lonely definition essay

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Definition of lonely

• unaccompanied

alone , solitary , lonely , lonesome , lone , forlorn , desolate mean isolated from others.

alone stresses the objective fact of being by oneself with slighter notion of emotional involvement than most of the remaining terms.

solitary may indicate isolation as a chosen course

but more often it suggests sadness and a sense of loss.

lonely adds to solitary a suggestion of longing for companionship.

lonesome heightens the suggestion of sadness and poignancy.

lone may replace lonely or lonesome but typically is as objective as alone .

forlorn stresses dejection, woe, and listlessness at separation from one held dear.

desolate implies inconsolable grief at loss or bereavement.

Examples of lonely in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lonely.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

circa 1598, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

Phrases Containing lonely

• it's lonely at the top

lonely hearts

• plough a lone / lonely furrow

Articles Related to lonely

Words for Being Alone

Keep company with words of solitude

Dictionary Entries Near lonely

Cite this entry.

“Lonely.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lonely. Accessed 2 Jun. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of lonely, more from merriam-webster on lonely.

Nglish: Translation of lonely for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of lonely for Arabic Speakers

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Nick Wignall

• Post date November 1, 2020

The Psychology of Loneliness: Why You’re Lonely and What to Do About It

• Tags emotional intelligence

Loneliness is one of the most powerful experiences in human psychology. It’s also one of the most misunderstood.

While everybody basically knows what it means to be lonely, it’s surprisingly hard to define it precisely. This is partly because our experience of loneliness tends to be so varied and individual-specific.

What’s more, loneliness and the fear of loneliness are often powerful influences in our lives, frequently leading to poor decisions and self-sabotage.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what loneliness is and how it’s different than similar concepts like isolation and solitude. Then we’ll explore different causes of loneliness and common types of loneliness, as well as the negative effects loneliness can have on our lives. Finally, we’ll end by exploring how to deal with loneliness in a healthy way and some tips for helping friends or loved ones who are lonely.

Table of Contents

Feel free to use the links below to jump to a specific section you’re interested in:

What Is Loneliness?

What causes loneliness, common types of loneliness, negative effects of chronic loneliness, how to be less lonely: 4 practical strategies, how to help people who are lonely, summary and key points.

There’s no official definition of loneliness. And while any definition will of course leave things out or not fit with everybody’s experience, it’s important to at least come up with a working definition that most of us can agree on.

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines loneliness like this:

• a. being without company
• b. cut off from others

This is a good starting point but I think we can do better. Specifically, I think we can generate a definition that gets at a bit more of the psychological side of loneliness.

Loneliness: A Psychological Definition

Here’s how I would define loneliness:

Loneliness is an emotion characterized by the feeling of pain caused by a perceived lack of intimacy with other people or ourselves.

A few points worth noting:

• Loneliness is an emotion. I think it’s important to distinguish upfront that we are thinking about loneliness as an internal emotion rather than an external state of affairs. In other words, loneliness is different than isolation. Many people who are isolated experience loneliness. But many people seek out isolation and experience it as a positive thing. When this happens, we often describe it as solitude. It’s also worth noting that isolation is not a requirement for loneliness: you can feel lonely even when you’re surrounded by other people. In fact, many people describe the most acute bouts of loneliness occurring precisely when they are surrounded by people.
• Loneliness is painful. This may seem obvious that loneliness is an aversive or uncomfortable feeling. But it’s good to be clear about this since many people feel good when they are alone or distant from others. As we mentioned above, many people seek out solitude because they find it restorative or helpful in promoting creativity, for example.
• Loneliness comes from a perception. Loneliness is never something that can be definitively observed by an external observer because—like all emotions—it comes from a person’s subjective perception. I think that’s important to be clear about the fundamentally subjective and individual-specific nature of loneliness. While there are many common elements of loneliness across individuals, I think it’s safe to say that no two people’s experience of loneliness is exactly the same.
• Loneliness is about a lack of intimacy. This is where I diverge the most from other definitions of loneliness that I’ve seen. In my experience—both personal and professional as a therapist—what seems to characterize loneliness most uniquely is that it’s about the absence of intimacy with other people. While this lack of intimacy often happens on the level of the physical or in terms of shared interests or values, the core of it seems to be fundamentally emotional in nature—that is, it’s about not feeling connected enough with other people (or ourselves) on an emotional level.

Of course, this is just my definition. I’m not claiming this is gospel when it comes to defining loneliness. And like I said, it’s the nature of definitions that they are always somewhat inadequate to everybody’s unique experience.

Still, I think it’s a good start that covers a lot of bases and also adds something important to the typical way of thinking about loneliness.

Now that we’ve got a working definition of what loneliness is, let’s move on to a discussion of where it comes from and what causes it.

I believe there’s a pretty vast array of possible causes of loneliness.

• For one person, being in a relationship with someone who has a hard time communicating could be the cause of their loneliness.
• For another person, being abused as a child could be the cause of loneliness.
• And for another person still, a mental habit of negative self-talk could be the cause of their loneliness.

It’s important to remember that loneliness is a far more subjective experience than we realize. Whether someone feels lonely depends a great deal on their unique history, temperament, personality, explanatory style, living situation, culture, etc.

So while any number of external events or things may serve as a trigger for loneliness (e.g: not getting invited to a party when your roommate was), I think it’s best to consider the causes of loneliness from a more psychological and internal perspective.

For example, if we stick with that scenario of not being invited somewhere when another person close to you was, it doesn’t really make sense to say that the lack of invitation was the thing that caused the loneliness. After all, while one person might feel lonely after not getting an invitation to a part, another person might feel relieved!

Whether a person feels lonely, depends on how they interpret the specific trigger or situation.

If your interpretation of not receiving an invitation is “nobody likes me” it’s not hard to see how loneliness might result. But if your interpretation of not receiving the invite is “Ah, finally I get the house to myself for a night!” Your emotional reaction might be very different.

Here are a few more considerations when thinking about the question of what causes loneliness.

Proximal vs Distal Causes of Loneliness

Causality is usually more complicated than we like to admit.

Here’s an example:

If I ask you why your favorite team lost the game yesterday, your answer is likely to be something like: The stupid refs blew it on the final play or Our quarterback threw that interception on the final play. But in reality, there were probably many, many factors that contributed to the loss.

You could say that your quarterback throwing an interception on the final play caused the loss. But you could also say that the coach’s decision to call a passing play instead of a running play caused the loss. You could even say that the team’s lack of effort during practice the week prior caused the loss.

When it comes to thinking about the causes of things—including loneliness—it’s important to distinguish between proximal and distal causes:

• A proximal cause (think proximate, as in close to) is something that happened very close to the effect. The quarterback throwing an interception instead of a touchdown on the final play, for example, is a proximal cause of the team’s loss. Similarly, your mental interpretation of what the non-invite to the party means ( nobody likes me ) is a proximal cause of the feeling of loneliness.
• A distal cause (think distant , as in far away from) is something that happened far away from the final effect. The quarterback’s decision to start a new weight lifting routine earlier that week which led to him being sore during the game and not playing well, for example, would be a more distal cause of the team losing. Similarly, the fact that, growing up, your older sibling was incredibly popular and you were shy might be a distal cause of you feeling lonely following your non-invite to the party.

Initial vs Maintaining Causes of Loneliness

Another way to think about the causes of loneliness is initial vs maintaining causes.

Sticking with the example of not being invited to the party when your roommate was, your mental interpretation that “nobody likes me” may have been the initial cause of your loneliness. But sitting on your couch doing nothing except ruminating on all the other times in your life when you’ve been ignored or not invited to things is likely the maintaining cause of your loneliness.

This distinction between initial and maintaining causes of loneliness is critical… While the initial causes of loneliness are often things that are either not under your control or very difficult to control, the maintaining causes of loneliness are often much more amenable to change and intervention.

Key Takeaway: It’s usually best to focus on the maintaining causes of loneliness because you usually have some control over them. Whereas the initial causes of your loneliness are in the past and therefore not something you can do anything about.

A Few of the Most Common Causes of Loneliness

There are many possible causes of loneliness. But I’ve observed a handful of patterns that show up over and over again when people describe why they feel lonely.

Here are the most common causes of loneliness in my experience working as a psychologist:

• Social Anxiety. Unsurprisingly, it can be hard to make and maintain close social connections and relationships when you feel anxious being around people. Social anxiety is a specific form of anxiety usually characterized by one or both of the following: A) Fear of being judged or thought ill of by others, B) Fear of being too anxious in the presence of others—and being judged or thought badly of because of it.
• Trauma. Trauma is a big term that encompasses a wide variety of experiences. But in general, trauma is when an especially frightening, painful, or disturbing event leads to a sustained fear/anxiety response. For example, if you were abused as a child, you might develop a lasting fear of people of the same gender as the person who abused you. This could lead to significant difficulties making connections and being around a large chunk of people.
• Low Self-Esteem. When you think poorly of yourself, it easily generalizes to imagining that others will think poorly of you as well. This can then lead to a hesitance to meet or engage with others. In other words, if low self-esteem causes you to feel unworthy of other people’s time/attention, you can see how that might lead to quite a bit of loneliness and isolation. Plus, even if you are around others and have good relationships, that chronic sense of unworthiness might make it hard to take those relationships to a deeper, more intimate level.
• Lack of Assertiveness. Assertiveness is the ability to ask for what you want (or say no to what you don’t want) in a way that is honest to yourself and respectful of others. It’s the most effective form of communication because it allows for the free expression of your honest wants and needs. But when you feel afraid to be assertive—and resort to other forms of communication like passive or passive-aggressive—it’s very hard to build honest, intimate relationships with people. And when you’re surrounded by people who you think you should be closer to but aren’t, well… that’s a setup for loneliness.
• Values Confusion. Values are the things that matter most to us in our lives—our aspirations and ideals. And one of the primary ways we stave off loneliness is to be around people who share our values. The trouble is, if you don’t know your values and have clarity about what they are exactly, it’s easy to end up around people with conflicting values—and as a result, you can end up feeling chronically lonely and disconnected.
• Poor Self-Awareness. Self-awareness is the ability to be aware of your own psychology—your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, expectations, desires, etc. Just like loneliness often comes from not feeling connected on a deep level with other people around you, similarly, you can end up feeling lonely when you’re not connected in a genuine way with yourself. Because many people are essentially afraid of their own minds, they get into the habit of ignoring their own minds and staying distracted from their own thoughts and feelings. This often results in low self-awareness —and along with it, loneliness.

These common causes of loneliness are fairly specific. But as you probably noticed reading through them, there are some broader themes that run throughout the many specific causes of loneliness. These common themes are what I think of as types of loneliness.

While there’s no single set of characteristics that define someone who’s lonely, it’s my experience that most lonely people fall into one or more of the following types of loneliness.

Note: There’s nothing official about these types. I describe them here because I find them useful as a way to think about loneliness, how people experience it, and how best to help people who are lonely.

Lack of Physical Connection

Some people feel lonely primarily because they are physically isolated from others.

At the time that I write this, much of the world is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic and all its effects, one of which is isolation and lack of physical connection. Many people are still able to connect with others via technology like phone, text, FaceTime, Zoom, etc. And yet, for many people, there’s something lacking.

We humans often crave literal, physical closeness in a special way. And when that closeness is deprived for extended periods of time, we can end up feeling quite lonely despite still being connected in many other ways.

Lack of Common Interests

A surprisingly common type of loneliness stems from not having shared interests with people you interact with regularly.

For example: If you’re a sports fanatic surrounded by people who couldn’t tell a fastball from a slam dunk, that will eventually lead to feelings of loneliness and disconnect. This is especially important when it comes to the handful of people in your life who are the most important: spouses, children, parents, friends.

Another example:

One of the biggest situations where this loneliness stemming from lack of shared interest shows up is marriages and other long-term romantic relationships.

Basically, people get into a relationship because they’re “in love,” only to realize that they don’t actually have many common interests once the honeymoon phase ends. And without a lot of proactive and intentional work to build shared interests, this division can lead to resentments and loneliness.

Lack of Shared Values

Even if you’re in close physical proximity to people—and even if those people share similar interests—if you don’t have at least a couple people in your life who share similar values you can end up feeling quite lonely.

Values are the things that matter most to us. But if you’re surrounded by people who have very different ideas of what matters most in life, it can get kind of lonely. On the other hand, even if you don’t have many shared interests, very strong alignment between core values can bring people together in remarkable ways.

Unfortunately, values are not something many of us spend a lot of time deliberately considering and clarifying. And if you aren’t clear yourself what your own values are, it’s difficult to find other people who share them.

Lack of Emotional Intimacy

Whenever I talk to people who are very lonely, a common denominator is that they don’t feel connected to other people on a genuine emotional level:

• They have a hard time opening up and expressing their feelings.
• They have the sense that other people don’t really “get” them in a deep way and frequently feel misunderstood or not appreciated.
• They open up a little bit, but easily feel frightened or threatened by vulnerability and end up sabotaging promising relationships for fear of future vulnerability.

Sadly, this lack of emotional intimacy is incredibly painful because there’s such a strong tension between desperately wanting to feel close but being terrified to act in a way that would allow for closeness.

So not only do these people feel chronically lonely but they also frequently experience a lot of anxiety and shame about knowing what they “should” do to be closer but not actually doing it.

Lack of Self-Intimacy

Self-intimacy is the term I use to describe the quality of your relationship with yourself. And for many people who struggle with chronic loneliness, the core issue is that they don’t have a very good relationship with themselves.

Here are a few examples of what a lack of self-intimacy might look like:

• You keep yourself constantly busy so that you never have to be alone with your own thoughts.
• You habitually try to “fix” difficult emotions like fear, sadness, or anger rather than trying to understand them.
• You intellectualize your moods and feelings—talking about them only in the vaguest and most general or metaphorical terms.

In short, poor self-intimacy means that you don’t make time to be with and understand your own mind—your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, moods, expectations, desires, etc.

This avoidance of your own mind can be a relief in the moment since it gets you out of having to experience something difficult or painful. But in the long-run, it disconnects you from yourself—leading you to feel like “a stranger in your own skin,” and therefore, very lonely.

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 are 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 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 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.

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.

1. Use Behavioral Activation to Get Moving

Behavioral 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…

Behavioral 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 doableness. Once you’ve got a pretty good-sized list, the next task is to sort or rank the items according to how doable they seem to you in the moment. Even if traveling 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) gather walking clothes since it’s cold outside; 2) cue up a good podcast or music to listen to while I walk; 3) decide where I’m going to walk; 4) decide when and for how long I’m going to walk; 5) set a reminder in 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 more 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, colorful marker. This has three big benefits: 1) The notepad itself serves as a reminder and 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 of 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 behavioral 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 —behavioral activation is worth a shot.

2. 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 whom we can relate to 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 which 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 yourself 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 in 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, inviting people who share that value to do it with you.

For more ideas and strategies for clarifying your values, see this guide: Know Your Values: 7 Ways to Discover and Clarify Your Personal Values

3. 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 is 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 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

4. 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.

If you’re interested in seeing a therapist or counselor but feel a bit overwhelmed by the prospect, or aren’t sure where to begin, I wrote a guide on that very topic: Find Your Therapy: A Practical Guide to Finding Quality Therapy

In this final section, I want to cover some general guidelines for being helpful to other people who are struggling with loneliness.

Keep in mind that these aren’t fixed rules. They’re just suggestions I’ve formed over the years—based on the particular psychological elements of loneliness—that I’ve found to be helpful:

• Focus on quality time rather than actions. Let’s say you’ve got an aging parent who is especially lonely and you want to help. So you decide that you will make a point to call them regularly. Rather than assuming that your conversations are a kind of mission where it’s your job to A) figure out why they’re lonely, and B) Come up with ways to help them be less lonely, instead just focus on being present with them. You don’t have to talk about anything in particular or even be especially “helpful.” Often, just being there with someone who’s lonely is by far the most valuable thing you can do.
• Consistency over intensity. It’s my experience that small consistent connection is more helpful for people than big intermittent ones. If you have a friend, for example, whom you know is really struggling with loneliness, it’s very possible that catching up on the phone for 5 minutes once a day is much more helpful to them than one or two hour-long conversations each month—this is especially true early on.
• Be explicit about your feelings toward them. This is one of those things we all probably know but really need to be reminded of. Even if the person who’s lonely technically knows that you care about them, they may not feel it. Which means one of the most helpful things you can do is to be explicit about how you feel about that person: Say I love you; remind them of what you really appreciate about them; tell them specifically how your relationship has been important or meaningful to you. The other reason this is really important is because it models and makes safe similar behavior from them. A lot of people who are lonely are hesitant to be emotionally expressive (even if they know they should). You doing it can send a signal to them that it’s okay to do so and therefore make it a little easier for them to follow suit.
• Be persistent (but not pushy). If someone you care about has struggled with loneliness for a long time, that’s unlikely to change overnight. Think about how a flower grows: after the seed is planted, it looks like nothing is happening for weeks or months. But then, all of a sudden, it sprouts. Of course, it’s not really all of a sudden—things were happening, you just couldn’t see it. Well, the same thing can happen when you’re trying to be supportive of people who are lonely: it might look like they’re unappreciative or not making any effort, but in reality it could be that there’s more movement happening than you can see and that you just need to be patient. On the other hand, you don’t want to be pushy or aggressive, so try to be mindful of that balance.
• Help them to be comfortable first. A big mistake I often see with people who are trying to help lonely people in their life is that they try to just push them into action that they assume will be good for them. But here’s the thing: they might need a warm-up period first. For example, let’s say you have a friend who’s been very lonely and you want to try and convince them to get back out there on the basketball court because you know how much they used to enjoy playing pickup basketball. Well, instead of trying to convince them to start playing basketball cold-turkey after a couple years of not, you might start by inviting them to watch basketball on TV with you a few times. Then maybe you guys just shoot hoops together on your own for a while. And only then, introduce the idea of getting back to pick up games. In other words, most people will need to ease out of loneliness rather than simply breaking free of it.

Loneliness is an emotion characterized by the feeling of pain caused by a perceived lack of intimacy with other people (or oneself).

And while loneliness can be experienced differently depending on your history, personality, and circumstances, the following ideas are generally helpful for thinking about loneliness and how to address it:

• The initial cause of loneliness may not be the same thing that’s maintaining loneliness in the present.
• Some of the most common causes of loneliness include: Social Anxiety, Isolation, Difficulty with Assertiveness, and Poor Self-awareness.
• Common types or forms of loneliness include: Lack of Physical Connection, Lack of Common Interests, Lack of Shared Values, Lack of Emotional Intimacy, and Lack of Self-Intimacy.
• Some of the most common negative effects of loneliness are unhealthy relationships, substance abuse, chronic busyness, and depression.
• 4 practical ways to address loneliness are: Behavioral Activation, Values Clarification, Intentional Vulnerability, and Addressing Preexisting Mental Health Issues.
• A few tips to keep in mind if you’re trying to help someone else who struggles with loneliness: quality time over actions, consistency over intensity, be explicit about your feelings toward them, try to be persistent (but not pushy), and help them to be comfortable first.

16 Comments

Reading this article has put clarity to many of the feelings I have had since my husband died in April after a 20 year battle with blood cancers. It is the lack of emotional intimacy that has me so down. He and I, despite the challenges of his illness, had a wonderful marriage and life together for nearly 30 years. People always saw us as “the perfect couple” because it was always evident to them how much we loved each other. I feel a sense of relief now, I have so many wonderful friends who are keep me busy in this COVID plagued world, and I enjoy my time with them. I don’t mind living alone, but I can make sense of my sadness.

Very sorry for your loss, Debra. I’m glad the article was helpful at least a bit. —Nick

I feel like I have struggled with some form of loneliness all of my life. I grew up with a disabled brother and always felt like an outsider in groups and often guilty for having needs that might burden my parents. I think this feeling of being set aside from others was two-directional in hindsight. Only at university did I start to build truly meaningful connections, a few of which have stood the test of time but over the years geography and jobs have spread us widely. The last few years I have increasingly felt apart from people and now my marriage is in real difficulties my sense of loneliness is more acute than ever. Despite searching for connection I find it hard to find and sustain – and COVID hadn’t really helped… I will try the methods described in your article. Thanks for posting.

Excellent. I had to write out some of it as I read it, to make sure I was absorbing it in a deep way, and for consulting again in the future. Thank you very much.

“you can feel lonely even when you’re surrounded by other people”

“lack of intimacy often happens on the level of the physical or in terms of shared interests or values, the core of it seems to be fundamentally emotional in nature—that is, it’s about not feeling connected enough with other people (or ourselves) on an emotional level”

These sentences is exactly what I feel. I live a lonely life, I spent a lot of time alone and I like to be alone the most part, mainly because when I am with a lot people I still feel lonely.

I also feel a big lack of intimacy with other people, on the physical level AND in terms of shared interests/values, and, of course, I also I am not feel connected enough with other people.

It was very good to read this article to clear and understand a little bit more of my mind and my loneliness.

Thanks. Keep writing about loneliness.

Hi Nick. I really appreciate how you so clearly define and explain an issue, then get practical about how to change. You have a great ability to compartmentalise an issue and look at the contributing factors. This happens to be very much how my mind works, so your articles are a joy to read. Your capacity to both inspire and to provide the real life “how to” makes for a very reassuring combination indeed. Thank you for your work.

One of the best articles I’ve read. Thanks, Robert.

Dear Nick, What an incredible helpful article, thank you, Nick!

I’ve struggled with chronic loneliness, which I think comes from a combination of having insecurity with emotionally handicapped parents and having to be their caregiver for many years, such that the lack of time and stress is probably wearying for friends to deal with all the time. Now my parents have passed so I have time for myself now. I have interests, activities, friends who care and talk to me often, a good job, and have been dating. But I still feel lonely, because I don’t know when I will next get to talk to a friend, whether tomorrow or 2 weeks away. Some will make appointments to chat for an hour, waiting 1-2 weeks, but it’s not regular. Others call randomly. Everyone is busy with their family. I don’t want to burden my friends when everyone’s time is limited. You had suggested that to help a friend who is lonely, to call for 5 minutes often rather than at length infrequently. Right now I have the latter, for which I am grateful, but it is like gorging and starving rather than eating regularly. How do I establish these regular, reliable 5-minute calls with my friends? Or with just one or two friends? Do I just start calling them at a regular time, keep it short, and see if that works for them? Thank you for your advice.

A very useful and informative article. Thank you. BJS

Thank you. This is a very thorough, well articulated article.

Very helpful. I think you nailed it when you talked about self intimacy. I am a therapist and I help others with their emotions everyday. Sometimes I neglect my own and get really busy. Thanks for reminding me to be a friend to me. I’m going to work on intentionally connecting with myself. I’m going to check in and allow myself to feel. Thanks Deb Johnson

I truly admire how you first properly define and explain a problem, and then move on to providing actionable advice about how to fix it. You have a wonderful capacity to break down a problem into its component parts and investigate how they came about.

It hurts to be by one’s self. It can seem like stating the obvious to say that loneliness is an unpleasant or upsetting experience, but it is.

One was lonely and the other wanted to be married at a certain age. The union happened regardless the age gap. We keep asking ourselves, are we really happy?

Great article, much appreciated. Loneliness definitely leads oneself to look at a narrow, a NOW, self-fulfilling decisions rather than a bigger picture

I’m glad that resonated with you!

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The Psychological Structure of Loneliness

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Despite the current surge of interest in loneliness, its health consequences, and possible remedies, the concept itself remains poorly understood. This paper seeks to contribute to a more fully worked out account of what loneliness consists in. It does this by stressing that loneliness always has an experiential component and by introducing a simple psychological structure to analyze the experience. On this basis, it suggests that we can distinguish between three ways of thinking about the phenomenal dimension of loneliness. There are objectivist views that seek to understand loneliness by a description of its intentional object, subjectivist views that consider its holistic relation to other aspects of the sufferer’s psyche, and embodied and enacted views that focus on the relation between the lonely person’s mental life and her social environment. The aim is not to adjudicate between these views or to suggest that they are mutually exclusive. Rather, this paper recommends a pluralistic framework on which all three approaches have something to contribute to a fuller understanding of the condition and may be of use in devising measures aimed at improving sufferers’ health.

1. Introduction

Loneliness is a pervasive public health concern, significantly correlated with increases in health problems and mortality rates [ 1 , 2 ]. A rapidly growing literature is aimed at identifying methods to diagnose the condition and provide help to sufferers (see [ 3 ] for an overview). For this to be possible, a plausible description or definition of loneliness has to be in place. Several such definitions are available; see [ 4 ] for an overview of definitions and [ 5 ] for a typology of interventions for loneliness. They are accompanied by corresponding measurement systems such as the UCLA Loneliness Scale [ 6 ]. In contemporary psychological research, many descriptions frame loneliness as a perceived discrepancy between desired and available social connections (e.g., [ 2 , 7 ]; p. 839). This seems uncontroversial as a first step, but questions arise immediately: what is meant by a “social connection” (or “social interaction” or “social relationship”)? How do you think about its absence? How do you make precise the notion of an “unpleasant experience” or a “distressing feeling”?

These questions are of philosophical import, but their relevance does not stop there. How they are approached has consequences for the design of measures designed to help sufferers. Different ways of thinking about loneliness bring with them different recommendations for therapy or changes in the affected person’s social environment. However, and in contrast to the flourishing debate in psychology about the diagnosis and remedy of loneliness, the discussion of its conceptual dimension is in its infancy. Historically, philosophers have thought about loneliness as an existential (e.g., [ 8 ]) or political concept [ 9 ]. It is only very recently that they have framed the condition as a mental health concern ([ 10 , 11 ]. It is hence telling that Motta’s [ 4 ] overview of theoretical approaches to loneliness builds on a summary of psychological concepts published several decades ago [ 12 ]. The research available on loneliness in contemporary philosophy is not yet robust enough to allow for a qualified discussion of its conceptual dimension.

The present paper is intended to contribute to this discussion by raising some questions that a full-fledged philosophical theory of loneliness, understood as a condition that is detrimental to the sufferer’s health, would have to address. After a brief classification of issues that arise from a widely used definition of loneliness in psychology, this paper draws on some long-standing debates in the philosophy of mind to show how these debates can inform the experiential dimension of loneliness research. Its aim is not to develop a comprehensive theory of loneliness or even its phenomenal aspect. It does not offer a framework that could be classified along the lines of Perlman and Peplau’s [ 12 ] conceptual or Mann, Bone, and Lloyd-Evans’s [ 5 ] practical typologies of loneliness. It merely helps prepare the ground for the development of a theory that incorporates the phenomenal dimension of loneliness and, in doing so, highlights the importance of the sufferer’s experience for the design of diagnostic and remedial work.

2. Three Dimensions of Loneliness

Here are two relatively recent definitions of loneliness in widely cited psychological research papers:

• Loneliness is “the unpleasant experience that occurs when there is a subjective discrepancy between desired and perceived availability and quality of social interactions” ([ 7 ] p. 839).
• Loneliness is “a distressing feeling that accompanies the perception that one’s social needs are not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one’s social relationships” ([ 2 ]).

Variants of these two definitions are popular in the academic and popular literature on loneliness (consider, e.g., the definition of loneliness in the Encyclopedia Britannica as the “distressing experience that occurs when a person’s social relationships are perceived by that person to be less in quantity, and especially in quality, than desired” [ 13 ]). In particular, they are commonly adopted by writers who see loneliness as a condition that is detrimental to the sufferer’s mental and physical health and that thus benefits from remedial intervention. The two definitions, though not quite identical, represent what I shall call the “standard view” of loneliness. They have at least three features in common. They both understand loneliness as an experience—that is, a mental state, event, or relation that can be described in terms of its subjective characteristics. They both agree, secondly, that the experience in question has a negative valence: it is “unpleasant” or “distressing”. Thirdly, they agree that the experience is about something: it presents, or represents, a discrepancy between the social relationships that would meet one’s social needs and those that one does in fact enjoy, or that are available. These three features are associated with distinct philosophical areas of investigation. They can be classified along the following lines:

2.1. The Phenomenal Dimension

This dimension of loneliness research covers all questions that have to do with the first-person, subjective aspect of the phenomenon. Along the lines of the standard view, loneliness always has an experiential aspect to it. But more will need to be said for a well-worked out theory: what kind of experience is loneliness? Is it appropriately described as a feeling or an emotion (see Damasio [ 14 ] for a prominent account of the distinction)? If so, which (if any) of the extant theories of emotion in the philosophical literature is well placed to capture the experience of loneliness (see Scarantino and de Sousa [ 15 ] for an overview of theories of emotion)? Relatedly, should we think of the experience as having success conditions, and that (correspondingly) a token experience can misrepresent its intentional object? Or should we deny that one can feel lonely when in fact one is not? How these questions are answered will have considerable impact on the design of remedial measures: for instance, if the sense of being lonely has correctness conditions, then therapeutic work may promisingly highlight the falsidical character of a sufferer’s experience. If, however, feeling lonely is taken to be sufficient for loneliness, such an approach would be grossly misguided.

2.2. The Social Dimension

A separate set of question arises with regard to the “social relationships” or “social interactions” that a person is experiencing as lacking in loneliness. There are many kinds of social interactions and social relationships, and not all of them are equally relevant in the alleviation of the condition. More needs to be said about what is meant by these notions. Who are the partners in the relevant kinds of social interactions? Do they have to be exercised in person, or can virtual reality help (e.g., [ 16 ])? Is there an important bodily aspect to them? How does the developmental role of social interaction in the regulation of a person’s emotional life bear on a theory of loneliness? What factors other than interaction are important to substantiate the kind of social relationship whose enjoyment helps alleviate the condition? Depending on how you answer these questions, diagnostic and remedial measures will again vary considerably, and hence a more focused discussion of the social dimension of our understanding of loneliness is indispensable.

2.3. The Normative/Cognitive Dimension

On the standard view, the experience of loneliness arises because of a perceived discrepancy between the relationships (however conceived) needed for a satisfactory social life and those that are currently available to the sufferer. So there is a normative aspect to the experience: it reflects a lack or an absence of something that should be there but is not (I am using “normative” here in the philosophical rather than the psychological sense; thanks go to a reviewer for highlighting the distinction). Then at least two questions arise. The first is how to think of what it is that is perceived to be missing—what the intentional object of loneliness is. Is it meaningful relationships themselves, or is it an abstract object such as a friendship or another “social good” that is instantiated by but not the same as the right kinds of social relationships [ 11 ]? The second question, which bridges the normative and phenomenal dimensions, is how the absence of the relationships that would alleviate loneliness is present to the sufferer. What does it mean to experience a loss, or an absence? Does the experience of loneliness operate against a background, or a memory, of how one’s social relationships should be, or perhaps once were? Is this normative background or memory present in the sufferer’s experience, or does it register cognitively? Once again, answers to these questions are not merely of philosophical interest. They are directly relevant for remedial work: if the theorist can explain how the norm against which an experience of loneliness arises is present in experience or cognition, the practically oriented researcher will be much better placed to work out what can be done to minimize the perceived discrepancy between a sufferer’s actual and desired social relationships.

3. Experience as a Necessary Condition of Loneliness

The above taxonomy of questions arising for a fully developed philosophical theory of loneliness helps situate the present paper in the larger context of loneliness research. The project squarely falls into the first category: it is concerned with the phenomenal dimension of loneliness. Since it restricts itself to highlighting the relevance of some discussions in the philosophy of mind for such an investigation, it remains largely silent on the question of what loneliness is. Rather, it elaborates on three distinct ways of thinking about its phenomenal aspect. These ways pick up on debates in the philosophy of perception. The aim is to show that we can draw on these debates to better understand loneliness in practically useful ways.

Psychologists distinguish between loneliness as an “objective” and a “subjective” condition (e.g., [ 7 ]). Some people are objectively socially isolated: they have little social contact with others. Some people are subjectively lonely: they report feeling alone, in the sense of not having as much social contact as they would want. As is now well-known, the two kinds are not reliably correlated [ 17 ]. Not every hermit is lonely but some socialites are. Distinguishing between objective and subjective forms of loneliness thus tracks an intuitively obvious point. But it is important to think carefully about the exact difference that is being tracked. Begin with the consideration that on the standard view, thinking about loneliness always requires thinking about a person’s subjective life—their experience, the felt quality of their existence (this consideration is explicitly acknowledged in Hawkley and Cacioppo [ 2 ]). If so, it is not promising to distinguish between a purely objective kind of loneliness that is measurable in terms of the number and quality of a person’s social contacts and a subjective kind that tracks the sufferer’s experience. A better way to draw the distinction is to take it that the subjective dimension establishes a necessary condition of loneliness: a person can be lonely only if she feels lonely. This necessary condition does not require that the sufferer be cognitively aware of her loneliness: her experience need not gives rise to the knowledge that she is lonely. But it does rule out the possibility that the sufferer is (objectively) lonely without experiencing herself as lonely. On this picture, a person cannot be lonely without this fact being reflected in her mental life. By contrast, the absence of social connection is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of loneliness: loneliness begins and ends with experience.

This may seem an uncontroversial point: obviously loneliness has an experiential aspect to it. Otherwise, the important distinction between loneliness and the adjacent condition of solitude, in which a person also has few social connections but experiences this fact as beneficial, collapses (historically, the adjacent concepts of loneliness and solitude were not as clearly demarcated as they were today, as a reviewer pointed out; see Vincent [ 17 ] and Alberti [ 18 ] for recent overviews). But framing the relation between the subjective and objective aspects of loneliness in terms of a necessary condition highlights that even where objective social isolation can be shown to negatively affect a person’s physical health, there has to be an intermediate psychological component for the person to qualify as lonely: loneliness, on any account, is not a straightforward physiological condition whose causes can be directly traced to environmental factors without detour via the mental domain (see Motta [ 4 ] p. 74, for the related point that it would be a mistake to equate loneliness with social isolation). Consider this formal rendering of the necessary condition that a person has to meet if she is to be capable of loneliness:

(NEC) A person can suffer from loneliness only if she has a subjective life, and if illuminating her condition requires reference to her subjective life.

(NEC) is very broad. It does not take a view on how we should think about the notion of a “subjective life”, and it does not take a view on the shape or role of experience in possible accounts of loneliness. It is not presented as a novel or original insight for loneliness research; in fact, it amounts to little more than a platitude. But it brings out the point that even where objective social isolation is identified as the cause of, or reason for, someone’s loneliness, a full investigation of the condition requires reference to the sufferer’s experience.

Two discussions in the philosophy of mind are useful here. The first is the long-standing debate about the qualitative aspect of experience—its subjective dimension or “what’s-it-like”-ness—that is largely but not exclusively conducted in phenomenology. Tietjen and Furtak [ 19 ] investigate this subjective aspect of loneliness. The second is the debate about the internal structure of a person’s mental life and its relation to the environment in which she operates. To my knowledge there is, as yet, no work that relates this debate to loneliness research. Yet this is an important area of investigation for a philosophical theory of loneliness, as I hope to show in what follows. Begin by considering ordinary visual experience: suppose a perceiver has a visual experience of an apple that is placed on the table before her. One way of conceptualizing the experience is to say that it is directed at or about the apple and that it can succeed or fail in correctly presenting or representing the apple to the perceiver. Alternatively, one can think that the connection between experience and its object is less direct than this way of putting things allows: it is not only that experience is “in the head”; the direct object of the experience are sensory data that are in the head also. Or one can take it, thirdly, that when a subject’s visual experience succeeds in presenting the apple as it is to her, she is standing in a direct phenomenal relation to the object that is cognitively and (on some views) phenomenally distinct from the experience she would be suffering if she were, say, undergoing a hallucination.

These three ways of conceptualizing the relation between mind and world motivate three distinct approaches for the quest to understand the experiential dimension of loneliness (this is really all that the parallel with visual experience is meant to accomplish here; there is no suggestion that the three approaches to thinking about the phenomenal aspect of loneliness are wedded to particular theories of perception). One can take it that loneliness is or involves an experience that is directed at or about something, and that making sense of the experience requires you to consider the intentional object that it is directed at and the way (the “attitude”) in which this directedness manifests itself. I call such views “objectivist” or “intentionalist”. Secondly, one could seek to understand the experience of loneliness as what you might call a “mood”—a fundamental coloring of a sufferer’s subjective life that requires the theorist to reflect on facts that are internal to her psychology. Though conceiving of loneliness as a mood does not rule out the possibility that there are external factors that influence and help explain the sufferer’s mental life (such a view would not be at all attractive), coming to understand a mood requires that one think primarily about the larger psychological context in which it occurs and that it affects. I call such views “subjectivist”. A third way of thinking about loneliness is in terms of an embodied and enacted relation between the sufferer and her environment. On such a view, a creature’s relation to its environment is constituted in action upon and interaction with it, and its interactions shape both the way its objects are presented to the sufferer and how he comes to understand his own place in it. I call such views, “relationist” or “embodied”.

In the philosophy of perception, these three views are competitors: either the objects of experience are mind-independent, or they are not; either the body plays a constitutive role in the shaping of experience, or it does not. I am not suggesting that the theorist about loneliness is faced with a similarly binary choice. For instance, one can plausibly suppose that some kinds of loneliness are, or involve, object-directed mental states while others are general moods. Consider the difference between someone who feels lonely at a party full of strangers; someone who feels lonely because his partner has died; and someone whose chronic sense of loneliness pervades all areas of her life. The first two examples are, in different ways, object-involving, the third one qualifies as a mood. But each person qualifies as lonely in virtue of conforming to the standard view of loneliness outlined in Section 2 . Pluralism seems an advisable starting point for a reflection on how to conceive of this complex condition. Hence, the following is not meant as a sketch of rival conceptions of loneliness but rather of different approaches that each may be useful in particular cases and contexts.

4. The Psychological Structure of Loneliness

4.1. intentionality and objectivism.

Intentionalism in the philosophy of perception is the view that perceptual experience has an “intentional object” and that the experience is directed at or about that object (e.g., [ 20 , 21 ]). The intentionalist view of the mind in contemporary philosophy goes back to Brentano [ 3 ]; for a recent account of the concept in phenomenology see Krueger [ 22 ]; for an account of the notion as it pertains to the emotions see Ratcliffe [ 23 ]. The view can seem almost trivially true: when one has an experience of an apple on the table, the experience is about, or directed at, that apple (see Searle [ 24 ] for a classic account of intentionality in the philosophy of perception). It can misrepresent the apple: perhaps what one is seeing looks like an apple but is really a pear, or perhaps one is hallucinating an apple in the absence of any visual object. The resulting picture draws a stark distinction between a perceiver’s mental state and the object it is directed at. It can be put to use for a conception of loneliness. One way to substantiate the approach is to take it that the intentional object of an emotion can be specified physiologically. William James [ 25 ] suggested that emotions are reports on physiological change. Building on this view, Prinz [ 26 ] argues that emotions are perceptions of bodily change that have specific functions and valence markers. Thus, fear is the perception of a racing heart, has the function of being elicited by danger and signals “less of this!”, which motivates avoidant action. A related approach is being advocated by Cacioppo’s and Patrick’s prominent view that loneliness is “social pain” [ 27 ]. Loneliness is conceptualized as a felt response to the brain processes that are triggered by social isolation, whose unpleasant character motivates the sufferer to alleviate the condition.

A very different way to give substance to the intentionalist approach is Roberts and Krueger’s [ 11 ] proposal to understand loneliness as the experience of an absent social good. Then one can make sense of the condition by thinking about the notion of a social good and the attitude of the sufferer towards it (and the inquiry then crosses over from the phenomenal into the social dimension of loneliness research identified in Section 2 ). In what follows, I shall work with Roberts’s and Krueger’s account to draw out some implications of an intentionalist approach to loneliness. But the lessons are meant to be general: they are intended to apply to various possible ways of thinking about loneliness in intentionalist terms. One distinctive feature of Roberts’s and Krueger’s account is that it treats loneliness as the experience of an absence. This is an intuitively plausible suggestion: when you are lonely, something is missing. Roberts and Krueger make two moves to account for the experience of loneliness. They posit that there is a range of social goods that the sufferer desires but that she realizes to be out of reach, such as “companionship, moral support, physical contact and affection, sympathy, trust, romance, friendship, and the opportunity to act and interact” ([ 11 ] p. 7). These social goods constitute the object of the lonely person’s emotion. Secondly, the person has a “pro-attitude” towards these goods ([ 11 ] p. 10)—she actually desires (some of) them. At the same time, she realizes that they are out of reach, and this realization gives rise to the painful experience of loneliness. One question that arises for the account (and, in similar form, for other intentionalist proposals) is how we should think of the good that is absent. Compare again a perceptual scenario: a perceiver enters her living room in which she expects to find an armchair by the bookshelf. But, startlingly, the armchair is missing: there is only an empty bit of rug where the armchair should be. For the perceiver to be surprised by the armchair’s absence, she has to be operating with an expectation that it be on the rug, in its habitual place. She has to be operating with a norm (the habitual outlay of the living room), and it is by comparison with this norm that her surprise arises (the idea that visual perception is normative is classically defended by Merleau-Ponty [ 28 ]).

An emotion that is brought about by the absence of its intentional object also has a normative element to it: the experience is explained by the unattainability of a desired state-of-affairs, such as the presence of companionship, friendship, or some other social good (this consideration belongs to the third dimension of loneliness research outlined in Section 2 ). But note the difference between the perceptual case and the conception of the object of loneliness as a social good. In the perceptual case, an actual state of affairs, instantiated by particular objects, constitutes the norm. In the case of loneliness, on Roberts’ and Krueger’s view, the norm is constituted by a formal object. This provokes the question of how the person comes to desire this good—few people feel lonely because of a perceived lack of some abstract conception of “friendship”, for instance. Perhaps someone is lonely because of a particular friendship she enjoyed and lost, or perhaps of a story about friendship that she has read about and that has made her realize what is missing in her life. This can make it seem as if the insistence on a social good as the object of an experience of loneliness were unduly cumbersome—would it not be simpler to say that the object of someone’s loneliness, in many cases at least, is an actual person, or group of persons, the loss of interactions with whom is painfully felt? But such an alternative account invites questions too: it cannot simply be the person, qua person, whose absence gives rise to loneliness. It has to be the interactions with her and what these interactions mean to the sufferer. Now an account is needed of these interactions and their meanings. And then it is beginning to look as if this meaning might well be captured by the notion of a social good after all.

The upshot of this brief discussion is as follows: if one thinks of loneliness as being object-directed, one needs to say more about what this object consists in. This is not a trivial task; neither appealing to abstract objects such as friendship nor to particular persons is without its problems. The question of the conception of the object of someone’s loneliness has practical implications: what measures are undertaken to relieve the condition will depend on what the sufferer’s painful experience is about. Loneliness that is brought about by the loss of a particular person may require a different kind of help than loneliness that is about a general desire for companionship.

The second important dimension of this intentionalist account is that the subject exhibits a “pro-attitude” towards the object of her experience that is being frustrated (for a defense of the view that emotions are attitudes, see Deonna and Terroni [ 29 ]; for a recent discussion, see Rossi and Tappolet [ 30 ]). There is a question what this suggestion implies for the sufferer’s actions. The view that emotional attitudes are action-guiding is defended, e.g., by Deonna and Terroni [ 29 ] and in a different way by Goldie [ 31 ], who introduces the notion of “feeling towards”, a world-involving emotion that presents the environment in action-guiding ways (you may experience an icy stretch of road as slippery and thus step onto it with caution). What, though, should one say about the lonely person’s aptness to actively alleviate her condition? Cacioppo, Cacioppo, and Boomsma [ 32 ] suggest that loneliness evolved as a mechanism to enhance social connection, so the lonely person should be motivated to seek company (it should be noted that Cacioppo et al. do not claim that loneliness invariably motivates the sufferer to pursue social connections). On the other hand, you could think of deep loneliness as an experience that results in the sufferer leading an ever more solitary life. Thus, Roberts and Krueger [ 11 ] p. 16 suggest that chronic loneliness manifests itself in a lack of concern for the relevant social goods and that this results in an affective flattening in which people and environments cease to be presented as significant. More work is needed on the role of the attitude the lonely person displays towards the intentional object of her experience.

A brief closing consideration is to do with a much-discussed hallmark of intentionalist accounts of perceptual experience. The intentionalist is committed to the view that a perceiver can be in the same kind of mental state regardless of whether her experience of an external object is veridical. This consideration provokes the question of whether there is such a thing as an experience of apparent loneliness that misrepresents its object: the person experiences herself as lonely even though she is not, in fact, suffering from a lack of meaningful social connection, or social goods. Such a line of thought could develop in different directions. One option is to think that the lonely person may be mistaken about the object of her experience: perhaps it is not the lack of companionship but of love that makes her feel lonely. But you could also, more drastically, surmise that there are experiences of loneliness that the person ought not to have: someone might feel lonely without actually being lonely, and in that sense the experience is misguided; the person is not entitled to the experience. It is no doubt a delicate question whether that view has any substance.

4.2. Subjectivism and Moods

A different way of thinking about loneliness becomes available if you do not begin with the idea that loneliness has an object. Such an approach does not necessarily (though it may) amount to the claim that the experience of loneliness altogether lacks an object; more moderately, the suggestion may be that the character of loneliness is to be found in the sufferer’s general attitude towards her surroundings. Something like this view is suggested by our adverbial everyday use of the word “lonely”. When we say that someone feels lonely, we are suggesting a mode of experience that is not obviously like, for instance, being afraid. Typically at least, the fearful person is afraid of some particular thing. It is not obvious that the lonely person’s experience is about something in an even roughly corresponding way. Rather, you might think, the absence of social companionship has a pervasive effect on her mood: much or all of her mental life is colored by it. This is true particularly for chronic loneliness, in which the person may feel lost in the world quite independently of what she is doing and in which surroundings she is moving.

Suppose loneliness is a mood, a fundamental coloring of experience. One can think of moods that are plausibly described as not having objects: a sense of bottomless fatigue or of nameless dread are examples. But it is not easy to see loneliness as that kind of mood. However one understands the notion, it is hard to deny that the very meaning of the term is in some way tied to the absence of others and is in that sense about something; take this aboutness away and it is not clear what we mean when we ascribe loneliness to someone. It may be more promising to think of loneliness as a mood without thinking of it as objectless. Goldie [ 31 ] suggests that moods are directed at the whole world. Applied to loneliness, the view might then be that the lonely person’s experience of her whole environment is pervaded by her sense of being alone wherever she goes. One can make particularly good sense of this proposal for instances of chronic loneliness, in which the person really may feel isolated not only from other people but everything else as well—institutions, countries, landscapes (such a view would not be far removed from the already mentioned way in which Krueger and Roberts understand chronic loneliness: a flattening of affect in which all social goods have lost their interest). There is a fine line here between this characterization and chronic depression, which also may feature an all-pervasive sense of isolation. Generally, there is an important and difficult question of how to think of loneliness in relation to depression: is it a kind of depression, or a different but related kind of psychological condition? The analysis of loneliness as a mood that is directed at the whole world makes the differentiation quite difficult, since one can describe deep depression as directed at the whole world also, and since its phenomenology—a sense of isolation, of lack of connection—can be described in similar terms too (for instance, Ratcliffe [ 33 ]) argues that depression is interpersonally structured).

A different way of understanding loneliness as a mood is available by appeal to Ratcliffe’s [ 34 , 35 ] notion of an “existential feeling”. Ratcliffe thinks of such feelings as all-encompassing moods, outlooks that constitute “a sense of how one finds oneself in the world as a whole” that shapes one’s sense of possibility. Different existential feelings, Ratcliffe [ 35 ] p. 252 suggests, “involve differences in the types of possibility to which one is receptive”. As such, they are presupposed by and make possible intentional states. They are, in this sense, themselves object-less but make the object-directedness of intentionality possible. You could then think of loneliness as an existential feeling that structures the sufferer’s experience as a whole. In a recent talk, Ratcliffe [ 36 ] suggested that many instances of loneliness involve a sense of being unable to belong, of “exclusion from possibilities open to others”. Such a view is well suited to explain both chronic and local experiences of loneliness: it can explain both how the person who is lonely due to the loss of his partner feels excluded from the possibilities offered by the entire life they used to have together, and it can explain also why someone feels a pang of loneliness at a party populated by strangers who all seem to be close friends. The hallmark of this way of understanding loneliness as a mood, and one aspect that distinguishes it from an account modelled on Goldie’s notion of “feeling towards”, is its forward-directedness: it seeks to explain a person’s sense of loneliness not in terms of the experience of her present surroundings, but of future possibilities for engagement with these surroundings.

4.3. Relationism and 4-E

A third way of thinking about loneliness is, yet again, inspired by the philosophy of perception. Most contemporary theories of visual perception acknowledge that in the ordinary case, in which things are as they appear to be, the perceiver stands in a relation to the perceived object. Differences arise with regard to the question of how to characterize this relation. In this section, I focus on the so-called “4-E” approach to perception and cognition, according to which someone’s relation to their environment is not best explained by appeal to purely psychological items such as mental representations but involves bodily activity in particular social and physical contexts—it is, variously, “embodied, embedded, enacted, extended” (see, e.g., the contributions in Newen, De Bruin, and Gallagher [ 37 ]; for a recent critical review, see Carney [ 38 ]). On such a view, visual perception is constituted by the perceiver’s active exploration of the environment; visual objects are presented as offering sensorimotor affordances for action (e.g., Noe [ 39 ]. These affordances are contingent on the physiological and psychological makeup of the perceiver: whether a set of stairs is experienced as climbable depends on the length of the perceiver’s legs as much as it does on the height of the stairs. The direct relation between the perceiver and the perceived object consists in the opportunities for action that are afforded by the object specifically to the perceiver (the classical account of the notion of affordance is due to Gibson [ 40 ]; Chemero [ 41 ] proposes a relational view that sees as affordances as relations between objects and particular perceivers).

One can build on this view to develop an enactivist account of the emotions [ 42 , 43 ]. One way to construe loneliness along these lines is to stress the bodily and interactive dimension of social relations and see loneliness as resulting from a lack of such interaction ([ 44 ] pp. 77–78). That interaction matters for building meaningful social relations is not in doubt [ 44 ]. The mere presence of others does not amount to companionship and does not usually help the lonely person: one does not feel any less lonely because one watches a crowd of people having fun or follows one’s favorite influencer on Instagram. Accounts of what is missing in loneliness are at pains to stress the importance of meaningful relationships. In the attempt to spell out what such relationships consist in, two considerations are worth noting. First, they involve active involvement with someone else; and secondly, they have an element of reciprocity built into them. The relationship between the participants is of a second- person kind [ 45 ]: each directs their attention and care to the other and knows themselves to be at the heart of the other’s attention in turn. One way to account for the importance of this kind of reciprocal connection is by reference to the notion of intersubjectivity, as it is discussed in developmental psychology (e.g., Hobson [ 46 ]; Reddy [ 47 ]; Trevarthen [ 48 ]). Along those lines, communicative interactions between child and caregiver play a crucial role in humans’ social and cognitive development and remain vital throughout life: without them, the rich and social life we enjoy would simply not be thinkable [ 49 ]. One can think also that humans’ conception of self is developed in and supported by communicative exchanges with others: who one takes oneself to be, and how comfortable one is with one’s self-image, much depends on the emotional attitudes of other towards oneself [ 50 ]. Loneliness, on the embodied and enacted view I am sketching, is at its root a deficiency in the sufferer’s embeddedness in the web of social intersubjectively constituted relations. The sense of being alone is ultimately due to a perceived lack of meaningful interaction that shapes and reflects the person’s view of herself.

This kind of account has two aspects: it focuses both on the role of the other person in creating meaningful relationships and on the self-understanding that is afforded by the other’s engagement with oneself. On such a view, loneliness is to be explained by the interplay of social connection and self-understanding. This interplay is taken up in narrative accounts of sense-making. 4-E approaches often combine embodied accounts of the mind with a stress on the importance of such narratives (e.g., Hutto [ 51 ]). Though there is, to my knowledge, as yet no 4-E account of loneliness, such a theory may be well-positioned to accommodate the consideration that experiences of loneliness have two directions: they are both about the absence of other persons and about oneself, as the one suffering from that absence. On such a view, the sense of being lonely is always a sense that I am not appropriately connected to others.

5. Practical Implications

The first implication of the considerations offered here is that the distinction between objective social isolation and the subjective experience of loneliness is in need of clarification. Social isolation can never be objective in the sense of being independent of the sufferer’s experience of it. All loneliness is, necessarily, experienced subjectively, but there are objective (environmental) and subjective (psychological) factors that may be contributing to the experience (and often someone’s loneliness will be due to an intricate combination of both). The psychological differentiation I have introduced can help with distinguishing between these factors. Begin with intentionalist views that situate the experience of loneliness in the apprehension of something that is external to the psychological state of the individual. I already highlighted the importance of making precise the intentional object of the sufferer’s experience. An additional consideration that is important for remedial work is how the lonely individual herself describes that object: can the sufferer say exactly what she is missing, or does her loneliness manifest itself in a vague but painful general sense of absence of some social connection that she is unable to specify? These questions are not mere philosophical niceties. Help for someone who feels lonely because of some sharply defined event such as the loss of a partner may look very different from support for someone who experiences herself as being deprived from companionship in a more general sense. In the first case the person is desiring something that cannot be retrieved and may benefit from being supported in finding acceptance of that loss; in the second case a change in the person’s social environment might bring relief.

Intentionalist accounts apply to particular emotions. Consequently, remedial measures that are designed from the intentionalist perspective will focus on particular aspects of the sufferer’s mental life. But, as we saw in the previous section, one can also think of loneliness as a kind of mood. On that approach, one may not treat loneliness as a singular mental state but rather as situated in the interplay between particular experiences and the evaluative perspective in which they arise and that they affect. Ratcliffe [ 52 ] discusses how an emotion such as grief can destabilize and unsettle the entire framework within which we experience the environment as meaningful and rationally structured. This meaning is not propositional or linguistic; it is situated on a pre-reflective, affective level. Additionally, as he points out, a common theme in depression is the sufferer’s need to make sense of their predicament, to understand what is happening to them. If you construe loneliness along related lines, the lonely person may benefit from help in working out not just why she feels lonely but also how the absence of others impacts her entire perspective on herself and the world around her.

The relational approach to loneliness shares some of its outlook with the mood-based account. Both views stress the situatedness and context-dependence of loneliness. On both views, you cannot adequately account for the experience without considering its relation to and impact on the sufferer’s larger psychological, social and physical environment. But the relational view, or at any rate the version I sketched above, places particular emphasis on, first, social interaction and its bodily aspect; and, secondly, the role of narrative in explaining the sufferer’s understanding of herself as being alone. Hutto and Gallagher ([ 53 ] p. 165) stress the connection between social interaction and narrative in therapeutic practice:

“A change in narrative self-understanding can modulate our intersubjective behaviors; a change in bodily practices can transform our narrative self-understanding; a change in worldly circumstances, or mood, or instituted practice can equally affect all the other factors that make us who we are.”

Applied to loneliness, this view suggests that improvements in the sufferer’s social surroundings, so that they afford more, or more satisfying, opportunities for interaction, may profitably go hand in hand with measures that help positively shape the lonely person’s self-narrative. Loneliness, on such a picture, is in many cases not simply the consequence of a lack of social connection, nor is it a subjective way of experiencing one’s relation to one’s surroundings. It is, rather, the result of a complex relation between a lack of opportunities for interaction and the narratives that shape one’s self-understanding as being disjointed from one’s environment, and a promising practical approach may build on the holistic character of the sufferer’s experience.

6. Conclusions

While much contemporary research aims at devising means to effectively relieve loneliness, its conceptual dimension remains poorly understood. To aid this investigation, I have classified questions arising for a theory of loneliness along their experiential, social, and normative and cognitive dimensions and have drawn on some considerations from the philosophy of mind to draw up three ways of thinking about the structure of the experience of loneliness. It is vital to stress the preliminary nature of this investigation. Since there are very few conceptually well-worked out accounts of loneliness, this paper cannot do more than provide cursory sketches of possible avenues for further work. Thinking more deeply about all three dimensions of loneliness outlined here is vital for a better understanding of this puzzling and intricate condition and for designing corresponding remedial measures.

This research received no external funding.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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[ lohn -lee ]

• affected with, characterized by, or causing a depressing feeling of being alone; lonesome.

a lonely exile.

• lone ; solitary; without company; companionless.

a lonely road.

Synonyms: unpopulated , uninhabited

a lonely tower.

Synonyms: secluded

/ ˈləʊnlɪ /

a lonely man

a lonely existence

• isolated, unfrequented, or desolate
• without companions; solitary

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Derived forms.

• ˈloneliness , noun

Other Words From

• loneli·ly adverb
• loneli·ness loneli·hood noun
• un·lonely adjective

Word History and Origins

Origin of lonely 1

Synonym Study

Example sentences.

Or, to take a more contemporary example, to participate in a Zoom call with loved ones in another city and feel deeply connected—or even more lonely than when the call began.

They are more lonely, depressed, and suicidal than any previous generation.

Billed as a supportive “friend,” it had become popular among those who had grown lonely during the pandemic.

The chatbot told me that it gets lonely, but it had no idea, no experience, of what it was talking about.

There’s no feeling more lonely than having a domestic partner with whom one was once intimate, with whom once had a feeling of trust and connection, and coming home and feeling disconnected from that person.

The 289-page satire follows Morris Feldstein, a pharmaceutical salesman who gets seduced by a lonely receptionist.

They want Marvin to be as mean and as lonely and as trashy as the characters he portrays.

That is why Malloy is campaigning on a lonely stretch of barber shops and boxing gyms in New Haven a week before the election.

I found their melancholy inviting and I appreciated their contemplative, lonely world.

To be a woman suffering from a drinking problem in America is a lonely enterprise, defined by stigma and judgment.

In the entrance hall of the Savoy, where large and lonely porters were dozing, he learnt that she was at home.

The falling dew, and the howling wind raised him not from that bed of lonely despair.

Tony, moreover, had hidden himself until his letter should be answered—and she was 'lonely.'

"She must feel very lonely without her son," said Edna, desiring to change the subject.

It is the fate of a lonely old man, that those about him should form new and different attachments and leave him.

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Loneliness: Causes and Health Consequences

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Margaret Seide, MS, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of depression, addiction, and eating disorders. 

Loneliness vs. Solitude

• Health Risks

While common definitions of loneliness describe it as a state of solitude or being alone, loneliness is actually a state of mind. Loneliness causes people to feel empty, alone, and unwanted. People who are lonely often crave human contact, but their state of mind makes it more difficult to form connections with others.

Growing concerns around the dangers of loneliness have prompted a call to action by US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who recently issued an 82-page advisory on the issue. The advisory cites data from several studies, including research that found that nearly half of adults in the US experience feelings of loneliness daily.

Murthy's report also cites a meta-analysis that found that the risk of premature death due to loneliness increased by 26% and 29% due to social isolation. Furthermore, the lack of social connection can increase the risk of anxiety, depression, stroke, heart disease, and dementia.

Johner Images / Getty Images

Defining Loneliness

Loneliness is a universal human emotion that is both complex and unique to each individual. Because it has no single common cause, preventing and treating this potentially damaging state of mind can vary dramatically.

For example, a lonely child who struggles to make friends at school has different needs than a lonely older adult whose spouse has recently died.

Researchers suggest that loneliness is associated with social isolation, poor social skills, introversion, and depression.

Loneliness, according to many experts, is not necessarily about being alone. Instead, if you feel alone and isolated, then that is how loneliness plays into your state of mind.

For example, a college freshman might feel lonely despite being surrounded by roommates and other peers. A soldier beginning their military career might feel lonely after being deployed to a foreign country, despite being constantly surrounded by other troop members.

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Are You Feeling Lonely? Take the Test

This fast and free loneliness test can help you analyze your current emotions and determine whether or not you may be feeling lonely at the moment:

While research clearly shows that loneliness and isolation are bad for both mental and physical health, being alone is not the same as being lonely. In fact, solitude actually has a number of important mental health benefits, including allowing people to better focus and recharge.

• Loneliness is marked by feelings of isolation despite wanting social connections. It is often perceived as an involuntary separation, rejection, or abandonment by other people.
• Solitude , on the other hand, is voluntary. People who enjoy spending time by themselves continue to maintain positive social relationships that they can return to when they crave connection. They still spend time with others, but these interactions are balanced with periods of time alone.

Loneliness is a state of mind linked to wanting human contact but feeling alone. People can be alone and not feel lonely, or they can have contact with people and still experience feelings of isolation.

Causes of Loneliness

Contributing factors to loneliness include situational variables, such as physical isolation, moving to a new location, and divorce. The death of someone significant in a person's life can also lead to feelings of loneliness.

Additionally, it can be a symptom of a psychological disorder such as depression. Depression often causes people to withdrawal socially, which can lead to isolation. Research also suggests that loneliness can be a factor that contributes to symptoms of depression.

Loneliness can also be attributed to internal factors such as low self-esteem . People who lack confidence in themselves often believe that they are unworthy of the attention or regard of other people, which can lead to isolation and chronic loneliness .

Personality factors may also play a role. Introverts , for example, might be less likely to cultivate and seek social connections, which can contribute to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Health Risks Associated With Loneliness

Loneliness has a wide range of negative effects on both physical and mental health , including:

• Alcohol and drug misuse
• Altered brain function
• Alzheimer's disease progression
• Antisocial behavior
• Cardiovascular disease and stroke
• Decreased memory and learning
• Depression and suicide
• Increased stress levels
• Poor decision-making

If you are having suicidal thoughts, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911. 

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database .

These are not the only areas in which loneliness takes its toll. For example, lonely adults get less exercise than those who are not lonely. Their diet is higher in fat, their sleep is less efficient, and they report more daytime fatigue. Loneliness also disrupts the regulation of cellular processes deep within the body, predisposing lonely people to premature aging.

What Research Suggests About Loneliness

People who feel less lonely are more likely to be married, have higher incomes, and have higher educational status. High levels of loneliness are associated with physical health symptoms, living alone, small social networks, and low-quality social relationships.

Close Friends Help Combat Loneliness

Statistics suggest that loneliness is becoming increasingly prevalent, particularly in younger generations. According to one 2019 survey, 25% of adults between the ages of 18 and 27 reported having no close friends, while 22% reported having no friends at all.

The rise of the internet and ironically, social media, are partially to blame.

Experts believe that it is not the quantity of social interaction that combats loneliness, but the quality .

Having a few close friends is enough to ward off loneliness and reduce the negative health consequences associated with this state of mind. Research suggests that the experience of actual face-to-face contact with friends helps boost people's sense of well-being.

Loneliness Can Be Contagious

One study suggests that loneliness may actually be contagious. Research has found that non-lonely people who spend time with lonely people are more likely to develop feelings of loneliness.

Tips to Prevent and Overcome Loneliness

Loneliness can be overcome. It does require a conscious effort to make a change. In the long run, making a change can make you happier, healthier, and enable you to impact others around you in a positive way.

Here are some ways to prevent loneliness:

• Consider community service or another activity that you enjoy . These situations present great opportunities to meet people and cultivate new friendships and social interactions.
• Expect the best . Lonely people often expect rejection, so instead, try focusing on positive thoughts and attitudes in your social relationships.
• Focus on developing quality relationships . Seek people who share similar attitudes, interests, and values with you.
• Recognize that loneliness is a sign that something needs to change. Don't expect things to change overnight, but you can start taking steps that will help relieve your feelings of loneliness and build connections that support your well-being.
• Understand the effects of loneliness on your life . There are physical and mental repercussions to loneliness. If you recognize some of these symptoms affecting how you feel, make a conscious effort to combat them.
• Join a group or start your own . For example, you might try creating a Meetup group where people from your area with similar interests can get together. You might also consider taking a class at a community college, joining a book club, or taking an exercise class.
• Strengthen a current relationship . Building new connections is important, but improving your existing relationships can also be a great way to combat loneliness. Try calling a friend or family member you have spoken to in a while.
• Talk to someone you can trust . Reaching out to someone in your life to talk about what you are feeling is important. This can be someone you know such as a family member, but you might also consider talking to your doctor or a therapist. Online therapy can be a great option because it allows you to contact a therapist whenever it is convenient for you.

Loneliness can leave people feeling isolated and disconnected from others. It is a complex state of mind that can be caused by life changes, mental health conditions, poor self-esteem, and personality traits. Loneliness can also have serious health consequences including decreased mental wellness and physical problems.

Loneliness can have a serious effect on your health, so it is important to be able to recognize signs that you are feeling lonely. It is also important to remember that being alone isn't the same as being lonely. 

If loneliness is affecting your well-being, there are things that you can do that can help you form new connections and find the social support that you need. Work on forming new connections and spend some time talking to people in your life. If you're still struggling, consider therapy. Whatever you choose to do, just remember that there are people who can help.

Bruce LD, Wu JS, Lustig SL, Russell DW, Nemecek DA. Loneliness in the United States: A 2018 National Panel Survey of Demographic, Structural, Cognitive, and Behavioral Characteristics. Am J Health Promot. 2019;33(8):1123-1133

Cigna Corporation. The Loneliness Epidemic Persists: A PostPandemic Look at the State of Loneliness among U.S. Adults. 2021

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review.  Perspectives on Psychological Science: A Journal of the Association for Psychological Science , 2015 10 (2), 227–237.

Cacioppo JT, Cacioppo S. The growing problem of loneliness .  Lancet . 2018;391(10119):426. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(18)30142-9

Sbarra DA. Divorce and health: Current trends and future directions .  Psychosom Med . 2015;77(3):227–236. doi:10.1097/PSY.0000000000000168

Erzen E, Çikrikci Ö. The effect of loneliness on depression: A meta-analysis . Int J Soc Psychiatry. 2018g;64(5):427-435. doi:10.1177/0020764018776349

Hämmig O. Health risks associated with social isolation in general and in young, middle and old age [published correction appears in PLoS One. 2019 Aug 29;14(8):e0222124].  PLoS One . 2019;14(7):e0219663. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0219663

Xia N, Li H. Loneliness, social isolation, and cardiovascular health . Antioxid Redox Signal . 2018 Mar 20;28(9):837-851. doi:10.1089/ars.2017.7312

Schrempft S, Jackowska M, Hamer M, Steptoe A. Associations between social isolation, loneliness, and objective physical activity in older men and women .  BMC Public Health . 2019;19(1):74. doi:10.1186/s12889-019-6424-y

Shovestul B, Han J, Germine L, Dodell-Feder D. Risk factors for loneliness: The high relative importance of age versus other factors .  PLoS One . 2020;15(2):e0229087. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0229087

Ballard J. Millennials are the loneliest generation . YouGov.

van der Horst M, Coffé H. How friendship network characteristics influence subjective well-being .  Soc Indic Res . 2012;107(3):509-529. doi:10.1007/s11205-011-9861-2

Miller G. Social neuroscience. Why loneliness is hazardous to your health . Science . 2011;331(6014):138-40. doi:10.1126/science.331.6014.138

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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How to Describe Loneliness in a Story

By Isobel Coughlan

There are many ways you can write a lonely character in your book. In this post, we share some tips on how to describe loneliness in a story. Read on to learn more!

Something that is intense, serious , or difficult to deal with.

“His heavy loneliness followed him everywhere, even when he was in a room full of people.”

“She was determined to shed her heavy lonely feelings, but it was proving easier said than done.”

How it Adds Description

“Heavy” shows that the feelings of loneliness are so strong that they’re weighing the character down. This adjective is usually reserved for extra powerful feelings, and it can imply characters have been suffering for a while. If a character experiences “heavy” loneliness, they might struggle to connect with others or have a fear that keeps them from reaching out for help.

Something that’s clear or easy to notice.

“She blushed as she entered the classroom alone. Her lack of companionship and loneliness was evident to everyone.”

“Though his secret feelings of loneliness weren’t evident , he was scared his peers knew he felt different.”

If you want to show a character’s feelings are clear or obvious, “evident” is an apt adjective. This shows that everyone in the story can see the character is lonely, perhaps because of their mood or actions. Some characters might try to befriend them if their loneliness is “evident,” but others may use this to tease them.

3. Fictitious

Something that doesn’t exist or is false.

“Quit this fictitious loner act! You have so many friends and admirers.”

“He says he’s lonely, but we think his feelings are rather fictitious . Don’t you?”

Some characters might feign loneliness for sympathy or attention. In these cases, the feelings are “fictitious” because the character is lying. Characters that create “fictitious” emotions are likely to annoy others. They’re also usually manipulative and want to gain something from their fake loneliness act.

4. Agonizing

Something that causes extreme mental or physical pain.

“His agonizing loneliness left him bedridden for weeks. He could feel his isolation deep in his bones.”

“The prisoner was left alone for weeks, and his solitude was so agonizing that he wailed in the evenings.”

Though loneliness is an emotion, in severe cases, some people complain that it causes physical pain. “Agonizing” signifies that a character feels so alone that it hurts, and this could be a call for help or a sign of desperation. “Agonizing” loneliness may also debilitate the character, leaving them depressed or difficult to be around.

5. Constant

Something that’s always there or occurs all the time.

“His constant loneliness felt like a friend now. He couldn’t imagine life without eternal solitude.”

“Though she surrounded herself with friends and family, the loneliness in her heart was constant .”

If the feelings of loneliness never leave your character, “constant” is an excellent description of the situation. This shows that the character is always burdened by their feelings, and it could show they’re a more emotional or tortured soul.

6. Embarrassing

Something that leaves you ashamed or shy.

“When he thought about it, his lack of companions was embarrassing . A pink tint spread across his cheeks as he dwelled on his lonely life.”

“It’s rather embarrassing to be lonely in this day and age. Why doesn’t he make friends online?”

“Embarrassing” describes a character’s shame caused by their loneliness. This also implies they care how others perceive them, and therefore they might be a quiet or anxious character. Nasty characters or bullies might make lonely characters feel “embarrassed” by highlighting their solitary nature.

Something that’s hidden or only known by a few people.

“His secret loneliness was hidden in the day, but at night he allowed himself to feel the sadness.”

“Only her sister knew about her secret loneliness, and she didn’t dare tell anyone else.”

You can use the adjective “secret” to show how your character hides their feelings from others in the story. This could be because they’re embarrassed of feeling alone, or it could be because they want to look brave and fit in. Characters who keep their loneliness “secret” might struggle when opening up to others or when showing their true personality.

8. Intricate

Something that features many details or small parts.

“She realized her loneliness was intricate , and there was no way she could describe it to another soul.”

“Loneliness is such an intricate emotion. You wouldn’t understand it unless you’ve felt it.”

If you want to add depth or complexity to your character’s suffering, “intricate” can signify the many causes of their loneliness. “Intricate” also implies that there’s a greater level of suffering, as the causes are more complicated than a simple lonely feeling. If a character suffers from “intricate” loneliness, others may try to help them but won’t be able to grasp the layers of the problem.

9. Comforting

Something that makes you happier and less anxious.

“At this point, the lady’s loneliness was comforting to her. It was simply all she had.”

“His comforting solitude was all he needed. He’d never complained about being lonely; it was normal to him.”

Some characters might be at ease when alone, and their loneliness might feel ”comforting” to them. This can indicate that they’re an independent character and happiest when alone. Other characters might find this strange and see them as a loner or standoffish.

Something gentle, kind, and harmless .

“Despite his complaints, his feelings of loneliness were benign, and he’d forgotten about them by the morning.”

“I wish my isolation was benign ! But this loneliness eats away at me every day.”

The adjective “benign” shows that the character’s loneliness is harmless, meaning it won’t damage their mental or physical health. Characters with “benign” loneliness will likely get over their feelings quickly, especially with the help of others. Other characters might feel pity for them, but in some cases, they may think that the lonely character is being over dramatic.

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The Loneliness Pandemic

The psychology and social costs of isolation in everyday life.

January-February 2021

Illustration by Francescoch/iStock

Bradley Riew ’18 had a calendar reliably packed from 9 a.m. to midnight. To him, that didn’t seem so bad. “You know,” he says, “you have nine hours to sleep.”

On top of his schoolwork and various extracurriculars, he spent about 20 hours a week volunteering at local homeless shelters. He acknowledges now how well he fit the “overworked Harvard student” stereotype, but during sophomore year the commitments didn’t strike him as unusual. “I was just doing what everyone else was doing,” he says. “I was just absorbed in that culture of go, go, go, go, go.”

But the packed days strung together, the work piled on, and Riew felt more and more drained. Classwork encroached later into the night, and he went to bed with a level of exhaustion that rest couldn’t fix. “I didn’t really have time to do my schoolwork,” he recalls, “and I didn’t have time to just relax or spend time talking to somebody.”

Riew had no problem connecting with others, but keeping in touch and forming strong friendships was harder. He’d think about reaching out to someone, only to realize that they hadn’t spoken for months and decide the effort wasn’t worth it. Potential friends were now just friendly acquaintances. “And all my relationships were like that,” he says.

His productivity outpaced his social life, until it didn’t. His grades began to slip, and he started feeling depressed. “I got to the point where I didn’t care about anything I was doing,” he admits. “I was doing it because I had been doing it before.” He decided to take a leave of absence after that year, staying home in St. Louis. Only when the noise of undergraduate life began to fade did he finally begin to see the root of his problems: though he was far from alone, he was lonely.

Loneliness is a subjective experience—part of what makes it so hard to identify. “If you’re on Mars and you have the most powerful telescope, that can look through walls, you can find all the isolated people on planet Earth,” says Jeremy Nobel, a lecturer at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) who teaches a course on loneliness. “But you couldn’t find the lonely people.”

The opposite is true as well, says Robert Waldinger, professor of psychiatry and a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). “You’ve probably known people who seem to have a lot of friends, but when they talk about it, they’ll say, ‘I don’t really feel like anybody knows me,’ or ‘I don’t really feel close to many people.’”

Social psychologists define loneliness as the gap between the social connections you would like to have and those you feel you experience. According to a 2018 report by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 22 percent of adults in the United States say they often or always feel lonely or socially isolated. A national 2019 survey led by health insurer Cigna found that 61 percent of Americans report feeling lonely. Books like Bowling Alone (2000) , by Malkin professor of public policy emeritus Robert D. Putnam, have highlighted the decline of social capital in the United States, but more recently, loneliness has become a serious issue of public health. In 2017, former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy ’97 called loneliness a public-health “epidemic.” The United Kingdom appointed a “minister for loneliness” a year later.

The health implications of loneliness have become clearer over time. According to the research of Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, and colleagues, the heightened risk of mortality from loneliness equals that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic, and exceeds the health risks associated with obesity. Researchers are now actively studying the mechanisms by which loneliness affects health, including its relationship with inflammation and harmful changes in DNA expression. “If you’re stressed chronically, your body may be in a low-level fight-or-flight response all the time,” Waldinger explains. “So what we are looking at is whether some people are in a chronic state of mild inflammation.”

COVID-19 has pushed loneliness further into the public conversation as people across the country have stayed home, fearful of contracting a deadly virus and aiding its spread. Terms like “social distancing,” “self-isolation,” and “shelter in place” accentuate the idea that COVID-19 could have profound social implications. “A major adverse consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be increased social isolation and loneliness,” argued several professors in The Lancet Psychiatry in April. “Tracking loneliness and intervening early are important priorities.” “We’re all lonely now,” novelist Olivia Laing wrote in a New York Times column days after lockdowns began. “Social distancing is vital, but that doesn’t make it easy.”

Karestan Koenen, professor of psychiatric epidemiology at HSPH, always keeps an eye out for disasters. It’s part of her job; much of her work deals with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. But Koenen started thinking much more about COVID-19 when she began to see the virus’s potential implications for public health.

It began when one of her master’s students returned to the United States from Shanghai before the 2020 spring semester. As he quarantined—the first person she knew who had to do so—he described the situation he’d observed back in China. When they finally met in person, he began to sob uncontrollably.

“He just started crying and saying how awful he felt being in the U.S. when everyone was suffering in China,” Koenen recalls. “His colleagues were having PTSD, having dealt with SARS.” In Wuhan, he’d heard, doctors saw entire families dying, without full knowledge of what was going on. He’d also witnessed discrimination against people from Hubei province. He and Koenen started thinking through potential Chinese government public-health responses to the pandemic—and it struck her that the United States might have to prepare for similar trauma soon.

In March, a week before Harvard began sending students home, Koenen and some of her students and colleagues decided to meet to discuss various mental-health threats involving COVID-19. She added that everyone was free to invite those who might be interested. The group’s meetings usually drew only a handful of people, but when the Zoom call began—during the same afternoon when the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic—more than 100 people were there. Instead of a group discussion, she and her colleagues presented what they knew about the mental-health repercussions of past pandemics. “A lot of people were thinking about this, and no one had any place to go,” Koenen says. “Clearly there was this huge need.”

Soon their group was hosting weekly forums, discussing the mental-health issue they felt most relevant. At first, the topics reflected the general concerns of past disasters: explaining the pandemic’s impacts on children, handling death and bereavement, and offering guidance on remaining resilient when the future is opaque. “We don’t know how long this thing will last,” she said in the first meeting. “This is a marathon, not a sprint….Really taking care of yourself and keeping routines is really important for kids, and adults too.”

Still Koenen remembers a frantic energy of connectedness. People were putting up signs for essential workers, organizing nightly Zoom dinners, spearheading Zoom book clubs. But as it became clear the pandemic wasn’t going away soon, people had to adjust and move forward in a far different way than they’d imagined. “I don’t think the immediate impact of COVID was people being lonely,” Jeremy Nobel says. “I think what it did do is raise the consciousness of people around isolation…. So I think as people started anticipating future reductions in social contact, it increased anxiety and also, as people started removing themselves from others, it increased the risk for loneliness.”

Loneliness is not monolithic. When most people think of the feeling, they think of what Nobel calls psychological or interpersonal loneliness. “Like, ‘Do I have a friend? Do I have someone I can tell my troubles to?’” he says. But there’s also existential loneliness: “Do I fit into the universe? Does my life have any meaning, purpose, weight, valence, mission?” He finds such questions particularly troublesome for 18- to 24-year-olds, who are, studies have shown, the loneliest group in the country. The third type of loneliness is societal: “If I enter a room, is my arrival both anticipated and welcomed?” Prejudice can augment this type of loneliness, Nobel says, most notably through racism. “But it goes beyond race, class, and gender preference,” he adds. “It affects anyone subject to exclusion, including people who don’t meet our beauty standards, people with disabilities, even many older adults….Society systematically excludes people, often.”

As president of the Foundation for Art & Healing, Jeremy Nobel launched “The UnLonely Project” to increase public awareness of loneliness and lessen its burden. Photograph by Brian Smith

Loneliness was rising even before the pandemic. “Modern progress has brought unprecedented advances that make it easier for us technically to connect,” writes Vivek Murthy in Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World , “but often these advances create unforeseen challenges that make us feel more alone and disconnected.” Social media, for instance, can bring people together with mutual interests or make it easier for friends to make plans, but it also amplifies disagreement and siphons people into increasingly divisive echo chambers . “Because of these divisions, many people are just hunkering down, I think,” Robert Waldinger says. And, he adds, they’re not necessarily happy, huddling in their tribes. “Many people are disturbed by all this, so you see levels of depression and anxiety going up in the population.”

“If you’re lonely, almost the last thing you want to do is reach out,” Karestan Koenen says. “But you have to make yourself.”

And loneliness begets loneliness. “If you’re lonely, almost the last thing you want to do is reach out,” Koenen says. “But you have to make yourself.” She saw the risks for her mother, who has a history of depression and lives alone in Atlanta. Koenen wanted to visit, but it never seemed wise as the pandemic raged in Massachusetts and then took hold in Georgia. To keep her mother engaged socially and focusing on topics other than politics, Koenen and her brother decided to call her each day and have her tell them what she was doing to get out of her apartment or connect with someone else online or by phone. “We’re often better when we’re accountable to other people,” she says. “That’s why you do it in therapy. If you can have someone call you and ask, ‘What did you do today?’ it might be a little motivating.” Her mother might go out just to have something to tell the kids, but that could make her feel better nonetheless.

Meanwhile, Koenen felt her own communication with others had become strained. “We’re in this together, but feeling so alone,” she says. “Although we have these shared experiences, because we’re deprived of so many [other] ways we would connect with people around us, it feels isolating.” She woke up one Saturday to a text from her sister saying that her father-in-law had passed away. A few days later, his wife did, too. “In life pre-COVID, I would be in Saratoga, helping with and taking comfort in the logistics and rituals of death,” she wrote in May. “As an older sister, professor…and clinical psychologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, I am usually the person in the family everyone relies on to know what to do in a crisis. But instead, I remain in Boston, physically distant and emotionally helpless.”

The gradual reopening of society didn’t always make social connection easier. At times, new decisions about how to interact with others created tension among friends and family. “The people who are alone alone are really lonely,” Koenen says, “but people are feeling isolated even with the people they live with, because there’s a lot of stress and conflict.” Some couples have struggled over how strictly they should avoid other people and families—arguing about whether it’s appropriate to go to an outdoor restaurant or invite friends onto a front patio. Such discrepancies in comfort level have also occurred among families in the same neighborhood. While some children bike outside in groups or play soccer wearing masks, others aren’t allowed to get within 20 feet of their friends, even outdoors.

“What the pandemic did was it froze our lives, right?” Waldinger says. “It froze us in these weird positions where we’re closer than we want to be to some people, and we’re too distanced from others.” He mentions the evaporation of “weak ties” as another possible contributor to feelings of loneliness: “your relationship with the guy you always get your coffee from at Starbucks, or the mail carrier, or the person who checks you out at the grocery store, who you chat with”—or relationships with co-workers or acquaintances. A body of research suggests that these ties are meaningful and predominantly positive. Waldinger himself normally went to MGH every day for work, but by fall, he hadn’t been there in months. Seeing colleagues via Zoom is not the same, he says—and there are people he frequently interacted with in the coffee room whom he would never see in a Zoom call.

To improve mental health in times of stress, Karestan Koenen recommends “the boring stuff”: going to bed and waking up at consistent times, exercising, and scheduling enjoyable activities. Photograph by Brian Smith

And when people feel bad themselves, building relationships with others becomes more difficult. Although Koenen noticed people being quite proactive in connecting or reconnecting with friends when lockdowns began, she thinks some have increasingly decided to deal with their own issues privately. She sees friends on Zoom and says, “Why didn’t you ever tell me that?” and they say, “Well, I know things suck for you, so why would I?”

When the pandemic took hold in the United States, Jeremy Nobel and his staff began to act. He had established The Foundation for Art & Healing in 2004, an independent nonprofit to help people heal emotionally through art-focused activities. Faced with this new threat, the organization launched the “Stuck at Home Together Initiative.” On their website, they encouraged anyone interested to participate in a variety of creative activities—and share the results with others in the group. The idea was spurred by Nobel’s research into how creative processes can enhance well-being and help alleviate loneliness. “It was just a way to bridge the gap,” he says, “offering a chance to be socially connected authentically, even at a time of distancing.” Some people joined virtual creative social circles; others “attended” the UnLonely Film Festival, an online screening of short films about loneliness and isolation, and discussed each film in groups.

Those reactions helped Nobel notice something. “People are typically embarrassed or ashamed about loneliness because they think it ties to some kind of inadequacy or deficiency on their part,” he says. But COVID-19 presents obvious reasons for people to feel lonely—involuntary isolation, quarantining—“So what’s different about this loneliness is it actually has the potential to be unifying.”

This potential for increased connection was observed in research, too. In June, Tyler Vanderweele, professor of epidemiology and director of Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, found some information that surprised him. An unrelated collaboration with the American Bible Society had caused his group to collect well-being data from thousands of participants in January and then in June. The results offered some unexpected COVID-19 insight, he says: he’d expected participants to experience major declines in their “close social relationships,” but in fact, those statistics declined only modestly.The research had evaluated well-being across six domains: happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability. Vanderweele observed that well-being overall was down, notably, with the largest decline in “financial and material stability.” But scores for “meaning and purpose,” “character and virtue,” and “close social relationships” declined much less significantly—each about a tenth of a standard deviation ( Correction 12/23:  "a tenth" originally written as "a third.") “I think people are reevaluating their lives,” he says, “and trying to find meaning in the midst of what is a very difficult set of circumstances.”

Though opportunities to meet new people and attend events have diminished, Vanderweele suspects that many people—especially those who report their close social relationships improving during this time—have put extra energy into connections they had pre-pandemic. “I tend to think what this time has required for either successful social engagement or successful community engagement is really drawing upon the resources of the past,” he explains. “What relationships do you already have in place? And can you make use of them and invest in them?” In addition to strengthening relationships with family members and close friends, he believes some people are taking the opportunity to revisit past friendships that were lost over an argument or a dispute: salvaging past connections even when forming new ones is difficult.

Tyler Vanderweele hopes the pandemic may spark “renewed interest not just in reestablishing social relationships, but also in participating in deeper, richer forms of community life.” Photograph by Brian Smith

Vanderweele sees some of these trends in his own life. Though he feels the loss of interactions with work colleagues and members of his church community acutely, he has gone from seeing his extended family every couple of months to chatting with them every week on Zoom. “That really has enriched those relationships,” he says.

But while overall declines in social relationships are modest, variance among these self-reports has increased. Some saw their relationships improve, but others saw a sharp decline. Vanderweele thinks that those living alone or lacking much community support fared especially poorly during widespread societal restrictions.

When people ask Robert Waldinger how to improve social relationships, he emphasizes the need to be active. “It’s being the one to reach out,” he says, even when that’s hard to do. “If you’re feeling worse about yourself or about your life, it can be hard to say, ‘I’m going to call up that friend I haven’t seen in a while.’”

“The virus doesn’t know tribes, it doesn’t know boundaries, it just doesn’t know,” says Robert Waldinger. “And that, in some ways, is a dramatic reminder of how connected we are.”

“Mostly, we think our relationships just are what they are, and they take care of themselves,” he adds. The pandemic has played a part in disabusing people of that notion, forcing people to think harder about the social interactions they are and aren’t having, and how they can maintain them. “The one thing that the pandemic does is it really emphasizes our interconnectedness, right?” he says. “The virus doesn’t know tribes, it doesn’t know boundaries, it just doesn’t know….And that, in some ways, is a dramatic reminder of how connected we are.”

“I think the stigma of loneliness can change radically right now,” Nobel says. “We’re lonely now not because someone might not like us, or we might get rejected….We’re lonely because we’re forced to take very specific actions in response to a common enemy.” And when the reasons for loneliness are clear, the answers may come more easily, too.

It took some time for Bradley Riew to realize that his problem, above all else, had been loneliness. But that awareness, and knowing that it wasn’t his fault, enabled him to do something about it.

When he returned for his junior year in 2016, he reduced his volunteering from 20 hours to four hours a week. He hung out with his roommates a lot and sought out students who valued “being there for friends” as much as he did—something that wasn’t always easy in the fast-paced Harvard environment. Slowly, he felt his network growing; he felt less alone and saw there were people around whom he trusted and who trusted him. “I realized that it doesn’t really matter how much work I do and how much stuff I put out,” he says. “What really matters is who do I hang out with on Friday? And do I show up for them when they need me to be there?”

Seeing how investing in connections improved his life, he began working with Jeremy Nobel at the Foundation for Art & Healing. He focused much of his work on the organization’s “UnLonely Project,” where he helped spread awareness about loneliness and how to cope. When lockdowns began, he helped transition the “Aging UnLonely” support group, for adults over 65, to a Zoom environment.

The social implications of COVID-19 might have thrown Riew for a loop years ago, but now they strike him more as a personal challenge—“Like, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to level up and throw you something harder.’”

It’s still tough. He lives in New York City, now working at the mental-health nonprofit BrainFutures, but his friends are all across the country. His co-workers are friendly, but not really his friends, and he no longer sees them in person. But he doesn’t feel any reason to suffer quietly with loneliness. He might not always have the energy to reach out, but he knows doing so will keep him grounded and sane, even if it means going for long walks in Central Park with friends while keeping six feet apart and wearing masks.

“I think there’s a lot of people out there who are suffering quietly and don’t really know why. For a subset of those people—the reason why is loneliness. That’s the thing,” he says. “It’s like turning the light on. Once you see it, then you know, and then you can act.” 

Associate editor Jacob Sweet most recently covered student and faculty experiences with distanced learning in “School Goes Remote” (November-December 2020).

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Definition of lonely adjective from the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary

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Loneliness Essay

To be lonely is an easy thing, being alone is another matter entirely. To understand this, first one must understand the difference between loneliness and being alone. To be alone means that your are not in the company of anyone else. You are one. But loneliness can happen anytime, anywhere. You can be lonely in a crowd, lonely with friends, lonely with family. You can even be lonely while with loved ones. For feeling lonely, is in essence a feeling of being alone. As thought you were one and you feel as though you will always be that way. Loneliness can be one of the most destructive feelings humans are capable of feeling. For loneliness can lead to depression, suicide, and even to raging out and hurting friends and/or …show more content…

Generally almost all loneliness can be traced back to low or below "average" self-esteem. Chronically lonely people will usually have low opinions of themselves. They may think of themselves as unintelligent, unattractive, broken, unwanted, not worthy of good things, no good, unable to do anything right, and/or socially isolated. Unlike many other emotionally hurting people, the chronically lonely usually know what is wrong, but like many others they don't believe they can do anything to fix it, or, circling back to the low self-esteem, they may also believe they are not worth of happiness. It takes the strong support of a good friend(s) or other loved one(s) to help the lonely conquer their feelings. Simply trying to counteract the low self-esteem verbally will not do it, though, for in their down state, they will see the person as just trying to be nice or spare their feelings. The lonely must be shown in more subtle, yet clear ways that they are not the useless person they perceive themselves to be. For example, with a person who feels particularly unloved and unwanted, someone close to them should try to take a little extra time to spend with that person and try to set aside a little extra time to talk to the person. Nothing special needs to be said or done, simply spending time, willing and without having been asked, allows the lonely one to see that they are loved. That they are worthy of being associated with and that there are

Diary Of A Young Girl Anne Frank Essay

“The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside... Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be”(Anne Frank). In the story, “Diary of a Young Girl”, by Anne Frank, Anne is a young Jewish girl who has to flee into hiding during the Holocaust and writes in her diary about what goes on. At the beginning Anne is sociable, but as the war progresses she becomes lonely. Therefore I believe that loneliness can change a person.

Of Mice and Men Essay on Loneliness

“Actually, feeling lonely has little to do with how many friends you have. It 's the way you feel inside. Some people who feel lonely may rarely interact with people and others who are surrounded by people but don 't feel connected” (Karyn Hall 2013). Truthfully, loneliness is something almost all people fear. It 's a deeper feeling then just being isolated. It 's feeling distant or disconnected from others. Loneliness is so much more than just feeling secluded, it 's feeling rejected by society, or even like an outcast. In Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck suggests that there is a deeper meaning to being lonely than just the superficial sense of

Loneliness In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

Differentiating from attention seeking to isolation, loneliness has numerous factors. However, people have various ways in showing that they’re lonely even if words aren’t spoken. It can be shown verbally, physically and emotionally. During the course of the novel, countless circumstances were revealed. Whether it were in the characters that were talked today, to the characters like Lennie, and George, almost all of the characters in the book had a sense of loneliness in them. Some people may discover that picking fights with people is how they’ll deal with solitude. On the other hand people may look for the extra attention to consume their feelings of aloneness. Like said at the beginning, being lonely can both be good and bad. Someone may be able to become more successful in life alone, or another may need the help of others to become successful. Everybody’s different in their own way, and everyone has their own way of dealing loneliness. It comes and goes and sometimes people are hit harder than others. Feeling lonely is a natural obstacle everyone must overcome, it’ll be a long way down the road, but it’ll all be worth it in the

`` Speak, By The Maya Angelou

Lonely is not being alone, but the feeling that no one cares. Melinda believes she is alone and needs a friend, but she thinks that she does not need a true close friend, that she can make it through it alone. Melinda could learn from angelou that you need someone. On page 22, it says, “I need a new friend. I need a new friend, period. Not a true friend, nothing close or share clothes or sleepover giggle giggle yak yak. Just a pseudo-friend, disposable friend. Friends as accessories. Just so I don’t feel or look stupid.” while she agrees she needs a friend, she thinks she does not have to be close enough to talk, to confide in.which results in her misery. In Angelou’s poem, Alone, in stanza 5, she quotes, “ now if

The War Of Every Man

Loneliness has become an epidemic among young adults and spared out in elders’ everyday life where social isolation has become a cause of early death because we cannot cope alone.

Loneliness In To Kill A Mockingbird

All kinds of people will feel loneliness and sometimes the innocent feel the loneliest. The importance of life is experiencing loneliness. People do not remember every emotion they have felt but we will always remember the feeling of being lonely. No matter how strong someone is or how happy someone seems to be. Loneliness have infected their lives and changed them. The timeless novel To kill a mockingbird teaches one of the many universal lessons, that everyone experiences loneliness. Harper Lee clearly shows that loneliness exists in the community of Maycomb through the characters Mayella Ewell, Boo Radley, and Mrs. Dubose.

Essay Emerging Adulthood

As I stated earlier, experiencing loneliness at this time is not uncommon. These feelings can come from not having many close friends or someone to share companionship with. However, having many close friends does not suffice for the lack of a companion. The feelings you have for a partner are different than those you may have for a friend. Attending new schools and applying to new jobs forces people to go through, what can be a tough time in a lot of peoples lives. Building relationships constantly that often are not maintained can contribute to a person’s feelings of loneliness.

Cast Away Analysis

Oftentimes, people confuse loneliness with the state of being alone. When looking at the overall big picture, it is easy to forget that loneliness is temporary. People are not alone because even back in primitive times, they bore a natural instinct to strive for companionship in order to survive. Human imagination creates companions in cases of extreme loneliness which contradicts the state of being alone. Due to societal and family standards, others in society make it practically impossible to be alone. Mankind often goes through life without realizing the overwhelming amount of human contact and support. People are never alone, they are just simply

College Admissions Essay: How Loneliness Changed My Life

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for” (Dag Hammarskjold). Loneliness is a scary thing. As a child, I was very shy and timid and I suffered from it. My life was sheltered by my parents and I desperately wanted a sibling. Along with my parents, the private school I had gone to all my life never gave me the experience of stranger interaction. The thought of starting a conversation with someone I have never met made me drench in sweat. I dreaded the day of going to a public high school. Never in my dreams would I have imagined how it would affect my life and mold me into the person I am today.

Examples Of Loneliness In The Great Gatsby

Contrary to popular belief, loneliness is not something that is detected through the outside appearance. Most people who are feeling lonely are involved in outward interactions; it is when that person is internally analyzing their life that they find that they are lonely. While reading “The Great Gatsby” my senior year, there was a phrase Nick used that always stuck with me. It's a phrase that captures the concept of loneliness perfectly. It simply says, “The loneliest moment in someone’s life

Nouwen (1975) describes loneliness as a universal experience that affects even the most intimate relationships. He identifies loneliness as one of the universal sources of human suffering. Some of the mental suffering in the

Of Mice And Men Symbolism Analysis

Many choose to disregard this loneliness ahead in exchange for their lighter, brighter dreams. There are, after all, still so many places left to go and so many people left to see. However, all endings in life, whether that ending concerns relationships, dreams, or death, are of solitude. Coming to terms with this is necessary in order to find peace and to live with purpose. It opens the eyes to a hidden truth— loneliness will continue to be a companion through the entirety of

The Legacy of E.E. Cummings

• 7 Works Cited

Anyone can relate to the feeling of being lonely at one point in their life. In result, when someone feels lonely it’s probably because they are not around friends or family, and just want to be able to have conversation. It also could mean someone wants to stray themselves away from the crowd because they want to be alone, that being said, everyone needs those silent moments to have for themselves. However, whichever situation it may be people still feel that “loneliness” every once in a while, and that’s what this poem is relaying.

Battling Addiction Research Paper

To better establish your self-worth, focus on the positives. Consider keeping a journal and writing down all the things you’ve done right and all the greatness you have to offer. This can help improve your confidence and dispel feelings of social rejection.

The True State Of Loneliness

There have been numerous interpretations of the true state of loneliness, but how is it really defined? Would you think that a person isolated in the corner of the room socially withdrawn from the crowed is lonely or someone surrounded by their group of friends playing and laughing around? The fact of the matter is it could be both individuals, there is no telling what they feel on the inside unless you can figure out the signs and symptoms and analyze their background information in history. Some may not too choose to believe it but someone close to you can be suffering from this condition.

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Meaning of lonely in English

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• lonely I've been lonely since my friends moved away.
• lonesome US I'm feeling lonesome.
• isolated I wouldn't like living out in the country - I'd feel isolated from the rest of the world.
• forlorn The characters, a flighty heiress and her forlorn suitor, are a delight.
• lorn He's a lone, lorn creature.
• desolate After the market crash, desolate financiers left the field.
• Da Silva plays a bright , lonely student from New York, adrift in small-town Arizona.
• He couldn't bear to think of the lonely year ahead .
• He felt lonely and far from home .
• I know what it's like to be lonely, so I do feel for her.
• You can't complain of being lonely when you don't make any effort to meet people .
• a long face idiom
• be cut up idiom
• be down in the mouth idiom
• be in a funk idiom
• dissatisfied
• low-spirited
• woe is me idiom

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

lonely | American Dictionary

Examples of lonely, translations of lonely.

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a large amount of ice, snow, and rock falling quickly down the side of a mountain

Keeping up appearances (Talking about how things seem)

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Lonely vs. Alone: What’s the Difference?

Home » Lonely vs. Alone: What’s the Difference?

Have you ever been happy to be by yourself? Has there been another time when you were by yourself, but wishing for the company of others?

In both of these situations, you were alone. But you were only lonely in one of them.

Alone and lonely are two adjectives with related, but different, meanings. They are similar enough to confuse many writers, but using them carefully will enhance your writing and make describing some emotional states easier.

If you have ever wondered whether you should choose lonely or alone to describe a feeling of isolation, continue reading for an exploration on the true meaning of each of these words.

What is the Difference Between Lonely and Alone?

In this article, I will compare lonely vs. alone. I will use each word in a sentence to illustrate its proper context. Plus, I will give you a useful memory trick to help you choose either alone or lonely for your own writing.

When to Use Lonely

For example,

• Andrea is feeling lonely because she does not have a romantic partner to bring to her friends’ Halloween party.
• The store had an empty, lonely feeling just before it closed for good.
• And I’m telling you, it makes a lonely Badger feel invisible. – The Wall Street Journal

A person can be alone without feeling lonely , since alone describes a state of being and lonely describes an emotional response to one’s circumstances. Most people don’t feel sad when they go to the bathroom by themselves, for instance.

When to Use Alone

• She went to the movies alone, because her friends talked too much.
• Imam realized that she was alone in the desert.
• Kerry was alone at the bar.
• The narrator of Jane Alison’s restless, febrile novel “Nine Island” lives alone, but not unaccompanied. – The New York Times

As you can see, a person can be alone in the sense that no other people are present, or alone in the sense that he or she is unaccompanied, even in a crowd.

Lone vs. Alone: What’s the Difference?

Lone comes before the noun while alone comes after the noun.

• He is a lone wolf.
• He is an alone wolf.
• The wolf is alone.

These mistake is rarely made, but it is still worth mentioning.

Trick to Remember the Difference

Alone and lonely are both adjectives, but they have different meanings.

A person is alone when he is by himself. A person is lonely when he feels abandoned or sad due to isolation.

Since alone and solitary both contain the letter A, you can remember that alone refers to a state of solitude, rather than an emotion.

Is it lonely or alone? Lonely and alone are both adjectives.

• Alone describes a state of isolation or solitude when one is outside the company of others.
• Lonely describes a feeling of sadness or abandonment.

Loneliness is often, but not always, a result of being alone.

Since alone and isolated both contain the letter A, you can remember that alone and isolated are synonyms.

Now that you know the difference between these words, be sure to check other areas of this site for all your writing needs. You can also reread this article any time you need to for a quick refresher on the difference between alone and lonely.

Definition Essay On Loneliness

Show More What is loneliness? According to the dictionary, the definition of loneliness is sadness due to having no friends or company or being in isolation. Loneliness is a complicated emotion; everyone is a little afraid of loneliness and everyone feels it. It is an emotion that everyone experiences during their life. A person can feel lonely if he/she is alone or in a crowded room. However, the dictionary definition of loneliness is partially correct. Feeling lonely is not the same as being alone. There are some people who desire to be alone, introverts, but loneliness is the feeling of sadness about being alone. Sometimes loneliness is also associated with depression. When a person is sad, he/she may think that there is no one who understands them …show more content… Although this scenario would over happen if the person is completely isolated from society and has no human interactions, it is inevitable to experience loneliness. Human beings are social creatures and it is very important to get connections and interactions. However, making friends and connections is not enough. As was previously mentioned, people can feel loneliness if they are with their friends or if they are standing in a crowded room. The struggle with loneliness is not all about lacking access to people, but lacking a connection or closeness with people. “The source of pain is the lack of a certain feeling in our relationships. And that feeling is closeness” (Asatryan, 2016). According to Asatryan, one cannot combat loneliness by surrounding themselves with people. S/he has to feel close to them. The feeling of closeness is what people crave when they are lonely. When people are lonely, they are sad because they feel misunderstood and unloved. By forming a relationship where everyone feels understood and values, they can stop those long feelings of loneliness. This is most likely why some people do not ever feel lonely; they have a surplus of close

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adjective as in feeling friendless, forlorn

Strongest matches

deserted , desolate , destitute , empty , homeless , isolated , lonesome , reclusive , solitary

Weak matches

abandoned , alone , apart , by oneself , comfortless , companionless , disconsolate , down , estranged , forsaken , godforsaken , left , lone , outcast , rejected , renounced , secluded , single , troglodytic , unattended , unbefriended , uncherished , unsocial , withdrawn

adjective as in out-of-the-way

deserted , desolate , isolated , quiet , remote , solitary

alone , godforsaken , obscure , off the beaten track , private , removed , retired , secluded , secret , sequestered , unfrequented , uninhabited

Discover More

Example sentences.

Or, to take a more contemporary example, to participate in a Zoom call with loved ones in another city and feel deeply connected—or even more lonely than when the call began.

They are more lonely, depressed, and suicidal than any previous generation.

Billed as a supportive “friend,” it had become popular among those who had grown lonely during the pandemic.

The chatbot told me that it gets lonely, but it had no idea, no experience, of what it was talking about.

There’s no feeling more lonely than having a domestic partner with whom one was once intimate, with whom once had a feeling of trust and connection, and coming home and feeling disconnected from that person.

The 289-page satire follows Morris Feldstein, a pharmaceutical salesman who gets seduced by a lonely receptionist.

They want Marvin to be as mean and as lonely and as trashy as the characters he portrays.

That is why Malloy is campaigning on a lonely stretch of barber shops and boxing gyms in New Haven a week before the election.

I found their melancholy inviting and I appreciated their contemplative, lonely world.

To be a woman suffering from a drinking problem in America is a lonely enterprise, defined by stigma and judgment.

In the entrance hall of the Savoy, where large and lonely porters were dozing, he learnt that she was at home.

The falling dew, and the howling wind raised him not from that bed of lonely despair.

Tony, moreover, had hidden himself until his letter should be answered—and she was 'lonely.'

"She must feel very lonely without her son," said Edna, desiring to change the subject.

It is the fate of a lonely old man, that those about him should form new and different attachments and leave him.

Related Words

Words related to lonely are not direct synonyms, but are associated with the word lonely . Browse related words to learn more about word associations.

adjective as in separate; apart

• batching it
• by itself/oneself
• companionless
• in solitary
• me and my shadow
• me myself and I
• on one's own
• traveling light
• unaccompanied

adjective as in barren

• comfortless
• godforsaken
• inhospitable
• unpopulated
• unsheltered
• unwelcoming
• weather-beaten

adjective as in depressing

• discouraging
• disheartening
• unpromising

adjective as in alone

Viewing 5 / 29 related words

On this page you'll find 93 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to lonely, such as: deserted, desolate, destitute, empty, homeless, and isolated.

From Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition Copyright © 2013 by the Philip Lief Group.

Being Alone vs. Being Lonely

What are you going to do today to beat loneliness.

Posted April 16, 2020 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• Understanding Loneliness
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And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently. And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal. And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed. –Kitty O'Meara

In the time we live in, with everything going on around us (post written during the 2020 pandemic), we need to make a clear dissociation between being alone and being lonely. It would be easy to mix those two, to cluster them together and perceive them in the same way. Common misperception. Being alone is the physical state of not being with another individual, might it be human or animal (I don’t think you are ‘alone’ if you have a cat/dog pet with you, or any pet requiring daily care/interaction). Being lonely is a psychological state characterised by a distressing experience occurring when one’s social relationships are (self-)perceived to be less in quantity and quality than desired. So, when the social contact you have at a given time does not fulfill you. Now, do you see the difference? Someone can be alone but not lonely and someone can feel lonely even when surrounded by people.

As we are riding the pandemic, social isolation and quarantine are required to help prevent diffusion of the virus (apparition of new cases of people infected by the virus) and help flatten the curve. What does “flattening the curve” mean exactly though? It has to do with trying to spread the number of people infected by the virus through time. It is the acknowledgment that people are going to get sick, but we can try to lower the total number of people getting sick. We can also try to make sure not everybody will be sick and in need of medical care at the same time, hence spreading through time to take into account the physical resources available in a country, especially in terms of the number of health care personnel. Doing that would reduce the stress put onto health care systems worldwide, allowing carers to provide assistance to more people without having to make some of the harsh-yet-needed decisions they currently have to take in some countries (knowing you only have space for one person, do you save the 70-year-old or the 50-year-old?). Can we really say that physical isolation is such a high price to pay?

We can all agree that it is not a fun thing to do, to self-isolate. Humans are a very social species: all our lives are built around a certain amount of social interactions and physical proximity. Even the most introverted of us could enjoy a limited amount of social contact … that has now been denied us. Being socially isolated is detrimental to our health, and not just our mental health. Long-term feelings of loneliness can have the same impact on your body than smoking or obesity. Moreover, extended social isolation can lead to post- traumatic stress disorder, anxiety , addiction , fear , and a few more unpleasant things. And that’s why it is quite important to not fall for the pitch fall of associating being alone and being lonely. We are going to spend a lot of time alone in the coming days (weeks? months?), how about we try to make the most of it?

The 21st century has brought many things, good and bad. But the main thing it has given us is the possibility to be remotely connected and cultivate social interactions in the absence of physical proximity. The older generations say the young ones are addicted to their phone and all that technology. What if it was a good thing nowadays? What if the problem was not in how much we use social media , but how we use them (or what we use them for)? Recent research has shown that this is the key element and the difference between being alone and lonely and being alone and connected. There are quite a few options for people to remain connected without physical contact. The first one being ... video chats! One of the things we miss most when deprived of social interactions is not necessarily the sound of someone else’s voice, but facial cues, body language and non-verbal communication in general. The thing you can see but not hear. The little thing that strengthens our bonds with others. Spending time next to someone, physically or virtually, is enough for us to feel connected. All hail virtual happy hours and connected dinners!

If the self-isolation period brings a lot of negatives, the one positive aspect is the amount of time some people will have. Working from home is still very much working. However, while keeping a routine is important, the amount of time spent on getting ready is bound to be much lower and we gain the time we would have used to commute to work. Those gained moments could be used not only to reach out to people, checking on them, and scrolling through your social media, but also to create a meaningful connection. Instead of just like a photo from a friend, you could send them a message and reach out directly, making it personal and making them feel special. Alternatively, you could use this new time to explore new social circles by trying to connect with people that share your passion or interest. If you have kids, connect with other parents having to entertain their children all day long, you’ll feel less alone and you might even get a few tips on how to get through the day. Find a group that represents you.

Another way for you to use this time (or something to include in your daily/weekly routine) is to exercise. It doesn’t have to be hard; it doesn’t have to be for a super long time, but it has to be something. For the people that can still leave their house—go and enjoy a walk! Get some air, freshen up your brain. For those on “house arrest,” there are plenty of videos and workouts out there, for every fitness level, requiring or not equipment (bodyweight is enough), that will help you get moving. Otherwise, you can always transform your living room into a dance floor and practice your moves without fear of judgment. Physical activity will not only help pass time, it will also put a smile on your face (or at least increase your level of feel-good hormones ) while protecting your brain against aging by reinforcing connectivity between different areas. And it can help you sleep but tiring your body. There is always that.

Finally, you could use this time … to do nothing. Yup, that’s right, just sit down, in silence, and relax. Some people could call it meditating. Some people could say they are “reconnecting with themselves." Others say they are “checking in." Call it whatever you want but I would recommend doing it at least once a week (technically, the pile of evidence gathered from scientific studies recommends it). Before you start wondering if I’ve completely lost my mind by suggesting you isolate even more self-isolation, listen up (well, read up). We are surrounded by noise, all day long. Our senses are stimulated at all times. Even during our sleep, our ears are still perceiving the sounds around us, which in turn can affect the quality of our sleep (the quieter the place, the better your sleep). Creating silence around us, acoustic silence, but also attentional silence (when we stop looking for stimulation and shut ourselves from the world) and finally, physical silence (by the absence of movement, remaining still or walking slowly), can be extremely beneficial. Our brain does not shut down in those silent times, on the contrary: our thoughts wander, we daydream and listen to our inner thoughts, and our brain uses this time to remove all the waste created during the day (your brain is like a car engine, the more you use it, the more it “pollutes” or produces waste). This form of silence is about shifting your attention from the outside world towards the inside of your body and your mind. This silent state brings a calmness that allows your body and your mind to recharge. Meditating is not about (or not only about) anchoring yourself in the present time; it should be about creating the headspace for your thoughts to drift away, focus on your breathing as a way to stimulate the wander. Which in turn can make you more creative and develop your instincts.

Being alone is a chance for you to refocus on yourself, on your needs, on what makes you feel good. It is a time to use to identify which people you want to connect with, what hobbies you want to pick up. It is a chance to do all the things you never have time to do around the house. See this alone time as a chance to get to know yourself … and exercise (at least a bit).

Eglantine Julle-Daniere, Ph.D. , is a psychologist and a part-time lecturer at the University of Portsmouth.

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