THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF YEAR?
It’s the SILLY SEASON, when parties, presents and prosecco abound. But what if you feel left out of the festivities – or COMPLETELY ALONE?
How to cope when you’re lonely in party season.
The offer from a London pub was simple: if you’re going to be alone on Christmas Day, come here. There’ll be a hot meal and your choice of festive poison waiting for you. And company. On what can be the loneliest day of the year for many, it was a lifeline – something to cling to when everyone else had, quite literally, gone home. Christmas can be the most wonderful time of the year – but not for all of us. For many, it’s a season of extreme loneliness. If your family lives far away, if you’re grieving, if you’ve just been through a break-up, if you have nobody, then all those carols about being together and the magazine spreads featuring family feasts are completely at odds with how you’ll be spending December 25.
Beyond Blue lead clinical adviser Dr Grant Blashki says Christmas can be extremely lonely and isolating. “It can stir up memories and past conflicts, place significant financial pressure on families and be a stressful period for people who have existing mental health conditions such as anxiety or depression,” he says.
We don’t often talk about loneliness because there’s nothing fun or easy or comfortable about saying, “I feel alone.” For all the gains we’ve made in discussing mental health, loneliness — ironically — has been left behind. And that’s a problem because it’s emotionally and physically debilitating. Research shows loneliness can be as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and as big a mortality risk as having diabetes.
Millennials and post-millennials have been observed as the loneliest generations ever. If you’re marginalised that risk increases – for instance, in a survey conducted by the UK disability charity Scope, 85 per cent of disabled young people (those aged between 18 and 34) reported feeling lonely.
Like all mental health issues, loneliness exists on a spectrum: from the twinge of FOMO we feel when left out of after-work drinks, to the isolating ups and downs of relocating to a new city, or the desperate desolation of truly feeling alone all the time. Given the way we live now, it makes sense that up to eight in 10 people identify as being somewhere on the loneliness spectrum. More of us are delaying marriage and having children later. We live overseas, away from our families. We sometimes work at home as the traditional 9-5 workplace shifts to allow telecommuting and flexible working. These lifestyle changes have a real impact on the way we connect with others.
It’s not just about our worlds changing: loneliness is about the strength of our connections, or lack thereof. “Loneliness is more related to the quality of your relationships than the quantity,” says clinical psychologist Dr Michelle Lim, who heads Swinburne University’s Social Health and Wellbeing Laboratory and is chair of the Australian Coalition to End Loneliness, which was established in response to the growing issue of social isolation. To wit: in a 2016 Lifeline Australia survey, 60 per cent of respondents said they “often feel lonely”. In the same year, a University of California San Diego Medical School study linked loneliness with DNA, suggesting some people are genetically predisposed to it. “We have to start educating and encouraging young people to maintain good relationship hygiene throughout their lives, beyond the context of high school and working, and for people in retirement to prepare for that in terms of their mental health,” says Dr Lim.
After a 2017 report from the Jo Cox Loneliness Commission found more than nine million Brits “are often or always lonely”, Tracey Crouch was appointed the UK’S Minister for Loneliness. Then, there’s the “Eleanor Oliphant effect” in response to Gail Honeyman’s portrayal of isolation in her novel Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. “The idea for Eleanor Oliphant came from an article about loneliness,” says Honeyman. “It included an interview with a young professional in her twenties. She lived in a city, and said she’d often leave the office on Friday night and not speak to another human being until she returned on Monday morning.”
Soon after the novel’s release, a fresh spate of listicles and long-reads abounded on “showing up for your friends”, but most
spoke only to those who have relationships to maintain. So what about people like that young professional in her twenties? People like the fictional Eleanor Oliphant? Honeyman’s work has served as a profound and heartbreaking illustration of what life can be like for a person who relishes hearing the sound of their own name at the end of a service-centre call and only experiences the touch of another human when it’s time for a flu injection. We hear time and again that human connection is the antidote to loneliness, but actually engaging in it is easier said than done.
Perhaps one of the best places to start is a club. Shared interest + controlled social setting = a less anxiety-inducing way to meet people. There are girls-only clubs such as Future Dreamers in Byron Bay and The Cool Career in Melbourne, aimed at 12 to 25-year-olds. There are ones for millennials and older, too: the Sydney outpost of HER Global Network launched this year, while the League of Extraordinary Women hosts events around Australia. And that’s just if you want to front up to an IRL event. Join a Facebook group or follow a women’s collective on Instagram and comment and share ideas. Online communities are on-the-go accessible, always open and give you the option to take a conversation private or offline.
Tapping into the power of online communities, and spurred by her own feelings of post-natal isolation, Natalie Mogford launched marketplace Global Village. She says during playground trips she “would share life experiences with strangers at the park – many of us new mothers – each with a sense of loneliness. We were missing that sense of community that made us feel secure and loved.” It led her to develop an app allowing users to seek help and offer support to other women around the world – the kind of good deed that deserves a place in your life well beyond the season for giving. “Giving is usually connected with donating money or time, but for the act of giving to be truly effective it has to be the simplest form – everyone wants to feel they’re not alone.”
While in-person conversation can’t be beat, the feeling of connectedness technology can provide can keep the ache of loneliness at bay. Think of the way you chime in when Georgia and Karen banter during an episode of the My Favorite
Murder podcast or when you watch Busy Philipps lament a sleepless night on her Instagram Stories. It’s a reminder that “your people” are out there.
Interestingly, we sometimes open up to strangers more easily than to our inner circle. “When we need someone to talk to about a personal difficulty, we often seek not sympathy but cognitive empathy; not pity but a sense that the person really understands our difficulty,” says Mario Luis Small, a Harvard sociology professor and author of Someone To Talk To. It explains why we may pour our heart out to a new colleague at the office end-of-year party or share our life story in line for prawns at the fish market – because the other person may offer understanding without judgement or interference. (And opening up to a new friend is an effective way to determine the course of the relationship – you’ll either ghost each other or become fast chums).
Though we are biologically programmed for social interactions, that basic need is smothered in glitter and existential dread come Christmas, when can’t-miss parties and must-do tasks proliferate. If you’re alone and don’t want to be, seek out a local community event or charity organisation that might need helpers. If someone in your life has no plans, extend a no-pressure invitation to yours. As philosopher Julian Baggini puts it, “Being alone may be a problem, but making the lonely feel like sad freaks is an even bigger one.”
Which is why the pub that hosted that Christmas dinner last year was filled with guests. It was an invitation free from expectation or judgement. There’s nothing wrong with baked ham and pudding for one, but bonbons – and the loot inside them – are better when shared.
“Being alone might be a problem, but making the lonely FEEL LIKE SAD FREAKS is an even bigger one”