Throughout my childhood and adulthood, I’ve often heard the

10 min readDec 5, 2020

I started blogging in 2007. I remember it being easy to plop down in my chair and churn out a 1,000-word draft. I’d just wake up and do it, and then go get breakfast. But somewhere around 2013, I noticed I was interrupting myself to check Facebook or email a lot more frequently. Around 2015, I started to see it as a problem.
In the time it took me to outline this article, I checked Twitter three times and my inbox twice. I responded to four emails. I checked Slack once and sent two texts. I went down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos. Every few minutes, I refreshed Amazon to see if the ranking of my books had changed.
Chances are you go through this do-si-do yourself on the regular. For me, it’s only gotten worse as time has gone on — which is strange because you’d assume that my attention span and focus would be getting stronger as I get older.

We’re offering a free course to all of our new subscribers as a thank you for your continued support. When you sign up using this link, we’ll send you tips on how to boost mental clarity and focus every two days.As someone who has an insecure attachment style, I deeply long for relationships but often fear I’m on the verge of losing them. Out of desperation for a relationship, I’ll put up with toxic behaviors, making excuses for people and trying to “see the bright side” when in actuality, I’m just not being honest with myself. Even worse, I sometimes let that negative treatment affect my self-worth and self-esteem.The best way to identify this habit is to step back and view your reactions in contrast to the source. Are you reacting in a proportional way? If you find yourself overthinking and overanalyzing comments, events and interactions, it may be a sign you’re lonely.

Many people think of lonely individuals as clingy, needy folks desperate for any human interaction. The fact is that when you’re lonely, you actually start acting “overly defensive and come across to others as detached, aloof, or even hostile,” according to Guy Winch, clinical psychologist researcher.

It took me many years to realize that men were treating me in toxic ways. It took me many years to realize I’m worth more than unhealthy relationships and that I could let them go and still be okay. It took me many years to stop making false excuses for men who didn’t deserve that from me.

If you don’t have important connections with people in your life, your brain scrambles to find the next best thing: stuff. Many deeply lonely people fill the void of their relationships with cars, phones, gun collections.

I want you to recognize the signs and learn to respect yourself earlier than I did. However, I also want to be clear on two things: (1) I’m not a relationship expert and I’m speaking from my own personal experiences and viewpoints. Unfortunately, I can’t speak to every person, relationship or nuance, in which some of these points may look different in another situation. (2) While I touch on signs of and resources for abuse in this article, my suggestions for helping yourself are mainly focusing on relationships that are unhealthy or give us less than we deserve. Abuse is a much more complicated situation, especially when it comes to getting out of that relationship and finding safety. If you feel unsafe or abused, please access these resources when you can, rather than utilizing the suggestions I list below.

The best strategy to counter this habit is not to go cold turkey, but rather to find healthy replacements. I can’t replace all my time online, but I found that as I spent more time painting, I wanted to spend less time scrolling. This didn’t help me feel less lonely, but it did help me identify the fact that I was lonely in the first place. Without social media filling the interaction gap, reality became clear.

One of the hallmarks of loneliness is a desire to patch that perceived gap, often using social media. The problem is social media is like Splenda water for hummingbirds — they drink because it’s sweet, but not only does it not do anything for them, they don’t realize it’s actively harmful. You can like and comment and message, all without realizing that this interaction isn’t what you truly crave, and that research shows limiting social media would actually make you feel less lonely.

The best way to mitigate this habit is to slowly begin incorporating deeper social connections. It’s hard, honestly, to reach out when you’re lonely because your energy levels are already drained just from being socially depleted. Start small, and start with something that you know you can look forward to — a 20 minute phone call while you take a walk, a socially distant beer with a friend, or a Netflix party date watching a movie you love, are all great places to start.

Once you know what to look for, it’s obvious: you have a fear of being alone; you have an unhealthy attraction to acquiring material goods, social interactions leave you exhausted; your stress levels are through the roof; you can’t put your phone down; and nobody seems to realize you’re hurting but you. The good news is once you’ve noticed any of these habits, you can begin to work on fixing them. Loneliness is a tough condition to beat, but it’s worth the effort.

It’s self-perpetuating behavior: you feel lonely, so you lash out, but without realizing it. Then you’re sad and confused when people start drifting away from you, making you feel lonelier.

It’s hard to realize you’re being standoffish unless it’s pointed out to you, so the simplest strategy to spot this is simply by seeing how you feel others are treating you. Do you feel like nobody’s responding to your attempts to connect? If so, it’s probably because you’re reacting in an aloof manner without even realizing it.
At my loneliest, I stayed up until midnight most nights scrolling on Twitter, checking my email, refreshing my notifications every chance I could to try to get that quick rush of dopamine that meant someone had connected with me in any shallow, meaningless way. I dreaded the moment I’d have to turn off my screens to go to bed, alone with my thoughts until I could fall asleep. When I tried to stop, the loss of all social interaction was a shock to my system.

Suddenly, I had to pay attention to my attention. I didn’t know how to not distract myself anymore. It felt like I was living in some kind of digital hellscape, where the process of doing anything significant and important seemed impossible.

This means that it takes a big jolt to break the cycle. The good news is you don’t have to do this alone. If you can tell a friend or family member you’re struggling, often they’ll be able to meet you more than halfway. It can feel daunting to reach out for help, but you can’t rely on your support network if they don’t know you need them. Don’t rely on them magically noticing — reach out.
Loneliness is a compounding problem. The more chronically lonely you are, the less energy you have, the harder it is to form and maintain meaningful connections, making you even lonelier in a never-ending downwards spiral.
This should have been 20 minutes of work, tops. Yet the cost of these compulsive interruptions goes way beyond the added amount of time that it took me to finish the damn thing. These distractions interrupted my train of thought, likely reducing the quality of my writing and necessitating more edits and revisions. They created anxiety as I spent much of my distracted time anxious about the fact that I wasn’t working and my working time anxious that I was missing out on text conversations, email threads, or news updates. They made the process of writing less enjoyable and more taxing.

Researchers found that when you’re lonely, already anxious and starved for connections, you’re primed to think of minor incidents as much more stress-inducing than they actually are. “…[L]oneliness promotes short-term self-preservation, including an increased implicit vigilance for social, in contrast to nonsocial, threats,” reported Capiocco et al in their 2013 study.

Maybe you can count on one hand the number of stressful experiences you’ve had in the past month. And maybe you’re starting to stress out just thinking about how much stress you’ve felt this week, let alone this month.
Loneliness is a self-perpetuating and miserable state to be in, exacerbated by the fact that frequently, you don’t even realize you’re lonely. Especially if you have all the trappings of an active social life — a loose group of friends, 100 likes on your social media post, an invite to the next gathering — it can be nearly impossible to realize that the reason you’re seeking so much attention, the reason you push people away and can’t seem to fall asleep at night is because actually, you’re lonely.

Throughout my childhood and adulthood, I’ve often heard the

Written by Sujan