Loneliness and social isolation
When we read the definition of loneliness as issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it makes us feel incredibly sad. According to their definition, loneliness is a “feeling like you do not have meaningful or close relationships or a sense of belonging.” To lack meaningful or close relationships, to lack a sense of belonging, can be exceptionally damaging to a person’s mental health. Studies show there is a high correlation between loneliness and depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. This is one of many reasons why we have chosen to prioritize loneliness as an area of expertise.
Loneliness isn't a numbers game; you can feel lonely in a crowded room. Loneliness involves feeling emotionally disconnected from others, either because they don't care, respect, or understand you. So, loneliness is about the quality of our social interactions rather than the quantity. Another way of putting it is that loneliness is defined by a gap between your expectation for meaningful social connection, and the reality you experience.
When you are ready, you can book a free ten-minute telephone consultation. You can book this online here.
Explore Transform Counseling & Psychotherapy
Ridgewood, New Jersey
Loneliness isn't a numbers game; you can feel lonely in a crowded room. Loneliness involves feeling emotionally disconnected from others, either because they don't care, respect, or understand you. So, loneliness is about the quality of our social interactions rather than the quantity. Another way of putting it is that loneliness is defined by a gap between your expectation for meaningful social connection, and the reality you experience.
When you are ready, you can book a free ten-minute telephone consultation. You can book this online here.
Explore Transform Counseling & Psychotherapy
Ridgewood, New Jersey
Latest blog posts to help you with loneliness
(and the impact on your mental health)
(and the impact on your mental health)
“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
The U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has referred to loneliness as a public health epidemic, and yet people rarely admit that they are lonely or socially isolated. It seems that people are more willing to admit that they are stressed than to talk about loneliness and isolation. Despite the lack of discourse, research shows that many people are feeling lonelier and more socially isolated since the COVID-19 pandemic.
When we look at the quality of our relationships, we can often find the source of our loneliness. For example, we might be stuck in unhelpful patterns with our friends and family, unable to live authentically out of fear of rejection or judgment. To change this can sometimes require a deep dive into the expectations and assumptions that were given to us at an early age. Therapy is a wonderful opportunity to examine each expectation and assumption and decide whether we need to keep these or discard them, replacing them with something that is a better fit.
This is where a psychotherapist can help you with loneliness. We can help you to identify loneliness as one of the root causes of your mental distress, and then we can then help you to plan how you are going to tackle this. For example, as a result of working together, you might realize that you need to address the quality, not just the quantity, of your connections, so you can make informed choices to better protect your mental health.
Loneliness, social isolation, and shame
Often shame lingers around loneliness like a dark cloud. The United States is a country biased towards extroversion, so some might view social isolation as a “failing” or “weakness.” However, we see loneliness as an inevitable symptom of a society that has become more dependent on technology and less appreciative of the benefits of person-to-person interaction. At Explore Transform, we will help to de-stigmatize loneliness.
Aside from technology, loneliness and social isolation can also result from a lack of opportunity for adults to make and maintain friendships. One of the reasons for this is the way society is set up, with more resources focused on opportunities for children to foster friendships compared with resources for adults to do the same. Societal expectations also play a part in this, where the young are expected to spend at least a portion of their time and energy on making and maintaining friendships, whereas there are fewer expectations of an adult to do the same.
The slow rot of loneliness
Research shows that loneliness and social isolation can have a significant impact on your mental health because you lack the opportunity to feel supported when you are feeling stressed or down. When you are lonely and socially isolated, you are also deprived of the opportunity to have your feelings validated, so you don’t get a sense of what is proportionate or expected in the circumstances.
Loneliness and social isolation can lead to excessive rumination, where you are stuck in a loop of your own thoughts, without the chance for someone to offer alternative ways of thinking. They can help you to see where you might have missed certain key facts that might make things feel more manageable. In short, we all need some sort of outlet, and when we experience anxiety, depression, or symptoms of trauma, loneliness and social isolation can prolong or intensify your symptoms.
Because many people don’t admit to feelings of loneliness and social isolation, it can cause a slow and silent deterioration of a person’s mental health. Without others to catch them, a person can fall into a trap of their own thoughts and fears. Studies show that the more experiences we have, the greater likelihood our mental health will improve. Those varying experiences can include eye contact with others, seeing them laugh or smile, hearing reassuring and soothing tones from someone’s voice, or the gentle sway of their movement. According to Polyvagal Theory, this is part of a process known as co-regulation. In short, if the other person is safe and calm, offering facial expressions or vocal tones that are calming, then we are also likely to feel safe and calm in their presence. You can read more about Polyvagal theory here.
Loneliness and depression
When we work with our clients, often we have heard the following descriptions of loneliness:
“When I feel lonely, I feel flattened, without much interest in anything.”
“I hate it when I am lonely because I end up just drifting through life, without much to get me excited. I flick through social media, stare at the TV, and nothing engages me.”
"Loneliness sucks because I end up turning to people who don't deserve my time and attention. It's like eating junk food when I am starving. Then, when I fill my time with people like this, people whose values don't align with my own, it leaves no room for my kind of people. A vicious cycle."
“I used to look forward to the weekends, when I could hang out with my friends. But since everyone has got married off or had kids, I have become more and more isolated.”
“When I’m lonely, things just seem pretty grey, like someone has turned all the color off.”
“It’s the dull yearning of loneliness that gets me the most.”
“Loneliness is a painful absence, a longing for something just out of reach.”
“Emptiness. Quite literally, there is an emptiness in my life, and that is reflected in the lack of joy but also the lack of people I share values with.”
“Blah. That’s how loneliness feels. I feel blah, I drag my feet around life in a blah mood, and I hate it.”
Many of these accounts sound like depression, so it is no surprise that there is a high correlation between loneliness and depression. Depression is not just a bad day. Often, clinicians identify depression when feelings of flatness, dullness, irritability, sadness, and loneliness last for two weeks or more. There are other ways to identify depression, and it can look different for different people. If you think you might have depression, it is important that you share this with your clinician.
Loneliness, social isolation, and social anxiety
Assumptions can contribute to loneliness and social isolation, leading to social anxiety. For example, you might carry assumptions that the world is not safe, or others cannot be trusted. Or you might carry assumptions about yourself. If you have low self-esteem, you might carry self-defeating assumptions that translate into beliefs such as “I am worthless” or ‘I am never good enough.”
This negative inner critic can be a tough housemate to live with. Even when you are trying your best to manage this loneliness and social isolation, you can end up feeling like you are a “failure.” At Explore Transform, we will help you to identify a more compassionate voice so you can evaluate what is right for you, given all the circumstances. For example, you might accept that, for now, social contact can only be through video calls, rather than in-person contact with your friends and family. Or a telephone call to your friend once a week is better than no call.
When we have helped people work through social anxiety, it has been truly amazing to watch them gradually challenge these unhelpful assumptions and beliefs about themselves and the world around them.
Without these unhelpful assumptions and beliefs, it can take a bit of time to adjust to this new way of life. After all, you have based your life around these assumptions and beliefs, so there might be a process of grieving the loss of that old life. You might also need time to grieve the loss of opportunities you could have pursued if these assumptions and beliefs had not got in the way.
Loneliness, social isolation, and your “zones of influence”
As with most issues that we explore in therapy, we need to identify the “zones of influence” before we can clarify the goals of your therapeutic work. In other words, we need to identify the areas/zones of the issue that are under your control, and the areas/zones of the issue that are not under your control.
For the areas/zones of our loneliness that are not within your control, we can focus on reducing the symptoms of this distress. For example, we can create opportunities for self-care, so the loneliness does not feel so distressing. This might result in more work on your self-esteem, so you can accept that you deserve this self-care. Often, in therapy, these issues are inter-related.
Loneliness, social isolation, and trauma
Loneliness and social isolation can sometimes result from trauma. When you experience trauma, your nervous system can get stuck in the survival mode of "flight-or-flight" or "shutdown." In either state, it can be hard to maintain deep or meaningful social connections. For example, you might feel panicky in the "fight-or-flight" state, or you might feel numb or blank-minded in the "shutdown" state.
At Explore Transform, we are experienced in helping survivors of trauma to work through these symptoms of trauma. With the right help, you can learn about your nervous system and realize a sense of calm and safety when this is appropriate. At Explore Transform, we approach this work using a combination of Polyvagal Theory and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy). You can read more about Polyvagal Theory and EMDR here.
Loneliness and marginalization
Loneliness and social isolation can be a particular issue if you are part of a marginalized group. For example, if you are from the queer or trans community, you might have experienced discrimination which has left your nervous system in the survival mode of "flight-or-flight" or "shutdown." At Explore Transform, we are queer owned and run, so we understand what it is like to live within this community, and we know how important it is to find a place where you feel safe enough to share your experiences. However, we appreciate that every person is different, so we will work hard to view things from your own framework.
Are you lonely and socially isolated?
When a mental health clinician assesses someone, they will evaluate you for loneliness and social isolation. For example, how often do you explore your thoughts and feelings with people in your life, and do you have people to turn to in a crisis.
Any set of self-assessment questions is never going to serve as a substitute for a full clinical assessment. However, these can start you thinking about the subject of loneliness and social isolation. Use the scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is “not at all” and 10 is “always”:
The relationship between loneliness, powerlessness, and burnout
If you have read our pages on powerlessness or burnout, you may see that there is a fair bit of overlap between those two issues and loneliness. All three of these issues are closely related, all three can increase the likelihood or severity of mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, and so that is why we have chosen to specialize in those three areas. There is hope in this overlap: If you work on one (for example, loneliness), it is highly likely that you will see an improvement with the other two issues (powerlessness, and burnout).
As mentioned above, when you are ready, you can book a free ten-minute telephone consultation. You can book this online here.
Explore Transform Counseling & Psychotherapy
Ridgewood, New Jersey
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
The U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has referred to loneliness as a public health epidemic, and yet people rarely admit that they are lonely or socially isolated. It seems that people are more willing to admit that they are stressed than to talk about loneliness and isolation. Despite the lack of discourse, research shows that many people are feeling lonelier and more socially isolated since the COVID-19 pandemic.
When we look at the quality of our relationships, we can often find the source of our loneliness. For example, we might be stuck in unhelpful patterns with our friends and family, unable to live authentically out of fear of rejection or judgment. To change this can sometimes require a deep dive into the expectations and assumptions that were given to us at an early age. Therapy is a wonderful opportunity to examine each expectation and assumption and decide whether we need to keep these or discard them, replacing them with something that is a better fit.
This is where a psychotherapist can help you with loneliness. We can help you to identify loneliness as one of the root causes of your mental distress, and then we can then help you to plan how you are going to tackle this. For example, as a result of working together, you might realize that you need to address the quality, not just the quantity, of your connections, so you can make informed choices to better protect your mental health.
Loneliness, social isolation, and shame
Often shame lingers around loneliness like a dark cloud. The United States is a country biased towards extroversion, so some might view social isolation as a “failing” or “weakness.” However, we see loneliness as an inevitable symptom of a society that has become more dependent on technology and less appreciative of the benefits of person-to-person interaction. At Explore Transform, we will help to de-stigmatize loneliness.
Aside from technology, loneliness and social isolation can also result from a lack of opportunity for adults to make and maintain friendships. One of the reasons for this is the way society is set up, with more resources focused on opportunities for children to foster friendships compared with resources for adults to do the same. Societal expectations also play a part in this, where the young are expected to spend at least a portion of their time and energy on making and maintaining friendships, whereas there are fewer expectations of an adult to do the same.
The slow rot of loneliness
Research shows that loneliness and social isolation can have a significant impact on your mental health because you lack the opportunity to feel supported when you are feeling stressed or down. When you are lonely and socially isolated, you are also deprived of the opportunity to have your feelings validated, so you don’t get a sense of what is proportionate or expected in the circumstances.
Loneliness and social isolation can lead to excessive rumination, where you are stuck in a loop of your own thoughts, without the chance for someone to offer alternative ways of thinking. They can help you to see where you might have missed certain key facts that might make things feel more manageable. In short, we all need some sort of outlet, and when we experience anxiety, depression, or symptoms of trauma, loneliness and social isolation can prolong or intensify your symptoms.
Because many people don’t admit to feelings of loneliness and social isolation, it can cause a slow and silent deterioration of a person’s mental health. Without others to catch them, a person can fall into a trap of their own thoughts and fears. Studies show that the more experiences we have, the greater likelihood our mental health will improve. Those varying experiences can include eye contact with others, seeing them laugh or smile, hearing reassuring and soothing tones from someone’s voice, or the gentle sway of their movement. According to Polyvagal Theory, this is part of a process known as co-regulation. In short, if the other person is safe and calm, offering facial expressions or vocal tones that are calming, then we are also likely to feel safe and calm in their presence. You can read more about Polyvagal theory here.
Loneliness and depression
When we work with our clients, often we have heard the following descriptions of loneliness:
“When I feel lonely, I feel flattened, without much interest in anything.”
“I hate it when I am lonely because I end up just drifting through life, without much to get me excited. I flick through social media, stare at the TV, and nothing engages me.”
"Loneliness sucks because I end up turning to people who don't deserve my time and attention. It's like eating junk food when I am starving. Then, when I fill my time with people like this, people whose values don't align with my own, it leaves no room for my kind of people. A vicious cycle."
“I used to look forward to the weekends, when I could hang out with my friends. But since everyone has got married off or had kids, I have become more and more isolated.”
“When I’m lonely, things just seem pretty grey, like someone has turned all the color off.”
“It’s the dull yearning of loneliness that gets me the most.”
“Loneliness is a painful absence, a longing for something just out of reach.”
“Emptiness. Quite literally, there is an emptiness in my life, and that is reflected in the lack of joy but also the lack of people I share values with.”
“Blah. That’s how loneliness feels. I feel blah, I drag my feet around life in a blah mood, and I hate it.”
Many of these accounts sound like depression, so it is no surprise that there is a high correlation between loneliness and depression. Depression is not just a bad day. Often, clinicians identify depression when feelings of flatness, dullness, irritability, sadness, and loneliness last for two weeks or more. There are other ways to identify depression, and it can look different for different people. If you think you might have depression, it is important that you share this with your clinician.
Loneliness, social isolation, and social anxiety
Assumptions can contribute to loneliness and social isolation, leading to social anxiety. For example, you might carry assumptions that the world is not safe, or others cannot be trusted. Or you might carry assumptions about yourself. If you have low self-esteem, you might carry self-defeating assumptions that translate into beliefs such as “I am worthless” or ‘I am never good enough.”
This negative inner critic can be a tough housemate to live with. Even when you are trying your best to manage this loneliness and social isolation, you can end up feeling like you are a “failure.” At Explore Transform, we will help you to identify a more compassionate voice so you can evaluate what is right for you, given all the circumstances. For example, you might accept that, for now, social contact can only be through video calls, rather than in-person contact with your friends and family. Or a telephone call to your friend once a week is better than no call.
When we have helped people work through social anxiety, it has been truly amazing to watch them gradually challenge these unhelpful assumptions and beliefs about themselves and the world around them.
Without these unhelpful assumptions and beliefs, it can take a bit of time to adjust to this new way of life. After all, you have based your life around these assumptions and beliefs, so there might be a process of grieving the loss of that old life. You might also need time to grieve the loss of opportunities you could have pursued if these assumptions and beliefs had not got in the way.
Loneliness, social isolation, and your “zones of influence”
As with most issues that we explore in therapy, we need to identify the “zones of influence” before we can clarify the goals of your therapeutic work. In other words, we need to identify the areas/zones of the issue that are under your control, and the areas/zones of the issue that are not under your control.
For the areas/zones of our loneliness that are not within your control, we can focus on reducing the symptoms of this distress. For example, we can create opportunities for self-care, so the loneliness does not feel so distressing. This might result in more work on your self-esteem, so you can accept that you deserve this self-care. Often, in therapy, these issues are inter-related.
Loneliness, social isolation, and trauma
Loneliness and social isolation can sometimes result from trauma. When you experience trauma, your nervous system can get stuck in the survival mode of "flight-or-flight" or "shutdown." In either state, it can be hard to maintain deep or meaningful social connections. For example, you might feel panicky in the "fight-or-flight" state, or you might feel numb or blank-minded in the "shutdown" state.
At Explore Transform, we are experienced in helping survivors of trauma to work through these symptoms of trauma. With the right help, you can learn about your nervous system and realize a sense of calm and safety when this is appropriate. At Explore Transform, we approach this work using a combination of Polyvagal Theory and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy). You can read more about Polyvagal Theory and EMDR here.
Loneliness and marginalization
Loneliness and social isolation can be a particular issue if you are part of a marginalized group. For example, if you are from the queer or trans community, you might have experienced discrimination which has left your nervous system in the survival mode of "flight-or-flight" or "shutdown." At Explore Transform, we are queer owned and run, so we understand what it is like to live within this community, and we know how important it is to find a place where you feel safe enough to share your experiences. However, we appreciate that every person is different, so we will work hard to view things from your own framework.
Are you lonely and socially isolated?
When a mental health clinician assesses someone, they will evaluate you for loneliness and social isolation. For example, how often do you explore your thoughts and feelings with people in your life, and do you have people to turn to in a crisis.
Any set of self-assessment questions is never going to serve as a substitute for a full clinical assessment. However, these can start you thinking about the subject of loneliness and social isolation. Use the scale of 0 to 10 where 0 is “not at all” and 10 is “always”:
- At the moment, I feel lonely or socially isolated.
- I feel emotionally disconnected from the people in my life.
- I feel empty and lost.
- I feel like the people in my life don’t care, respect, or understand me.
- I don’t have enough people in my life for my needs to be met.
- I don’t have at least one person I trust enough to turn to if I need to.
- I feel uncomfortable admitting if I ever feel lonely.
- I spend more time on social media / online than I spend time seeing friends or family.
The relationship between loneliness, powerlessness, and burnout
If you have read our pages on powerlessness or burnout, you may see that there is a fair bit of overlap between those two issues and loneliness. All three of these issues are closely related, all three can increase the likelihood or severity of mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, and so that is why we have chosen to specialize in those three areas. There is hope in this overlap: If you work on one (for example, loneliness), it is highly likely that you will see an improvement with the other two issues (powerlessness, and burnout).
As mentioned above, when you are ready, you can book a free ten-minute telephone consultation. You can book this online here.
Explore Transform Counseling & Psychotherapy
Ridgewood, New Jersey