Loneliness – how it feels and ways to cope

(≈5 min read)

If you’ve ever felt it before, you’ll know that deep loneliness is one of the worst feelings someone can ever experience. Not only is it damaging psychologically, but it’s also incredibly bad for your body.

The scientific research on this is clear: one piece of research found that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, another that loneliness is twice as unhealthy as obesity for older people and another, after analysing nearly nine thousand women with breast cancer, found that compared to socially integrated women, socially isolated women were 64% more likely to die from breast cancer and 69% more likely to die from any cause.

So the burning question is this: why is loneliness so deadly?

To answer that, allow me to take you all the way back to the Stone Age. If you were an outcast back then, times would be real tough; no one to share food with, no one to hunt with, just desperately scavenging for scraps of food from the forest floor to survive off. The odds of impending death for a lonely individual would have been extraordinarily high.

And that, in short, is why we evolved to experience this painful emotion loneliness – to prevent us from dying. If loneliness made us happy, then we’d all be alone, not share resources and the entire human race would be wiped out. So instead we feel loneliness and that’s our brain signalling to us that if we don’t make a change soon and start being more social, things are going to get real tough.

Obviously, in this day and age, and thank god for this, solitude is not likely to result in imminent death. But our brain doesn’t know that. The evolutionary function loneliness serves has barely changed, and that’s why it’s so potent. We’re meddling with features of our consciousness that date way back to the start of humanity.

There’s a significant difference between being alone and feeling alone. There’s this widespread belief that being surrounded by people eradicates the chances of someone experiencing loneliness. That, however, is not true. 

Tips for coping with loneliness

Loneliness, when given the opportunity to manifest into something monstrous, can pull us from our daily lives and send us tumbling into the depths of a kind of hopelessness that in the moment might appear insurmountable.

It’s a feeling I’ve personally experienced and one that I’ve developed, over the years, multiple ways to cope with. It’s super important to note that these are not ways to eradicate the problem entirely; I’d go as far as saying that a complete solution is impossible.

But there are techniques you can use that might just help make the loneliness manageable, diminished enough such that you can function without it having a significant impact on daily life.

Realise you are not alone

One of the first thoughts that might hit you, when you’re all alone in bed, no one to talk to, no one to message, is the thought that this is a problem only you have to contend with. You can hear the party going on next door and you can hear your friend on the phone, laughing in the room beside you and you feel as though everybody out there, everybody but you has connection.

What you fail to realise, however, is that there is someone exactly like you, as you sit there alone, desperately craving for someone to talk to too. You are not alone and you’ll never be alone and this is not just a ‘you’ problem. It’s a universal problem.

There are all these millions of people out there desperate for connection just like you; you just need to find them.

Talk to someone

They say a bird trapped in a cage for a long time will prefer the cage to freedom.

We have a tendency to use loneliness as an excuse to justify even more time alone. Our brains deceive us into believing that just because we feel this way right now, that we’ll feel like this forever. But you won’t. This is just a phase, a phase that will soon end.

But to help it end sooner, there are ways you can and should help yourself. Please don’t view yourself as a helpless victim. Whenever you begin to feel lonely or sad or as if life is getting on top of you, you should always try to take some kind of action. Whether that be going to the gym or going for a walk or meditating, make sure you do something to ensure you don’t spiral down into that state of helplessness.

For loneliness specifically, the first thing to do is to force yourself to speak. It doesn’t matter to who, it doesn’t matter about what. But just go and find someone you trust and speak to them. Even if there’s no one in your life who you feel comfortable confiding in, there are plenty of anonymous helplines or online chat forums out there which you can turn to.

Your brain might tell you that no one wants to speak to you, that all attempts at connection will end up being pointless. But they won’t. In fact, there’s a very decent chance that the person you reach out to is feeling lonely and looking for connection too.

A few techniques you could use to help deal with unhelpful thoughts that might be preventing you from reaching out are mindfulness, meditation and ACT. I won’t go into the details here but I’ve written a whole article on mindfulness and meditation as well as one on ACT and regulation of emotion that might come in handy. I should reiterate though that everything I write is no substitute for professional advice – if you need external help, please get it.

But to sum up:

Do things to get better; don’t wait to get better to do things.

But be careful who you talk to

The worst thing you can do when feeling lonely is surround yourself with people who make you feel even lonelier. As Robin Williams said in the film ‘The World’s Greatest Dad’:

“I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.”

Although in the previous section, I highlighted the importance of reaching out, it’s super important that you only reach out to people that you can genuinely count on and trust. It can be easy, when you’re feeling ostracised and sad, to hang out with certain toxic crowds solely to mimic the feeling of belonging. If people make you feel worthless or alone, don’t continue socialising with them. Another quote by Robin Williams:

“Don’t associate yourself with toxic people. It’s better to be alone and love yourself than be surrounded by people that make you hate yourself.”

So be careful, don’t act out or do impulsive things just because you feel a certain way right now. How you feel in this moment will change. It’s inevitable. What you’re experiencing is nothing more than a temporary phase that will pass. It’s best, therefore, not to make permanent decisions you’ll later regret based on these temporary feelings.

A message to those of you who know someone who might be suffering

If you’re someone who’s reading this just to gain insight into the mechanics of loneliness and what it feels like, this section is particularly relevant to you. If you feel as if someone in your class or on your floor or in your workplace might be suffering, please don’t stand in silence like everyone else, pretending they don’t exist.

That person everyone is ignoring is a person too, a human with emotions and feelings and a family that loves them. The likelihood is they’re not trying to isolate themselves or seem inaccessible; they’re just struggling. So give them a chance. Try talking to them about anything. Just make an effort to try and get to know them and I promise you, more often than not, they’ll really appreciate that.

Not only are you making them feel better, but by showing compassion and kindness you’ll also be making yourself feel better too. There’s often so much concealed beneath the surface of an individual and to get access to all that kindness and wisdom, you just have to be willing to give people a chance, to make an effort when nobody else is.

The strange thing about loneliness

Loneliness is not a simple emotion to contend with, it’s a deep and complex feeling that’s often indescribable without resorting to some kind of metaphor or story-telling.

When we talk about mental health issues like loneliness or anxiety or depression, it’s often very difficult to describe exactly how we feel without utilising metaphor. We always feel like something but that something is often very difficult to pinpoint. There’s something much more powerful and relatable about giving an account in the form of a story or poem.

Fiction and poetry provide a way to transcend the nature of our current lives and live momentarily in someone else’s; feel what they’re feeling, experience what they’re experiencing.

And I feel like with a feeling as deep as loneliness, this was the only way to convey its contents in a way that helps people who have perhaps never experienced it that deeply, get a glimpse of what it’s like.