What is loneliness?The Internet tells us that this is a special psychological state of a person associated with the absence of close emotional connections with other people. Probably, each of us at least once in our lives felt lonely. Agree, such a stage in a person's life is remembered with hostility, and at the slightest approach of it, there is an immediate desire to know how to fight loneliness. But is it really necessary? Let's try to understand this problem.
Loneliness: Pros and Cons
“Loneliness is a bastard”, —is sung in one well-known song. However, is it true? For the last few centuries, people have been trying to get rid of loneliness. Many fail on this front, and all because they initially approach the issue incorrectly. Loneliness has its positive sides. True, in this case psychologists prefer to call it by another word - “solitude”. Let's think about how our contact with the environment is built. So, you have a need that you realized after some time. After that, you have to choose an object from the environment with which you will satisfy yourself. Having found it, you merge with it for a moment into one whole. Here we can talk about something material, as well as about living people. Obviously, it is impossible to always be in contact with someone or something. At some point it is interrupted, and you need time to digest the impressions and experience received. If this stage did not exist, the psyche would simply not cope with the information received. In addition to the most important function described above, loneliness has a number of other advantages:
- Time for yourself When you communicate a lot withother people, you don't have the opportunity to do something for yourself. And what about our favorite self-care procedures, reading, watching stupid TV series and a lot of other pleasant nonsense? Doing all this, we relax and get pleasant emotions.
- The opportunity to understand yourself Life is full of suchsituations when we don’t know what we want and what we need to do. Solitude creates a psychological space in which you have a chance to hear and understand yourself. Agree, there’s no way around it!
- Freedom When you are not tied to anyone, it givesyou have a huge amount of freedom of action. You don’t have to report to other people and take their opinions into account when making decisions. You just do what you want and achieve the goals you need.
Of course, everything is not as rosy as we would like.think. It is not by chance that loneliness has so many negative connotations. Women are especially afraid of it - perhaps this is due to our high emotionality and need for communication. Most likely, you are well aware of the disadvantages of loneliness without us, but we will still list them:
- Health hazards Latest researchshowed that there is a connection between loneliness and the risk of developing various diseases. Along with alcohol, cigarettes and unhealthy fatty foods, it exhausts the human body and leads to the emergence of psychosomatic disorders: diseases of the nerves, heart, stomach, etc. ...
- Deterioration of contacts with the world Lonely personbegins to suffer from mistrust of everything around him. Often this is due to the fact that people find themselves alone after quarrels, betrayals and breakups. Severe stress traumatizes the human psyche, and it can be very difficult to recover from it.
- The "contagion" effect When your girlfriendtells you about her loneliness, you may have feelings and experiences that are in tune with her state. After all, each of us is lonely to some extent, and when we come into contact with such people, this effect is amplified.
- Unnoticed loneliness Very rarely to otherspeople manage to notice that you are alone. A lonely person looks and acts almost like everyone else, only inside he has pain. This leads to a deterioration in the psychological state, and you experience the feeling that no one understands you.
You are alone?
Surely after reading all of the above,you are interested in the question of how lonely you are. When you come home, you find yourself alone with yourself, and often this is accompanied by a feeling of gray, murky melancholy that covers the entire space around you. The TV and the cat become members of your family, and you can distinguish the DJs of your favorite radio station by their voices. Naturally, your psychological state is far from ideal. You feel empty, sad, and the word “happiness” can only make you smile sadly. Some lonely people begin to make evil and poisonous jokes, “flooding” the entire space around them with sarcasm. A person experiencing loneliness really wants to sleep, but there may be problems with sleep. It is not surprising, because it is not a lack of sleep, but the fact that the bed is the only place where it is still warm and cozy. You feel uncomfortable in the apartment - its emptiness interferes. Life begins to resemble Groundhog Day: everything is the same, and nothing new happens. At the same time, you start to avoid people. Of course, they can't understand what's happening to you. The strongest sign of loneliness is the feeling of being abandoned in a crowd of people or at a party. You may not want to take off your sunglasses even at night - what if someone sees your eyes?
Wrong ways to escape from loneliness
For any person, the experience of lonelinessbecomes an incredibly painful test. Longing, emptiness, a feeling of lack of something important - all these things prevent a person from experiencing solitude to the fullest, forcing them to run away from it wherever their eyes look. The fear of being left with their own inferiority leads to the emergence of various versions of this escape. Women's escape from loneliness most often takes the form of an obsessive desire to get married. This leads to indiscriminateness in the matter of choosing a partner, which, of course, does not bode well. The charm of the courtship period and the enticing prospect of an engagement ring on the ring finger of the right hand literally do not allow a woman to see inconsistencies in values, worldview and views on family life. You dream of a cozy house with three children, and he - of a round-the-world trip? What difference does it make, because we love each other so much! All this ends with a feeling of deception in the relationship. But breaking up after years is not so easy, and you continue to nominally remain a couple, while experiencing a feeling of loneliness in the family. If marriage does not work out, you can try to become part of some group or community. This creates a feeling of togetherness and belonging to something important. All sorts of unscrupulous people love to take advantage of this need, for example, sects, membership in which leads to the loss of one's own identity. Thanks to the Internet, in the modern world, almost no one feels lonely - or rather, there is always an opportunity to escape from loneliness into virtual reality. Social networks, forums, communities of interest - there are a lot of platforms on the Internet for communication and uniting people with each other. However, there is a danger here. The relationships that we build in reality require a significant amount of effort from us and the need to compromise, and also contain a significant element of risk - what if they don't like me, or they leave me for someone better? Online relationships are simpler and easier in this regard: if something goes wrong, you can simply “delete” the unwanted person from your friends list and find a replacement. And you are, by and large, not communicating with a real person, but with your fantasies about him.
Loneliness: how to deal with it?
Are there any correct options on howfight loneliness? In general, nothing is impossible for a person. But, most likely, you will need to change something, because your usual lifestyle has led you to a negative state. What should you do?
What conclusion can be drawn from our article?Everything needs balance. There is no point in fighting solitude, it is a natural phase of contact with the world, necessary for processing the experience gained. But if it takes up more of your life than necessary and turns into oppressive loneliness, then you should work on it. Remember that everything is in your hands, and you can become happy if you really want it! We recommend reading:
