Having been a child who spent a lot of time alone, I went into lockdown thinking, “This’ll be fine, I know how to do this.” But after several months I started noticing the extent to which I was having imaginary fights with people, over-interpreting signals from friends and getting mad about things that turned out not to matter, and particularly having a hard doom focus on the apocalypse.
After people who loved me advised me to try being social, I scheduled some phone calls and outdoor distanced hangouts with people and almost immediately felt better.
“Oh,” I—a therapist with eight years’ experience—realized. “I was lonely.”
My younger, more left-brained and dismissively attached self tended to need explanations as to why socializing with other people was important. For a time other people seemed unsafe, more likely to bully or alienate than to accept and understand, but I let those bad experiences be reasons to avoid trying altogether.
What I didn’t fully understand was that many of my barriers to talking to people were results of chronic loneliness. This became more clear in recent years, having come across the late John Cacioppo’s research into the effects of chronic loneliness.
In brief, Cacioppo suggests that loneliness is “social hunger,” the indication from our whole organism that we are in need of social connection. When we go too long, chronically hungry, we start to experience certain recognizable patterns:
- Feelings of low self-worth
- Sensitivity to real and perceive rejection
- Fears of setting boundaries in current relationships, and a tendency to be taken advantage of
- Poor health (positive social connection decreases stress and blood pressure)
- Increased substance abuse or self-harming behavior
- Increased depressive symptoms (lack of motivation, tiredness)
- Paranoia and mistrust in others
Important things to know about loneliness is that, while the effects are the same, the appearance of loneliness varies widely. Social hunger is variable. Some of us need daily social contact; others feel perfectly well satisfied with the occasional phone call or outing.
Our social hunger is also only met in relationships that are mutual and authentic. If your only social contacts are your therapists and doctors, there’s nothing wrong with that, but those don’t feed the hunger in the ways that peers, friends, and family do.
One can have a job where they talk to hundreds of people a week, always networking and being “on” but still incredibly lonely because they necessarily cannot be their whole selves in these relationships. Two people can live together in committed relationship and be lonely. One person can live on their own, only go out once a month, and feel perfectly well-fed.
Being alone does not necessarily lead to loneliness. The easiest way to think about the differentiation is choice. Choosing to go to a silent meditation for a week may be a beautiful experience of time alone and in connection with what is greater than the self. Being compelled into isolation through solitary confinement or protracted lockdown due to pandemic concerns is not chosen, and thus far more painful and lonely.
Chronic loneliness is the ultimate self-defeating condition, with its tendency to make us assholes toward those trying to connect with us. We’re so on edge, mistrustful, desperate for connection and terrified of getting hurt, that our guardedness and vigilance for signs of rejection are highly sensitive. Instead of tolerating awkward moments, jokes that landed badly, or confusing statements, we’re more likely to interpret these as signs of scorn or rejection and then react with our own protective “fuck off” energy.
At the same time, we’re more likely to settle for people who really do treat us badly because we’re afraid of having boundaries and losing all connection. It’s very confusing.
In the past year something obvious finally clicked for me. We talk about authenticity in terms of “vulnerability” because it requires setting aside, on purpose, our social safety measures. To connect, we must lay down our weapons and armor.
There are times when it is unwise to do so, when we need those weapons and armor, particularly with those unwilling to lay down their own. There are times when our inability to lay down our weapons and armor costs us opportunities for the connection and love they long to experience. There is risk in every choice, but from every experience we can accrue wisdom to guide future risks.
In these COVID19 pandemic days, social connection without proper safeguards exposes us to serious threats to physical health and wellbeing, not to mention the threat of overwhelming our medical system. And the lack of connection has tremendous and important social and emotional consequences for our wellbeing.
Some focus on the social and emotional damage of isolation and say we need to end social distancing and masking now because of it. Some focus on the medical risks of COVID19 and say we should be stringently locking down because of the real and enormous risk. These two positions, in my mind, are not equal in merit, but we do need to reckon with managing the physical and emotional risks and the current tension between them.
There are plenty of options available for getting some social connection that are low risk of COVID infection: phone calls, video calls, outdoor distanced gatherings, going on walks with masks.
As more of us get vaccinated, obviously the range of safe social options increases with other vaccinated people. I am not an epidemiologist or an expert in transmission, but I’ve come up with four “slider bars” by which I calculate COVID risk:
- Masks: The more people involved are wearing masks, the less risk of COVID infection.
- Proximity: The further apart people are, the less risk of COVID infection.
- Time: The briefer the social encounter, the less risk of COVID infection.
- Ventilation: The more ventilation in the space, the less risk of COVID infection. (Outdoors is ideal.)
When risking social connections, if you want to increase risk on one of these slider bars, you could offset it with the others, such as: hugging someone you love (more risky time and proximity) while outdoors and masked (less risky ventilation and masking).
In general, if you’re feeling lonely and having any of the experiences I’ve named above, consider extending yourself a bit to connect. If you don’t talk to anyone, try texting a friend to tell them you’re thinking about them. If you only text people, try scheduling a phone call. If you have lots of calls, try scheduling an outdoor walk.
Remember, when you’re getting connected, that it’s going to be emotionally challenging. It’s like if you used to be athletic but find yourself getting winded going up a staircase again because you’ve lost conditioning. This is not a permanent situation, it’s simply about getting your conditioning back.
You don’t jump from not exercising at all to running a marathon next week. You start where you’re at, start getting some practice exercises in, get rest between exercise, and then slowly increase the duration and intensity.
We’re getting through this, and in some ways this may be the hardest time, when we can see the end. If you’re struggling, know that we’re struggling with you, and if you can, take a risk.
