids and inflammatory processes that have known consequences for vascular health and functioning [ 62 , 63 ].

Neuroendocrine Effects

Changes in TPR levels are themselves influenced by a variety of physiological processes, including activity of the autonomic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) axis. The sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system plays a major role in maintaining basal vascular tone and TPR [ 64 , 65 ] and elevated sympathetic tone is responsible for the development and maintenance of many forms of hypertension [ 66 ]. To date, loneliness has not been shown to correlate with SNS activity at the myocardium (i.e., pre-ejection period [ 21 , 56 ]) but was associated with a greater concentration of epinephrine in overnight urine samples in a middle-aged and older adult sample [ 21 ]. At high concentrations, circulating epinephrine binds α-1 receptors on vascular smooth muscle cells to elicit vasoconstriction and could thereby serve as a mechanism for increased SBP in lonely individuals.

Activation of the HPA axis involves a cascade of signals that results in release of ACTH from the pituitary and cortisol from the adrenal cortex. Vascular integrity and functioning are beholden, in part, to well-regulated activity of the HPA axis. Dysregulation of the HPA axis contributes to inflammatory processes that play a role in hypertension, atherosclerosis, and coronary heart disease [ 67 – 69 ]. Loneliness has been associated with urinary excretion of significantly higher concentrations of cortisol [ 70 ], and, in more recent studies, with higher levels of salivary or plasma cortisol [ 71 , 72 ]. Pressman et al. [ 72 ] found that loneliness was associated with higher early morning and late night levels of circulating cortisol in young adult university students, and Steptoe et al. [ 71 ] found that chronically high levels of trait loneliness in middle-aged adults (M=52.4 years) predicted greater increases in salivary cortisol during the first 30 min after awakening (i.e., cortisol awakening response) such that the cortisol awakening response in individuals in the highest loneliness tertile was 21% greater than that in the lowest tertile. In our study of middle-aged and older adults, day-today fluctuations in feelings of loneliness were associated with individual differences in the cortisol awakening response. For this study, diary reports of daily psychosocial, emotional, and physical states were completed at bedtime on each of three consecutive days, and salivary cortisol levels were measured at wakeup, 30 min after awakening, and at bedtime each day. Parallel multilevel causal models revealed that prior-day feelings of loneliness and related feelings of sadness, threat, and lack of control were associated with a higher cortisol awakening response the next day, but morning cortisol awakening response did not predict experiences of these psychosocial states later the same day [ 73 ]. Social evaluative threat is known to be a potent elicitor of cortisol [ 74 ], and our theory that loneliness is characterized by chronic threat of and hypervigilance for negative social evaluation [ 9 ] is consistent with the finding that loneliness predicts increased cortisol awakening response. The relevance of the association between loneliness and HPA regulation is particularly noteworthy given recent evidence that loneliness-related alterations in HPA activity may occur at the level of the gene, a topic to which we turn next.

Gene Effects

Cortisol regulates a wide variety of physiological processes via nuclear hormone receptor-mediated control of gene transcription. Cortisol activation of the glucocorticoid receptor, for instance, exerts broad anti-inflammatory effects by inhibiting pro-inflammatory signaling pathways. Given that loneliness is associated with elevated cortisol levels, loneliness might be expected to reduce risk for inflammatory diseases. However, as we have noted above, feelings of loneliness and social isolation are associated with increased risk for inflammatory disease. This finding may be attributable to impaired glucocorticoid receptor-mediated signal transduction; failure of the cellular genome to “hear” the anti-inflammatory signal sent by circulating glucocorticoids permits inflammatory processes to continue relatively unchecked. We found evidence consistent with glucocorticoid insensitivity in our examination of gene expression rates in chronically lonely versus socially connected older adults [ 75 ]. Genome-wide microarray analyses revealed that 209 transcripts, representing 144 distinct genes, were differentially expressed in these two groups. Markers of immune activation and inflammation (e.g., pro-inflammatory cytokines and inflammatory mediators) were over-expressed in genes of the lonely relative to the socially connected group (37% of the 209 differentially expressed transcripts). Markers of cell cycle inhibitors and an inhibitor of the potent pro-inflammatory NF–κB transcript were under-expressed in genes of the lonely relative to the socially connected group (63% of the differentially expressed transcripts). The net functional implication of the differential gene transcription favored increased cell cycling and inflammation in the lonely group [ 75 ].

Subsequent bioinformatic analyses indicated that loneliness-associated differences in gene expression could be attributable to increased activity of the NF–κB transcription factor. NF–κB is known to up-regulate inflammation-related genes, and its activity is antagonized by the glucocorticoid receptor. Bioinformatic analyses also indicated a possible decrease in glucocorticoid receptor-mediated transcription in the lonely group, despite the fact that there were no group differences in circulating glucocorticoid levels. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that adverse social conditions result in functional desensitization of the glucocorticoid receptor, which permits increased NF–κB activity and thereby induces a pro-inflammatory bias in gene expression. Group differences in NF–κB/glucocorticoid receptor-mediated transcription activity were not attributable to objective indices of social isolation, nor were they explained by demographic, psychosocial (i.e., perceived stress, depression, hostility), or medical risk factors [ 75 ]. These results suggest that feelings of loneliness may exert a unique transcriptional influence that has potential relevance for health.

In an extension of this work, a recent study showed that feelings of social isolation were associated with a proxy measure of functional glucocorticoid insensitivity [ 76 ]. The composition of the leukocyte population in circulation is subject to the regulatory influence of glucocorticoids; high cortisol levels increase circulating concentrations of neutrophils and simultaneously decrease concentrations of lymphocytes and monocytes. In a study of older Taiwanese adults, this relationship was reflected in a positive correlation between cortisol levels and the ratio of neutrophil percentages relative to lymphocyte or monocyte percentages. However, in lonely individuals, this correlation was attenuated and nonsignificant, consistent with a diminished effect of cortisol at the level of leukocytes.

The precise molecular site of glucocorticoid insensitivity in the pro-inflammatory transcription cascade has yet to be identified, and additional longitudinal and experimental research are needed to determine the degree to which chronic feelings of social isolation play a causal role in differential gene expression. However, the association between subjective social isolation and gene expression corresponds well to gene expression differences in animal models of social isolation (e.g., [ 77 – 79 ]), suggesting that a subjective sense of social connectedness is important for genomic expression and normal immunoregulation in humans. Impaired transcription of glucocorticoid response genes and increased activity of pro-inflammatory transcription control pathways provide a functional genomic explanation for elevated risk of inflammatory disease in individuals who experience chronically high levels of loneliness.

Immune Functioning

Loneliness differences in immunoregulation extend beyond inflammation processes. Loneliness has been associated with impaired cellular immunity as reflected in lower natural killer (NK) cell activity and higher antibody titers to the Epstein Barr Virus and human herpes viruses [ 70 , 80 – 82 ]. In addition, loneliness among middle-age adults has been associated with a smaller increase in NK cell numbers in response to the acute stress of a Stroop task and a mirror tracing task [ 71 ]. In young adults, loneliness was associated with poorer antibody response to a component of the flu vaccine [ 72 ], suggesting that the humoral immune response may also be impaired in lonely individuals. Among HIV-positive men without AIDS, loneliness was associated with a lower count of CD4 T-lymphocytes in one study [ 83 ] but was not associated with the CD4 count in another study [ 84 ]. However, in the latter study, loneliness predicted a slower rate of decline in levels of CD4 T-lymphocytes over a 3-year period [ 84 ]. These data suggest that loneliness protects against disease progression, but no association was observed between loneliness and time to AIDS diagnosis or AIDS-related mortality [ 84 ]. Additional research is needed to examine the role of loneliness chronicity, age, life stress context, genetic predispositions, and interactions among these factors to determine when and how loneliness operates to impair immune functioning.

Future Loneliness Matters

Interventions for loneliness.

Six qualitative reviews of the loneliness intervention literature have been published since 1984 [ 85 – 90 ], and all explicitly or implicitly addressed four main types of interventions: (1) enhancing social skills, (2) providing social support, (3) increasing opportunities for social interaction, and (4) addressing maladaptive social cognition. All but one of these reviews concluded that loneliness interventions have met with success, particularly interventions which targeted opportunities for social interaction. Findlay [ 87 ] was more cautious in his review, noting that only six of the 17 intervention studies in his review employed a randomized group comparison design, with the remaining 11 studies subject to the shortcomings and flaws of pre-post and nonrandomized group comparison designs.

We recently completed a meta-analysis of loneliness intervention studies published between 1970 and September 2009 to test the magnitude of the intervention effects within each type of study design and to determine whether the intervention target moderated effect sizes (Masi et al., unpublished). Of the 50 studies eligible for inclusion in the meta-analysis, 12 were pre-post studies, 18 were non-randomized group comparison studies, and 20 were randomized group comparison studies. Effect sizes were significantly different from zero within each study design group, but randomized group comparison studies produced the smallest effect overall (pre-post=−0.37, 95% CI −.55, −.18; non-randomized control=−0.46, 95% CI −0.72, −0.20; randomized control=−0.20, 95% CI −0.32, −0.08).

Our model of loneliness holds that implicit hypervigilance for social threat exerts a powerful influence on perceptions, cognitions, and behaviors, and that loneliness may be diminished by reducing automatic perceptual and cognitive biases that favor over-attention to negative social information in the environment. Accordingly, we posited that interventions that targeted maladaptive social cognition (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy that involved training to identify automatic negative thoughts and look for disconfirming evidence, to decrease biased cognitions, and/or to reframe perceptions of loneliness and personal control) would be more effective than interventions that targeted social support, social skills, or social access. Moderational analyses of the randomized group comparison studies supported our hypothesis: the effect size for social cognition interventions (−0.60, 95% CI −0.96, −0.23, N = 4) was significantly larger than the effect size for social support (−0.16, 95% CI −0.27, −0.06, N =12), social skills (0.02, 95% CI −0.24, 0.28, N =2), and social access (−0.06, 95% CI −0.35, 0.22, N =2); the latter three types of interventions did not differ significantly from each other. The results for social cognitive therapy are promising, but this intervention type appears not to have been widely employed to date relative to other types of loneliness therapy. Moreover, existing social cognitive therapies have had a small effect overall (0.20) relative to the meta-analytic mean effect of over 300 other interventions in the social and behavioral domains (0.50) [ 91 ]. A social cognitive approach to loneliness reduction outlined in a recent book [ 92 ] may encourage therapists to develop a treatment that focuses on the specific affective, cognitive, and behavioral propensities that afflict lonely individuals.

Implications for Health

Reducing feelings of loneliness and enhancing a sense of connectedness and social adhesion are laudable goals in their own right, but a critical question is whether modifying perceptions of social isolation or connectedness have any impact on health. VanderWeele et al. (unpublished) recently examined the reduction in depressive symptoms that could be expected if loneliness were successfully reduced and found there would be significant benefits that would accrue for as long as two years following the intervention. Would a successful intervention to lower loneliness produce corresponding benefits in physiological mechanisms and physical health outcomes? The only extant data to address this question comes from a recent study in which 235 lonely home-dwelling older adults (>74 years) were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. In the treatment arm of the study, closed small groups of seven to eight individuals met with two professional facilitators once a week for 3 months to participate in group activities in art, exercise, or therapeutic writing. The control group continued to receive usual community care. Relative to the control group, individuals in the treatment group became more socially active, found new friends, and experienced an increase in feeling needed [ 93 ]. This was accompanied by a significant improvement in self-rated health, fewer health care services and lower costs, and greater survival at 2-year follow-up [ 94 ]. Feelings of loneliness did not differ between the groups, however [ 93 ], indicating that changes in loneliness were not responsible for improvements in health. According to our theory of loneliness, the interventions targeted by the treatment study would not be expected to influence loneliness dramatically because they fail to address the hypervigilance to social threat and the related cognitive biases that characterize lonely individuals. That is, group activities such as those introduced in this intervention provide new social opportunities but do not alter how individuals approach and think about their social relationships more generally. An intervention study of loneliness and health has yet to be designed that addresses the maladaptive social cognitions that make loneliness the health risk factor it increasingly appears to be. Beyond that, additional research is needed to determine the mechanisms through which successful loneliness interventions enhance health and survival, and to examine whether the type of loneliness intervention moderates its health benefits.

Conclusions

Human beings are thoroughly social creatures. Indeed, human survival in difficult physical environments seems to have selected for social group living [ 95 ]. Consider that the reproductive success of the human species hinges on offspring surviving to reproductive age. Social connections with a mate, a family, and a tribe foster social affiliative behaviors (e.g., altruism, cooperation) that enhance the likelihood that utterly dependent offspring reach reproductive age, and connections with others at the individual and collective levels improve our chances of survival in difficult or hostile environments. These behaviors co-evolved with supporting genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms to ensure that humans survived, reproduced, and cared for offspring sufficiently long that they, too, could reproduce [ 96 – 98 ]. Human sociality is prominent even in contemporary individualistic societies. Almost 80% of our waking hours are spent with others, and on average, time spent with friends, relatives, spouse, children, and coworkers is rated more inherently rewarding than time spent alone [ 99 , 100 ]. Humans are such meaning-making creatures that we perceive social relationships where no objectifiable relationship exists (e.g., between author and reader, between an individual and God) or where no reciprocity is possible (e.g., in parasocial relationships with television characters). Conversely, we perceive social isolation when social opportunities and relationships do exist but we lack the capacity to harness the power of social connectedness in everyday life. Chronic perceived isolation (i.e., loneliness) is characterized by impairments in attention, cognition, affect, and behavior that take a toll on morbidity and mortality through their impact on genetic, neural, and hormonal mechanisms that evolved as part and parcel of what it means to be human. Future interventions to alleviate the health burden of loneliness will do well to take into account our evolutionary design as a social species.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant R01-AG036433-01 and R01-AG034052 from the National Institute on Aging and by the John Templeton Foundation.

Contributor Information

Louise C. Hawkley, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 940 E. 57th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

John T. Cacioppo, Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.

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How to Cope With Loneliness

If you or a loved one are struggling with a mental health condition, contact the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline at 1-800-662-4357 for information on support and treatment facilities in your area.

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database .

Virtually everyone experiences loneliness from time to time. The feeling can be especially noticeable around the holidays, Valentine's Day , birthdays , and times of extreme stress.

The sheer number of adults in the United States who feel lonely is quite large—in a January 2020 survey of 10,000 adults by Cigna, 61% of those surveyed said they felt lonely. However, people don’t always talk about feelings of loneliness and don’t always know what to do with these feelings.

Other than being emotionally painful, loneliness can impact people in many ways:

• Depression : A 2021 study published in Lancet Psychiatry found associations between loneliness and depressive symptoms in a group of adults 50 years old and older. Research also suggests that loneliness and depression may feed off of and perpetuate each other.
• Physical health : Several studies have linked emotional stress with depressed immunity. Other research links loneliness and depression with poorer health and well-being. Therefore, people who are experiencing loneliness are susceptible to a variety of health issues.
• Physical pain : Research shows that the areas of the brain that deal with social exclusion are the same areas that process physical pain, adding a scientific explanation to the oft-romanticized experience of a "broken heart."

Are You Feeling Lonely?

This fast and free loneliness test can help you analyze your current emotions and determine whether or not you may be feeling lonely at the moment:

If you’re experiencing loneliness, there are some things you can do about it. Below are nine strategies for dealing with loneliness.

Join a Class or Club

Whether it’s an art class, exercise class, or book club, joining a class or a club automatically exposes you to a group of people who share at least one of your interests. Check your local library or community college as well as city parks and recreation departments to see what's available.

Joining a class or club can also provide a sense of belonging that comes with being part of a group. This can stimulate creativity, give you something to look forward to during the day, and help stave off loneliness.

Volunteering for a cause you believe in can provide the same benefits as taking a class or joining a club: meeting others, being part of a group, and creating new experiences. It also brings the benefits of altruism and can help you find more meaning in your life.

In addition to decreasing loneliness, this can bring greater happiness and life satisfaction. Additionally, working with those who have less than you can help you feel a deeper sense of gratitude for what you have in your own life.

Find Support Online

Because loneliness is a somewhat widespread issue, there are many people online who are looking for people to connect with. Find people with similar interests by joining Facebook or Meetup groups focused on your passions. Check to see if any apps you use, like fitness or workout apps, have a social element or discussion board to join.

You do have to be careful of who you meet over the internet (and, obviously, don’t give out any personal information like your bank account number), but you can find real support, connection, and lasting friendships from people you meet online.

A word of caution: Social media can actually increase feelings of loneliness and cause FOMO, or "fear of missing out" so be sure to check in with yourself if you're starting to feel this way.

Strengthen Existing Relationships

You probably already have people in your life that you could get to know better or connections with family that could be deepened. If so, why not call friends more often, go out with them more, and find other ways to enjoy your existing relationships and strengthen bonds?

If you're struggling to find the motivation to reach out to your loved ones, it might be helpful to start slowly. Come up with just one supportive friend or family member who you could imagine reaching out to. It's also reassuring to know that strong social support is beneficial for your mental health.

Adopt a Pet

Pets, especially dogs and cats, offer so many benefits, and preventing loneliness is one of them. Rescuing a pet combines the benefits of altruism and companionship, and fights loneliness in several ways.

It can connect you with other people—walking a dog opens you up to a community of other dog-walkers, and a cute dog on a leash tends to be a people magnet. Additionally, pets provide unconditional love, which can be a great salve for loneliness.

Talk to Strangers

An easy way to find connections in everyday life is by interacting in small ways with acquaintances or strangers you encounter. In fact, research shows that doing so contributes to our social and emotional well-being. So next time you grab a cup of coffee or see your neighbor on a walk, strike up a conversation. You might just find you feel happier afterward.

Do you have a smartphone that you frequently check while out and about? Think about putting it away a bit more. Whether you're looking up directions or checking the news while waiting in line, research suggests that technology can get in the way of social opportunities.

Practice Self-Care

When you're feeling lonely, be sure you're doing what you can to take care of yourself in other ways. Self-care is always a good idea, but especially when you are feeling down. Eating nutritious food, exercising, and getting enough sleep will only make you feel better in the long run. Bonus: Take a workout class or join a running club for exercise and social interaction.

Distract yourself from those feelings of loneliness and make a date with yourself. Do you have a hobby you've always wanted to take up or a home improvement project that's been lingering on your to-do list? Take some time to invest in yourself and your interests and keep your mind occupied in the process.

Press Play for Advice on Loneliness

Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares ways to stay strong even if you feel lonely.

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See a Therapist

Research suggests that loneliness and symptoms of depression can perpetuate each other, meaning the more lonely you are, the more depressed you feel, and vice versa.

Sometimes just “getting out there” and meeting other people isn’t enough. It's possible to still feel lonely when you’re around them, which could actually be a sign of depression or social anxiety. If this is the case for you, it may be a good idea to seek psychotherapy to help with feelings of loneliness, especially if you also feel other symptoms of depression .

Some forms of therapy, especially cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), can help you to change your thoughts as well as your actions to help you not only experience less loneliness but have more tools to prevent it. Whatever you do to combat loneliness, know that you are truly not alone, and there are many things you can do to feel more connected.

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Cigna. Loneliness and the workplace .

Lee SL, Pearce E, Ajnakina O, et al. The association between loneliness and depressive symptoms among adults aged 50 years and older: A 12-year population-based cohort study . Lancet Psychiatry . 2021;8(1):48-57. doi:10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30383-7

Achterbergh L, Pitman A, Birken M, Pearce E, Sno H, Johnson S. The experience of loneliness among young people with depression: A qualitative meta-synthesis of the literature .  BMC Psychiatry . 2020;20(1):415. doi:10.1186/s12888-020-02818-3

Vitlic A, Lord JM, Phillips AC. Stress, ageing and their influence on functional, cellular and molecular aspects of the immune system . Age (Dordr) . 2014;36(3). doi:10.1007/s11357-014-9631-6

Mushtaq R, Shoib S, Shah T, Mushtaq S. Relationship between loneliness, psychiatric disorders and physical health? A review on the psychological aspects of loneliness . J Clin Diagn Res . 2014;8(9):WE01-4. doi:10.7860/JCDR/2014/10077.4828

Kawamoto T, Ura M, Nittono H. Intrapersonal and interpersonal processes of social exclusion . Front Neurosci. 2015;9:62. doi:10.3389/fnins.2015.00062

Sandstrom GM, Dunn EW. Social interactions and well-being: The surprising power of weak ties . Pers Soc Psychol Bull . 2014;40(7):910-922. doi:10.1177/0146167214529799

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By Elizabeth Scott, PhD Elizabeth Scott, PhD is an author, workshop leader, educator, and award-winning blogger on stress management, positive psychology, relationships, and emotional wellbeing.

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How to Deal with a Fear of Loneliness

Last Updated: June 20, 2021 References

This article was co-authored by Chloe Carmichael, PhD . Chloe Carmichael, PhD is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist who runs a private practice in New York City. With over 12 years of psychological consulting experience, Dr. Chloe specializes in relationship issues, stress management, self-esteem, and career coaching. She has also instructed undergraduate courses at Long Island University and has served as adjunct faculty at the City University of New York. Dr. Chloe completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York, and her clinical training at Lenox Hill Hospital and Kings County Hospital. She is accredited by the American Psychological Association and is the author of “Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety” and “Dr. Chloe's 10 Commandments of Dating.” There are 8 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been viewed 11,957 times.

No one likes to feel lonely, but it is a part of life sometimes. You may experience loneliness from the end of a relationship, or just from spending an evening home alone. However, if you live in fear of loneliness and you do extraordinary things to avoid experiencing loneliness, then you may benefit from examining and then facing your fears. It might also be helpful to find some ways to enjoy your alone time more than you do now.

Examining Your Fear

• For example, do you worry about being lonely because of the negative feelings it will cause? Or do you worry about not achieving certain personal milestones because of being alone and lonely? Or, are you worried about what other people will think of you if you end up alone? What does loneliness mean to you? Why is it such a bad thing?

• For example, a fear of loneliness may cause you to book lots of activities throughout the week so that you rarely have to spend time alone. However, your fear of loneliness might be considered a phobia if it causes you to have severe distress or panic attacks when you are facing any time alone.

• One option is to turn unrealistic thinking into questions. For example, you might think to yourself, “I will be alone for the rest of my life!” To challenge this thought, you can ask questions about it. You might ask, “What is my evidence for that?” “Is this really a realistic outcome?” “What other outcomes are more likely?” [4] X Research source
• Another option is to use self-talk to reframe an unrealistic thought. You can do this by immediately responding to any unrealistic thoughts with more realistic thoughts. [5] X Research source For example, if you catch yourself thinking, “I will always be a loner,” then you might replace it with “I am kind, intelligent, and fun to be around. I can make friends if I want to.”

• You might even find that your friend or family member has experienced similar fears, which can be relieving and may provide you with some comfort.

• Engage in activities that you are good at. Doing things that you already know you can do well may help to boost your sense of self-efficacy. For example, if you are good at writing, then look for more opportunities to write. If you are good at running, then sign up for a 5K or half marathon.
• Control anxiety. Keeping your anxiety under control may also help you to feel more confident in your abilities. Try to focus on the positive in situations where you might feel anxious.
• Reflect on your successes. Looking back on times when you have succeeded at something may help to build your sense of self-efficacy. Try making a list of your past successes, such as graduating from high school, winning an award, or getting a promotion at work.
• Find someone to look up to. Having a role model can also help you to build self-efficacy. Try to find a peer or someone who is a few years older than you who has been successful in some way. For example, you might choose a coworker, a friend, or even a celebrity. Look at how they succeeded at what they wanted to accomplish and think about how you can model your behavior after their.

Facing Your Fear

• Deep breathing.
• Progressive muscle relaxation.

• Try to think of activities you tend to avoid due to a fear of loneliness and include these on your list.
• For example, the least frightening item on your list might be something like spending an evening at home alone, whereas the most frightening item on your list might be something like taking a long trip overseas by yourself. In between, you might list things like eating dinner alone in a restaurant, not having any weekend plans, or attending a party by yourself.

• For example, if you begin with something like spending an evening alone, then you might begin by just spending an hour or two alone to see how that feels. [13] X Research source Then, you might work up to spending several hours by yourself.
• Remember to use relaxation techniques to soothe yourself if you become anxious during the activity.

• There may be some things on your list that you cannot expose yourself to, such as a fear of living alone if you live with a significant other. However, facing the other fears on your list will give you some confidence and you may feel like you are better equipped to deal with those situations if and when you have to face them.

Finding Ways to Enjoy Alone Time

• You might even consider making a list of unfinished projects that you can pull out any time you are alone. This may help you to feel as though your alone time it an asset rather than a cause for despair.

• Taking a long bath.
• Giving yourself a manicure or pedicure.
• Enjoying a home facial.
• Trying out a new hairstyle or makeup look.
• Taking a nap.

• For example, if you enjoy reading, then you could use your alone time to start a new book. If you like to play an instrument, then you can use the time to practice and compose. If you are fond of cycling, then you can go for a long ride.
• Choose something that will help to satisfy a creative urge or that you think will help to give your life meaning. Try to avoid filling your time with mindless activities, such as watching TV.

• Meditating. Meditation is an excellent way to quiet your mind and get in touch with your inner self. Try starting out with a short five to 10 minute meditation and work up to meditating for longer periods of time.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ Chloe Carmichael, PhD. Licensed Clinical Psychologist. Expert Interview. 29 May 2019.
• ↑ http://www.helpguide.org/articles/anxiety/phobias-and-fears.htm
• ↑ http://blogs.psychcentral.com/weightless/2015/05/reframing-negative-thoughts-into-helpful-questions/
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cravings/201409/fake-it-til-you-make-it-positive-self-talk?collection=164978
• ↑ http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/affective/efficacy.html
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/flourish/201002/if-you-think-you-can-t-think-again-the-sway-self-efficacy
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/in-flux/201410/the-importance-being-alone
• ↑ https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love/201109/why-am-i-so-afraid-being-alone

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‘The Loneliness One dare not sound’: A Poem by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) wrote powerfully about loneliness and solitude, and perhaps nowhere more movingly than ‘The Loneliness One dare not sound’, a poem about a loneliness so profound that we can’t even bring ourselves to confront it for fear of being overwhelmed. This loneliness is ‘The Horror not to be surveyed — / But skirted in the Dark — / With Consciousness suspended — / And Being under Lock’.

The Loneliness One dare not sound— And would as soon surmise As in its Grave go plumbing To ascertain the size—

The Loneliness whose worst alarm Is lest itself should see— And perish from before itself For just a scrutiny—

The Horror not to be surveyed— But skirted in the Dark— With Consciousness suspended— And Being under Lock—

I fear me this—is Loneliness— The Maker of the soul Its Caverns and its Corridors Illuminate—or seal—

If you enjoyed ‘The Loneliness One dare not sound’, you might also enjoy our pick of Emily Dickinson’s greatest poems .

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Human Fear of Loneliness

The drive behind human existence can be effectively encapsulated by Norman Cousins who claimed that it was “the eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.” This can be achieved by either confronting or avoiding it. It’s known that for prolonged periods of isolation the mental faculties of human beings gradually begin to degrade. In modern society, it’s evident that individuals’ tolerance for solitude has significantly decreased thereby heightening individuals’ resistance to it. Although this is likely due to the common belief that individuals develop through cultivating relationships and that any form of solitude is unhealthy or unbeneficial.

However, psychologists emphasize why solitude is beneficial to human development and explain why individuals might resist it. This is supported both psychologically and quantitatively through research.

Some psychologists believe that individuals’ fear of isolation is rooted in the fear of oneself. Constantly socializing with others allows individuals to suppress upsetting thoughts by presenting a social persona; however, when removed from the restricting confine of others these darker aspects reemerge.

This is effectively described by Nietzsche who states that “it is what one takes into solitude that grows there, the beast included.” Some may overcome the beast, but many would succumb and be ruined thus Nietzsche believed that “many should be dissuaded from solitude.” According to Nietzsche, an individual who cannot confront the beast is constantly clinging to others stating that “one man runs to his neighbor because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to lose himself.

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Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison for you.” Although these individuals manage to avoid solitude, they become a crippled version of themselves.

For individuals to actualize their full potential, they need to fulfill Maslow’s meta needs (highest needs). This essentially refers to individuals’ drive for knowledge, beauty, and creativity. However, these needs require self-fulfillment. Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, reiterates this idea by stating that “it is impossible to get blood from a stone, to get spirituality from a physical being.” When individuals attempt to fulfill these needs through others in an intimate relationship it results in a God-like idealization of the partner and slavish dependence. “If the partner becomes God they can just as easily become the Devil; the reason is not far to seek … If you find the ideal love and try to make it the sole judge of good and bad in yourself, the measure of your strivings, you become simply the reflex of another person. You lose yourself in the other, just as obedient children lose themselves in the family. No wonder that dependency, whether of the god or the slave in the relationship, carries with it so much underlying resentment (Becker, The Denial of Death).” Here, Becker essentially emphasizes how an individual’s dependency causes them to be compliant to avoid abandonment and thus resulting in the formation of a false persona where an individual’s personality becomes a mirror reflex of how they think others want them to be. This was officially termed the False Self by Donald Winnicott. Winnicott claimed that individuals needed to develop “the capacity to be alone” to avoid such dependency. He believed that in the capacity to be alone, the false self can be broken down and individuals can recognize their true feelings and needs.

The majority of individuals today are prone to believe that the maturation of an individual’s psyche is facilitated by social relationships and has a profound role throughout their lives. Object attachment theorist, John Bowlby states that “intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or toddler or school child but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age.” However, Bowlby’s emphasis on interpersonal relationships dismisses the significance of solitude on personal growth. Anthony Storr in, Solitude: in a Return to the Self, argued that solitude cultivates creativity and thereby personal growth because “it is in the struggle to give form and order to an external creative work that we also, often without knowing it, are imposing form and order on our mind…maturation and integration can take place within the isolated individual to a greater extent … introverted creators can define identity and achieve self-realization by self-reference, that is, by interacting with their work rather than by interacting with other people (Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self).” Ultimately, emphasizes that individuals can attain self-actualization by developing a relationship with their work.

Although solitude is deemed to be beneficial from a psychological and philosophical approach, researchers claim that loneliness results in higher rates of mortality. A meta-analysis conducted by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues at Brigham Young University concluded that “social isolation results in a higher likelihood of mortality… Cumulative data from 70 independent prospective studies, with 3,407,134 participants followed for an average of 7 years, revealed a significant effect of social isolation, loneliness, and living alone on odds of mortality. After accounting for multiple covariates, the increased likelihood of death was 26% for reported loneliness, 29% for social isolation, and 32% for living alone.” However, it’s important to distinguish between solitude and loneliness. A study conducted by B. M. Barer and C.L. Johnson examined loneliness among 150 older adults and obtained both qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative data was obtained by asking participants to discuss their satisfaction with their social life. Using the Bradburn Affect Balance Scale to measure loneliness, Barer and Johnson concluded that “79% of the respondents were unmarried and 58% lived alone. Almost two-thirds were widowed; of those who had children, almost one-third had lost a child; and less than one-half had a surviving sibling. Even though 70% had some functional impairment that limited their mobility, few complained of being lonely. On a four-point scale, 54% reported never feeling lonely, 10% rarely experienced loneliness, 24% reported some loneliness, and only 12% reported frequent feelings of loneliness. The findings suggest that the respondents attach their meaning to being alone, and experience solitude rather than loneliness (Barer & Johnson, 1990).” Thus, it’s important for researchers to clarify the functional definition of loneliness in their experiment and how they are specifically measuring it. For example, feeling misunderstood or ostracized can be characterized as being lonely whereas solitude can correlate with negative emotions such as anxiety but not those of being cast out.

Solitude is important in the sense that it allows individuals to cultivate a character that is removed from any constricting external demands, and once this character has been established individuals will be able to maintain a form of independence in their relationships. This is encapsulated in Angelo Caranea’s article “Lessons of Solitude: the Awakening of Aesthetic Sensibility,” where he deconstructs and emphasizes the importance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy that “it is necessary to teach (individuals)… to retreat from society—at least for a while, until (they become) … self-sufficient or virtuous—so that (they) can then return it to enhance the general well-being or the good of all… (They) are not destined to remain solitary forever… (They are)… member(s) of society and must fulfill its obligations (Caranea, 2007).” Caranea notes that the reason “we suffer from solitude…is because there is a lack of true practice and true communication among us… we can only be of use to our community if we withdraw into solitude and begin, first, a pilgrimage of self-discovery, and then, re-enter the community to serve it selflessly and with silent integrity (Caranea, 2007).” Maintaining individuality is a method of serving that community. However, it is more likely to be achieved through self-imposed solitude than solitude imposed by others. Distinguishing these two scenarios is just as crucial as the distinction between solitude and loneliness.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in The Sorrow of Young Werther, stated that “there is nothing more dangerous than solitude.” However, the attainment of self-sovereignty over oneself and the cultivation of character can only be obtained by overcoming this darkness. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, advised that “…it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.”

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Fear of loneliness: An Analysis of Klara and The Sun

Introduction.

Klara and the sun by the Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro , published in March 2021. The novel is a dystopian science fiction work. Klara, the protagonist, is set somewhere in the USA. Klara, as an artificially intelligent robot and solar-powered, becomes a friend to a young girl named Josie, who’s genetically lifted and is more vulnerable to loneliness, disease, and death. This analysis discusses the fear of loneliness. To support this thesis, the essay will analyze the narrator Klara and the antagonist: Mr. Capaldi, and cloning Josie in Klara with a focus on social issues such as the social ranking system, and how artificial intelligence can master friendship skills and become a friend for a child, so she won’t be alone. 

Narrator: Klara

Klara is an artificial intelligence robot that is solar-powered. The novel starts when Klara as an artificial friend was standing behind a store frame glass and Josie, a sickly young 14 years old girl chose Klara to be her friend. This is because artificial intelligence is meant to help children like Josie to avoid loneliness. Josie comes from a wealthy family who could afford to get her a friend. Not only this, but Josie’s family could amend her genetics to achieve higher academic performance. The results would be that Josie ends up in eternal loneliness from private lessons online at home to a lack of social life and an absence of normal school life. Every morning, Klara wakes Josie up to meet her mother before going to work. Klara tries to be a good friend to Josie and she believes that the sun can cure diseases, so she makes sure to watch the sun from the window of Josie and Josie’s room every day and in the evening together with Josie. They watch the sunset together. Klara is smart and she uses her skills to gather information to learn how to better serve Josie. She can understand Josie’s feelings even though Josie doesn’t show them. “Klara reveals the AF’s capacity for feelings” (6) 

The novel tells us that Klara can analyze the combinations with remarkable accuracy. When Josie gets sick, Klara begs for the sun to heal Josie, Klara believes in the sun and its powers to heal sick people “a special kind of nourishment from the sun had saved them” (37). 

That’s what the novel told us in the beginning when Klara was in the store. While she noticed that the sun heals a beggar man with his dog. Here appears another theme which is that faith stands in contrast with science. Science says that children who are genetically modified are exposed to sickness and can die but Klara proves that the sun is a great source of power that can heal Josie. In the garden next to Josie’s home, there was a machine that generates smoke which blocks the sunlight according to Klara. Klara called this machine ”the Cootings” and it decided to destroy it. To do this, it asks Rick for help “You keep saying it’s important. Important for Josie. So yes, I’d like to help.” (158) The meaning of faith is obvious here. That is, Rick believes in Klara and therefore, he helps Klara.

Thereafter, Josie starts recovering and starts at the university. The novel shows us another fear from Melania the housekeeper in Josie’s home “It remains hard not to believe Melania Housekeeper was opposed from the start to my presence” (51). It can be interpreted that Melania is afraid of losing her job by being replaced with Klara.

Relationship: Josie and Erik

During Josie’s sickness, Rick is a friend and a neighbor for Josie. He comes often to play with Josie. Rick is not from a wealthy family like Klara but rather he is a normal student who is not lifted. Josie and Rick share a love as Klara says. “I can see Rick is afraid Josie might become like the others” (89). Here, Klara tells that Rick is afraid for Josie to be like other students, who are like her because when Rick sometimes meets them at Josie’s home, he feels they are not normal, not like him. Rick and Josie worried about losing each other when they decided to go to different universities. Also, Rick’s mother, Helen, sends a message to Klara to tell Josie a message to persuade Rick to apply to the only university that allows a non-lifted student like Rick to study with talented students like Josie. Here, the novel shows the social classification as well as the fear of losing Rick and Josie’s relationship. Klara tells Rick about how the sun is important for Josie’s health. Klara begs the sun to heal Josie for her love, Rick “Perhaps the Sun may ask, ‘How can, we be sure? What can children know about genuine love?’ But I’ve been observing them carefully, and I’m certain it’s true.” (272). This is during Klara’s supplications for the sun to heal Josie.

Antagonist: Mr. Capaldi and cloning Josie in Klara

Well, Klara integrated with Josie as Josie is sick and Klara will become Josie if Josie dies. However, this is what Josie’s family aimed to do. Chrissy, Josie’s mother asked Klara “to be Josie, just for a little while” (103). Klara imitates Josie and talks exactly as Josie does. Then, Chrissy asked Klara to not say to Josie that she has imitated her. Klara tells Chrissy that she has hope and “Josie will soon become better” (107). Chrissy has a fear of loneliness and losing Josie as she lost Sal, Josie’s sister, before. Therefore, the cloning idea was to avoid Josie’s family’s loneliness if Josie died. Mr. Capaldi is the direct antagonist in the novel. His goals are purely technological and not humanitarian “There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klara’s of this world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now. It’s not faith you need. Only rationality.” (208) This becomes obvious when he meets Chrissy, Klara, and Paul Josie’s father, to explain that his research is not harmful, an attempt to create an android version of Josie and implant it in Klara. 

Fear of loneliness

All the characters in the novel work to avoid isolation, fear of loss, and hence, loneliness. Klara has been created to avoid genetically predisposed children like Josie feeling lonely. Klara is loyal in her work with Josie and makes sure Josie does not feel lonely. During the novel, Klara loves Josie.

Chrissy wants Klara to be a clone of Josie’s because she is afraid of losing Josie like she lost her sister and feeling lonely. Rick and Josie are afraid of loneliness and the loss of their love due to their choice to study at different universities. They parted at the end of the novel but kept in love with each other.

The novel leaves the reader wondering if it was the sun that healed Josie. One will never know for certain. The sun is a symbol that was used in ancient civilizations, as a symbol of God. We don’t know if the meaning of the sun here is the god and Klara is praying to the god for healing, and if the power of faith can heal, despite scientific research.

In the end, we find Klara telling the story from the scrap yard where she sits now. It is a sarcastic ending for an artificial friend. Ishiguro softens this with a visit from Klara’s retired manager, who expresses to Klara that she was lucky, lived in a successful home, and successfully fulfilled her mission. The fear of loneliness is clear during the novel and even the meaning of faith and love was Klara’s message during her job with Josie. Despite the widespread technology and the sciences of cloning, there still would be faith and love. Thus, technology can not eliminate it. We live, love, and share life with others regardless of whether they are living creatures or Afs. Klara cannot be Josie, but like Josie who’s lifted can be Klara. 

Source: Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the sun, 2021.

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How Pixar’s ‘Inside Out 2’ explains modern therapy culture

“Inside Out 2” is the latest Pixar summer entertainment juggernaut. It’s beautifully rendered, funny and thoughtful, as one might expect of Pixar, and delivers young viewers a positive message about remaining true to core values including loyalty, honesty and kindness. I went to see it with my three older kids, and we enjoyed it very much. Nonetheless, something about it left me troubled—saddened, even.

As in the first “Inside Out,” protagonist Riley’s emotions are represented by vivid characters, and tenets of psychology are creatively depicted through the dramatic action. In the sequel, Riley (now 13) grapples with new psychological challenges—specifically, the emergence of Anxiety as a powerful emotion—and has to learn to achieve psychic equilibrium over the course of a three-day ice hockey camp.

In the film, a structural addition to Riley’s inner landscape (distinct from the control room from which her emotions steer her, and the endless Amazon-style warehouses of her old memories) is the sense-of-self tree. It’s a pristine, sky-blue crystalline structure that resonates like a stringed instrument. Once Anxiety arrives in the control room, she and other newcomers—Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment—wrest control of Riley’s thoughts and behaviors and execute a coup, sending the longer-standing emotions into exile.

Anxiety is never presented as a villain; at worst she’s an anti-villain, obsessively intent on protecting Riley and steering her toward a specific vision of worldly success and safety. Nevertheless, the net effect of Anxiety’s interference is an unintentional moral corruption of the girl, symbolized by the warping of the sense-of-self tree into a jagged configuration in an ugly shade of orange.

Through conversations with my college-aged students over the years I have learned that Disney, and especially Pixar, loom large in their worldviews. Perhaps this should come as no surprise given the genius of Pixar’s first films, the sheer dominance of the House of Mouse in the culture at large, and the impressionable age of Disney’s target audience. It is no secret that Disney refers to its army of story and image designers as “imagineers,” and it is hard for me not to hear in the neologism echoes of Stalin’s notion of artists being the “engineers of the soul.” Which is to say: they decide what the dominant metaphors for the future will be, and whom or what they will serve.

The linguist and neuroscientist George Lakoff argues that we live primarily through metaphor —that it molds, imperceptibly, every aspect of our experience, including our sense of who and what we are, our relationships, and even how we perceive time and space. (A simple example from Lakoff is the concept of time as a moving object, bringing events toward us through space: “I can’t wait for the arrival of Christmas.”) Just as noteworthy is how wholly common metaphors blind us to alternative models of reality. Every new cultural age brings with it a new set of metaphors, which inculcate in us new models of what we are, what sort of world we inhabit, and what our goals should be. We become blind, without knowing it, to old ways of seeing and feeling.

Pixar’s dominant metaphors for the good often revolve around labor, and more specifically the modern corporate American workplace. The “Inside Out” universe is illustrative: Riley’s consciousness is structured like a TV control room that oversees a complex of cognitive functions, all staffed by vast numbers of low-level employees (like cleaners and construction workers). Or consider “Toy Story,” which depicts toys as essentially child care employees/therapists, with Woody as their manager, or “Monsters, Inc.” sees kids’ emotions (namely fear) as central to a high-tech monster economy. Even the more spiritual setting of “Soul” seems like a cross between a Silicon Valley campus and the Esalen Institute .

I don’t perceive Pixar as malevolently manipulative. But just as Anxiety mobilizes Riley’s unconscious to believe things that are “good for her,” no ill will is required for cultural products to blind us to other, maybe healthier ways of thinking. In the mid-20th century, the social theorist Philip Rieff conceived of three major types (or dominant metaphors) supplying Western civilization with its leitmotifs: Greco-Roman “Political Man,” followed by the Jewish and medieval “Religious Man,” and now the era of “Psychological Man.” In The Triumph of the Therapeutic—Uses of Faith After Freud , Rieff defines the latter two terms this way: “Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.”

There is an implicit loneliness in that word “pleased” that haunts me. Maybe it’s the etymological link to the Latin placare : to soothe or quiet oneself, having lost access to a divine that might offer comfort. Or perhaps it’s the implication that everything is destined to become entertainment, according to a model of the world as a set of commodities and services that one finds satisfactory or not. In the search for being “pleased” there is no role for sacrifice—no place for the heroic, and, ultimately, no sense of higher meaning that gives sustenance. Understandably, many are retreating ever further into a private self, with its private entertainments and self-contained wants and desires.

By the end of the film, Riley learns to shade the simplistic core beliefs of childhood (“I’m a good person”) with more nuanced, sometimes negative self-appraisals, such as the realization that she can be selfish, or even cruel. This more integrated sense of self is mature and realistic. Inside, Riley learns to accept herself warts and all, and “outside” she is embraced by her old friends and her new teammates.

It is a happy ending—triumphant, even. But the poignancy I felt upon reflection is that this ending is a “triumph” in Rieff’s ironic sense: a triumph of Psychological Man and of what we could call therapy culture. Riley is always fundamentally alone. Her sense-of-self tree grows toward no transcendent goal; it is rooted to nothing more lasting than the lifespan of her own psyche. Her ideals remain her own private achievements and pleasures.

So many of my students have everything going for them—talent, opportunity, drive—but something gnaws at them. If they are building a tree in their souls, how deep and strong are the roots? What is it growing toward?

In the wake of the critical and commercial success of the original “Inside Out,” its director Pete Docter (a Christian who has discussed his faith in America ) did not feel pleased. On the contrary, he experienced a strange emptiness. His next film, “Soul,” was about Joe Gardner, a jazz musician who finally achieves his dreams on stage, only to realize that meaning lies elsewhere—in spiritual life, predicated on seeing the divine in small things and communing deeply with others. (In Joe’s case, he takes a personal risk to coax an unborn soul into trusting that earthly life is worth living.)

I understand why Pixar would avoid proselytizing for any religious or transcendental perspective; this reticence is appropriate in a secular culture. But acknowledging the value of making sacrifices for a good that transcends the inward-looking sphere of pleasures and personal achievements is important. Talented minds are implanting ideals in the inner landscapes of our young. Let them invoke strong, connected root networks rather than elegant but solitary trees.

Colm O'Shea teaches essay writing at New York University. He is the author of the sci-fi novel  Claiming De Wayke  (Crossroad Press) and the academic monograph  James Joyce's Mandala  (Routledge). Visit him at  colmoshea.com . 

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Combating the Pandemic of Loneliness

The deeper meaning of kindness, compassion, and friendship..

Posted August 9, 2022 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• Understanding Loneliness
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• It is important to have relationships that allow you to disclose your authentic self especially during difficult times.

The last two years have been especially difficult for many people around the world. The direct and indirect effects of the coronavirus pandemic and response, including collateral damage, are still unclear. Complicating the process of completing an assessment, the World Health Organization, WHO, has advised that this global public health challenge is not yet over. 1 Moreover, it is unknown exactly when it will end.

What is clear is that COVID-19 has taken—and continues to take—a heavy toll. For instance, it has been reported that the pandemic has exacerbated the risk factors associated with suicidal ideation and behavior, as well as increased the prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders. 2

Lockdowns, social and economic disruptions, and sharp increases in unemployment have been some of the contributors that aggravated an already serious public health threat. In turn, the consequences stemming from them were compounded by a damaging societal climate marked by increases in social isolation , fear , domestic conflicts, financial or job losses, and other serious biopsychosocial risk factors. There is also evidence indicating aggravation of pre-existing mental health conditions, drug abuse or overdose, and diseases or deaths of despair since the beginning of the pandemic. 3

The challenges experienced in recent years have created a perfect storm of extreme stress and collective trauma for entire populations, leaving very few people untouched or unscathed by its reach. Most worrisome is the fading of hope and the inducing of a sense of despair among people who have been adversely affected. Moreover, the prevalence of loneliness, which is associated with despair, likely was exacerbated by the social distancing and isolation practices put in place. It should not come as a surprise that loneliness has even been described as a “pandemic” in its own right. 4

Against this backdrop, humanity needs to find a remedy for dealing with potential pandemic-induced psychological impacts, such as loneliness and despair. Good intentions notwithstanding, it is ill-advised to rely solely on medical specialists and other professional healthcare providers to confront the psychological and emotional impacts, alongside the physical effects, of the pandemic on their patients’ well-being. Adopting a screening protocol for loneliness by primary care physicians and allied clinicians, to be sure, can identify a patient in need of further consultation and intervention. Still, there are other ways to address loneliness at an earlier stage that can meaningfully engage the broader community of stakeholders in the process of reversing the fading of hope in the face of what appears to be inescapable suffering.

It is more important now than ever for human beings to practice kindness and reach out to others in acts of compassion and friendship . As the ancient Greek storyteller Aesop wisely advised in his fables, “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” Kindness is an act when trying to help others; it is closely related to another important human attribute, compassion , which is the ability to feel for another's suffering. Taken together, these qualities provide a platform for connecting with and supporting others in ways that can help to counteract the fading of hope and, in turn, uplift the human spirit. 5

Most readers will agree that difficult times show us who our true friends are. The confidence that someone will be there for us, spiritually and emotionally if not in person, during such times is grounding and helps us navigate through the fog of life’s many obstacles. In this regard, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote extensively about the notion and importance of true friendship as a determinant of “meaningful” living. His view stands in sharp contrast to the role of friendship in today’s socially networked world.

“ What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies .”—Aristotle

In this connection, what do you think Aristotle would have to say about the meaning of—and the path to—friendship that has come to popularize the new millennium? Have we perhaps gone too far in our quest for connection with others in a world that has become increasingly disconnected and lonely, even before COVID-19 entered?

The search for meaning is the primary, intrinsic motivation of human beings and is a megatrend of the 21st century. 6 From a meaning-centric perspective, where does friendship fit in? How might friendship help to reduce the prevalence of loneliness and despair that are now associated with the pandemic?

To be sure, there are more questions than answers, although there are some trends worthy of mention. For example, I recall an article in USA Today about a decade before the pandemic that addressed social media ’s influence on friendship. It concluded, “Just as our daily lives are becoming more technologically connected, we’re losing other, more meaningful relationships. Yes, we’re losing our friends.” 7

The joys of real human contact are being replaced by electronic stimuli and shallow “social connections” rather than the kind of true friendships described and espoused by Aristotle. There is evidence that while we have plenty of acquaintances, more and more of us have few individuals to whom we can turn and share our authentic selves, our deep intimacies, let alone have confidence that they will be there to support us in our time of need.

In his classic work Ethics , Aristotle offered the following ageless wisdom : “The desire for friendship comes quickly. Friendship does not.” It takes time and effort to build true friendships, relationships through which you are able and willing to disclose your authentic self—innermost thoughts, intimate feelings, sensitive vulnerabilities, and secret fears.

In today’s pandemic-driven world, many people seem to have drifted away from true friendships and a sense of “community” and, either by choice or out of necessity, are living lonely lives. It’s time to resurrect the meaning and value of authentic relationships with others through acts of kindness, compassion, and friendship. It’s time to begin the process by extending beyond ourselves and connecting meaningfully with others, especially those who are lonely and may have lost hope in themselves and humanity.

1. “’ COVID-19 is not over ,’” Tedros warns World Health Assembly. United Nations.

2. John A., et al. (2020). “ The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-harm and suicidal behaviour: update of living systematic review .” F1000Research. 2020 September 4; 9:1097.

Santomauro, D., et al. (2021), “ Global prevalence and burden of depressive and anxiety disorders in 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic .” The Lancet. 2021 November 6; 398 (10312):1700-1712.

Pirkis, J., et al. (2021), “ Suicide trends in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic: interrupted time series analysis of preliminary data from 21 countries .” The Lancet Psychiatry, 8(7), pp. 579-588.

3. For example, see: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on suicidal attempts and death rates: a systematic review. BMC Psychiatry

4. Lonergan-Cullum, M., et al . (2022), “ A New Pandemic of Loneliness ,” The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine , May 2022, Vol. 35 (3), pp. 593-596

5. For more insights into the topics of kindness and compassion, see: Pattakos, A. and Dundon, E. (2015). The OPA! Way: Finding Joy & Meaning in Everyday Life & Work . Dallas: BenBella Books, Chapters 4 and 5.

6. Frankl, V.E. (1992). Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy , 4th edition. Boston: Beacon Press, p. 105; Pattakos, A. and Dundon, E. (2017). Prisoners of Our Thoughts: Viktor Frankl’s Principles for Discovering Meaning in Life and Work , 3rd edition. Oakland: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, p. 175.

7. Vernon, M. (2010). “Is true friendship dying away?” USA Today , July 27, p. 11A.

Alex Pattakos, Ph.D. , is the coauthor of two books on the human quest for meaning, Prisoners of Our Thoughts and The OPA! Way .

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A Tip Sheet to Help Decipher American Politics

With the presidential campaign in a stretch of discord and profound uncertainty, here are a few pieces that provide understanding and context.

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By Damien Cave

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Damien Cave, the Australia bureau chief.

I had just passed through metal detectors at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Monday when I heard one of the security guards tell a colleague that the man who tried to assassinate former President Trump was an “antifa extremist.” It was a baseless claim, drawn from social media posts that falsely identified an Italian sports journalist as the shooter.

And for me, it was a sharp reminder: Welcome to America, land of divisions, home to extreme polarization and factual challenges.

I’ve been here for the past three weeks, for vacation and meetings with sources and colleagues. Coming back to the United States from Australia is always a bit jarring — the pace of news and life seems faster; the shopping aisles have more forms of processed foods; and people’s voices seem louder (mine included).

This time, though, the experience has been especially overwhelming as the American presidential campaign hit a stretch of violence, discord and profound uncertainty. I can’t claim to have any special insight or ability to explain what’s going on — when I joked with a politics editor that I was confused, he quickly noted that I was not alone — but I figured it might be useful to share a few pieces of journalism, mostly but not exclusively from The Times, that could be useful in the search for understanding and context. This is not a comprehensive list, of course, but a short, somewhat arbitrary tip sheet for those who (like me) may feel a bit confounded by recent events.

Trump Shooting

Along with rank speculation and misinformation about the shooter’s motives, there has been a lot of news coverage about the shooting on Saturday of Mr. Trump. But for the most comprehensive look at what went wrong in terms of security, watch The Times’s video investigation , which uses video and careful analysis to explain what happened, minute-by-minute.

For analysis of what the shooting could mean for American politics, don’t miss this article by Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, who wrote that almost immediately after the shots were fired, “Fingers were pointed, conspiracy theories advanced and a country already bristling with animosity fractured even more.”

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