Loneliness
This is a blog I have wanted to write for quite some time. When the idea of including a blog on our website was first discussed I knew that loneliness was a subject I had to write about and considering the year we've all had I think it is even more important to speak about it now.
I can't pinpoint exactly when, but at some point in the early part of 2019 I realised I was lonely. Though the realisation of this was quite jarring, looking back it was a feeling that had been growing, not yet in my awareness, for some time. I was living alone for the first time and I was enjoying having the flat all to myself. Plus, most of my time was taken up with work and studying, so as my friends drifted away from Glasgow for various reasons I didn't really see any pressing need to be forming new social networks here. I could go and visit friends wherever they'd moved to if I wanted to see people. And I was around people all the time. How could I be lonely? But, I was.
This experience of mine is not unique. Even before lockdowns were a thing we were facing a crisis of loneliness in our society. According to a 2018 survey from The Economist and the Kaiser Family Foundation almost a quarter of adults in the UK and US say they often or always feel lonely, a lack of companionship, left out or isolated. The same survey found that one in five millennials feel like they have no friends. Another survey by AgeUK found that as many as 49% of older people (equivalent to over 5 million individuals) say their television or pets are their main form of company. And, a survey by the BBC found that over a third of people in the UK said that they often or very often feel lonely, with that figure rising to 40% in younger people. It seems incredibly counterintuitive that there are more of us and we are better connected than ever before and yet the number of people in our society feeling lonely is growing at an increasing rate.
What does it feel like to be lonely? Olivia Laing writes in The Lonely City:
“It feels like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do.”
Even more than hunger, loneliness is comparable to malnutrition, the lack of something we require to survive. Even the most introverted of us require at least some level of closeness and connectedness with other people. Solitude is not the same as loneliness, I have always been someone who needed my own space and time to myself, but that didn't feel lonely as I had friends around me that I could reach out to and see whenever any of us wanted. As I came to have less and less friends in close physical proximity this solitude changed into a feeling of isolation which I grew to feel trapped in.
Humans are fundamentally a social species, we evolved living in constant contact with other human beings. Like any other social animal, being isolated is an incredibly stressful experience for us. Being on the social perimeter is a dangerous place to be and our brains, like those of other social animals when in this position, go into a self-preservation mode. One result of this is that we become hyper-vigilant for perceived threats and this anxiety leads us to perceive more situations as potentially threatening. This is one of the ways we can come to feel trapped in loneliness; we know we need to reach out and form connections with other people, but reaching out becomes an anxiety inducing and dangerous feeling experience for us. So we turn inwards, we isolate ourselves further and reaching out becomes even harder. It is also how loneliness can persist even when we have people around us, our loneliness alienates us and prevents us from deepening our connections with others for a whole variety of reasons. That feeling of isolation creates a gulf between the lonely person and everyone around them.
Even while we sleep we are still in this hyper-vigilant state and research has shown that loneliness increases the number of micro-awakenings we have each night and lowers the overall quality of our sleep, which prevents us from using sleep to process our feelings from the day before causing emotions to build up; leaving us less well rested and able to cope with these feelings. This further increases the stress we are under and we know that levels of stress hormones such as cortisol are higher in lonely people. In his talk The Lethality of Loneliness, John Cacioppo discusses the many harmful physiological impacts that loneliness has on us. And, speaking of loneliness being lethal is not hyperbole. Some experts have gone as far as to argue that being lonely for a prolonged period is more harmful to a person's health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Added to this, as well as increased anxiety, prolonged loneliness brings with it depression and, not having people around us to help soothe this, our chances of reaching for potentially unhealthy coping strategies massively increases. For me this was smoking 15+ cigarettes a day; I smoked when with people to manage my anxiety and I smoked when on my own to cope with feeling isolated.
One of the most pernicious aspects of loneliness though is the stigma that comes with it. Even now admitting to having been lonely feels like I am revealing some dirty secret. When we are hungry or thirsty we don't tend to see these as indicators of some flaw in us, but often with loneliness we do. Rather than seeing loneliness as our body signalling for us to reach out, often it has us asking “What is wrong with me?” This puts us even more on the defensive, it becomes a secret to hide rather than a feeling to share and further compounds feelings of depression and anxiety by adding shame. Being lonely is not a sign of any flaw in us as individuals though. It is a normal reaction to feeling isolated from other people. Rather than criticising ourselves for feeling this way and hiding it from others it is a really important feeling to listen to.
The data I shared earlier in this blog is evidence that this is not a problem of a few lonely individuals, we are facing a crisis of loneliness in our society. And, for this reason, it is important that we recognise the ways that our systems are breeding loneliness One facet of this is the increasing numbers of us who are living alone and so spending more of our time boxed away from other people. A report by the Community Led Homes partnership, reveals that more than one third (36%) of those who live on their own say they feel lonely due to their living situation. Urban sprawl has also been credited by some as increasing loneliness as the distance between people even within the same town or city grows and casual meet ups become something that have to be planned in advance.
Our workplaces also contribute to loneliness; hotdesking in open plan offices, variable shift patterns and gig work have all become more common, meaning we are less and less likely to be regularly working alongside the same people and so have less chance to form meaningful relationships with co-workers that might give us some of the connection we crave.
An increasing reliance on technology is also a factor. So many of our social interactions have moved online (even outside of this pandemic.) One theme that emerged from the BBC's loneliness survey was that people who felt lonely tended to have more online only friends. This is not to say that online communication is something inherently bad, but it can increase our chances of feeling lonely and/or prevent us from recognising or acting on those feelings. I'm sure a great many of us over the past year have discovered the limits of online interactions. It gives us something, but it is in no way a substitute for the touch or even the presence of a friend or loved one. However, the stunted sense of connection we get from this is often enough for us to convince ourselves that we can't really be feeling lonely and to ignore the early warning signs. I believe online communication is also part of the reason why it is becoming less common for people to have relationships with their neighbours. If, sitting in our houses, we are able to talk to whoever we want through our phone or computer then there is less impetus to speak to our neighbours and so another potential source of connectedness or community is neglected.
There are a great many more systemic factors that contribute to the growing loneliness in our society and I am not able to list them all here, but the last one I would like to mention is what I see as a toxic individualism that permeates our culture. It is an attitude typified by the phrase “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” and not wanting to “burden” your friends and family by asking for any help or support. In my experience this attitude is actively damaging to mental health in all circumstances. It cuts us off from our main ways of dealing with pain or distress, which is to seek support from other people. All counselling fundamentally relies on the fact that speaking to other people about what we are feeling in a safe and supportive environment is an essential part of growing and healing from painful experiences. Mutual support and working together to overcome obstacles is the defining feature of being a human, it is how we came to be such a successful species. Yet, somewhere along the line we've been convinced to deny this aspect of ourselves; when it is us who need support or are facing an obstacle our society tells us to feel that needing support is a sign of a weakness in us. It's not. When our friends and loved ones are struggling we do not look down on them as being weak and the people who care about us will not see us as weak if we ask for their help. In fact, it is vital that we do ask for help.
I think it is important to end this blog by talking about what we can do to combat loneliness when we begin to feel it. Scanning through articles on loneliness on google there are a lot of suggestions to do things like extending the small interactions you have in your day-to-day life, such as saying a few extra words to shopkeepers, speaking to people at the bus stop, etc. and while these are all things that can help rebuild our confidence in social interactions and ease some of the gnawing feeling of isolation, ultimately this kind of surface level interaction is not what we are really seeking. Two things that I can say from my own experience were not helpful were spending more time online and dating. When I first noticed feeling lonely I threw myself into both and for me it just increased my feelings of estrangement, something that was also found by the BBC loneliness survey. Therapy can be useful, especially where loneliness has led to feelings of depression or high anxiety, but I think it too has the same issues as extending those small day-to-day interactions; it can help remove obstacles to ending loneliness, but it doesn't give us all that we are looking for.
Something that certainly can help though is getting involved with something bigger than yourself. Clubs, political groups, music groups, groups to clean up your local area, etc. are all places that tend to generate a sense of community as every individual is involved in reaching the object of that organisation. Situations in which we are learning or achieving something with other people lend themselves to creating a feeling of connection between the people taking part.
Most importantly though, reaching out to people is the path out of loneliness Speaking to people about how we are feeling and forging connections, even though it can be terrifying and even though it can sometimes lead to rejection, is how we heal that gulf between ourselves and others and end isolation. As Joe Moran says in Shrinking Violets:
“Eventually most of us come to see that our feelings of unbelonging are unexceptional, and that the truly heroic act is to carry on trying to connect with others, even if it can be dispiriting to keep doing something you are not very good at.”
I said at the beginning that this blog was even more relevant now due to Covid and then have barely mentioned the pandemic or the impact it has had. The main reason for this is that loneliness is not something new or unique to this pandemic. As we have seen it has been growing in our society for some time. One positive thing that has come out of this pandemic for many of us is that more and more of us are reaching out to one another, checking in with each other and offering the emotional support we all need to cope with isolation We have also seen an increase in things like mutual aid groups and tenants groups, where communities are coming together to support one another through this pandemic. I hope that we take this experience of isolation that we have all shared and carry on this kind of community re-building to create a society where this ever growing crisis of loneliness is reversed.
Further resources:
The Lethality of Loneliness, John Cacioppo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0hxl03JoA0This Is What Loneliness Feels Like, Rosie Leizrowice
https://rosieleizrowice.medium.com/this-is-what-loneliness-feels-like-1796e1a7ea8dThe Power of Loneliness, SRSLY Wrong
https://srslywrong.com/podcast/209-the-power-of-loneliness/
By Paul Johnson