Facts About Loneliness

When was the last time you felt truly connected to another person? How about a group of people? Sometimes we can be in a room full of other people and still be distracted by creeping feelings of isolation. Feeling distant or misunderstood can quietly corrode our confidence and our wellbeing can suffer.

We can feel lonely even when we’re surrounded by people. If we feel emotionally or socially disconnected or unfulfilled by our closest relationships, we’ll experience loneliness. Even people who are in long-term relationships, work with others each week, or have supportive family can feel lonely. Loneliness is a state of mind that can cause us to feel distressed and to experience extreme discomfort, and studies show that the pain lonely people experience can cause them to have difficulties in self regulation, disrupt sleep quality, and can cause people to develop a negativity bias where it's more challenging to maintain positive emotions or to connect with others.

Loneliness hurts! This excerpt from the book, Lost Connections, highlights just how stressful loneliness can be: "Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol levels to absolutely soar - as much as some of the most disturbing things that can ever happen to you. Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack. It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger."

Not only is loneliness mentally stressful, it's unhealthy for our physical health, too. Even brief moments of loneliness impacts our immunity, increasing our risk for developing disease or getting sick. The stress loneliness put our bodies through can also increase our risk of cardiovascular disease by raising our blood pressure and increasing our cholesterol. There's evidence that these health concerns represent as great of a risk for our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity. Studies have concluded that chronic loneliness increases our risk of an early death by 14%. 

Alone we are vulnerable, but with brothers and sisters to learn with, we can grow and progress as one strong family! ​

Connect with Healthy resources

Shifting Away from Lonely Feelings

​If we're feeling especially lonely, there are many ways we can remind ourselves of our connection to this world. Every thought we have is meaningful, because we train our perspective with each thought. Our perspective is what creates our reality, helping us to contribute positively to the world around us. Are we looking at the world with appreciation? Or are we focused on what we don't have? Every time we express, whether it be speaking, writing, singing, or creating, we're contributing in a meaningful way to the world. Are we expressing in a grateful, positive, and empowered way? Or are we expressing in a frustrated, negative, and victimized way? Every expression has influence. Our words create sound waves that can positively or negative influence the other vibrational energy around us. Every choice we make and every action we take are not separate from the world. If we're acting nonviolently, reducing our stress, refilling our happiness, and extending our joy in all that we do, we're balancing the violence, stress, and suffering on the planet. When we choose to act in a way that is loving, kind, and gentle, we're creating peace in the moment we're in, and this is a miracle. We can be free of loneliness when we realize every thought, word, and action we take directly contributes to the energy in the universe, powerfully connecting us to all that is, in each and every moment.

List of Enjoyable Activities

Conscious Choices

Shifting to Positive Emotions

Relationship with Self

There will be times in our life when we have to be alone. Sometimes, we may be surrounded by other people and still feel an enormous sense of isolation. In these times, we can remember all love is organic, meaning we must constantly tend to our love or it will weaken. Just as we say thoughtful things, do kind actions, and create strong bonds with our friends and loved ones, we can nurture the relationship with our self as carefully as we would with someone very important to us. Just like in any relationship, when we act in a way that is loving, kind, caring, forgiving, and fun with our self, we naturally will find a deep, connective love. When we extend this loving-kindness to our self, we can enjoy exploring our unique skills, find fun in freeing our inner child, amply our creative brilliance, discover new talents, and find stability in the solidity of the intimate, evolving understanding we've built of our true self.

Deepen Your Understanding: When we practice mindfulness, we're never alone. A sangha is a community of people who practice mindfulness together. We don't have to physically be with our sangha to feel a loving connectedness with that community. Soothe loneliness by practicing with this Sangha Meditation, and know someone else in the world is meditating with you, right now in this moment.

Sangha Meditation

Finding Inspiration in Loneliness

When we’re feeling especially lonely, we can think of people we value or miss, and we can acknowledge three positive characteristics we admire about them. We can invite these qualities into our daily experiences to strengthen our own personality traits and to honor the people that we're separate from.

Practice: Visualize what you would look like successfully expressing each quality you value, inspired by people you look up to.
​Spend 5 minutes concentrating on how you’d look, feel, and what actions you’d do.