Suffering loneliness? You’re not alone, it’s a scourge of modern times – but there are ways to combat it

FEELING lonely was a condition I never thought I would experience. Admitting you’re lonely seems a bit shameful, rather like saying you haven’t had sex for months and you’re desperate to feel someone else’s skin.

There is a definite stigma attached. It could mean you are a failure socially. So how did it happen to me, the woman who has spent decades going out most nights?

I admit I can be difficult, opinionated and picky about my friends. I’m not an easy person to get on with. Even so, I have loads of very long-standing friends, but modern life makes it difficult to see them as frequently as before.

We often live at least an hour’s journey on public transport from each other. We’ve stopped chatting regularly on the phone. I had a couple of pals I would call every Sunday morning for a catch-up, but that has fizzled out. No-one answers their home phone these days in case it’s a cold caller.

Some of my contemporaries are busy looking after grandchildren or aged parents; some, like me, haven’t retired and are still working hard.

Proactive

So, yes, I feel lonely – but I’m not going to take it lying down. Instead, I have a plan: to speak to at least three new people each day, in an effort to exercise my social skills, learn about other people and, ultimately, defeat loneliness.

There are many reasons for feeling lonely, and things definitely got worse when society became so self-obsessed; when we started banging on about ‘me-time’ and ‘self-improvement’, all stuff you do on your own.

You don’t notice isolation creeping up, and then you might end up not talking to anyone for days at a time.

That happened to me one weekend last year – three days when the phone didn’t ring. I got a few emails, some tweets and a couple of texts, but no-one actually spoke to me. It was life-changing.

I went from misery to anger to selfdoubt. And I decided I’d do something positive about my predicament so that it would never happen again.

I would be proactive and treat combating loneliness like learning a new skill. It couldn’t be that different from taking up boxing or fly fishing.

I started to make the effort to talk to people I didn’t know, people who weren’t relatives, friends or fellow workers. Or people I was paying to work for me.

At first I set myself the small target of one person a day. That may seem pathetic but it was quite a challenge, mainly because people tend to recognise me and I have to get past that and talk normally. I am 6ft tall with bright red hair, so not easy to ignore or mistake for someone else.

At first I felt stupid, but I have gingerly progressed from a couple of sentences to a real chat.

The results have been rewarding. I’ve had conversations about all sorts of things and gained insights into strangers’ lives.

When I spoke recently at a conference organised by the Campaign To End Loneliness, I announced that I was upgrading my target to three people a day, explaining why I’d made this decision.

It really struck a chord with the audience, many of whom told me on Twitter later that they, too, felt alone. I have discovered that there are literally millions of busy people who have shared my experience of loneliness. That miserable weekend when the phone didn’t ring for me is not at all unusual in 2018.

Isolation

The reasons are complex, ranging from isolation in old age to the all-pervading impact of social media and our overreliance on screens rather than face-toface contact.

In cities, there are rarely garden walls to chat over as we hang out the washing, like my mum did.

What’s more, loneliness can start in your teens – 18-year-olds spend half an hour a day less socialising than they did in 2000. Instead, they spend evenings in their rooms, conversing by text and WhatsApp with their ‘friends’. BBC Radio 4’s All In The Mind programme conducted a loneliness survey and found that 40% of 16- to 24-year-olds said they felt lonely often or very often, compared with just 27% of those aged over 75.

In the UK, GPs are being encouraged to steer lonely patients towards walking clubs, dance classes or art groups instead of dishing out pills. Such publicly funded campaigns have attracted much mockery, but I profoundly disagree. The health implications are enormous – loneliness is linked to strokes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s – so the money is well spent if it helps keep people active and interested in the world around them.

Governments need to ensure proper funding is channelled to local authorities and ring-fenced for community activities.

In the meantime, it’s easy for lonely people to adopt my simple strategy of talking to one new person a day – or three, if you feel brave. Here are some of my recent encounters:

One night, I was walking a friend to the station after supper when I noticed a woman in her 50s walking in the same direction. I struck up a conversation and found out she had moved from an inner city borough, away from her friends and family, to a place that she didn’t like but where she could afford a home and where her son wouldn’t get involved in gangs or drugs. He was now doing well at school and passionate about rugby.

Sacrifice

In a couple of minutes, I’d heard the story of a working woman prepared to make a huge sacrifice for her family.

On another occasion, I was eating Sunday lunch in a restaurant when a group of men in their late 50s (looking well-dressed and successful) came in and ordered drinks. I had written them off as posh bankers on a team-building weekend, or blokes playing golf.

Later, I started a conversation with two of them and found out they’d all been in the same class at school 43 years ago, and had not seen each other since.

They showed me school photos, and it was very touching to see middle-aged men so comfortable in each other’s company. One man had even read about my plan to talk to three people a day and thought it a very good idea.

My supermarket checkout lady told me she has to turn up at 6am if the store is opening at 8am, and the only upside is staff get to buy discounted food first.

In Portugal recently, I walked into a café in Lisbon and started chatting to my waiter. He had come to the UK from Bangladesh but, after attending college in Leicester, couldn’t get a decent job. So he went to Portugal to stay with an uncle, learned the language and was working as a waiter while training to be a guide.

Older people see their friends and partners gradually die and many retreat into immobility, focusing on memories of happier times. They need help to start talking to strangers again, to trust people they don’t know.

But recognising loneliness and tackling it can’t just be left to GPs and councils, although they have a part to play.

Ultimately, we ourselves must fight off the feeling before it takes hold. Otherwise we will all have shorter and more miserable lives.