What is it?
Loneliness is a purely subjective and individual experience, you can be continuously surrounded by friends and have plenty of socialisation and still feel lonely. This is because loneliness is part of your biology. Just as hunger is a biological response telling you that you need to see to your physical needs. Loneliness is a psychological response telling you that you need to pay attention to your social needs.
Over the last decades this feeling of ‘loneliness’ has become chronic for millions.
In the UK 60% of 18-34 year olds feel lonely regularly.
This response comes all the way back from hunter gatherer times and it acted as an indicator that told us how likely we were to survive. Natural selection rewarded our ancestors for working together and forming social connections.
Therefore the parts of our brains associated with socialisation evolved to help us recognise social signals from others.
In this period of history the needs of individuals were very different; looking after children, finding food and constructing shelter from the natural world was almost impossible to fulfil by yourself. So being alone meant a much harder life and potentially death if a predator spotted you alone. Our bodies combatted this issue by forming a neurological pathway that is very similar to the neural pathway responsible for physical pain, we now refer to this physiological response as social pain. Social pain acted as an early warning system for behaviour that would isolate you, our ancestors that experienced more of this social pain were increasingly likely to modify their behaviour and return to the tribe or group.
How does it work?
This mechanism worked for most of history, until modern times where this response is very easily triggered, when we may not even be in danger. Today we move away from our social groups for:
Most stumble into this by accident. We are busy! Filling our time with work, university, romance and maybe even games or Netflix. Sometimes, the easiest thing to sacrifice becomes time with friends. This can lead to chronic loneliness as we become more comfortable with the familiar, and struggle to form closer relationships with new people as adults, however, biologically we are still attuned to being with others in a classically social way.
The consequences...
The consequences of experiencing the stress caused by chronic loneliness can be very unhealthy, larger scale studies indicate that this can be twice as dangerous as obesity and as dangerous as smoking a packet of cigarettes every day, meaning:
- Faster ageing
- Cancer being more deadly
- Your immune system becoming weaker
Although the main danger comes from the fact that once this behaviour goes too far it can become self-sustaining.
Physical and social pain share the same mechanisms in your brain, both will end up feeling like a threat. The self-sustaining loop manifests itself by pushing your brain into self-preservation mode, warping your perception of others. You end up becoming more aware of other peoples expressions while becoming worse at understanding them. Perhaps recognising neutral faces as hostile and what they say as aggressive when they weren’t. Loneliness can make you assume the worst about other people’s intentions towards you, which may make you seem more socially awkward than you really are.
What can you do?
There are a few paths that you can take to address this feeling; if loneliness has become a strong feeling in your life, you can start by taking some time to 'simply recognise the cycle' that you’re in. Usually this manifests with:
-
Initially feeling a little isolated
- Feeling more tense and sad
- Making you focus on the worst of people’s behaviour
- Making your thoughts on yourself and others more negative
This cycle can spiral to be worse and worse, altering your behaviour, making you want to avoid social interaction and leading to this cycle becoming harder and harder to escape. This is often a slow process that leads to a severe and negative state of mind. The first thing that you can do is to identify the feeling, accept that loneliness is a perfectly normal feeling and that you do feel it. Absolutely everyone feels lonely at some point in there life, there is no shame in it.
'You can’t eliminate a feeling or just ignore it, but you can accept the feeling and address the cause'.
You can self examine experiences that upset you and think about what you focus your attention on. Try to see if you are focusing on the negative. For example, if you are having a conversation with a friend, maybe they said something that upset you, if you look back at the content of the conversation as if it were a transcript written on paper:
Then there are your thoughts on the world:
- 'Are you assuming the worst?'
-
'Are you entering a social situation and already decided how it will go?'
- 'Are you assuming others do not want you there?'
- 'Are you being defensive and trying to avoiding being hurt?'
Conversely:
- 'Can you risk opening up?'
- 'Can you give others the benefit of the doubt?'
- 'Can you take the risk in assuming that they are not against you?'
YOUR behaviour
- 'Are you avoiding people?'
'Are you pushing people away?'
'Have you become complacent with life?'
'Are you acting as if you are being attacked?'
- 'Are you looking for ways to avoid invitations until they stop?'
These questions can lead to incredible self-improvement, but introspection alone could not be enough. 'If you feel that you may not be able to solve your own situation, please reach out for professional help, this isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of courage'.
There are some fantastic things in modern life, but none of them are able to substitute that biological/physical need to socialise with other people.
Try this now...
Reach out today:
-
Write to a friend that you haven’t seen in a long time...
- Invite someone from work for a coffee...
- Call a family member that you haven’t spoken to in a while...
We are simply trying to exercise the parts of our brains that link to socialisation.
SOURCES
Emotional first aid – Guy Winch Ph D.
Loneliness human nature and the need for social connection – John Cacioppo & William Patrick
Loneliness – Kurzgesagt
