THE THREE AGES OF LONELINESS
OF All the emotions that we experience as human beings, feeling lonely is surely one of the most dreaded. That’s because we’re inherently social creatures — and it’s the reason isolating people of whose behaviour we disapprove is such a powerful punishment.
Think about it: we send recalcitrant children to the naughty step, where they sit alone and ponder what they did wrong; and if an adult upsets us, we give them the cold shoulder. Prison isolation cells are reserved for inmates whose crimes warrant the severest penalty.
We don’t look on hunger, thirst or physical pain in the same way — instead, we recognise these feelings as the body’s way of telling us that we need to eat a sandwich, drink water or take the weight off a sprained ankle.
loneliness is no different. It serves as a red flag that says something has gone wrong with the quality of the interactions we’re sharing with other people. So, instead of feeling crushed by this most negative of emotions, we should view it as a call to action.
Throughout this series, we have looked at how loneliness can strike at any age. How younger women experience it when they spend too much time living vicariously through social media, and why friendships often fall away in middle age as we become over-stretched by work and family commitments.
After retirement, losing your sense of purpose can leave you feeling horribly alone.
But, whatever your age, there’s plenty you can do to banish loneliness. And I believe older people offer some of the best examples of how to do that. One of the most rewarding areas of my psychotherapy practice is the work I do with people in their 60s and 70s who are determined to make the most of their later years.
This is the age group that appears to have every risk factor going when it comes to leading a lonely existence: they’re more likely than younger generations to suffer from ill-health, to be bereaved, to have stopped working and to be living alone.
And yet, data tells a different story as far as this third age of loneliness is concerned. According to a recent study by the Office for National Statistics, the under-24s are three times more likely to say they often or always feel lonely than someone who is over 65.
How can that possibly be? If my clients are anything to go by, then it’s because the older generation are far more open to the idea that loneliness can be conquered — so they take a proactive approach in tackling it.
Take Anne, a 64-year- old retired dentist. She sold her practice two years ago so she could enjoy travelling with her husband, spending time with her baby granddaughter and socialising with the friends for whom she’d been too busy when she was working.
However, soon after retiring, her world was turned on its head when a work opportunity saw her daughter and granddaughter move to the other side of the country and then her husband died suddenly of a heart attack.
Determined not to become isolated, this lady forced herself out of the house to spend time with the friends she felt she’d neglected for so long.
Yet she struggled to connect with them. ‘We’d go out as a group — perhaps to a restaurant — but, even though I was surrounded by friendly faces, I still felt desperately lonely,’ she told me.
I hear a similar refrain from lonely people all the time — they talk about having a husband to go home to, but feeling lonely every moment they spend with him, or admit that they’re drowning in online friends, yet still don’t feel they have anyone to talk to. They say: ‘I work in an office full of people, yet I spend my days feeling horribly alone.’
AND that’s the thing about loneliness. It has little to do with how many people you have available to you — it’s what you get out of your interactions with them that truly matters.
Dr David Holmes, who is a senior psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, says loneliness is your psyche’s way of emitting a rallying cry — telling you that it’s time to make changes in your life.
‘If you’re lonely in your marriage, then perhaps it’s time to find out what lies at the root of the problems in the relationship,’ he says. ‘Maybe you need to look into marriage counselling, or even consider: “Am I with the wrong person?”
‘Someone who works long hours surrounded by other people, yet feels desperately isolated, might find a career change is the fix they’re looking for.
‘And if you feel lonely in a crowded room, then maybe you need to refocus your energies on spending time with a smaller circle of people to whom you feel more deeply connected.
‘This is what’s actually, counterintuitively, so great about loneliness. If you listen to it, then the changes it inspires you to make can end up giving you a far more fulfilling life than if you hadn’t felt lonely in the first place.’
I couldn’t agree more. And I also wonder whether the fact that divorce rates among the over-60s are steadily rising — while they continue to fall for the rest of the population — is one example of just how determined older people are to put right such emotional wrongs.
Take my client Anne, to whom it soon became clear that there was nothing wrong with her friendship circle: it’s made up of kind and caring people. But she had another need that wasn’t being met, which lay at the heart of her loneliness.
Because losing her family — which is essentially what happened when her daughter moved away and her husband died — didn’t just send Anne into a period of grief.
Coming so soon after her career abruptly ended, it also robbed her of her sense of purpose. Caring for others had been a defining feature in her life — and now it had gone.
But she wasn’t about to be beaten. In an attempt to feel valued again, Anne signed up as a volunteer at a charity shop. This wasn’t an easy fix for her — her confidence was low and she felt anxious at having to forge new relationships with strangers when she already felt so vulnerable.
My role was to help Anne manage the social anxiety she’d developed — which can affect women of all ages — so that it wouldn’t hold her back as she tackled her loneliness.
Deep-breathing exercises helped calm her panicky feelings about interacting with new people. And she focused on the activities that made up her volunteering role — sorting donations, putting price tags on clothes — rather than fretting about how she might make friends.
This made her feel less anxious and, therefore, connections with others came much more naturally.
I encouraged her to recognise every small victory — even if it was simply the fact that she’d managed to spend a whole day out of the house.
After all, beating loneliness is all about taking baby steps and managing your expectations.
I see a lot of older people like Anne taking up voluntary work to fight their loneliness, as well as new hobbies — some even return to studying or take up language or music lessons. These