“I Feel So Alone”
The Feeling of Loneliness
Loneliness tends to hit you right in the pit of the stomach. It radiates to the heart. It’s darker in color. It’s a slower emotion, which is why it can feel like it’s never going to go away. It’s heavy.
What thoughts make us feel this way? “I’m isolated. I have no one. Nobody understands me. No one is there to help me.”
The truth is that loneliness isn’t cured by having tons of relationships and friendships and being around people all the time. Instead, we can combat it by having deep connections.
Relationships versus Connections
You could have a hundred friends and still be lonely. For example, maybe you have dozens of sorority sisters, but you don’t connect with any of them. An outsider looking into the situation would think that you’re not lonely at all. How could you be? You have sisterhood and camaraderie. But inside, you may be feeling alone because you haven’t made deep, quality connections.
Resolving Loneliness
Dealing with loneliness all starts with us loving ourselves, being confident, and finding strength within ourselves. When we do this, that can be our first deep connection. If you’re deeply connected to who you are, you can eliminate loneliness by yourself.
How to Foster Your Connection With Yourself
Awareness
Step one of fostering your connection with yourself is self-awareness: understanding who you are, why you’re here, and what you want.
There are so many things you can do to learn more about yourself. Don’t be afraid to explore that. You can do a reading with an astrologer. You can do an Enneagram personality test. You can play a get to know you game to get feedback from others.
Anything that can give you more self-awareness is powerful. Ultimately, we’re not who we were yesterday; we’re who we are today. And how we show up today has a hand in deciding who we will be in the future. We have total control in deciding how things will go from here on out.
Knowing who we are and how we’re unique is really powerful. We start to respect ourselves more when we understand ourselves more. When we don’t know who we are, we aimlessly wander and hope something sticks. In contrast, when we really know who we are, we start taking action, making change, and taking our life in the direction we want.
Acceptance
Step two is self-acceptance. “This is who I am. I was made perfectly imperfect and I can love that.” There’s no such thing as perfection and no need to chase after it. If you try to chase it, you’ll just get frustrated and give up. So accept who you are as you are. You have permission to love yourself as you are today. That’s how you stop feeling lonely.
When we feel lonely, we wonder who we can find to make us feel better. We feel like we have no one. But you can have yourself. It’s just a matter of starting the process of believing that. You have to do the work to make yourself believe that you are enough as you are to give yourself everything you need.
When you have a solid relationship with yourself, you’ll be able to build stronger relationships with others. When you come into a deeply connected relationship with another person, it will no longer be about you running from your loneliness. It’ll be about how you show up to the relationship with love for yourself and a knowledge of what you want.
If you hold yourself to these standards of how you want to show up for yourself, you’ll attract people that are doing the same thing for themselves, instead of attracting people who always want more and more from you, which may make you retract and stop pursuing finding a relationship.
How to Build Confidence
When you have the confidence to start putting yourself out there into the world to attract deep, meaningful relationships, you can enhance the ability to experience life with other people.
Take Care of Your Physical Health
By taking care of your physical health and establishing an exercise routine, you can decrease feelings of loneliness. It’s all about confidence building, understanding your unique body, understanding what you want for yourself, and showing up for yourself.
In fact, some of the strongest relationships I ever had came from sports teams. That’s because, through activity, you’ll gain confidence and meet other people who show up for themselves. Gyms and classes are a supportive, community environment where you can build strength from within and externally with others who want the same thing. When you confidently move your body and create a complete awareness of who you are, it feels safe. Those types of relationships take off.
Take Care of Your Mental Health
There’s also the facet of mental exercise, constantly challenging yourself to be aware of your thoughts and how they show up. Our thoughts create our feelings, our actions, and our results. We can reevaluate our thoughts, create new beliefs, and create the results we want based on a belief. This takes time, work, and commitment, but it can be one of the best things you can do to combat loneliness.
Set Small Goals
2021 is coming up. Instead of making all or none goals for the new year like “I’m going to eat perfectly,” set a small goal for yourself - any goal that will help you overcome any resistance you’re feeling. Go to the place that feels heavy and then pick the smallest goal possible, the smallest step forward, to get out of that situation.
Maybe what feels heavy is that you feel overscheduled. You commit to too many things on the weekends. You want to have the flexibility to sit around if you want to. Instead of committing to not scheduling anything every Saturday for the rest of your life, try to pick one Saturday this month to have two hours of unscheduled time. Own it. Show up. Try it and see how it feels. If it feels good, do it again. Keep building until you hit it just where you want it.
This is how we change and develop new habits. This is how we’ll stop feeling lonely. It’ll give us the confidence we need to believe in who we are to have an improved relationship with ourselves so that we are willing to create deep and meaningful relationships with other people.