Loneliness: Pixabay Anyone can feel lonely no matter how many people surround them. This is a normal and sometimes even beneficial state, from which it is easy to benefit. Still, many are looking for an answer to the question of how to cope with loneliness? It would be good to understand the reasons for this feeling, which may be associated with psychological problems, complexes, and high expectations. Below are tips that are useful for each of us.
How to overcome loneliness: understand the reason
Ask yourself: why do I feel lonely? Do you have few friends or rarely communicate with them? Make new acquaintances or find time to regularly communicate with friends. In such cases, it is useful to keep a diary, write down your thoughts, and track your well-being. For example, you can write like this:
- the feeling of loneliness comes to me when...
- for the first time I felt alone...
The recordings will help you better understand yourself and cope with the root cause of the unpleasant feeling. In some cases, talking to a psychologist helps if you understand that you cannot cope on your own.
Signs
The feeling of loneliness manifests itself in quite specific ways. A person literally begins to experience internal suffering. This feeling is so deep that it suppresses all joy. A person often plunges into a depressive state and discovers an inability to cope with basic tasks. Let's take a closer look at these signs.
Feeling of insignificance
A person, exposed to strong experiences, is not able to objectively assess the situation. It will constantly seem to him that he is doing something wrong, but in fact he will endlessly miss opportunities that arise. The feeling of one’s insignificance often forces one to abandon existing prospects and be content with little. A person ceases to realize his value because he does not know how to come to an understanding of his value. It turns out that the individual loses touch with himself, his desires and aspirations.
Decreased self-esteem
Being alone, we cannot essentially evaluate our own achievements and talents. Any good undertakings are blocked at the root. All because we have no one to compare with. After all, loneliness makes a person very vulnerable, forces him to withdraw more and more into himself, and learn to distrust others unnecessarily. As a result, there is a significant decrease in self-esteem, the desire to act, to strive for something significant disappears. A person can exist for a long time in dissatisfaction with himself, constantly plunging into self-recrimination and reflection. A sharp decline in self-esteem certainly harms the individual.
Feeling of despair
A characteristic sign of fear of loneliness, which rarely anyone manages to avoid. Feeling his uselessness, the person is increasingly immersed in painful experiences. Despair is a critical point, but it occurs in almost everyone who is often left to their own devices. Coping with this condition is not so easy, especially if it has been going on for a long time. Sometimes it takes a lot of effort to radically change the situation.
Fear for the future
A clear manifestation of the fear of loneliness, characteristic of all people without exception. No one is immune from strong negative emotions. People are afraid of loneliness precisely because they are incredibly afraid of the prospect of remaining unwanted. This puts more pressure than quarrels with relatives. Fear for the future originates from self-doubt and the inability to critically assess the situation. A person simply feels unable to cope with severe anxiety and does not know what is best to do.
Distinguish between loneliness and solitude
Being alone is sometimes useful to understand yourself and engage in your favorite hobbies. If you are haunted by feelings such as sadness, loneliness, melancholy, then listen to these tips:
- develop and work on yourself;
- learn new things, cook delicious food, join a hobby club;
- do something that you have always put off on the back burner.
Learn to communicate with yourself, understand who you are. People always like individuals who love and value themselves. Then others will be drawn to you and desire communication.
What it is
The feeling of loneliness is an acute and prolonged experience of one’s uselessness, detachment from society and other people, accompanied by negative emotions: sadness, melancholy, despair, depression.
It is a strong feeling of loneliness that in many cases leads to apathy, depression and suicidal thoughts. It is difficult and dangerous for a person to constantly be there.
However, it is worth keeping in mind that loneliness itself and the feeling of loneliness are completely different things, often not at all related to each other. For example, a person can spend most of his time alone with himself and not experience any discomfort. Conversely, a feeling of loneliness can overtake a person in a noisy company in the midst of general fun.
Loneliness comes in different types. Someone, for example, feels lonely because of his otherness: the difference in views, principles, judgments with representatives of his environment. Also, feelings of loneliness can be associated with the loss of a loved one or separation.
How to Deal with Loneliness: Boost Your Self-Esteem
How to cope with loneliness: Pixabay
Often people with low self-esteem avoid communication, considering themselves unworthy, wrong, afraid of hearing criticism. Many people probably know cases where an ugly duckling at school turned into a successful businessman in adulthood.
Remember that you are an individual. This means that what distinguishes you from others is the most valuable gift. To improve your self-esteem, do the following:
- consult a psychologist;
- develop in what you love;
- go in for sports.
Many successful show business stars have said that they were different as children. These differences helped them achieve success and become social individuals.
Epiphany or danger
Many artists insist that isolation stimulates creativity. Writers claim that loneliness helps one to merge with nature and indulge in bliss.
The Beatles recorded their best album while living as a hermit in India. The cult rapper 2Pac, as soon as he was released from prison, recorded his best album in just a week. He said it was the perfect time for creativity. Legendary director David Lynch, creator of the cult and mystical series Twin Peaks, has released a best-selling book about diving into the depths of consciousness and how it helps him in his work on films.
Most world religions recognize that solitude is beneficial for spiritual practices and insights. Moses spent 40 days alone on Mount Sinai before receiving the Torah.
Here's what 11 quotes and famous people say about loneliness:
- Johnny Depp said: “Being alone with your thoughts is a very dangerous activity... but very useful!”
- Stephen King : "Just because you're alone doesn't mean you're crazy."
- Jeff Noon . “Uniqueness always goes hand in hand with loneliness.”
- Osho : “He who can be happy alone is a real person. If your happiness depends on others, then you are a slave, you are not free, you are in bondage.”
- Jonathan Swift : “A wise man is least lonely when he is alone.”
- Philip Sidney : "Eagles fly alone, rams feed in flocks."
- George Bernard Shaw : “To be able to endure and enjoy solitude is a great gift.”
- Tao Te Ching : “We can achieve wisdom not through action and the pursuit of goals, but through inaction and abandonment of goals as such.”
- Edward Gibbon : “Solitude is the school of genius.”
- Blaise Pascal : “All of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly alone.”
- Pavel Durov : “An hour of solitude is more productive than a week of conversations.”
But there is also danger in being alone. There are devils in still waters . The philosopher Nietzsche says: “whatever is brought into solitude grows in it, even if it is the inner beast.” This beast could be anxiety, melancholy, depression, or something even worse. What goes around comes around.
Loneliness: Learn to Enjoy Your Company
No one to invite for a walk? Then go yourself. Go out to dinner, visit a movie theater and enjoy a great movie. Yes, at first you will be constrained, especially when watching noisy companies around. But then you’ll get used to it, especially since there’s nothing strange about having fun on your own.
To make your task easier, do this:
- Take a book to a cafe and read over a cup of coffee. Know that it's normal for everyone to spend time alone sometimes;
- be positive. Who said it would be easy? But for the second time you won’t have to force yourself.
This way you will not only have fun, but also expand your comfort zone.
Loneliness in the face of death
A person comes into this world alone and leaves alone. This is the law of nature, and no miracle cure can protect us from loss and separation. When someone close to you leaves forever, explanations and consolations do not help. Suddenly you find yourself in the face of a terrible force that you cannot resist. And any words are useless.
Ambulance
Since ancient times, people, faced with love and death, have called on art for help. They sang, composed stories, and covered the walls of their homes with intricate patterns. Art can help you too. Read, watch movies, go to exhibitions, listen to music. By and large, the entire centuries-old culture of mankind is an appeal to unattainable lovers. And perhaps the very feeling of belonging to eternal values will help you.
Change yourself
If you have previously enjoyed what others have created, try creating it yourself. Even if you have never been creative, take a risk. Dance, draw, write, embroider, sing, learn to play musical instruments. Most likely, you will not reach the heights of Picasso and will not become Mozart. But you will definitely find a way to express your feelings. And this is the first and most important step towards accepting what happened and moving on, keeping in your heart the image of someone who is truly dear to you.
How to get rid of feelings of loneliness: get a pet
Social research shows that the presence of pets can reduce feelings of loneliness. Get a dog: this way you will not only find a good friend, but also go for walks with your pet. There is a chance to meet other dog owners and make friends. Help to overcome loneliness:
- cats;
- hamsters;
- Guinea pigs.
Any living creature will bring variety and positivity to your life. Imagine: you open the door and a pet greets you. Immediately my soul feels joyful and good.
How to get rid of loneliness: help others
Help: Pixabay
Join a volunteer organization, charity event. If you are too shy, then start with online communities, and then move on from virtual communication to personal communication. Try to do this:
- Don't attend events just to make friends. Go there for a fun time;
- be yourself, be friendly;
- take a step forward. Show interest in other people, invite a new friend for coffee.
People love attention, so don't be afraid to be active and want to make acquaintances. Perhaps this will be the start of a good friendship.
How to fight loneliness: take care of yourself
Conflict at work, a quarrel with a loved one leads to the fact that many become isolated and engage in self-flagellation. You can't do that. Situations are different, try to look at what is happening from a different angle. Maybe everything is for the better? Either way, you will learn a good lesson.
Does loneliness haunt you? What to do? The following recommendations will help:
- listen to yourself and understand what you need;
- take a bath, drink a glass of wine, relax;
- take a walk in the park, go to your favorite cafe.
Take care of yourself and feel how your morale improves, the burden of problems is lifted, and you are again ready to communicate with people.
Forced loneliness
This can happen even to those who are usually surrounded by loving family and loyal friends. Sometimes circumstances are such that you have to move - temporarily or permanently. Because of work, health conditions, as a result of marriage, in the end. And then, suddenly finding yourself far from your loved ones, you feel abandoned and lonely.
Ambulance
If you've been separated for a short time, tell yourself: It's just wonderful that I have someone to miss. Time spent alone will help you realize love and show your loved ones how much you care about them. Indeed, in a normal situation, people often do not even tell each other about their feelings, considering that this goes without saying. When you are separated, feelings become heightened. Modern technologies allow you to maintain communication at any distance - telephone and Internet are at your disposal around the clock. Talk about what is happening to you, write letters. It may very well be that you will be able to get to know people you have known for a long time from a new perspective. And finally, do not forget the folk wisdom: if you cannot be close to those you love, love those who are close to you.
Change yourself
If life circumstances have separated you from your loved ones for a long time, you face a difficult decision. And yet you need to accept it and determine what is more important to you: the circumstances that keep you away from your loved ones, or the people close to you themselves. Sometimes it turns out that even the most brilliant career in the capital or abroad is not worth separation from those you love. It happens that for the sake of loved ones you have to forget your pride, ambitions and even what previously seemed an unshakable life principle. Every new day opens up new opportunities. And it’s up to you how you manage them.
Call old friends
Communication: Pixabay
Rest assured that people who liked to communicate in the past will still not mind meeting today. We often lose touch when we get caught up in work. Call old acquaintances and friends, offer to sit in a cafe. To ensure successful communication, follow these tips:
- be nice, be interested in the other person;
- be positive and radiate optimism.
It all depends only on your thoughts and mood. Be sure that everything is fine, communicate easily, and then there will really be no reason to feel sad.
Now you know what to do if you feel lonely. Use the recommendations to get a taste of life again.
Original article: https://www.nur.kz/family/self-realization/1875358-kak-spravitsa-s-odinocestvom-effektivnye-sovety/
Orthodox Life
Why do people become lonely?
– An important autumn theme is loneliness. Let's try to find out where this feeling comes from?
– Loneliness as a human condition can occur in different people. The most common reason is that a person lives outside of love, outside of trying to love another.
The Japanese medieval writer Sei-Syonagon said that the worst thing in the world is not to be needed by anyone, and the most precious thing is to be needed.
Modern culture and civilization lead to the alienation of people from each other. According to modern understanding: man is a log to man.
Alienation and dissimilarity due to people’s loss of a sense of kinship with God is a feature of Western culture imposed on us and accepted by many.
One girl living in America said that her mother died and she shared her grief with her American friends. After listening to her, they asked: “Did anything else happen to you?”
And Evgeny Yevtushenko, when he got to the hospital, was horrified that the nurses had no sympathy for the patients, but looked at them only as an object of their work.
This attitude is not just random moments; it permeates the entire civilization.
Thus, Dale Carnegie suggests manipulating the interlocutor by playing on his passions, especially the passion of vanity. This really succeeds, because people still expect humanity from others, and as a result, many are hypocrites and seek only their own personal gain. God, the source of love, becomes stepfather.
– Why do they say: if a person is lonely, then he lived only for himself?
– This does not always happen. A person who has been going to church for many years can also feel lonely. The fact is that each of us is created in such a way that he can experience the fullness of bliss only when Christ loves him or people try to love with the full strength of their souls. The human soul cannot be satisfied with little things. She always misses Christ and divine love. Therefore, a Christian, when faced with an inauthentic attitude, can suffer from loneliness. And yet, it’s easier for a Christian because he has at least a few people who love him as if they were his mother.
– What makes a person lonely, separates him from God and his neighbors?
– Sergey Dovlatov writes: “The greatest loneliness is in the crowd.” There are many people in the city, but everyone is indifferent to each other. Everyone seeks only their own momentary benefit and does not go beyond the bounds of selfishness. Mixed in with all this are passions that seem to contemporaries to be natural desires of human nature, but in fact they plunge a person into loneliness, which provokes isolation from God, the Source of life. This is the most painful of loneliness, but modern society cannot even formulate it, because it knows neither about God nor about communion with God. Loneliness affects many people, even families, because most families were formed out of passion, not as a Sacrament, but as a cohabitation of bodies. The souls of the spouses do not open up, because they are afraid to meet misunderstandings.
Loneliness can be overcome by those who step beyond the wall of their egoism. The problem of loneliness is internal, it is not directly related to the presence of friends. But most people are looking for their own and that is why they do not find theirs.
– You can read that one of the serious reasons for internal loneliness is the habit of judging. A judgmental person, wherever he finds himself, is always dissatisfied with his surroundings. But how to fight such a habit?
– Every person, if he is only attentive to his life, will notice many lies that he admits in relation to the closest and dearest people. The hardest thing on earth is to truly love what you love. If a person understands this, he will be less willing to judge. Holy people, who seem to have the right to condemn others, never do this.
When one woman turned to Elder Vitaly Sidorenko and said: “I stink later,” he corrected: “It doesn’t stink, it smells.”
To get rid of condemnation, we need to force our soul to feel sorry for those whom we want to condemn, at the same time pray to God to deliver us from condemnation, and repent of this sin in confession in church.
– The cause of our spiritual loneliness can also be conceit and self-will. What are these qualities that you should be wary of?
– Conceit and self-will come from pride. But a proud person will not be satisfied even in heaven because he does not want to bow down.
A proud person does not feel guilty, and does not consider others to be better. That's why the proud doesn't love. To love, you need to see another person better than yourself. And without love there is no joy.
Philosopher Tatyana Goricheva writes: “The Cuban poet Jorges Valls, who spent 25 years in prison, answered the pope’s question, “Have you suffered?” replied “No. Only the Lord suffered; our suffering is nothing compared to His suffering.” He also said: “If I had spent 5 years in prison, I might still think that I was convicted innocently. But I was in prison for 25 years, and I know that I am to blame.” How opposite this truth about the human soul is to the modern Western attitude of finding inconvenience everywhere, being eternally dissatisfied and constantly blaming someone: society, capitalism, bureaucracy, but not ourselves.”
– There are people who, it would seem, are not created for loneliness. They are successful in everything, smart, sociable, but still remain lonely. Why?
– In Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451” there is the following episode:
“- But most of all... I still like to watch people... I want to know who they are, what they want, where they are going... Sometimes I eavesdrop on conversations on the subway... And you know what? - What? – People don’t talk about anything. - Well, how can this be! - Yes Yes. Nothing. They throw out names - car brands, fashions, swimming pools - and add to everything: “How gorgeous!” They all say the same thing..."
Loneliness is most often born in a person because he is empty, and external circumstances do not play a role here. A person very often works so as not to ask himself the question of why he lives. Remember the famous question of the existentialists: “What is life and is it worth the trouble of living?”
I remember before coming to the Church, many thinking people had the feeling that every day was in vain. And this feeling could not be smoothed out, removed, or changed. It testified that life is not involved in eternity. And after coming to Church, this feeling was replaced by a feeling of the futility of every day.
St. Augustine spoke about it this way: “You created us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”
– How to overcome loneliness, what first steps need to be taken?
– One man was embarrassed by the fact that in the temple where he went, almost no one needed anyone. People practically did not communicate, were not friends and were indifferent and sometimes hostile to him. He began to go to another temple, then to a third, but everywhere it was the same - almost complete and universal indifference. Then this man decided to help someone who was as lonely in the temple as he was. To do this, he chose an old woman and began to help her: he carried food, cooked, communicated, and after a while he began to notice that there were still kind people in the temple who were full of love for others. To see this, a person had to begin to do good himself, to be the first to reach out to others through the void...
– Sometimes, even when everything is fine, you are surrounded by close people who love you and whom you love, everything in life seems to be fine, but there is some kind of emptiness and loneliness in your soul. Why is this happening?
- We can talk a lot about this, but I will say briefly - this happens because a person does not pray. By praying, the human soul breathes God, which does not happen without a temple and without prayer.
One girl who recently came to Orthodoxy noticed: when she reads the prayer rule in the morning, she feels her day as part of eternity, and when she doesn’t read, she doesn’t experience anything like that.
– The Gospel says that if a person leaves his father, mother, relatives, he will gain much more than he had. The saints sought loneliness, went into the desert, and hid from people in the forests. But for what? What is the use of loneliness?
– Now I’ll say something that will seem strange. The saints who went into the desert never sought solitude. It is not human nature to be lonely. The Lord says: “It is not good for man to be alone.” And yet some saints left the world. For what? In order to heal one’s soul from evil alone with God through repentance, in order to love all people with Christ’s love, so that each person becomes dear, like God after God.
Among the saints there is such a married couple - Galaktion and Epistimia. They lived in the year 250 in the Roman Empire. In their youth, the couple noticed that there was a lot of passion in their relationship, but too little of what is called evangelical love, which does not think any harm to its neighbor and does not upset him in any way. And they went to the monastery: she to the women's, and he to the men's. Galaktion and Epistimia decided to learn to love all their lives on earth in order to know love with pure hearts in paradise. They died from the barbarians, but their idea is amazing.
Our life does not end with death, and a person on earth must learn to love, which does not want to possess and possess another.
At first it seems to us that there is a lot of pain and suffering in the world, but with God everything turns into joy, and suffering becomes a test.
And God not only makes us happy, He sends people into our lives who need us. This is a Church where people need each other, where people are in the love of Christ and in the person of a loved one, which everyone becomes. And a loved one is paradise, the only true and true one.
Artem Perlik
