Loneliness can hit you if you’re a young adult trying to navigate starting employment or education, and it can hit you when you’re older too. Photo / Getty Images
It peaks in young adulthood and older age in what’s called the ‘loneliness curve’. Here’s how to deal with feeling lonely in each life stage.
Loneliness can hit you if you’re a young adult trying to navigate starting employment or education, and it can hit you when you’re older too, when your relationship status changes or you’re dealing with health issues. This U-shaped pattern, peaking in younger and older adulthood is now being referred to as the “loneliness curve” thanks to a new study by Northwestern University. The study showed that loneliness consistently increased in older adults too.
“Loneliness often occurs when we’re in transition and we lose our connection to our anchor points so the U-shaped curve makes sense,” says Prof Olivia Sagan, a chartered psychologist who researches loneliness.
“In young adulthood, many of your anchor points – family, school, friendships – are stripped away and then later in life where we’re no longer working, and we have a lesser role amidst our families, it’s perfectly logical to say that that loneliness may also kick in then too,” she explains.
Loneliness is affecting us more than ever before. It’s been called everything from an “epidemic” to “the leprosy of the 21st century” with the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring loneliness to be a global health threat. One US surgeon general claimed that its mortality effects are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day while recent research in the UK by the Campaign to End Loneliness reports that more than 25 million British individuals feel lonely some of the time.
Part of the reason it has become such a huge issue is because the transient way we live our lives affects the quality and depth of our relationships, Sagan explains. “The loneliness research is very clear that it is not about how many friends you’ve got but the quality of your relationships.”
Defined by the Campaign to End Loneliness as an “unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. It happens when there is a mismatch between the quantity and quality of the social relationships that we have, and those that we want”. Loneliness can manifest itself in feeling sad, isolated and disconnected.
“Modern society has given us a broader range of choices than ever before. We can uproot to different countries and different towns and cities, we can leave behind oppressive cultural institutions, we can leave relationships behind that are no longer working for us so there are no longer these strongholds keeping us anchored to one particular geographical or psychological space.
Our society has given us all these new choices, but they have come at a cost of loneliness,” Sagan notes. “Part of our modern way of living – ephemeral, fragmented, hybrid, transitional – has been accelerated through digital platforms and social media and has made us less able to have prolonged and sustained human contact and conversations. We simply don’t have the time, we see people fleetingly and we invest less in the relationships around us.”
Adela Hussain, a 43-year-old visibility expert and entrepreneur, began to feel lonely when she left corporate life and launched her own business. “Gone were the big corporate teams, water cooler conversations, Christmas parties,” she says. “My life used to be one big whirlwind of people and now in my 40s it feels like I’m the last one standing in musical chairs. Behind me is my husband and ever-demanding five-year-old who keep me busy but I’m not socially connected. All my friends live too far away to come for dinner. Sometimes I envy the people who never left their hometown because they’re surrounded by life-long friends. Running an online six-figure business is often pegged as a dream, but no one tells you how deeply lonely it is. I meet up with people I met online in the business world but in a room full of them, I often feel lonely and wonder if the friendships are real or fake and based on a curated version of their personality. I feel like I barely know them,” she says.
Shirley Rundle is a mindset coach from Oxford who runs a life coaching programme for those struggling with loneliness. “Humans need connection, but we are living in a time of true disconnection. We might be connected by technology, be able to run our businesses from the beach but the screens all around us are disconnecting us from nature, from ourselves and from others. We need face-to-face interaction in order to thrive. We are living in a world where technology is replacing our connection to others, not enhancing it, “she says.
Here we drill down into four life stages and talk to the experts about how to deal with loneliness.
“As the way we socialise has changed so much, it makes it harder to make real connections especially as a young professional because there is the pressure of performing on social media and acting as if everything is fabulous,” says Rundle.
Use this life stage to learn the power of connecting with yourself and learning how to be authentically you, she says. Start by journaling every morning as part of a daily routine, she advises. “Then, you can connect more authentically with others,” she says.
She also suggests we try “active listening”, when you give others your full beam of attention. “Put your phone down, listen and reflect back. This can be one of the most powerful connection tools you can use in this distracted world.”
Hussain suggests reflecting weekly and asking yourself: “Are all your interactions online? Are they superficial? Do you need to add more in-person connections? Are you feeling energised or drained? Reflect on your feelings and then dial up or dial down ways to interact depending on what and who you need.”
“One minute, you’re a professional in the workplace wearing a power suit, the next minute, you’re stuck at home with vomit all over yourself. No wonder you feel lonely,” says Sagan. “All of your anchor points are pulled up and suddenly you become someone else, which is the main loss of anchor point, because you’ve actually lost your identity.”
Start creating new anchor points such as new communities of toddler groups, she suggests. “And online communities can help you connect with other new parents too.
“But I also think we also need to learn to be alone. Blaise Pascal in the 1600s said that: ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ We seem to have lost the capacity to be alone and we also need to teach our children this skill. I get on a soapbox about education and early years learning and primary education because kids aren’t allowed to be on their own at school, they’re not allowed to be quiet, to be introverts, to have thinking space, everything is about activity. But whether you’re a kid or an adult, you need to learn to be on our own.”
Hussain admits to feeling lonely when she suddenly finds herself child-free: “I’ve felt the loneliest when I’ve had a free Saturday afternoon without my kid and husband and discovered all my friends are either looking after their kids or that all my child-free friends have moved away,” says Hussain. “I’m learning it’s essential to build a community of people – with and without kids.”
‘Break bread’ as much as possible, Hussain advises. “Invite a new mum friend, colleague, Instagram friend out to dinner or snacks. Reach out. Stop waiting to be invited. Nothing works better than getting people around a table eating together,” she says.
As we get older, we have less energy, your kids might disconnect to live their own lives and we can start to feel more invisible so it’s important to consider the notion of ‘mattering’, says Sagan. “[The sociologist] Michèle Lamont’s research proved how important it is to feel that you matter in the world,” she says.
Sagan conducted a large research study across Scotland with refugees and interviewed them about their experience of loneliness. “What they wanted most was someone to just see them, to make some sort of communication with them, even if they couldn’t speak the same language. It came back to some really basic things: eye contact, hello, a small gesture, a bodily openness towards another person.”
If you’re feeling lonely, focus on the small things you might be able to do more of. “One thing I realised as I’m navigating this loneliness journey is that in order to remove loneliness, I need to be visible and not hide away and that can come with confronting and accepting the fact that if I’m hiding away, I am partly responsible for this,” says Hussain.
“Retirement can trigger loneliness as the daily social interaction provided by work colleagues fades away and you have to find a new sense of purpose. Loss of identity is also a risk at this point as lots of us link our identity to our careers but it is also a chance to reinvent yourself,” says Rundle. Try volunteering.
“Part-time jobs or taking on some freelance projects can ease the transition.”
Volunteering for a cause you believe in can be so beneficial in terms of meeting new people and creating new experiences. Studies show volunteering decreases loneliness. Investigate becoming a befriender. There are many befriending services that focus on the elderly who might not have any friends or family to visit them.” Find people with similar interests by joining something like the online platform ‘Meetup’ where you can search by location and interest, suggests Rundle.
Think about getting a pet. Dogs and cats give us so many benefits – preventing loneliness is one of them. “Whether you’re a retiree or an entrepreneur working from home, you can learn to interact with people locally to you…your barista, your gym buddies, your neighbours, your yoga instructor. Start ‘water cooler’ conversations with these people. They’ll help you maintain your communication skills and give you a feeling of connectedness with the world,” says Hussain.
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