The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a spike in reports of loneliness. In late 2020, after the first waves of the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns, an astounding 36 percent of U.S. adults reported experiencing “serious loneliness.” Luckily, vaccines and, at times, lower infection-rates have allowed families and friends to be reunited.
Nonetheless, many people are still struggling with loneliness. And the issue was already a growing problem before 2020. A study done in 2018, for instance, found that 22 percent of adults were often or always lonely.
In our age of increasing social media and the availability of everything online—from electronics and furniture to prescription drugs and food—it has become incredibly easy for us to lose contact with fellow humans.
And, as has also been researched, having more people around you doesn’t necessarily cure loneliness. Being around friends or family who we don’t connect with can make us feel even more lonely. So it’s important to tackle loneliness at its source, if we can.
Mindfulness to tackle Loneliness
While mindfulness was not developed specifically for combatting loneliness, it has been found to be a useful tool in overcoming this age-old problem. The reason that mindfulness works is that it teaches us to let go of our resistance to loneliness. It’s our resistance, after all, that causes us the most suffering.
As many mindfulness teachers say: what we resist, persists. Resisting a mood or feeling often means thinking about it, over and over again. That thought actually makes the feeling grow deeper and deeper.
It’s like hunger or an itch. If we’re distracted, we often don’t notice these for minutes or hours at a time. Similarly with loneliness, we might be lonely for weeks or months or longer and simply fail to notice. But like hunger or an itch, it doesn’t necessarily go away.
Also, like hunger or an itch, if we pay attention to it, then we can skillfully solve the problem quickly. Hunger is telling us something: namely that it’s time to eat. An itch tells us that something is brushing against our skin. We can see these feelings as neither good nor bad, but simply as providers of information. Now that we have that information, what do we do?
When we discover that we’re lonely, what do we do?
Opening up with Acceptance
A step beyond noticing that we’re lonely is accepting it. This takes time and effort. It goes against our self-conceptions to say that we’re lonely. Our society, in addition to driving us toward loneliness, also stigmatizes this.
Accepting our situation allows us to dig into deeper questions of why we feel lonely. Has our work made us unhappy, leading us to avoid friends? Has a dispute with a loved-one flowed over into other relationships? Have we lost someone close to us and simply don’t know how to reach out?
There are countless paths a person can take to becoming lonely. Odds are, we’ve taken ours for a long time and simply ignored it. Many of these paths are our coping mechanisms, keeping us together through tough times. So, in that way they’re good. But if we’re lonely now, the path has gone too far. It’s time for us to re-examine where we are and where we want to go.
This self-examination can open new doors, too. Perhaps our path is driven from childhood experiences we’d like to think more about, perhaps with the help of a therapist. Perhaps we could use some professional help and assurance before putting ourselves back out there in the world. After all, sometimes our loneliness can become somewhat comfortable. It’s not really what we want, but we choose it over potentially worse outcomes such as rejection or embarrassment.
You see, this process of acceptance can take us down a pretty deep hole into our psyche. Mindfulness is a powerful guide as it helps us return to the present moment and the body and breath whenever we sense that we’re spiraling too far off course.
Developing a skill
Both mindfulness and acceptance take time to develop. Starting out with just mindfulness practice is a wise way to begin. This is because it is simpler and requires only that we come back to the breath every time the mind wanders.
Once we build up this ability, we can try “welcoming” various discomforting feelings such as loneliness. We might be surprised by how difficult this is at first. It is like the loving-kindness meditation when we reach the “difficult person” stage of practice. Perhaps we cannot work on the most difficult person in our lives right now. That’s okay. We choose someone else and work from there.
Similarly, when we’re dealing with loneliness, we can be approaching a huge complex of feelings: ranging from irritation to neglect, hurt and heartbreak, grief and social awkwardness. It can really be daunting. But digging in, slowly but surely, can also be incredibly rewarding.
Know thyself
For the great philosopher Socrates, the maxim that one should “know thyself” was a regular motivation. Socrates became famous for his method of questioning those he talked to until they realized that what they thought they believed, they in fact did not. With the right questions, Socrates was able to unearth the real reasoning and ideas of those he talked to. While this was invigorating to many of his students, it irritated others and he was eventually arrested and put to death.
That warning lives on in our current explorations of mindfulness and acceptance. Do the work to “know thyself” but be mindful that it can become very irritating indeed. And sometimes, when the going gets incredibly tough, it’s important to take a break. Socrates didn’t know when to take a break.
Justin Whitaker, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Buddhist ethics from the University of London. He has given lectures, and taught Buddhist studies and Philosophy at Oxford University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Montana, and at Antioch University’s intensive study-abroad program in India. A certified meditation teacher, he is a regular contributor to Patheos.com, and Senior Correspondent for Buddhistdoor Global. He lives in Missoula with his family.