How to beat the loneliness epidemic…by spending more time alone
“Large scale studies have shown that the stress that comes from chronic loneliness is among the most unhealthy things we can experience as humans. It makes you age quicker, it makes cancer deadlier, Alzheimers advance faster, your immune system weaker. Loneliness is twice as deadly as obesity, and as deadly as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.”
This YouTube video was included at the end of my social psychology lecture a few weeks back. That night I had a nightmare that I was diagnosed with a cancer that kept doubling in size by the hour, and the doctor said to me, “Sorry, there’s nothing we can do. You just spend too much time alone.” Unsurprisingly, I woke up flustered and anxious, panicking that maybe my lifestyle choice to travel around in a van on my lonesome might all be a terrible mistake.
Once I’d thrown off the half-conscious bleariness and good quality caffeine was circulating my bloodstream, I started to think about this a bit more and do a little research. The important thing I learned was that it’s not ‘being alone’ that causes health problems so much as the stress of loneliness, which is a subjective, felt experience.
The stress of loneliness has affected me most when I’ve longed for some form of connection I wasn’t getting. When I have loved a man who was constantly unavailable, when I was desperate to be accepted by a group of people and didn’t feel I was, when a friend ignored my messages or stood me up, or when I was at a festival, watching groups of people who seemed to be effortlessly connected and I was feeling lost and detached from the vibe. I have unfollowed friends on social media who constantly express their appreciation for each other in public Facebook posts, because in times of feeling lonely and unloved, it has felt like waving food in the face of a starving person. It was the upward comparison that caused me so much stress and resentment, the feeling of ‘This is what I’m supposed to have but I don’t’.
One of the tragedies of social media is that it allows us to compare our insides with others’ outsides. Your average Facebook post contains fun happy people with their arms around each other and ear-to-ear smiles, you don’t see many of your friends posting alone from their beds on a Saturday night with tear-puffed faces and admissions of insecurity and fear. And so we are subjected to a constant upward comparison with a skewed version of reality, a perceived gap or failure that exacerbates that subjective feeling of loneliness.
Ironically, the stress of loneliness has hit me hardest at times when I was surrounded by people, mostly because I was surrounding myself by people because I was afraid to be alone. A single empty box on the Google calendar could move me to tears in those days. The answer wasn’t in finding more people to fill those boxes though… it was in learning to be my own best friend and celebrating my own company, which eliminated so much of that health-endangering stress. When my last relationship started going bad, I drank and smoked through the pain and developed a benzo habit. In the past year, travelling alone and single, I’ve given up all those things and there’s not a health professional alive who would argue the significant benefits of that.
I very rarely feel lonely now, because I love being alone and have chosen it for myself. I appreciate every phone call or video chat from an old friend, every brief connection with people camped next to me in a national park, every surprise email I get when someone was thinking of me. Because I accept and embrace solitude, every connection feels like a bonus to appreciate and be grateful for, rather than a lifeline in an angsty battle against the void of isolation. In loving myself and my own company, I don’t require so much from outside sources.
Once in India, I attended a talk in which the teacher asked us to imagine we were on a train. The train breaks down, and we are going to be late to a meeting we were travelling to. On top of that, the air conditioning dies, and no food and drinks are being served. After a pause in which we began making faces and conjuring up the inevitable frustration, she then asked us to imagine the scenario again, but this time seated with someone we were in love with. Suddenly the situation took on more levity, less stress and more humour. She explained that having God with us is like that. I don’t know much about God, but I think being in blissful appreciation of your own fabulous company might be more or less the same thing.
