MANAGING THE FESTIVE SEASON – PART 3: LONELINESS

Welcome everybody to the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast with me, Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, author and creator of the 8Wise^TM method for better mental health and wellbeing.

It is nearly upon us, and if you’re anything like me I like the festive period, I do like the festive period and I like doing the countdown. In fact, I got myself an advent calendar that was a cheese advent calendar because I’m trying to be so much better with reducing my sugar levels. So, I got a cheese one instead of my usual favourite chocolate one and I do my countdown. I try to find the fun and the joy in this festive period, but I’m also very, very, very aware that not everybody can do that, and that at this time of year it can be really very difficult for lots of reasons.

We’ve talked about this in the past with regards to financial issues, it can be an issue, a big one, having to spend time with family, travel, all of those types of things. But one of the topics that I want to talk about today is one that’s really, really close to my heart and one that I think an awful lot of people genuinely struggle with, even if they don’t admit to it and that is the issue of being lonely or feeling lonely at Christmas.

Now I know that feeling of loneliness, in fact I had it at the beginning of the year, I think the post Covid world. When we started going into Covid I was quite happy to pull back from everybody and just have a little bit of a break from people. To be honest I’m an introvert by nature, so just having some calmness away from people for a while was really, really very good until that calmness becomes a new routine and before you know it, you’re isolating yourself or you don’t realize you’re isolating yourself, but it’s what’s happening. And then what happens is obviously we then came out of Covid and people started doing things with people again and what I noticed is the first people that people want to do things with tends to be their families.

For me, I live so far away from my family and my amazing in-laws that I suddenly found that the people that I was doing things with on a regular basis weren’t available, just didn’t have the time because they were catching up with the people that just meant a little bit more to them and so I entered quite a horrific spiral of loneliness to be perfectly honest. And I did reach out to some people, and some people were great from that, and some people were not great from that. And that’s the reality in life, that sometimes when you do have a problem, you’re going to reach out and some of the people you reach out to are not going to reach back in the way you wanted to, expected to, or needed to. And other people are going to surprise you and shock you and are going to reach back and really hold onto you and save you. I definitely experienced some of that at the beginning of the year.

But what I also experienced at the beginning of the year is that I can’t rely on other people all the time to try and make me feel better and I say all the time, I never really do, I very rarely ask for support, and I very rarely ask for help. If anything, that’s one of my many weak areas in my own life, in my own development, it causes me more problems than it actually ever helps with. But what I have really realized is that there are some things where you have to take control of the situation, especially if you know that it’s going to have a negative impact on you. And this is about that being proactive, it’s about prevention rather than recovery, it’s about knowing yourself well enough to know what triggers those deep rooted feelings and thoughts and those processes that might lead you into those mental health issues and loneliness is definitely one of them.

You see, loneliness is such an issue for us because we’re pack animals, it’s human nature. We need, we actually need, to feel connected to others no matter how much we tell ourselves we don’t, no matter how much we might say “no, I like being on my own, I like my own company”. You can like your own company and you can be on your own but actually at our most primitive state, we need to feel connected to others. We are naturally social and feeling connected to others helps us to feel happier and healthier. And as you know with 8Wise^TM, it’s all about healthier and happier mindsets and so being connected to other people is really, really important and it plays a huge role in 8Wise^TM because we have social wellness, obviously about making sure you are connected to those core support systems you have, but it’s a really important factor in the emotional wellness element as well with regards to your ability to stay connected and not allowing low mood or high levels of anxiety or high levels of stress to force you to become disconnected from people. Therefore, because we have this need to feel connected, it’s common that we would then obviously feel lonely sometimes, and that loneliness can definitely hit us a lot harder if we’ve lost a loved one, if we’ve been through a relationship breakup recently, if we’ve moved to a new area and we don’t know an awful lot of people, if we’ve suffered from health issues that isolates us naturally and at Christmas time at the festive period, this can actually intensify those feelings an awful lot more.

Now, if you are someone who finds yourself feeling lonely, I just want you to know that you’re really not on your own with this, it’s very, very, very common and in the UK alone there’s over 9 million people who are often lonely as nearly half of Brits are socializing with friends and family only once a month, that’s not a lot of time to be connected to the people that you hold nearest and dearest to you. And therefore, that distance, that disconnection, can really lead us into this feeling of this deep, deep loneliness and at Christmas time it can feel even worse especially with our wonderful older generation who are not in the position to be able to travel as much as they could once before, not be able to travel as much as they want to and also to be in a situation where their own children, their own grandchildren, have then moved on and had families of their own and because of that, they’re restricted in their travel as well.

So, there’s a lot of people who have a lot of love in their lives from lots of people, but don’t necessarily get the chance to spend time with them at this time of the year. And with Christmas it also brings an awful lot of nostalgia of the good times we’ve once had, the Christmases gone by, the family meals, the family parties, all of those amazing things we did with our friends and it can be a time when, if we are not doing those things anymore, if we’re not spending time with the people that we care about and that we love and care about us and love us as well, obviously it can lead us into this darker thinking process, this mindset that doesn’t make us feel great. And a lot of that comes from loneliness and especially at this time of the year, aren’t we bombarded with party invites and adverts. I mean, I’m self-employed, so my inbox is constantly filled at the moment with emails about parties, networking events, not necessarily parties where I know lots of people, but a lot of businesses trying to get me to go there and get drunk and chat to people and buy a lot of stuff.

When that’s going on, that can be quite tough because you’re like “well, I’m going to go to all of these events but I don’t know anybody. I’m going to be lonely in a room full of people”. Then obviously social media doesn’t help because then I’m seeing all of my friends doing all of these amazing things because I live up in Liverpool and especially my friends back down in Somerset, because I spent most of my Christmases with them. I have the most amazing memories with my friends, especially my friend Jane, Hi Jane if you’re listening, my lovely friend Jane. Our houses have always lived back to back or front to front, so for pretty much most of our childhood we spent some period of time at Christmas together. Even on Christmas day, New Year’s Day, we did an awful lot. So, when I see things happening, when she’s wrapping, she’s getting all her Christmas decorations up and she’s wrapping her presents, I do, I start to get really quite homesick, and I get a little bit lonely with regards to not being able to spend time and with those people in those areas and make new memories with them.

All I’ve got now is I’m left with memories of years gone by and they make me happy. Those nostalgic memories make me happy, but it would be lovely if we could still keep building on those memories every year with the people who’ve meant so much to us, but it’s just not possible. And so, because of that, and because I know there’s quite a few people out there who are struggling and are feeling lonely, what I wanted to do is give you some support, give you some tools that might help you to manage the loneliness that you might be feeling over this holiday season, over this Christmas period so that maybe, just maybe if you put some plans in place, if you get proactive, you might be able to prevent those low moods from kicking in and maybe you might want to turn it around. Who knows, you might even meet some new people this Christmas who stop you from ever feeling like that level of loneliness again. So, if you want to write them down, grab your pen, grab your paper, put me on pause, now’s the time to do it but here are some of the tips that I want to share with you.

So, number one will come as no surprise because it’s one of my favourite things in the whole world. Make a plan of activities. I want you to schedule your time. I want you to fill out your day with different activities that you enjoy. It might be going to the gym, it might be cooking, it might be reading your favourite book, it might be having a chat with somebody on the phone. It might be going to watch your favourite film, it might be having a long bath, it might be lots of different things that you want to do, but I think the key is you want to counteract those negative feelings and those negative thoughts with something that’s more positive for you. That’s how we do it. We counteract so anything that’s bad, we aim to look at the good. Anything that’s negative, we aim to look at the positive. So, the first thing is, if you make a plan of all of the activities that really make you feel good, that bring out the best in you, that get you feeling like you’re good self again. Make a list of them and then schedule them in. So, fill your time with those things. Number one, I want you to make a plan of all the activities that you love doing. Then I want you to put them in your diary, and I want you to fill your time with things that really bring out the best in you, the things that bring out a really good healthy buzz in you.

And now number two, what I want you to do is I want you to get involved. If there is a social event that you see popping up that you think could be good, I want you to get brave and I want you to go, I want you to try new activities. I know it can be scary. I know that you might be mixing with strangers who you don’t know, but you know what, there will be lots of people in your area right now that are like you feeling isolated and feeling alone, and there are a lot of really good organizations out there, charities out there that are trying to put on events to bring people together so you don’t have this feeling on mass. So, I’m saying get involved, do your research, see what’s available in your area, and go and do them. I know it can be scary and I know it can cause anxiety, but you’ve got two options, you can either be scared and be lonely at home on your own, or you can feel the fear, go and do it anyway. and change what’s going to happen. Make some new friends, meet some new people, most importantly have some fun. But you are the only person who can do that. You are the person who has to make the decision to get involved.

Now, Christmas, it’s the time to indulge, you’ve got to treat yourself a little bit so make the period special for you. Whatever you like to do, surround yourself with the things that are indulgent to you. Get yourself your favourite drink, get your food in, get your snacks in. Make it a day where you are really indulging in the things that you love to do. Make yourself your priority. I think I’ve said it before on this, and I’ve got a friend who always did the same thing starting his Christmas day in his bath on his own, always starts his day in his bath on his own with his champagne, or I’m guessing it’s probably Prosecco, but he would always start his day doing the one thing that he really, really loved and I recommend you do the same. Surround yourself with the things that make it special for you.

Now get together with others if you can. By that, I don’t necessarily mean face-to-face or in person if that’s not possible. The magic of Zoom these days is people are in our rooms. I know it’s not quite the same thing, but at least you feel connected. So, make an arrangement, if you want to spend Christmas dinner with your family, get your laptop out, put it on a table, sit there with them at Christmas dinner and be on Zoom. Be involved in that conversation, be involved in that chitter chatter. Just feel connected to them, get together with people.

Before Christmas go and see people that you do know, see friends, don’t turn things down, go and do them. Get involved again, but make sure you get together with other people if you can. People is the crucial element here. Now, one of the biggest things I ask, I tell people to do, is if you can, this is a really good one, is get involved with giving back. Get involved with volunteering or get involved with a charity. Lots of reasons for this 1) it gets you out the house, 2) you’re connecting with other people. You’re connecting with people who are also trying to get out the house, meet new people, and do something really good, 3) the fact that you are doing something good will make you feel so much better. It’s just the way our brain works. Doing good for others actually helps us more.

So if you have got time on your hands and you don’t know many people, but you do want to go and get involved in things and you do want to go and have some interesting fun times with some new people, then I highly recommend that if you can give back, go and do some volunteering for a local charity and see who you meet and have a different type of rewarding Christmas this year.

The other option, of course, is to get away. And a lot of people who are on their own at this time of year choose to go away and because lots of people choose to go away, there’s lots of people who feel lonely when they’re at home alone suddenly meet up in all of these other amazing places and become really good firm friends. So why don’t you if the money allows it, if you are not going to get the chance to spend time with family and friends this year, like you would’ve normally wanted to, if it’s realistic with regards to how much time you’ve got on your hands and it’s affordable, then why the hell not. Why not go and book yourself in somewhere. Go and book yourself into an absolutely gorgeous hotel that will treat you like a king or a queen, or whatever else, either way you want to identify yourself as, why not indulge in the luxury of somewhere else. The key to loneliness ultimately is that it’s because we’re not connected, but realistically speaking, we have to be willing to put ourselves out there to do it.

When I was feeling really lonely, I mean, I told people I was feeling lonely, one of my friends turned around and said, it hurt at the time and I’ve pondered on it a lot since, she said to me “but isn’t that on you? How many people have you reached out to do things with” and sometimes one of our biggest issues when we get into this lonely head space, we think no one cares. We think no one will be interested and a lot of the time people are just so busy they don’t realize, that’s all it is. They’re not horrible, they don’t hate you, they don’t think you’re invisible. They’re just so wrapped up in their own world, they don’t realize. And sometimes what you have to do is let people know. And like I said earlier on, you might be in a position where you reach out to people and they don’t reach back in the way that you need them to. Yep. People are going to let us down, but sometimes they don’t. Sometimes you reach out and you put it on someone’s radar and before you know it, they are a bit more thoughtful with regards to where you’re at in life. They are a bit more aware of how things are impacting you and affecting you and the people who care about you would hate that to be the case. So sometimes you do have to reach out, you have to just send a message to someone and say “do you know what, I’m feeling really lonely right now. Is anybody free for a chat”. “I’m feeling lonely right now, is anybody available to catch up for a drink”. There are lots of people out there who will really, really try to do that with you.

Now, the other option is to join the online groups that are created specifically for loneliness. One of my personal favourites is actually done by the lovely, lovely comedian Sarah Millican and every year she does her online holiday group. I think it’s done via Facebook and via Twitter so you can join it and it’s basically lots of people who are in the same situation decide to create these online support systems. And if they live locally, they will meet up with each other and they will do something about it. They have made the decision that they want to connect, and so they’re going to connect with people who are in a similar situation to them. And so there are lots and lots of charities out there at the moment. Lots of organizations, lots of online organizations that want to be able to help you and support you from being lonely. So do your research, don’t sit there and go “Christmas is rubbish”, “this period of time is rubbish. No one cares about me”. That’s the priority right now, don’t wait for somebody else. Care about yourself. Go and find the places that will welcome you with open arms. Go and find those places, go and find those people because that’s all it takes, that you find them, you spend time with them, you connect with them, and all of those negative thoughts, all of those negative feelings you have that are linked to your loneliness will start to disappear and you’ll be surprised at just how connecting with people again can inspire you, can motivate you, can put that little spring in your step once again and maybe this doesn’t have to be the lonely miserable Christmas. It could be the time where you meet some new people and have some really good positive quality change in your life.

Now, the reason I’m saying all this is because loneliness is, yes, it’s a mental health risk, but it’s also a physical health risk as well. When we are feeling lonely, because we have the wide range of negative feelings and negative thoughts, it can make us feel really uncomfortable and when we feel really uncomfortable, it can make us then reach for coping mechanisms that don’t really work well for us, what I would call dysfunctional coping mechanisms. And I know I’ve mentioned things like indulge and surround yourself with lovely things, but actually one of the things if we don’t look after ourselves and we don’t reduce our feelings of loneliness, it can lead us to things such as alcohol and drug misuse, antisocial behaviour, it can start causing major issues with our physicality, cardiovascular issues, putting us at risk of strokes and things like that. We can have a decreased memory and learning because we’re not connecting with people. We’re not actually using the part of our brain that needs us to connect and needs us to grow. It can lead to depression, and as we know depression can lead to things like suicide. So, it can be a major risk to our health.

Loneliness can have a major impact on our stress levels, increasing our stress levels quite dramatically, which has a major health issue for us. It basically affects the way our cognitive function of the brain works, and because of that it can actually lead us to making poor decisions. If you’ve ever been that person whose sat home alone one night, you’ve had too much to drink because you’re feeling a little bit lonely, and then you’ve picked up the phone and you’ve messaged the wrong person or you’ve messaged the person you actually don’t want in your life just because you’re lonely. When we think about the booty call situation, booty calls tend to come from loneliness. We just want to reach out and want to feel somebody, want to touch somebody, we want to be connected to somebody and in that moment, we just reach out and a lot of the time we hurt ourselves in doing that. Not all the time, sometimes it’s fun, but sometimes we actually just reach out to the people that don’t help us move forward in life, hold us back sometimes, and it can lead to us feeling in an even deeper and deeper level of loneliness. And the experts believe that when it comes to really counteracting loneliness, it’s not about the quantity of social interactions that you have, it’s about the quality of those social interactions. So it doesn’t matter if you’re only seeing one person a week, if that one person is amazing and you come out of there completely vibing and feeling that buzz and that spring in your step because spending time with them was giving you such a strong sense of connection and connectivity, then that’s all great.

So it’s definitely something for you to be thinking about. Understand yourself, understand how your loneliness is making you feel, what are those emotions that it’s making you feel? What are those thoughts? What are those memories it’s linking you to. and then, like I said, you’ve got to think about all of these different ways that you could try and change them. Sometimes it might just be that you have these relationships in your life already, but you don’t have them at the quality and the level that you’d want them to. I do this with an awful lot of my clients. I call it looking at your significant relationships and sometimes when we’re lonely, we already have the answer right in front of us. It’s just that we are not building the relationship, we’re not developing the quality of that relationship and so sometimes we’ve got to look at all the people in our lives and we’ve got to say “okay, where do they fit?” and so I do it as if you imagine a dart board where you’ve got an inner circle and then you’ve got circles all the way around it. If you imagine you are the person right in the middle, in the inner circle, and then you do a list of all of the other people in your life with the people who mean something to you, that connection to them, and then you put them in the right circles. The circle that is closest to you would indicate the people that are closest to you. The circles that are furthest away, these people are still close to you and they’re important to you, but they’re just not as close as what we would call your inner circle. And then there might be people in your life who aren’t on that scale at all that you’d want them to be, but they’re not quite in any of the circles.

What this sort of approach lets you do is look at the people that you’ve got in your life and it allows you to go “okay, who do I want to be closer?” And sometimes you have to look at it the other way, who is too close and who do I need to put some distance between me, because loneliness isn’t just about not spending time with people. Remember I said it’s about the connection, the connectivity to those people. You can be in a relationship, spending lots of time with people and feel completely lonely. You can be sat around at the Christmas table with all of your family and you can feel incredibly lonely, you could be in what the world thinks is the happiest relationship in the world, but you yourself can be in it feeling incredibly lonely because loneliness is not about spending time with people, it’s about the connection you have with people. And so it’s really important that when you’re looking at your own support systems with regards to your own social wellness, you look at them and say “which of these people that I call my significant relationships do I genuinely have a connection to, who are the people that I feel that strong, positive, inspiring, motivational connection to that when I spend time with them, I am just buzzing because they bring out the best in me”. Because if you have those people in your life, whether they live next door, whether they live 3000 miles away, the important thing is, is that you keep building that connection. That might be that you speak to them on FaceTime, it might be that you speak to them on Zoom, it might be that you pop around for a tea of coffee once a week, but they’re the people whose relationships you want to keep building. You want to make stronger and stronger and stronger. then do the same with regards to those relationships that bring out the worst in you.

At this time of year, we do reflect an awful lot, especially as we come towards the end of the year. We tend to look back on the year and go “okay, where’s this year been, what’s been good, what’s been bad, what’s been ugly” and I recommend everybody, when it comes to your social wellness, to look at the people in your life, the situations you’ve been in, how many of them have been created by people, how many situations or really difficult situations or traumatic situations have you experienced that are related to some other people and these might be people that you think are significant relationships in your life. Because also, if you’re going to do that activity, it’s about looking at what circle you’ve put them in and are they in the right place, are they too close, do you need to move them, do you need to move them completely out, or are they a relationship you either need to let go of or you need to find some way of problem solving it and building on it again. Because, again, just because you have people around you, doesn’t mean that you can’t feel lonely. And a lot of the time it’s because we have lots of people around us, but we don’t feel connected to them, and therefore we have to find a way to feel connection to those people if we want to get rid of those feeling loneliness. Like I said, it’s really important that we do so if you are feeling lonely right now, you’ve got to do something about it. It can leave you feeling very isolated and disconnected from others. It’s a very, very complex state of mind that can be caused by so many different life changes, you might have experienced mental health conditions, poor self-esteem, your own personality traits, things like being slightly introverted, slightly shy. But it might also just be caused by the way the world has changed dramatically over the last few years.

But loneliness, we underestimate it. And it can have serious, serious health consequences, including decreased mental wellness, physical problems, and our psychological wellbeing plummeting. So, if you know you are somebody who is feeling a little bit lonely right now or you know that the closer we get to Christmas, that Christmas tends to trigger you on this, then definitely if you can try to do something about it, absolutely try to do something about it. As I said there are lots of things you could do. Go and volunteer, join a class, find some support groups online, contact some people you might not have spoken to in a long while and start strengthening those existing relationships. I’m a big fan of the old pet. My dog, Archie, the Shitzu is an absolute godsend when I’m having a rough day and not feeling at my best. Just getting a pet, having a connection to a pet is equally as important to having a connection to another human being.

Don’t be scared to talk to strangers. I mean, again, I’m really lucky. I live in Liverpool which is probably the friendliest city on the planet. Anybody will talk to you as you’re walking down the street, but if you don’t live in a place where other people talk to you, it can start with you. You can be that person who has a friendly smile on your face and says hello and hi. Another option is definitely if you go and get a dog, when you’re out dog walking, dog walkers are the most social people in the world. You will never be known by your name if you are a dog owner, you will only ever be known as the mom or dad of the particular dog. But you will stop, you will chat, you will interact with people, and it can give you that connection that you might be looking for in your life. And like I said, if you can keep really busy, fill your time with the things that you know make you feel happy, indulge in the things that bring you joy in your life, and that can be part of your self-care routine.

Now, if you think that you’ve been experiencing loneliness for quite a long time and it’s had an impact on your health, so for example, you are feeling a little bit depressed by it, you are feeling really low, mixing with people does make you feel uncomfortable, then I do recommend you speak to a therapist. And I know I say this an awful lot, but you do. When our mind gets to a certain stage when it’s dominating and it’s affecting our lives on a day-to-day basis in a negative way, not in a positive way and sometimes you just need a little helping hand to get yourself out of that. It does feel like a dark hole and sometimes just reaching out to somebody, them reaching back, them listening to you, them talking to you, them sharing tips and tools with you, that can be the light that brings you out of that tunnel, that brings you out of that pit of despair.

So if you are really, really struggling, then I do highly recommend that you get in touch with a therapist or feel free to get in touch with me as well.

So, Christmas. It can be a time of fun, of joy, of laughter, of amazing food, amazing drink, amazing parties. But I am also very, very aware that it can bring a lot of loneliness to people at this time. And if you don’t let people know you’re feeling lonely, they can’t help you. Try to get proactive, try to be preventative where you can. If you can join something, join something. If you can reach out to somebody, reach out to somebody, but don’t allow it to dominate you. If you are able to put something together now that can make you feel better, why not end 2022 feeling less lonely and more connected to your community, to the people in your life, to your colleagues. and maybe just the people in the world. Humans. Humans in general. And as I said, if you can learn to combat your feelings linked with loneliness, you will boost your social wellness, you will boost your emotional wellness, you will boost your spiritual wellness as well. And also, if you are doing lots of new interesting things, you would also boost your intellectual wellness, which will really help with personal development, personal growth, and brain health. And if you do all of that, then obviously it’s going to have a really good impact on your physical health too, because if we can learn to de-stress and we can learn reduce our mental health issues, that then reduces the risks and the symptoms that affect our overall physical health as well.

So if this sounds like you, if you know you are struggling, you’ve been waiting for the sign to do something about it, I’m your sign. Go and do something about it now. Thank you very much for joining me on this episode. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for coming along. In the next episode, we’re going to kind of build on loneliness to be perfectly honest and we’re going to talk about grief and bereavement. And I know this is a tough subject for an awful lot of people. I’m finding it very tough myself at the moment in my private practice where I’m seeing more and more clients come through where grief and loss and bereavement is huge, huge right now. Some who’ve been experiencing it for a very long time and for some that’s it’s just come to them.

So we’re going to cover that in our next episode but until then, thank you very much for joining me today. If this was your first episode of listening to Live the 8Wise^TM Way, then thank you very much. I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to email me at [email protected] or head to my website www.8wise.co.uk or leave a comment below. Alternatively, like, share, subscribe. You know, I created 8Wise^TM as a formula to support everybody to look after their own mental health and wellbeing and the reason I’ve got the podcast is because I want to reach as many people as I possibly can to help them to do that and, who knows, maybe something that was said today will help somebody else but maybe something that has been said in some of the other episodes will also help other people.

So please go and have a root around all the other episodes, listen to them if you’re interested and again, it would be great if you could comment, share, like, and subscribe so you don’t miss any others and so we can get the message out there and look after as many people in this world as we can.

Thank you very much for joining me on this episode all about loneliness. Like I said, reach out to somebody and get some help if you feel like you need it. But thank you very much for joining me. I’m Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, author and creator of the 8Wise^TM Ways to Better Mental Health and Wellbeing, and I look forward to chatting to you soon. Take care, and bye for now.