How to Deal with Loneliness
Posted on April 11, 2022 by Muunie Beard, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
We all feel lonely. It's sad, uncomfortable and isolating. How can we meet this loneliness in a new way and feel better?
Loneliness. It’s something we all experience, but doesn’t get a lot of lip traffic. Why? It’s uncomfortable, sad and a little embarrassing. It’s much more fun to talk about the times we feel connected and content.
But the richest opportunity to connect is through sharing the not-so-fun stuff. And after months of acclimating to not being able to go out and see friends or make new ones without anxiety, masks and safety precautions, loneliness and isolation have become central to our lives.
Even before the pandemic, many of us were already living isolated lives. I live alone in a studio apartment, my family is on the other coast and a lot of my professional life is solitary. We’ve been out of sync with the highly social, community-based environments we evolved in for a long time. And we feel this out-of-sync-ness on a daily basis in the form of chronic, low-level anxiety, an abstract feeling we don’t belong, a craving for deeper connection, purposelessness, insecurity, self-doubt, etc.
Loneliness also impacts our physical health. Our nervous systems simply work better and feel more at ease with the added security of someone else around. We wake up less throughout the night, we have a lower risk of developing chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, we secrete less stress hormones, and our blood pressure is lower.
So what can we do? Social media and digital interaction, lezbehonest, are unsatisfying diet substitutes that often leave us hungrier for the real thing.
Here are some ideas for combatting LONELINESS:
1. Touch yourself. I don’t mean masturbation…but I don’t NOT mean masturbation. Give yourself a deep and patient massage right where you need it. Caress your leg, arm or hands with a gentle, repetitive stroke. This will release some of the good chemistry we get when someone else does this for us.
2. Share something vulnerable on a phone call with someone you trust. The phone can’t give us touch. However, there is a lot of intimacy packed into pure vocal exchange. I like it because when you only have the sound of someone’s voice (as opposed to a FaceTime or Zoom), it actually allows you to focus on the humanness of their voice and open up more.
3. Snuggle yourself. Wear your comfiest clothes and surround yourself with pillows and blankets. Set yourself up for a sensory slam-dunk and allow yourself to delight in how it feels. The allowing is actually the hardest part. I double dog dare you.
4. Send me an email with your thoughts. I’ll read it and get back to you and then BOOM, we’re connecting.
