10 Reasons Why You're Lonely
1. Hollow Connections
You may be surrounded by people; you may have a long list of friends. So why do you feel lonely? On paper, you're a popular person, you're well liked. You find time to socialize, yet this nagging loneliness never goes away. Many people combat their loneliness by meeting new people; they grow their circle of friends.
But that's not why you're feeling lonely. You're not lonely because you don't know enough people; you're lonely because you don't know those people very well. Many lonely people have lots of friends, but their friendships are shallow and weak. You haven't invested enough time or effort to connect with these people, and they haven't connected with you.
Loneliness can be a tricky feeling. At its core, loneliness is making connections. You feel lonely because you haven't connected with someone on a personal level. Maybe that someone is a friend or family member. Maybe that someone is yourself. Either way, real emotional connections could be the answer you're looking for. Don't settle for lots of shallow friendships. Get to know the people in your life. Otherwise, your loneliness may never disappear.
2. Emotional Walls
Many people go through rough patches in their lives. Maybe you experienced a toxic relationship or a traumatic situation in the past. Now your past is keeping you from forming new relationships. Hardships and trauma raise barriers and build walls. You build these walls to protect yourself from pain, to avoid as much hardship as you can.
You block out everything that may hurt you. But what happens when you build walls all around you? When you're surrounded by boundaries, barriers, and shields, you cut yourself off from the outside world. In other words, you stop trying to be vulnerable. You may be safe behind your walls, but those walls are isolating you. You feel lonely because you've severed any and all emotional connections with others. You're trying to protect yourself, but you're actually creating negativity. You're making yourself feel lonelier.
It takes a long time for these barriers and shields to come down. It's a rough and frightening transition. It takes a lot of work to trust other people again. However, your walls, no matter how safe you feel behind them, are standing in the way of real connections. Bringing down your walls won't be easy or comfortable, but you can't hide behind your walls forever.
3. Outgrowing Your Past
For some people, loneliness is a new feeling. In the past, you rarely felt lonely. You were surrounded by friends and loved ones; you got along with everyone at work. Your social circle was lively and satisfying. But years have passed, and you're still surrounded by the same people. You didn't feel lonely before, but you feel lonely now.
You're struggling to connect with friends and co-workers like you did before. You don't feel satisfied like you did years ago. The problem is, you've changed. You're a different person now, but your environment remains the same. Your social circle satisfied your needs in the past, but your needs have grown since then. That's why you're feeling lonely; you've outgrown your past and now you're searching for something new.
4. Lack of Value
Are you part of a co-dependent friendship or relationship? In a codependent relationship, one friend or partner becomes responsible for another's happiness or self-worth. Instead of taking control of your own life, you may hang that responsibility on someone else's shoulders. In other words, you've taken a back seat in your own life.
You're not valuing yourself as an individual because you're dependent on someone else to make you happy. If you don't value yourself, it's difficult to form lasting connections. You convince yourself that you're not worthy of those connections. Just like that, you begin to feel lonely.
5. Biased Negativity
You may feel lonely because you've created a gap between yourself and the world around you. You may have created this gap out of fear, specifically a fear of rejection. Almost everyone fears rejection or failure. In our careers and relationships, we're scared to fail. Sometimes we're so afraid of failure that our fear controls us.
It holds us back and stops us from growing and experiencing new things. You may be scared of something simple like talking to a stranger. In your mind, this feels like a risk. You think to yourself, what if they reject me? What if they laugh at me? You get scared of what might happen, so you run away from valuable opportunities.
Over time, that fear of rejection changes your attitude. You may think, why bother meeting new people if everyone's going to reject me? You convince yourself that you're going to fail before you even try. Once you've adopted this negative mindset, it's really easy to prove yourself right. The mind often sees what it wants to see. If it wants to see cruelty and rejection, it will. It'll spin people's words, overanalyze people's body language, and misunderstand social cues. It'll search endlessly for proof that the world is an unfriendly place. Soon, your perspective becomes biased, and you feel isolated.
Unfortunately, many isolated people get stuck in toxic friendships and relationships. You're expecting rejection and failure, so you latch on to the wrong people—people who take advantage of you or treat you poorly. You may cling to these people to soothe your loneliness, but toxic friendships make you feel even lonelier. So, give the world a chance. Not everyone's open, kind, and friendly, but people just might surprise you.
6. Problems in the Past
Was there a time in your life when you felt lonely? Even though your life has changed since then, those negative feelings stuck around, and problems in the past can create problems in the present. It's important to address old emotions before they get worse. You may feel like they've disappeared; maybe you forgot all about them, but they still exist deep down inside of you.
Unearthing those negative emotions may sound like a painful chore. No one wants to revisit the hardest moments in their life, but you need to bring those leftover feelings to the surface, or they'll never go away.
7. Patterns of Loneliness
Do you feel lonely today? Will you feel lonely tomorrow? Loneliness can be a vicious cycle. You feel lonely right now, so you expect to feel lonely in days to follow. That expectation creates a toxic pattern, and that pattern pulls you down into a very lonely place.
Okay, here's the problem. When you expect to feel lonely, you stop trying to relieve your loneliness. You experience what you expect to experience, and your loneliness never goes away. Loneliness today does not guarantee loneliness tomorrow. So, treat each moment of loneliness as one independent feeling. It's here now, but it'll go away soon. If you can change your thinking, you can learn and grow from those lonely moments.
You can turn your loneliness into something stronger—gratitude. Gratitude for the life you're living, gratitude for the people who love you, and gratitude for the bonds you've worked so hard to create.
8. Personal Empowerment
Many people fill their lives with things they didn't choose. You bought what you were supposed to buy. You made friends with the people nearby. You chose a career path that satisfied the expectations of others. Now you feel lonely inside your own life. Why? Because you didn't choose your lifestyle on your own.
But there's always time to turn your life around. You can make decisions for yourself. You can populate your life with people who understand and respect you. By making your own choices, you create a deeper bond with yourself as an individual. You build a stronger sense of personal identity, and that identity gives you more confidence in yourself.
9. Selfish Action
How often do you think about others? You may spend your whole life thinking about yourself. You never think outside your own little bubble. That can be lonely. You've closed yourself off to the experiences, wisdom, and intimacy that others have to offer.
If you think about others, you welcome new and meaningful connections into your life. So help people and talk to people. Try to experience new perspectives. Go out of your way to learn from others. Each time you focus on someone other than yourself, your loneliness fades little by little. Eventually, it may vanish completely.
10. Defensive Loneliness
You may be feeling lonely because you've chosen to be lonely. It sounds counterintuitive, right? But this backwards phenomenon affects a surprising amount of people. Just think about it like this: if you call yourself a shy person, you act more introverted and reserved. Right? You created a shy persona for yourself, and you naturally became that altered version of your personality.
In the same way, if you call yourself a lonely person, you're going to feel lonely. But are you really as lonely as you think? Most of the time, you say you're lonely because loneliness is a defense mechanism. It's easier to be lonely than it is to be vulnerable, outgoing, or emotional. So you resign yourself to a lonely life.
The truth is, no one is inherently lonely. Loneliness is a temporary feeling, a fleeting state of mind. It's not a personality trait or a piece of your character. If you don't want to be lonely, you don't have to be. Now, of course, that means putting yourself out there. Taking social risks can be difficult and frightening, but taking those risks, choosing not to be lonely, pushes you toward genuine meaningful connections, and those connections can turn your loneliness into lifelong satisfaction.
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