Feel Lonely? There Are 4 Types of Loneliness. Here’s How to Beat Them

Sadly, we all get lonely from time to time, and social distancing and self-isolation certainly don’t help. Here, a psychologist offers her advice for coming these feelings of loneliness.

Have you ever gotten into bed at the end of the day and realized that you haven’t spoken out loud to anyone since the day before? Or simply found yourself feeling completely and utterly alone?

We live in a hyper-connected world, and yet we’re lonelier than ever before, we have more social media followers than real-life friends, and it’s easier to swap digital messages with strangers on the other side of the planet than it is to sit down for a chat with an actual person – especially now that we’re social distancing and putting ourselves in isolation.

Despite being traditionally viewed as an affliction that’s limited to the elderly, it’s now 16-24 year olds who make up the loneliest age group of all, a finding confirmed in the UK’s largest study on the subject, The Loneliness Experiment by BBC Radio 4. The study included over 55,000 people and found that 34% of 25-34 year olds are lonely ‘often or very often’ while 36% of 34-44 year olds felt the same.

Now, scientists are warning of the damaging effects of a ‘loneliness epidemic’, with loneliness even being equated to the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

As many of us will know, we don’t need to be physically alone to feel lonely. A toxic friendship or relationship can be incredibly isolating, for example, while spending too much time with people we don’t feel close to can have damaging effects on our psyche, even if we’re only interacting with them through our phones. Loneliness affects people in different ways, and for this reason there are four distinct types of loneliness identified by psychologists: emotional, social, situational and chronic.

But how do we know what type of loneliness we’re experiencing and, more importantly, how can we tackle it?

Emotional Loneliness

“Those who are emotionally lonely will find it difficult to improve things without tackling the root of the problem,” says Dr Spelman. “Emotional loneliness is not circumstantial but, rather, comes from within.”

Dr Spelman recommends therapy to help tackle the root cause of these feelings of emotional loneliness. “Working with a therapist, possibly with a technique such as behavioral cognitive therapy, or attending group therapy, is likely to lead to the best possible outcome,” she says.

“The person in question can start to understand why they are lonely, how their background and experiences have contributed to behaviors that make things worse, and how they can develop a new, and more useful, set of behaviours.”

Posted by Stylist.co.uk.