How to Deal With Feeling Lonely During the Holidays: 3 Tips to Use Your Mind-Body Connection to Deal With Loneliness
The holidays can often feel lonely to some, and that loneliness is a whole body experience. You may find yourself thinking all about your relationships, lack of relationships, or how hard it is to be around your family. You might feel hopeless because your relationships aren’t what you want them to be. You might feel heaviness in your body and heart, as well as an overall sense of sadness.
What is loneliness?
Loneliness happens when our need for gratifying social connection is not met. As humans, we aren’t meant to be alone. Studies show that people with meaningful social connections live longer, and overall have better physical and mental health.
Now, if you’re reading this, you’re probably struggling with feeling lonely, so I want to reiterate that this blog is not supposed to make you feel worse. It’s supposed to help you understand that if you are struggling in your relationships, there’s a good reason why you’re feeling sad right now. We are biologically wired to be connected with others.
Lonely vs. being alone
Feeling lonely and being alone are two separate things. We can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely. We can spend time alone and not feel lonely. Being alone is just a state of being. Feeling lonely is an emotional state, where we feel disconnected from others.
It’s important to note that when we’re around others and we feel lonely, this is because our relationships, or the people we’re around, don’t fill us up like we need them to. We also might have a feeling of loneliness already within us based on our life experiences and where we are in life at this time.
How does the mind-body connection help with loneliness?
Oftentimes, when we feel lonely it can come with self-critical thoughts or judgments about ourselves or others. It may also come with physical feelings of heaviness, anxiety, and tension. When we start to work with both the mind and body, we can start to soothe our internal state that might feel stuck in loneliness.
When we feel lonely, our internal beliefs might be that we “aren’t good enough”, or we “suck at relationships”, or “no one likes us”, just to name a few. We might ask ourselves “what’s wrong with me?”. These beliefs have an effect on our mind and physical body, and thus our health. When we start to pay attention to how the emotional state of feeling lonely affects our mind and body, we can then start to help both the thoughts and the body.
3 tips to manage loneliness from a mind-body perspective
1) Start doing more things for yourself that fill you up
Go for more walks. Watch something funny. Go to that art or yoga class you’ve been wanting to join! Read a book on self-development. Focus more on you. The more you build a strong relationship with yourself, and enjoy spending time on your own, the less you’ll feel lonely.
2) Start to become aware of how loneliness feels in your body
I know it can feel like an odd thing to try for some, but I encourage you to give it a go! When you’re feeling lonely, take a few minutes to close your eyes and breathe into your internal state. How does your body feel? Is it heavy, tight, uncomfortable, or anxious? Once you recognize how it feels, start to notice the sensations, without judgment. Let them be there. Sometimes, the reason loneliness sticks around is because we judge it and fight against it. What a lot of people don’t realize about loneliness is that if we practice letting it be, this helps it to subside. To learn more, check out my blog: 5 reasons why you still feel stuck in your health.
3) Put yourself out there
If there’s someone in your life you’ve been wanting to get to know more, or reignite your relationship with, make the commitment to initiate a connection. Call them, set up a time to hang out, or send them a text saying hi. The more you try to put yourself out there, the more you’ll feel empowered to keep doing it.
How I can help you with feeling lonely
If you need support with loneliness and want to make a change in your life, click the button below to set up a free intro call for therapy. Therapy can be a powerful tool to get through this time and help the part of you that is suffering. Through compassionate guidance, I can help you to process loneliness and give you skills to work through it.
Other services I offer
If you’d like an intro to regulating your nervous system, go ahead and sign up for my Nervous System Reset course, where you’ll learn how to understand your specific triggers, and how to work with them from a mind-body perspective. I give you tools, and lead you through mind and body-based exercises, including journaling, breathing exercises, meditations, and physical yoga therapy.
I am honored to help people along their healing journey. Specifically, I help people address anxiety, trauma, disordered eating, and nervous system dysregulation. I help by combining nervous system regulation, holistic psychotherapy, and yoga therapy. If you want to grow in your healing journey and make exponential changes, I would love to be your guiding support. Check out my other blogs to learn more about my practice.
