Chapter 1

Loneliness and Why You Feel It

IN THIS CHAPTER

Defining loneliness

Recognizing feelings of loneliness

Understanding why you feel lonely

Looking at the prevalence of loneliness

Millions of people worldwide experience loneliness. It’s so widespread that governments across the globe are implementing national strategies and action plans to tackle it.

It’s common to feel lonely at some point in your life. Although loneliness is a natural part of being human, when it strikes it can be particularly unpleasant. If you’re persistently lonely it can affect your mental health and well-being, and it can make you feel depressed, anxious, and insecure. It can also cause you to be more susceptible to physical health conditions such as heart disease and dementia.

But the good news is that loneliness doesn’t usually last for a long time, and even if it does, you can use several tactics to combat it and start to live a positive and happy life again. If you know someone you suspect is lonely and want to help them, or if you’re currently feeling lonely yourself, this book can offer perspective and strategies for overcoming loneliness.

For better or worse, as this chapter explores, you’re not alone in experiencing loneliness. Unfortunately, it’s a common issue worldwide. This chapter looks at what loneliness is and what it isn’t — in particular by clarifying the difference between loneliness and social isolation, which, contrary to popular belief, aren’t the same. It defines loneliness and examines the reasons behind those feelings.

What Is Loneliness?

Loneliness is an unwelcome and generally unpleasant emotional feeling that you get when you have a lack or loss of companionship. It happens when there is a discrepancy between the quantity and quality of the social relationships that you have, and those that you want.

Loneliness is categorized into two types: transient, and chronic.

Transient loneliness

In the short term, psychologists and neuroscientists don’t see loneliness as a problem but more of an indicator that a change is required. This kind of short-term loneliness, which often arises as a signal to make a change, is called transient loneliness.

Transient loneliness is temporary and can be the result of a life change. A number of life changes can cause you to experience transient loneliness. These can include changing schools, going away to college, starting a new job, moving to a new neighborhood, experiencing an empty nest when your children grow up and leave home, separating or divorcing, being recently unemployed or retired, or becoming a care-giver. Chapter 2 explains more about life transitions.

Although transient loneliness can be unpleasant, psychologists see it as an inherent part of human nature. It’s not necessarily problematic because it may prompt you to take action to connect with others and invest time and effort toward relationship building.

If you’re experiencing transient loneliness, it’s a good idea to work on it as soon as possible so that it doesn’t become chronic loneliness.

Chronic loneliness

Unaddressed transient loneliness can lead to chronic loneliness. Chronic loneliness can be more difficult to escape from, which means it can also be more damaging for your long-term health.

With chronic loneliness you start to develop negative perceptions of yourself and think that other people are negative toward you too. This can make you feel lonelier because you might be less likely to reach out to connect with others. This kind of chronic loneliness can lead to mental and physical health conditions, as I explain in Chapters 9 and 10.

Is It Loneliness Or Something Else?

It’s easy to mix up feeling lonely with being socially isolated, but they’re different. Assessing whether you’re feeling lonely or are socially isolated will help you decide which solutions are the most appropriate for you. You might be both socially isolated and lonely. If you are, there are ways to address that, too.

Experiencing social isolation

With social isolation, you don’t have any, or many, social ties with other people. This isolation is strongly connected to the quantity of contacts that you have. If you’re socially isolated, it means that you have a lack of social interaction. In any given week of the year, you don’t see, hear from, or talk to many, or any, other people.

Social isolation can be both voluntary and involuntary. You might choose to be socially isolated and actually enjoy it. If this is you, it’s fine. It’s okay to like being alone and to enjoy solitude, which I discuss later.

Because you can enjoy social isolation, it’s not necessarily something negative. But not everyone enjoys being alone, and you might find yourself socially isolated and unhappy about it. If that’s the case, the good news is that you can alleviate social isolation quite quickly. You just need to have more contact with other people. I provide some tips on how to connect with other people quickly in Chapters 5 and 14.

Loneliness is subtly different from social isolation. I mentioned earlier that social isolation is an objective count of your social contacts. Well, loneliness is more subjective. It’s a personal, unpleasant condition that arises when you have fewer, or different kinds of, social relationships than you’d like. Loneliness can emerge because the quality of your relationships is poorer than you’d like or because you feel that your relationships are subpar to those of your peers. Because loneliness is an unpleasant feeling, it’s always a negative condition, and it’s always involuntary. No one chooses to feel lonely.

Loneliness can take a little longer to resolve than social isolation because it’s based more on the formation of a bond with other people. But you’ll be pleased to know that you can create bonds to help you feel less lonely by following some simple steps in Chapter 5. And while you’re waiting for those bonds to form, you can rekindle your sense of belonging to places that you enjoy visiting. (See Chapter 15 for some quick tips.) You can also build your resilience to feeling lonely and stop that negative cycle of loneliness by improving the way you feel about yourself. I help you with techniques for accomplishing this in Chapters 13 and 16.

The measures of social isolation and loneliness that I provide here are designed to be a basic and quick assessment only. For a full assessment of your levels of loneliness, see Chapter 2.

Feeling lonely in a crowd

Although social isolation and loneliness are quite different, they’re also closely related. You can be both socially isolated and lonely. Or you can be socially isolated and not feel lonely. Likewise, you can feel lonely and not be socially isolated. This is where the phrase “feeling lonely in a crowd” comes from.

You might be surrounded by people, so not socially isolated, yet still feel lonely. When this happens it’s often because you don’t have meaningful relationships with the people you’re in contact with. (For more on meaningful relationships, see Chapter 14.) This could be for a whole range of reasons. You might not get along with the people you’re in contact with or not have anything in common with them. Or you might only have fleeting encounters with them, which makes meaningful connections difficult.

A classic example of people feeling lonely in a crowd is older people living in residential care. Just because all the residents are old and unable to live alone in their community anymore doesn’t mean they share common ground.

Here’s another example. Lydia is an 18-year-old tennis player who finds the world of tennis lonely. Her training partners are also competitors, so she finds it difficult to get close and make real friends with them. She decides to enroll in an art course at her...