If you wish, you can take a walk during that time or engage in a relaxed form of exercise like swimming. Set yourself a time limit for the silence, such as half an hour. We are used to televisions blaring background noise, car radios jingling, iPods playing, text messages beeping, cell phones ringing, Facebook notifications pinging, tweets tweeting, and emails downloading. Silence can be difficult and even scary for some people. But if you let yourself feel the emotion 100%, it may just move through you more quickly: Observe the sensations of the emotion, notice the thoughts that it triggers, cry if tears come. Especially if you are used to distracting yourself from your feelings, this exercise may feel uncomfortable. Here are three exercises for embracing loneliness:ġ.
#Im so lonely full#
Allowing the emotion to arise and giving it our full attention may be a key to letting it go. Adults, in an attempt to bury and control their emotions, often carry them with them for years. Though this may seem immature to adults, children also get over negative emotions extremely quickly and are able to move on to the next thing as if nothing had happened.
#Im so lonely free#
Distracting ourselves from a core problem does not get at its root.Ĭhildren, on the other hand, often give free rein to their emotions. Moreover, as explained by Harvard’s Dan Wegner, when we try to resist something, it tends to persist all the more. While these options may provide temporary relief, they often lead to other problems, such as weight gain in the case of overeating or drinking, exhaustion and burnout in the case of overexercising or overworking, and even addiction. We may engage in “healthy” forms of distraction such as reading, exercising, or working or “unhealthy” forms of distraction such as overeating, drinking, or watching hours of television. Most of us have learned to distract ourselves the very moment that we feel an uncomfortable emotion such as loneliness surfacing. When the pain of loneliness takes hold of you, here are some tools that can help build resilience. We are in touch with every other person and animal on the planet by the ground we walk on.
We are literally connected to every other human being who shares this same ecosphere with us simply by the air we breathe.
We are connected to millions of people all over the world through the intricate web of economic and social relationships that bring food to our table, clothes on our bodies. On the other hand, we are always completely interconnected no matter how few our friends. We are all independent entities with thoughts, feelings, and emotions that no one else can fully understand or experience no matter how numerous our friends. We come into the world alone, and we leave it alone. We can hypothesize that, similarly, loneliness is associated with the pain matrix.įrom one perspective, we are all fundamentally alone. In fact, several studies show that ostracizing others hurts us as much as being ostracized ourselves. A brain imaging study showed that feeling ostracized actually activates our neural pain matrix. It is not surprising that loneliness hurts.
From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.
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