Obviously, Loneliness itself is not a pleasant feeling. And for some, it’s downright painful.
But in the long run, the really severe effects of loneliness tend to be side effects of unhelpful strategies for managing the feeling of loneliness. In other words, when it comes to loneliness, the treatment is often worse than the symptoms.
What follows is a handful of the most common negative effects of Chronic Loneliness.
Getting Into (or Staying In) Unhealthy Relationships
When you’re feeling lonely, nothing could be more natural than the desire for companionship. And companionship with anyone is often a very good temporary relief from loneliness.
Unfortunately, like so many things in life that feel good in the short term, the long-term effects can be disastrous. That is, when loneliness is severe enough, people will often get themselves into the first relationship available to them without much thought about compatibility, values, personality, financial stability, etc—all the things that factor into a healthy long-term romantic relationship.
Similarly, many people end up staying in unhealthy or even abusive relationships for fear of going back to being lonely.
For people who have never experienced severe loneliness, it can seem confusing why someone we know or love would stay in a relationship that’s so obviously unhealthy. More often than we realize, the reason is that they are willing to accept anything rather than risk being alone again.
Loneliness—or the fear of it—can be a surprisingly powerful motivator, often to very harmful ends.
Substance Abuse
For many people, the simplest way to feel less lonely is to numb it out. And drugs and alcohol are often quite effective at this—temporarily.
Of course, it’s easy to look at this in the abstract and say, “Sure, substances will alleviate your loneliness for now but the long-term costs are way too high… Why do people do it?”
Well, if you’ve never personally been severely lonely, it’s hard to imagine what that kind of intense, long-lasting loneliness feels like—how desperate you can get to alleviate it, even if the costs are high.
The fact that loneliness can be A) intensely painful, but also B) Chronic and long-lasting means that many people see substance abuse as their only way to cope with feeling lonely and the despair that comes from imagining that they always will be.
Chronic Busyness & Stress
A less commonly observed negative effect of loneliness is chronic busyness and the stress that comes with it.
See, for many people who are either lonely or afraid of becoming lonely (perhaps because they have been in the past), one way to stave it off is to keep themselves constantly busy and occupied.
Like substances or impulsive relationships, chronic busyness is a distraction. It keeps you occupied and active—so much so that you may not even have time to consider the fact that you are indeed lonely.
The trouble with using chronic busyness as a way to cope with loneliness is that it trades off quality for quantity. That is, you spend so much time in shallow, superficial relationships that you never have time to cultivate deeper, more meaningful ones.
Once again, we see the short-term/long-term dilemma:
While a chronic business can temporarily alleviate that fear of loneliness, it does so at the expense of actually attaining the connection and intimacy you really crave.
And on top of that, being constantly busy is just plain exhausting and can easily lead to chronic stress, burnout, and anxiety.
Depression
Depression is a difficult thing to write or talk about because it’s so complex and individual-specific. But a common pattern I’ve observed among chronically lonely people is that they can end up becoming quite depressed.
In other words, when you’re lonely and isolated for long enough, it’s not surprising that symptoms of depression like low mood, lack of energy or enthusiasm, and hopelessness kick in.
Unfortunately, the loneliness-depression connection easily becomes a vicious cycle: While loneliness leads to depression, depression easily intensifies loneliness and makes it harder to break free of.
How to Be Less Lonely: 4 Practical Strategies
What follows are a few strategies I’ve found for dealing with loneliness in an effective way.
By targeting the underlying causes of loneliness rather than the symptoms, they tend to be quite effective in the long run if implemented consistently.
- Use Behavioral Activation to Get Moving
Behavioural activation is a technique to help you do things you know you should do despite not feeling interested or motivated to do them.
In some ways, the core problem with chronic loneliness is that you want more connection but you seem to lack the motivation to go get that connection:
You know you should pick up the phone and call some old friends, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it…
You know you should start going back to your weekly church service, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it…
You know you should give dating another shot, but you just can’t bring yourself to do it…
A behavioural activation is a structured approach to helping you get started doing those things you know would be good for you and reducing your loneliness. And while it’s historically been used as a very effective approach to helping people who struggle with depression specifically, I’ve found that it can be equally effective as a way to deal with chronic loneliness.
Here’s how it works:
Brainstorm a list of things you’ve enjoyed doing in the past. Don’t worry if they don’t seem enjoyable or interesting right now. When you’re in the grips of chronic loneliness, often nothing seems particularly enjoyable, which means your past experiences are probably a better guide here. This list can include really big things (travel to foreign countries) or very small things (that particular brand of vanilla tea I used to drink in college).
Rank the items on your list according to adorableness. Once you’ve got a pretty good-sized list, the next task is to sort or rank the items according to how they seem to you at the moment. Even if travelling sounds wonderful, if it’s not very doable right now, it should go toward the bottom of the list.
Assign each of the most doable items an enjoyment score. Quickly, scan through your top 5-10 items that are most doable and, on a scale of 1-10, assign each item a value in terms of how enjoyable you imagine it would be if you did it.
Take your top, most doable, item and break it down into its smallest steps. For example, if your item is “go for a walk,” your steps might include 1) gathering walking clothes since it’s cold outside;
2) cueing up a good podcast or music to listen to while I walk;
3) deciding where I’m going to walk;
4) decide when and for how long I’m going to walk;
5) set a reminder on my phone for my walk time. Now, if this sounds painfully detailed, good! Lack of clarity is usually the main obstacle to getting things done, so the clear you can be about even simple things you have a hard time doing, the more likely you will be to actually do them. Plus, the mere act of clarifying these steps is itself rewarding and motivating in a small way.
Track your progress. Keep a little notepad on your counter, for example, and write down each day of the week. Then, each time you successfully go for a walk, cross off the day with a big, colourful marker.
This has three big benefits:
1) The notepad itself serves as a reminder and a small accountability mechanism;
2) Crossing off the days is itself rewarding and therefore reinforcing;
3) Being reminded of your past successes walking will be rewarding and reinforcing future walks.
Track your enjoyment. After completing an item, note how enjoyable it was and compare it with your initial assessment.
On average, these activities will tend to be more enjoyable than your initial assessment. When you “prove” this to yourself repeatedly, it starts to change how you look at these activities and increase your future motivation for them.
Rinse and repeat. Once you’ve successfully done the first item on your list at least once, begin working your way down the list using steps 4-6.
The “secret sauce” of behavioural activation is two-fold:
The Power of Specificity. By forcing you to clarify and get specific about the actions you would like to take, it dramatically increases your odds of actually following through on them. Generality leads to stuckness; clarity leads to motivation.
Harnessing Reward and Reinforcement. Just like isolation and inactivity tend to make it harder and harder to get energy and motivation, taking action and getting even small amounts of enjoyment back into your life creates motivation. And once you have a little more motivation, it makes it a little easier to do a little more. From vicious cycles to virtuous circles.
If you’ve been feeling lonely and have a pretty good idea of what you need to do—but just can’t seem to find the motivation—behavioural activation is worth a shot.
Clarify Your Values
As we discussed earlier in this guide, one of the core drivers of chronic loneliness is a lack of shared values. When we’re either isolated or surrounded by people with different values, it can feel disconnecting and alienating.
Our values are a hugely important part of our identity and sense of self, which means it’s important to have people in our lives to whom we can relate on a values level—people who inspire us and whom we inspire.
The problem is a lot of the time we’re not actually very clear about what our core personal values are. And when you’re not really clear about your values, it’s hard to find other people who share them.
All of this means, if you want to surround yourself with and feel more connected to people who share your values, it’s critical to really get to know your values and clarify them more specifically.
Here’s one technique I like that can help you to clarify your core personal values: Relive the three happiest days of your life.
Often, the happiest days we experience are happy precisely because we’re really connecting with and living out our values:
Maybe it was the day you ran and finished your first marathon.
Maybe it was the day you had your first date with your first girlfriend/boyfriend.
Whatever the case may be, if you were genuinely happy that means you were connecting with some of your most important values. And those extremely happy days can be a good place to look for clues to help rediscover those values.
Here’s how to get started:
Schedule an hour or so of quiet time and make a list of your three happiest days.
For each day, try to really remember as many details of the day as possible. If it helps, revisit old photos of that day or call/text an old friend/family member who was present and pick their brains about it too. You could also just start writing about it—literally, tell the story of each day as if you were writing a short story.
Next, look for patterns among the three days. What are the elements that are consistent between them all? For example, maybe on all three of your happiest days, you were doing something intellectually stimulating and exciting. Or maybe all three of your happiest days involved your sister. Or perhaps in all three of those days, you were outdoors.
Make a list of these common elements or patterns, and for each, try to articulate a particular personal value they represent. For example, spending time with my sister. Spending time outdoors. Intellectual stimulation. Etc.
Pick the one personal value that seems most exciting or appealing and try to identify activities or situations in the present that could help you connect with and elaborate on that value. For example, if spending time outdoors is the value you choose, you might write down Go hiking in the national forest.
Once you’ve identified several activities that align with your newly clarified value, try to generate a shortlist of people you know who would also enjoy that activity.
Experiment with doing activities that align with your values, and if possible, invite people who share that value to do it with you.
- Practice Intentional Vulnerability
Emotional vulnerability is the willingness to acknowledge your emotions, especially the difficult or painful ones. And while it’s typically thought of in terms of expressing your emotions to other people, it’s just as much about being willing to look at your own difficult emotions.
This ability and willingness to acknowledge painful emotions are important when it comes to working through loneliness because, for many people, the key driver of their loneliness is a lack of genuine emotional connection—either with themselves or others. And by far the biggest reason this happens is that people are afraid to be vulnerable with their emotions.
Consequently, if you want to build more meaningful relationships with yourself or others, emotional vulnerability is key.
The trouble is, it’s hard. Being more emotionally vulnerable with yourself or others isn’t something you can just decide to do. Instead, it’s a skill that has to be built up slowly and progressively over time (much like any other skill).
The best method I know for doing this—for training yourself to be more capable and confident in acknowledging your emotions and expressing them—is what I call intentional vulnerability.
Now, intentional vulnerability isn’t as complicated as it perhaps sounds… All it means is that you deliberately make time to be emotionally vulnerable—initially in small ways and then in progressively bigger ways as your skill and confidence with it increases.
If you want to practice intentional vulnerability, here are a few good places to start:
Label your emotions with plain emotional language. One of the reasons many people feel so emotionally disconnected from themselves and others is that the language they use to describe how they feel is overly intellectual and vague.
When you describe how you’re feeling emotionally as stressed or bugged, or just tired, you’re avoiding the actual emotion (afraid, for example). And when you get in the habit of avoiding your emotions, you train your mind to see them as threats, which makes you even more likely to avoid them (instead of acknowledging them) in the future. So, a great way to practice intentional vulnerability is to get in the habit of using simple, plain language to describe how you feel instead of intellectualizing your emotions.
Practice emotion-focused journaling. A big part of what makes being emotionally vulnerable hard is that we have many thoughts and feelings in our heads, but we don’t express them and articulate them very often. This means we don’t feel very confident in our ability to acknowledge or express our feelings in a coherent way. You can practice expressing your emotions clearly by forcing yourself to write them down. Try spending 5 or 10 minutes per day free-writing about how you’ve been feeling.
Learn to be more assertive. Assertiveness means communicating your wants and needs honestly and respectfully. If you do this regularly—when you are direct about asking for what you want and saying no to what you don’t want—you become more confident in your ability to express difficult moods and emotions. For example, practice expressing what you actually want to watch on TV instead of simply deferring to what your partner suggests. Practice requesting a better table at a restaurant instead of sitting wherever the hostess leads you. You can learn more about assertiveness here: A Beginner’s Guide to Assertiveness
- Address Preexisting Mental Health Issues
Sometimes chronic loneliness is a very direct result of a preexisting mental health issue.
For example, in my work as a therapist, there have been many times when a client came to me with a primary complaint of loneliness. But when I discovered that they also had an existing mental health issue that seemed related, addressing that issue often took care of the loneliness on its own.
For example, if you’re chronically lonely but also struggle with social anxiety, often simply addressing the social anxiety on its own is enough to alleviate most of the loneliness.
In other words, just because you’ve been chronically lonely for a long time, that doesn’t mean that loneliness is actually your “biggest issue.” For many people, it will resolve itself once another mental health issue driving it is resolved.
While anxiety is often a hidden driver of chronic loneliness, I’ve seen the same thing be true of insomnia, trauma, bipolar disorder, depression, and eating disorders.
If you have a preexisting mental health issue that could be contributing to your chronic loneliness, it’s a good idea to talk to a qualified mental health professional and see about addressing the mental health issue first.
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