How Do You Overcome Loneliness?

Humans are deeply wired for social connection - we know this both because we feel it and because we’ve all seen disturbing news reports about loneliness being as bad for your health as cigarettes. But it can be easy to lose track of how much social connection was necessary to stay alive, before modern times. Nowadays, even if it feels terrible, you can work virtually, pay your rent virtually, watch movies of other people virtually, and not leave your apartment for days in a row. You can be lonely but still survive. Not so much for our ancestors, and that is a peak into why your brain experiences loneliness as an excruciating pain. .

I live in the prairies of Kansas, where humans used to live in small communities. Their bison hunts were conducted in a group, butchering and hide preservation happened as a community, and watchful protection was provided by other people in the village so you could sleep, and so on. Similarly, my own ancestors were villagers in Europe where neighbor midwives showed up to deliver babies, neighbor blacksmiths supplied tools, and neighbors came together to rebuild your home when it burned down. For much of human history it was genuinely difficult to stay alive for very long without belonging to a community, and our brains still carry this imprinted priority around social belonging.

But (this won’t be a news flash to you either, also thanks to news reports) modern society has generated a lot of lonely people. Loneliness is one of the heaviest emotional pains some people ever experience.

So how do you overcome loneliness?

Isolated barn in an empty field

An Important Ingredient in Friendship

A research study published in 2018 asked How Many Hours Does It Take to Make a Friend? In it, researcher Jeffrey Hall described the categories of friendships that most well-connected people have: 1-5 best friends, 10-15 good friends, 40-50 casual friends, and 120-150 acquaintances (neighbors, coworkers, etc). Then he turned to the question: how many hours do you have to spend with someone, for them to move into a closer level of friendship? He suggests that acquaintances move into casual friendship after 43-60 hours together in a reasonably short amount of time. Stepping from there into close friendship occurs after 80-100 hours together (again, assuming within a relatively short amount of time). And moving someone into the realm of best friend only happens after spending somewhere around 200 hours together in a relatively short span of time. A group of people might spend thousands of hours investing in each other to form a tight-knit friend group. (Read the study here.)

Obviously time together is not the only determiner of what generates a close friendship, but this study highlights such an important takeaway: you can't make friends without a significant investment of hours in a relatively condensed period of time. There's a reason so many classic tv shows revolve around neighbor friendships (from I Love Lucy to New Girl – we remain enchanted by neighbor friends): proximity on a regular, recurring basis provides an important building block for a friendship. You have to be around people a lot to become friends, and you have to stay around them a lot to remain friends. Friendship is a time investment, and proximity is part of the magic. As we talk about practical steps for making friends, filter it all through the lens of this question: who do I already, naturally, have proximity to? And: how can I increase my proximity to potential friends? (And if just thinking about that makes your heart race, considering adding a first step of making a therapy appointment to help with anxiety!)

Practical Steps to Make Friends

1) Explore where you can invest time by being around the same people, at least once a week. Faith communities, clubs, workplaces, and neighborhoods all provide places people can cross paths over and over and naturally accumulate the hours required to build trust and human connection. Find a place you can commit to showing up at consistently, so that you have an opportunity to build friendships. (Proximity!)

2) Alongside consistently putting yourself in positions where you can connect with other people, keep working on yourself. Healthy people tend to attract healthier friends, so keep moving toward personal growth. As you mature, heal, and shed bothersome patterns, you will attract more people who are on a similar growth trajectory.

This can admittedly be a challenging dynamic! We need other humans to get healthy, and we need to get healthy to build healthy relationships…. Finding where to put your foot on this hamster wheel can feel discouraging. So I encourage you to start with acceptance: your own healing work will over time, bring you healthier, supportive connections. It might not resolve today, but keep staying the course and things will begin shifting.

3) Accept risk. Risk by definition means you will sometimes experience rejection, but it is unlikely that you will find your way toward vibrant social connections without taking some risks. The book Mattering describes a father feeling isolated from fellow parents in the bleachers who were all on their phones during practices. He took a risk by inviting people to a book club… and no one came. Not one single person. But here’s the key: he tried again, this time inviting 30 neighbors to coffee with him across 30 days. That gave him a new idea, so he next put out an online invitation to a monthly dad's support group. This third try eventually evolved into a club of men supporting each other over breakfast every Friday at 7am, and in the fourth iteration of trying things, it blossomed into the lifeline he had been looking for.

Solving loneliness can be a trial and error process of putting yourself out there over and over again until you find the right people/activity mix that blossoms into something beautiful. Plan on taking risks that sometimes pan out and sometimes don't. If this sounds overwhelming due struggling with small talk, check out the book The Fine Art of Small Talk by Debra Fine. If anxiety holds you back, therapy can help.

Birds flying in formation together

4) Do something for someone else. In his book Lost Connections, Johann Hari describes his lightbulb moment:

“When I felt depression and anxiety start to set in, I felt a panicked need to keep my head above water – so I would try to do something for myself. I would buy something, or watch a film I like, or read a book I like, or talk to a friend about my distress. It was an attempt to treat the isolated self, and it didn’t work very often…. [Now] when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself – I try to do something for someone else. I go to see a friend and try to focus very hard on how they are feeling and making them feel better. I try to do something for my network, or my group – or even try to help strangers who look distressed. I learned something I wouldn’t have thought was possible at the start.... It worked much more effectively than trying to build myself up alone.”

Volunteering is a classic way to build meaning in your life, improve mental health, and begin building the connections that will reduce your own loneliness. Look for a place to regularly volunteer that is close to your heart and will put you around other people with similar passions – the animal shelter, a soup kitchen, or practicing reading with kids in schools. Even though this does not solve loneliness, it does shift something in you that is hungry when you're lonely: the sense that you’re making a difference in the world and that you matter. (And, it puts you in regular proximity to people who care about the same things as you.)

5) Don't overlook small connections. Humans deeply crave being deeply known and unconditionally loved; if you're experiencing intense loneliness right now, it can be tempting to pin your attention on gaining a best friend asap. But I encourage you to take opportunities to make connections of all kinds. Skip the self-check line and express your thanks to the cashier, then go through that same person’s line again next week to ask if it's been a busy day. These small interactions stack up and make a difference to them – and to you! Think about solving loneliness in terms of filling all those ranks of friendship: best friends, close friends, casual friends, and acquaintances. All of these levels will start in the realm of acquaintances, so make lots of acquaintances. Some of them will progress to closer friendships, but even the ones that stay in the realm of acquaintances will fill an important role in your sense of belonging to your community. Small connections are part of how humans feel belonging in the world, too.

If loneliness is something you want to address in therapy, schedule your free consultation. Let’s talk about it!

Elizabeth Peters, LMSW is a licensed therapist seeing clients in person in Wichita and online across Kansas. She provides EMDR and somatic therapy for adults who are overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma, painful relationships or spiritual harm.