Understanding Loneliness: Causes, Effects, and Coping Strategies

[00:00:01]knots hear me uh just drop a message in the chat but I'm assuming I see no messages as of now so I'm allowing myself to continue um my name is Stefan yakish and I've written about loneliness for one and a half years now I've researched it for two years and well yeah I've been dipping in and out of loneliness for pretty much my entire life as I'm sure many of you can relate so before we dive in I just wanted to to share three uh short disclaimers the first one being this is a talk about loneliness and I'm not a mental health professional I'm also not a neuroscientist or psychologist so if you do seriously struggle with loneliness I recommend seeking out a mental health professional I'm just a normal guy who wanted to explore this feeling and wanted to feel less lonely um so the second disclaimer is is that I'm normally a writer and I typically have all this time to think about sentences and edit them and delete them and today I don't so this is very much going to be new for me and a bit bit freestyle but uh yeah we're gonna make the most of it and the third disclaimer is if you have any questions or if you hear anything that piques your interest um if you have the option to ask a question um I think it's the blue button on the bottom right and then I should be able to see it hopefully um so yeah I don't want this to be just something where I vomit words in your face and um yeah just be like a throwback to the to the covet Zoo meetings um but yeah I want to make this more like a discussion so I'll talk for 10 minutes 10 15 minutes and then there will be time to ask questions and have a conversation so this talk is called what nobody talks about loneliness because I always had the feeling that I was never taught about loneliness like we learn about all these subjects in school math economics you name it but loneliness is such a common and distressing feeling and yet nobody ever teaches us what it actually is how we should talk about it and how we can cope with it so today my my goal is to change that and even if you just like take away one tiny thing about loneliness than mine my goal will be achieved so today I want to share three things in particular with you that doing all my research on loneliness have erupted themselves as sort of some of the most useful um lessons and these are number one the loneliness formula which sort of explains why we feel lonely what loneliness actually is and how we can put it into words the second one is the loneliness Loop which explains why we get stuck in in Social isolation and why it's so hard to break free and also why loneliness sort of takes a toll on us and the third thing is sort of in how we can cope with loneliness like since it's such a difficult feeling to deal with what there is we can actually do so before we before I dive into the three points maybe some personal history um so in one of the loneliest times of my life I was living in Portugal and I'd moved there all by myself to to sort of try what it's like to be a full-time writer and it was strange because I was living in a house with 10 other people I had this great co-working space I went to daily and also I had some friends there um and general connections like I had a Portuguese class and yet it didn't feel like I had all these people around me like it was I've constantly felt lonely and so disconnected and that's really where I started questioning um and started thinking about like why why do I feel so lonely even though I have all these people around me and that has sort of brought me to what I now call the loneliness formula and the loneliness formula is based on some of the most acknowledged definitions of loneliness and that's essentially that loneliness is a distressing Feeling caused by the discrepancy between desired social connections and perceived social connections so if we convert this into a formula it would be loneliness equals desired connections minus perceived connections and the result of this equation would be the amount of loneliness we feel so the higher our desired connections and the lower our perceived connections this Gap in between is loneliness so the higher desired Connections in the lower RPC connections the higher levels of loneliness we're going to feel and this explains why I felt so lonely during that time in in Portugal because I had this extreme desire to get to know new people in in in in Portugal to learn the language to build a community to find new friends maybe find a partner and yet I felt none of that like I just had two high expectations but none of that really resonated with me none of those connections felt deep enough um I remember I had this one roommate and like one of my 10 roommates and he would just always greet me with um hey bro how's it going bro and then I was like yeah good and you and that was it but that just felt me longing for for more so this explains why we can be very much alone but not feel lonely like when we're happily alone but don't feel lonely we don't have a desire for connections and we feel we perceive enough connections from ourselves and the English language has a wonderful work for this which is uh solitude um and it also explains why we can be among other people and feel extremely lonely in fact I think that's where real loneliness strikes because the connection is almost there in front of you like it's it's right there you can grasp it but it doesn't really connect and this frustration really turbo charges loneliness so this brings us to Point number two which is the loneliness formula the loneliness formed the loneliness Loop is number two and the loneliness Loop is essentially the self-fulfilling prophecy that perceived loneliness like this feeling of loneliness will actually lead to social isolation and that's what makes it so tricky so to understand this some very brief evolutionary history of loneliness like why do we feel loneliness what's the purpose of loneliness and originally loneliness was nothing but a an incentive a motivator from from our mind and body to Signal us that we need social connections so loneliness is on the same hierarchy as hunger thirst breathlessness and physical pain loneliness is social pain and this social pain which all tells it after being rejected or you know after someone said something to us that hurt us we feel the social pain of loneliness and this pain lights up in the same brain regions as these other fundamental survival mechanisms like hunger pain physical pain thirst Etc so it's really a fundamental uh mechanism for humans but of course loneliness isn't as easy to be solved as hunger like when we're hungry we can just go to the fridge and grab something but loneliness is much trickier to deal with and so the question is what happens when we can't soothe this social pain like what happens when we when like in my case when I was in Portugal I was unable to make these really meaningful connections so that's where we enter the loneliness Loop and our our brain will sort of switch from this um organic like natural social bonding mode to more like a self-preservation mode because we've been disappointed by other people in the past and we don't want to feel this pain again it's just like you put your hand on the stove one on a hot stove once and you don't want to feel this pain again so instead the brain switches to self-preservation which um manifests itself as withdrawal and you know mistrust in other people and we read social like otherwise neutral social science as hostile social science so there was this one time in Portugal where my Portuguese teacher sent me this long message and she said basically that she can't give me Portuguese lessons anymore and that she was too busy with her job and she wished me all the best but my lonely mind at the time interpreted this as my Portuguese teacher hates me I was never good at Portuguese anyway and I should just give up Portuguese lessons and when I recently reread this text message I was overwhelmed by the kindness but I only recognize this kindness from my less lonely place so these negative biases will slowly project onto other people and we since we start trusting others less or withdraw ourselves from social situations other people will pick up on this and then they actually mistrust us because they can see oh this person is not really trusting us but then we only mistrust them and then things just us and it's so this vicious cycle and that's really the loneliness Loop where we where this mistrust feels to and this withdrawal feels to again to actual social isolation so if this all sounds a bit gloomy and hopeless and difficult then that's because it is because loneliness is really a challenging emotion and as we've seen it's really at the root of our um survival so what can we do about it um and I thought about this for a long time but I'm gonna what I'm gonna say here because in my articles I share some more practical advice but um I think today the one thing I want to share is to cultivate an awareness around loneliness and to see loneliness for what it is because loneliness is so stigmatized in in modern society and this leads to this only worsens the the the Baseline let's say of loneliness that's already there like add the stigma on top and that really makes you feel bad about feeling lonely so when we can start to see loneliness for for what it actually is which is just a survival mechanism and it's our mind telling us to to to reconnect I think that already strips away a lot from the from the scary that's built around loneliness and with that comes a better understanding of okay I might have these negative biases and and probably more prone to withdraw when I feel lonely but then it's about seeing that and still seeking out still not giving into that and yeah I realize this this all sounds a bit uh you know difficult and and not easy to grasp but yeah ultimately I think it just comes down to seeing the bias and then still overcoming it by seeing it for what it is which isn't a bias and not reality so if you just take one thing away from this then let it be that loneliness is not your enemy it's a natural response from your body from your mind that you have unmet needs and loneliness doesn't make you a worse person or anything else it's the opposite like loneliness is one of the most human things we can experience as humans which is a sign to be more social and to reconnect and that wraps it up for my initial talk about loneliness I'm hoping you learned something and now I would love to discuss a few questions if you have any um I see I can announce a q a here I don't know if that will a difference um otherwise until I see any questions oh now I see some I think they they didn't load a few a few moments ago um let me just scroll through them I see a question from Patricia here which is how much of a factor was inability to speak the language I suppose you refer to the time I was in Portugal and that that's a that's a good question because at first I convinced myself it wasn't um but at the time at the end of the of my stay in Portugal which was about seven to eight months I really noticed how that further increased my my perceived isolation because I was walking on the street and I was hearing people talking and I couldn't understand them and that always put this barrier between me and them which again increased this this this invisible wall of um connection I hope that answers the the question um okay I see a question here by um Luanda I hope I pronounced that correctly um I seem to not know what I want most of uh I seem to not know what I want most of the times when I'm among other people I get very frustrated and want to be alone however when I'm alone I tend to long for some company what seems to be the problem and how can I tackle it it's a great question um I think I I often ask myself something very similar um and I I think I can relate to this which is I think you're talking about this when I when you're alone in your um at home you feel this need to connect with others but then you you get among friends and and that's and then again you feel like you're out of place there and you would rather be home or among other people so if that's your question I understand correctly um I would say maybe the longest formula can help you so maybe you can ask yourself why do you have a like what is the desire you have when you're Alone um like is it that you want to be among like that you want like a community like a bigger group of people or that you want a close group of friends or a um romantic partner I think analyzing what it really is that causes the loneliness because there are different types of loneliness that can that can help um get a better grasp on what it actually is you need and then when you're among people it can help might help ask yourself like why they make why it is that you you don't perceive the connection um in my own experience this has often be that we don't really share the same interests or that we we've just lived apart from each other you know because sometimes we we enter friendships or relationships and initially it's it's carried by by you know a shared hobby or shared value interest but then we go on living life out of comfort like this and then eventually at least that one that's how it was for me I find myself in this relationship a few years later and then I realized oh this is not actually the person that I originally like befriended and then often it can't just help to to take a break from from from that type of person or group and really examine what it is that um that that it is that caused this loneliness I hope that somehow answers your your question um okay I see another comment from Elizabeth I think it's not a question it's just a comment um thank you very much um are there any other questions you might have um Dennis asks and this is where it gets self-indulgence if I have Twitter or something we can connect um no I don't have Twitter but I have a website and I write on medium so probably the easiest way is just to find me on medium it's just my name Stefan Japanese and then um I have all the options there to um to contact and and reach out to me other than that I if there are no further questions and you have some time left um I can I can perhaps delve into a question that I often ask myself when I started researching moonness which is um canned loneliness kill you because that's a very sensationalist headline that I've often started seeing and there's this it's probably the most famous study on loneliness um which which basically showed that loneliness is as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes they and let me just check if um anyway to wrap this up um my research like and then I when I started researching on this I think a more nuanced way to say this would be that chronic loneliness can kill can kill and what it what what actually is so dangerous about loneliness is not the loneliness itself but the prolonged stress it causes so I've already mentioned like the notice Loop and how it how we get constantly in these situations where we scan other people for hostility um and this is enormous stress for our body like we are constantly in a fight or flight state and this sort of wear and tear is what actually makes loneliness so dangerous and as a result we sleep worse and sleep less because evolutionarily in this self-preservation mode we had to stay up at night and we're just for ourselves but um this is just something else I wanted to add that loneliness can kill yes but only when it's chronic and even then it's it's not a like one strike punch I could say process that draws itself over many years and maybe on the good side any type of connection any type of human connection can break us out of this loneliness cycle and it's like a soothing bond for our health so multiple Studies have shown that um human connections Health relationships are the number one indicator for a happy and healthy life so I just noticed that my q a wasn't really loading and I see there are a lot of um a lot more questions that came in um and we have about four minutes left um so I'm just gonna try if I find one more question that I can answer by the way you probably won't see all the questions because I have to approve them first for some reason um so that that's why it might be but um confusing I think this is a great question um it's by Mania if writing and problem solving helped me with this challenge of loneliness um I think yes I think the more I wrote about loneliness and the more I started understanding it the more actually grasped what it actually is and it helped me realize that luminous is often kind of the same the same thing that happens in horror movies like what makes horror movies so scary is that we don't really know what's behind the mask or what this strange demon is that uh is having all these evil forces and the same it's with loneliness like all the stigma makes luminous so terrifying and society that tells us that we need to be constantly among these among great friends and have great relationships and that everything is just fun and um I guess the writing helped me to to really understand that's not that longness is not a a a horror movie it's it's a natural response and so yes I think that helped me a lot and also something else I can just as one last uh nugget I can I can recommend is actually just journaling about the feeling of loneliness just writing it all down what you what you feel and then re-examining that journal entry for truth like really scrutinizing it if this is the reality like oftentimes we we feel like we can feel like we're like unlovable or that we don't have any friends but most often this is just or always this is not reality this is just inside of our heads so really writing this out and scrutinizing it helps us get a better grasp on it I hope that answers your question and I see we're approaching 10 a.m eastern time so I hope you took away you learned something from this and thank you very much for attending I have another session at 10 30 a.m eastern time about minimalism so if you want to join me if you're free and also if you want to read more about loneliness um I will link my collection of Articles here um I hope yep I hope you can see that not just go on medium and search for my name and then you'll find the article so thank you very much for attending and