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Loneliness - Social isolation and loneliness
contents
- What does social psychology say??
- Definitions of loneliness
- Reactionary loneliness
- Creeping loneliness
- The chronic loneliness
- otherness
- Feeling isolation
- sleep disorders
- Loneliness - a dilemma
- The creative suffering
- Social isolation and the consequences
- What can I do myself?
- separation Loneliness
- Relatives and friends
- Self-esteem is the problem?
- Find help
- A social task
- Make social media lonely?
- pressure to succeed
- What does the policy say??
- What does science say??
- Only an individual feeling?
- She is not to blame
- In danger of becoming lonely
- Studies and references
What does social psychology say??
Social psychology regards loneliness as the subjective feeling of suffering from a lack of fulfilled social contacts. This has nothing to do with whether or not those affected have objectively many contacts.
Loneliness feelings indicate that a person becomes aware of his social isolation and feels it to be negative. This is often followed by depression and the attempt to compensate for the negative feelings caused by drugs or alcohol. Such failed strategies to cope with loneliness reinforce social isolation.
Children today are often raised to lone fighters. Social isolation or loneliness is often the result. (Image: altanaka / fotolia.com) Definitions of loneliness
Peplau / Periman in 1982 a definition of the term valid until today. Accordingly, it is a subjectively experienced state, a rupture between the social relationships that a person has and those that he desires. So someone can be constantly among people and at the same time feel lonely. Conversely, a person who consciously turns away from other humans and lives alone in the forest need not be lonely, if that is exactly the condition he desires.
Reactionary loneliness
Reactional loneliness develops when life changes: changing places of residence, having children, job loss, boarding, leaving children, divorce, death of a partner, illnesses that tie a person to bed, accidents, but also old age. This form of loneliness is called reactionary because it means that those affected react to a changed situation in life. Familiar relationships break down or lose their intensity.
This reactionary loneliness is usually not permanent. It passes by when those affected build new social relationships that reflect the new life situation: finding a new partner, spending time with couples who also have children, or pursuing their hobbies with other retirees.
Reactional loneliness is not usually a mental health problem for the person concerned, but external circumstances, with people with strong contact faster than people who are struggling to form new relationships.
Creeping loneliness
Unlike reactionary loneliness, creeping loneliness is only conditionally a consequence of external circumstances. The victims have social contacts here, but they do not fulfill them. They complain that they know many people superficially, but that they do not develop deep friendships, or that old friends alienate themselves. The feeling of isolating oneself becomes stronger and stronger.
Loneliness can end in alcoholism. (Image: Syda Productions / fotolia.com) The causes are complex. For example, a person's interests, feelings, and goals are changing, and slowly he is moving away from his old friends. Or, conversely, a person stagnates in his development while his friends change. In the beginning, they still meet, perhaps even keeping up the old rituals, but these are increasingly empty. Creeping now they are at a distance from each other. Those who can not cope with this divergence and make no new bonds feel isolated.
External circumstances can play here. A classic example is a person who grows up in a small village and feels in his youth that he has a potential that does not understand his environment, and that he can not implement here. If he does not make the jump now and does not move into an environment where he could unfold, he may be creeping away.
The chronic loneliness
This condition extends over years and decades and is often associated with mental health problems. These people lack the ability to socialize on their own and maintain social relationships. This particularly affects people with a depressive illness.
otherness
The danger of becoming lonely is particularly great when the social environment perceives people as different. This applies, for example, to people who suffer from mental disorders such as Asperger's Syndrome, attachment disorders, borderline syndrome, bipolarity or paranoid schizophrenia.
People without special needs have little access to the thoughts and feelings of those affected and because of their unusual behavior, hardly anyone has deep friendships with these people.
However, people who do not suffer from a mental disability, for example highly gifted people, are also different. If they do not have contacts with people who understand their thoughts, that may or may not lead to a sense of social isolation.
Other people who have experiences that their environment can not empathize appear differently. This applies, for example, to soldiers returning from war to civil society.
Being different can make you lonely in the village. (Image: spaskov / fotolia.com) Feeling isolation
The psychologist John T. Cacioppo saw in solitude the social equivalent of physical pain, hunger and thirst. This feeling is so hard to bear that those affected carry out actions to end the condition or not even let it arise. Such actions include, for example, the so-called relational addiction, in which the victims repeatedly plunge into intimate relationships, even if they are destructive. They are driven by the fear of being alone. This also applies to some old people who intentionally delay their hospital discharge because they fear loneliness at home.
Feeling of isolation, like anxiety, increases the level of stress, and thus increases the risk of illnesses in which stress plays a role. This increases the blood pressure and the risk of heart problems. According to Cacioppo, loneliness plays into both suicide and psychosis, cognitive disorders and Alzheimer's.
sleep disorders
Those who suffer from loneliness sleep badly, according to a study by Lianne Kurina from Chicago. Although lonely people do not sleep shorter, they wake up more often at night and regenerate insufficiently through sleep. On the other hand, scientists from the University of California recently found that sleep disorders drive people to loneliness and isolation - an effect that could be observed after a sleepless night.
Loneliness - a dilemma
Once a person suffers from felt isolation, it usually becomes more and more difficult for him to establish social contacts that could escape this feeling. Due to his isolation, he becomes a "Eigenbrödler". His communication refers, due to the social isolation, mostly on himself. So he acts for potential new friends, at best, strange. They quickly go away because the lonely does not respond to the needs of the other person. He circles around himself and is trapped in this cage, even if he wants to go out.
Loneliness makes you a loner in the long run. (Image: LIGHTFIELD STUDIOS / fotolia.com) As much as those affected suffer from their social isolation, it is their familiar condition in which they move. They now behave towards other people as if they did not exist as separate beings. Lonely people often develop a behavior and represent attitudes that drive people into the distance without this problem. They are cynical, destructive, sometimes even misanthropic. At the latest, when the lonely ones construct a peculiarity out of their negative feelings, fellow human beings quickly distance themselves from them. For the non-lonely, it acts as if the lonely one is snubbing at them, as if they exclude - and he is not the one who feels excluded.
Those affected suffer mental pain and often direct it outward. They do not complain then "I feel isolated", but "the people are superficial". Some develop hatred and contempt for other people out of necessity.
The creative suffering
The Enlightenment in Europe also saw loneliness as positive when people withdrew from everyday life to reflect and enlighten themselves about society by seeing them from the outside. Romanticism glorified loneliness as introversion, in which people withdrew from a loveless outer world and sought out the inner world of their dreams.
Goethe's Werther, for example, was unable to cultivate any social ties in the superficial society of the bourgeoisie of his time, and he did not develop his creative powers until he turned away from this society. He suffered at the same time and ended his life with suicide. For Nietzsche, loneliness is a core element of great ghosts.
Loneliness is creative and encourages great minds. (Image: Alenavlad / fotolia.com) Social isolation and the consequences
Loneliness feelings are so scientifically spongy. The situation is different with the complex consequences of social isolation. Those who are socially isolated increase the risk of various diseases. Family, friends, relatives, colleagues or neighbors are not only an emotional support, but also a practical one. Other people recognize better than we do ourselves whether we lack something. They see our blind spots and urge us to do sports or go to the doctor. Thus, a stable social environment automatically improves health. However, this is not about subjective loneliness, but about objective social isolation.
What can I do myself?
Regardless of whether I am "guilty" or not, I can change my own behavior to get rid of the negative feelings. Even if it sounds strange to lonely people: This does not start with (compulsively) looking for social contacts, but with letting oneself feel better.
They can listen to their favorite music, go for a walk in the woods, visit a museum, rediscover hobbies, ride a bicycle, go to concerts or go to the theater, do things they love or once loved.
Also important are your own four walls: Set up your apartment so that you feel comfortable there. Whether it's the new pillows, a new wallpaper, new furniture, candles on a winter evening or lavender bouquets in the kitchen is up to you. You can also take care of houseplants or buy pets. Go to a restaurant and eat your favorite food alone. Paint, read, pot, create a garden.
These measures sound banal and are in fact not suitable when the feeling of loneliness accompanies a serious mental illness such as depression. In such cases, you can not rely on practical self-help, but must urgently go into psychiatric treatment. But if this is not the case, then it has a positive effect, to make your own environment alone so that you feel comfortable in it. On the one hand, the negative feeling becomes more bearable for them and you may even find that the lack of social relationships also has an advantage - being able to pursue one's passions. On the other hand, you are preparing to build more and more intense social relationships. Anyone who pursues his interests sooner or later finds people with similar inclinations, and they immediately have a topic of conversation that bores neither you nor their counterpart.
Beautiful interior makes it easy to invite a visit. (Image: Studio Romantic / fotolia.com) separation Loneliness
People who have had a long relationship, lived through crises, tried new beginnings, and eventually broke up, often have problems dealing with unfamiliar aloneness. Often this leads to negative feelings of loneliness. This danger is even greater if the relationship was once and for all, life was focused on the partner and old friends, colleagues or hobbies had the disadvantage.
Nevertheless, many people manage to survive this phase: they build on old friendships, go to parties, in cafes and pubs, meet new people. Some even enjoy being alone after the breakup to find themselves and build a new self. Those who are socially popular, in desires of potential sexual partners, and in their profession many also have private contacts, manage the first phase of mourning more quickly. Such people usually get to know new relationship candidates, have one or the other casual affair or one-night stalls, sometimes even enjoy sexually exaggerating and playing the old game of trial and error.
In others, however, the single life turns into tribulation. They desperately search for the right person and feel lonelier because they do not find anyone to whom their expectations apply. Or, conversely, you panic into changing bedfellows and feel lonelier because they knew from the beginning that "that's nothing". Flirts are not a tingling sensation but a compulsion. To do something alone seems at best to be an escape. The more they travel alone, the more they fear becoming nerds.
The feelings are now in a negative spiral. The victims believe that they are not lovable, the search for a partner seems to them in vain, they forgave themselves to their homes, are becoming increasingly shy and get to know so fewer and fewer people.
After a break, you often feel like motherhood alone. (Image: lassedesignen / fotolia.com) Relatives and friends
After a break there is no one to replace the lost partner. But there are friends and, if all else fails and you have a good relationship with your family, parents and / or children. They hug you, do something with them, distract you.
Is not the feeling of loneliness tipped into depression that you do not dare to leave home? Then go out. Jogging, hiking, swimming, cinema, pub, cafe not only improve the mood, everywhere you meet people. And people get to know you best when you do something that gives them pleasure.
Self-esteem is the problem?
If we understand the feelings of loneliness as a subjective sense of social isolation, then these can also result from the fact that we do not value ourselves and our interests. When I like myself, develop my own abilities, pursue my own passions, I do not find objective aloneness tantalizing - on the contrary.
It would be nice if someone shared my interests, but I prefer to pursue my interests by myself rather than sharing time with someone who has no connection to it. Some people run frantically away from being alone, because then they would be confronted with themselves. But whoever can not do anything with himself, for him alone means self-doubt, thought circles, uncertainty and confusion.
Find help
If you suffer from feelings of loneliness in the long term, seek help. As a first step you write a self-help group. Little helps more against the loneliness than the contact with other sufferers who have the same problem. You can also visit a counseling center or, in the case of a chronic condition, a psychotherapy.
With great suffering professional help is advisable. (Image: Photographee.eu/fotolia.com) A social task
Lonely ones also often suffer from the fact that individual responsibility is the guiding principle of late capitalism. They are then in a society that offers supposedly many possibilities, as your own fault of their condition. Here it is necessary to raise awareness, to involve people who obviously feel marginalized.
Make social media lonely?
The psychiatrist and Internet enemy Manfred Spitzer makes after his lurid -written book "Digital Dementia" the social media much responsible for the today rampant loneliness.
That is very undifferentiated. On the one hand, the accumulation of virtual FB friends can actually lead to less and less friendships in the real world. On the other hand, it is also possible to deepen social contacts via the internet, be it via the chat with the best friend, the skype with the grandchildren or the short message with the buddies. Online forums are often the first step out of social isolation: those who have become more and more isolated, it is easier for them to start with the filter of the Internet and then meet with their chat partners only later than immediately to go to a group meeting.
pressure to succeed
Young people today are under enormous pressure to succeed. At the age of 20, her education, her studies, her career should start. During their studies, they first encounter countless peers; Seminars, shared apartments, parties, love affairs and new friends. Then supposedly the first steps in the successful job start and in the early 30s follow family, children, home - so the neoliberal propaganda. But the reality is usually different.
The young "self-optimizers" select their social contacts as to whether they profit them professionally, real friendships are barely achieved, intensive discussions about private topics are a waste of time. In addition, the "self-optimizers" are always busy, communities do not grow, neighbors change, relatives live far away. Without this connection to people who are close to us, the feeling of loneliness is a logical consequence.
Especially young people often isolate themselves by pressure to succeed. (Image: weixx / fotolia.com) What does the policy say??
The SPD health politician Karl Lauterbach calls a responsible person in the Ministry of Health for the topic of loneliness, the CDU politician Marcus Weinberg a "lobby for lonely people".
The president of Diakonie, Ulrich Lilie says: "We need an alliance of politics and social groups such as churches, charities, sports clubs and cultural institutions."
What does science say??
The American Psychologists' Association concludes that people with many social contacts are 50% less likely to die early. According to an Australian meta-study, social isolation, loneliness, and single-lives have a significant impact on an earlier death - comparable to obesity and smoking.
The different risks are also related. Anne Böger of the German Center for Gerontology writes: "Lonely people smoke more often, are more likely to be overweight and report less physical activity."
Only an individual feeling?
To regard loneliness as a subjective feeling excludes the social background of social isolation. Those who involuntarily lonely as a result of reduced social benefits, precarious working conditions, displacement from the place of residence, because he or she can not pay the rent, or the is hardly helped with tips for individual crisis management. This is about political tasks such as social housing, tenant protection, social integration and improved social benefits.
She is not to blame
Those who involuntarily see themselves in solitude trap are not guilty. It is rather a biochemical process in the brain. When we cooperate with other people, when someone hugs us, when we successfully solve tasks in the team, the brain pours out "happiness hormones" as "sweets".
However, if a person feels marginalized and unloved, the brain activates the same centers as it does with physical pain. Suffering from loneliness is therefore a biologically meaningful mechanism for survival. Isolation and exile were historically logically extremely effective punishments for a social being like man.
In danger of becoming lonely
Some people are more likely to suffer involuntary loneliness than others. Those affected tend to be pessimistic about their environment, are shy, and are self-referential, ill-listened to others and, most of all, lack empathy. They talk little about their feelings and generally share little with what's going on in them.
People who enjoy being in organized groups, whether in football, the fire department or a local political group, run little risk of becoming lonely. They also tend to make private contacts, do not expect too much from them and are not disappointed if everything does not go perfectly. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Studies and references
Julianne Holt-Lunstad et al.: Social Relationships and Mortality Risk at www.plosmedicine.org. Called on 24.05.2018 (http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316).
Louise C. Hawkley and John T. Cacioppo: Loneliness Matters: A Theoretical and Empirical Review of Consequences and Mechanisms at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Called 09.08.2018