Do these 5 things to ease your pain of loneliness

In this article, I want to share some of the tools you can use to get immediate relief from the emotional pain of loneliness. The five tools listed below will help you restore connection within yourself and around you. The first four help you to reconnect with your mind, your emotions, your body and your spirit and the last one helps you to reconnect socially.

1. Reconnect with your mind: Journaling.

Journaling is, quite simply, the act of writing down your thoughts on paper. This is a great grounding technique to help you organise, process, and understand your thoughts in a logical way. I often recommend my client to follow the below instructions in their journaling practice (and do this myself too):

· Write freely — write whatever you think and feel, without filter. You can be confident that on one else is going to read what you write.

· Keep writing for a week, so you can start to see patterns emerge, and give your brain a sense that you don’t have to get it all out or see the whole picture in the first session.

· Read back through all your entries from the past 7 days, as if you were reading a novel.

· Observe what you notice, paying particular attention to the following questions:

o Are this person’s thoughts about the world and relationships entirely true? It’s possible that some of the stories in our head do not entirely represent who we really are. Also, many that seem true could be an assumption that you make about yourself and others. Journaling and looking back at your writing is an opportunity to do that for yourself.

o Are you willing to see the situation differently? Can you be flexible with your assumptions and see the situation differently?

Doing the above will calm your busy mind, create a place (i.e. your journal) for your thoughts to exist safely on the outside, instead of needing to stay inside your mind. This helps you to create space in you to see alternatives, or question those thoughts.

2. Reconnect with your feelings.

Loneliness is often disguised under feelings of sadness, anger, or anxiety. When we feel lonely, we tend to focus on or enlarge those uncomfortable feeling. If this happens, it is important to reconnect with the whole emotional spectrum that you are capable of.

For this, one good method is engaging in creative activities. I am not talking about sitting in front of TV and binge watch horror or comedy movies. I am talking about activities that requires you to be present with your physical surrounding. Those could be activities that stimulate your five senses such as music, painting, dancing, gardening, cooking, craft, coloring, being in the nature etc.

When you engage with these activities, pay particular attention to your feelings. For instance, ask yourself, when you hear the birds, how do you feel? Write about those feelings as if you’re describing them to a 5-year-old. Then try to do another activity and write the feelings you’re experiencing, repeat the same process. Notice how many other types of feelings you have access to, even when you are lonely.

3. Reconnect with your body

Loneliness can be described as a physiological fight and flight response to a perceived external social threat. This manifests as a sense of alienation from our body — the body goes in hyperdrive, even when nothing actually threatening is present.

To reconnect with your body, and regain a sense of physical presence and safety, a good method is to go through a body scan and seek to locate your sense of loneliness. Close your eyes and pay attention to your physiological responses. Scan where your loneliness feelings are stored. Your body tells you exactly where the feeling lives. You may feel that they are located near your heart, or expressed as a tension near your neck, or a heaviness in your chest.

Once you have located the feeling, physical exercises or light movements therefore help to move the feeling and allow further healing happens. Alternatively, you can also engage in movement-based activities such as yoga or Tai Chi. Notice every move, and the associated feelings. How do you feel when you left hand is toughing your right hand and do you feel tension when you do so? Releasing tension from your body through movement will allow your stuck feelings of loneliness to move, and eventually dissolve away.

4. Reconnect with your spirit

Spirit is your soul. Imagine disconnecting with your soul. You become a zombie. Reconnecting with your spirit involves asking big and deep questions about your life. Essentially, this is about asking three core questions:

1. What matters to you most in life, that you can’t live without? (Your values)

2. Why do you do what do you? For instance, I asked myself often ‘why do I want to be a psychologist/ entrepreneur, etc. (Your purpose)

3. What life you want to live in 3, 5 and 10 years-time? (Vision) Close your eyes and visualize what you would like your life to be.

I suggest that you do this when you feel better after practicing 1 to 3. By then, you will have more cognitive space and emotional grounding for deep personal analysis, and imagining your future.

This step helps you reconnect with WHO YOU ARE, and anchor you. Awareness of the answers is critical in order to create a meaningful life for yourself and inspire others around you. Loneliness starts when there is no anchor within yourself, you simply go with what society tells you to be, do , and want, and then you realize that it’s not what you desire.

5. Reconnect with others

When we feel lonely, we tend to search for external support and understanding. I have seen my clients desperately want their loved ones and colleagues to understand them and hear them. When they feel that people around them do not ‘get them’, they start to question the quality of their relationships.

This may be happening to you too. Gradually, you may start to react to and process information in a way that perpetuates the difficulty of connecting with others. In order to overcome this, it is important to try and reconnect with others. As part of this reconnection, it is very important to remember that you are a complex human being and made up of many qualities, identities, strengths, gaps, values, etc. You have different parts of you, and are connecting with others through those various parts of you.

As a way to start the reconnection process, I recommend asking yourself these few questions:

1. Which part of yourself do you feel is being rejected/ not seen / misunderstood by others? For instance, it could be your ‘go getter’ self being often misunderstood by others as ‘aggressive’, or it could be your ‘nurturing self’, the part of you that cares for others so much, being rejected by others. Once you have identified which aspect of yourself you feel is being rejected, acknowledge that this part does not represent ALL of you. Even if it was true that this part of you is rejected, unseen or misunderstood, others are not rejecting the ENTIRE you.

2. How important is it that the above parts be seen by __________? (Fill in the blank, with the name of your significant others, colleagues, other people).

3. How can you help others understand the above parts of you?

4. Which parts of yourself are seen and appreciated by others? Can you connect with others through these parts even deeper? For instance, it could be your ‘geek’ part, the part of you that loves data, or the ‘innovative’ part, the part that you often come up with new solutions. Whichever it is — can this be the basis for reconnection?

When doing this, you might also remember that no one is perfect, nor has to be. As you reflect on the above questions, try to see if you could, for instance, renew a relationship that has disappointed you before by connecting along a different part of you? It might also be worth acknowledging that it is unrealistic to expect the whole world to understand every part of you — and that it is OK to focus on the people you care about, at least to start with.

As I said, no magic wand or quick fix here. As with any physical muscle, you need to do the work to boost your psychological fitness and combat loneliness. These are simple habits and routines. They are not hard in themselves, but they need consistency and discipline. In the same way that you can’t expect to go to the gym once, and get all your exercise for the year!

Book in a session with me if you would like to deep dive some of these techniques.