Category Archives: Stress Management

Loneliness can kill you…Part 1

According to new research from the journal Nature, Human Behavior published on January 3, 2025, loneliness and social isolation lead to molecular changes that, in my simple terms, seem to set the body up for serious problems – increased risk for dementia, depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and early death.  The researchers’ recommendations include routinely asking about loneliness and isolation, the way a health professional asks about sleep habits, alcohol use, and drug use.

If you are lonely on an ongoing basis, this is for you.

Loneliness can strike through no fault of one’s own.

Losing your spouse, for example, or a best friend, will almost inevitably lead to a long stretch of deep loneliness during the initial year or so of grief, and can continue beyond, as the bereaved person struggles to outsource some of that emotional, intellectual and spiritual intimacy to other relationships. In a healthy marriage, you share all sorts of confidences with a spouse that you simply might not share with anyone else – fears, dreams for the future, spiritual insights and struggles, and the warmth of shared memories that are no one else’s but the two of yours.  Somehow, some of that must be extended to others, and depth built over time. It an absolutely monumental task to parcel out these small slices of the immeasurable depth of a healthy marriage.

Moving, alone, to a new city, for a new job, can be exciting, but the reality can include aching loneliness when everyone at the new job goes home to their lives and you go to your apartment and try to figure out how to build a life. Developing the big, and small, connections that make a place feel like home can be daunting, and for most people, it takes longer than they had ever anticipated.

Loneliness hits other people, too. Those who are living primarily second-hand, separated by screens and trying to substitute electronic connections for human ones, are often intensely lonely. Some people interact with others in person, but the conversations are shallow, guarded and therefore nearly empty of connection and meaning. This type of loneliness can be even more painful, because it seems inexplicable; how can a person live with family or a partner and yet feel deeply lonely?

So, what to do? Unfortunately, the impetus is mostly on the lonely people to do something differently.

Here are some suggestions I would give to a client in such a situation.

  1. Go to church or synagogue. If you are grieving, try to go back to your own – but if that’s painful, go somewhere else, at least for now. If you are new to the area, just find a place that seems like a possibility. Then go to the hospitality time afterwards. Introduce yourself, and invite people to tell you about the faith community. Do not stand around with your cup of coffee and wait for people to notice you. Set a goal: perhaps that you will introduce yourself to three people, get their names, and ask a little about this community. See what happens. Try to focus on the other person; make the conversation a chance to get to know them and about their community – not about you. If it goes fairly well, go back the next week, greet those three people (and anyone else you met) by name if you can, re-introduce yourself without taking them forgetting your name personally, and see if you can meet a couple of other people. Within a month, you will have some acquaintance with a dozen or more people and have a solid idea if this community offers activities for education, worship and service for you to join.
  2. Even if you usually like to do things solo join at least one activity – one exercise class, one art class, one talk at the local bookstore, etc. – on a regular basis. Get to be a regular. Greet other people.
  3. Volunteer in your community. Do this with others. Doing good solo is beautiful, but if you’re not getting out of your head and focused on others in an interactive way, you are missing part of the point.
  4. Be friendly but don’t try to bully people into being your friends. For example, if you are new to the area, don’t wear out your welcome with the neighbors who came over to introduce themselves on moving day.
  5. Please do not use alcohol or other substances, or resort to hanging out having drinks as a way to cut loneliness.
  6. Be patient and keep trying! Think of these steps as experiments. Track what happens over time; be willing to change to a different experiment if the first one isn’t working after a month or so.

As you can see, the remedies for loneliness all include getting out of your head and into the world. Focusing on others, in small ways (such as greeting them and showing interest) to big ones (such as volunteering), is a critical part of overcoming loneliness. This can be really hard, because loneliness tends to make people even more withdrawn, more insular – it is a self-perpetuating problem unless you boldly step out, even with small but courageous steps, into focus on others.

More about connecting with others in Loneliness can Kill You, Part 2, coming soon.

Stress…And a Lesson From Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi) helps people with insomnia via examining and, where appropriate, helping them change their behaviors and thoughts surrounding the issue of sleep.  One important factor we explore are called “Sleep Safety Behaviors.” These are habits which people believe are helpful for sleep.  Some sleep safety behaviors are in fact very helpful, such as avoiding screens for a couple of hours before bedtime, using soft, warm light sources in the evening, and avoiding upsetting discussions before bedtime. Other sleep safety behaviors are counter-productive, but if a person is convinced that they are helpful the anxiety around giving them up ends up disrupting the process of falling or staying asleep. The objective is to have positive habits around sleep, not unhelpful sleep safety behaviors. It is not as easy or obvious as it might sound.

For example, many people use alcohol as a type of sleep safety behavior. They believe it helps them relax and unwind, and seem to either not know, or disregard, that it actually is a sleep disruptor. Alcohol-fueled sleep usually involves waking up in the middle of the night as the effects of alcohol wear off. It also disrupts the quality of sleep. However, the person convinced that they “need” a drink to sleep may become so anxious about going without the drink that they have difficulty falling asleep, which they attribute (wrongly) to the absence of alcohol.

In the same way, don’t most people have some sort of “stress safety behaviors” to cope with stressful situations or extended times of stress? Some are helpful and constructive, and others are terribly unhelpful and even destructive.  Some are fairly neutral until taken to excess; an ounce or so of chocolate as a snack is one thing; a pound is another. Odds are, you know someone who clings to a stress safety behavior even though it is clear as day that it is unhelpful and even harmful. You may have encountered the futility of trying to convince the person that the extra drinks, the avoidance, the angry outbursts to vent over and over, merely get in the way.

Imagine a person for whom life has delivered a set of one-two punches – illness, a hurricane or two, unexpected car repairs. There are all sorts of paperwork and bills to tackle, and after a long day of work it is all too much. He takes an evening off to binge watch a favorite series, and then, the next day, everything is one more day behind, one more day piled up, and even more overwhelming – too much to be tackled, again, after a long and wearying day. Surely there is a half a season or so of something that will distract from the looming piles of paper.

Perhaps the person doesn’t binge-watch. Perhaps she enjoys a glass of wine, or two, or three, or, heck, why leave only one glass in the bottle? She adds poor sleep and the three days it takes for the full effect of alcohol to leave the brain to the problems still piling up on the table. Perhaps he gets caught up in a vortex of videos about things he cannot afford – certainly not at this moment – and adds envy and resentment to the problems at hand.

Odds are, too, you know people who have some good “stress safety behaviors.” Those habits reinforce resilience. You might notice some people seem to surf through the ups and downs of stressful times without falling apart or adding to the trouble at hand. If you are that someone, that’s wonderful; stick with it. If you know some people like that, but are not one yourself, perhaps you might give some positive stress safety behaviors a try.

If I were making an official list of Stress Safety Behaviors (which I am not at the moment), I’d probably include these:

Sleep: getting regular and adequate sleep – not feast or famine approaches to the weekly rotation, where you pretend you can “get by” on four hours during the workweek and really make it all up to your brain with a long sleep on Saturday.

Move regularly and adequately. Exercise, appropriate to your overall health and physician’s guidance, is essential. The machine needs regular movement to function properly.

Limit exposure to negative influences. Don’t feed your envy, your insecurities, or your bad habits.

Minimize exposure to media and people that encourage you to compare yourself to other people.  Do you think it’s a coincidence that so many magazines and websites feature articles about improving oneself – and a surfeit of advertisements for products that will, in theory, improve those things?

Treat Sabbath time seriously. Set aside one day each week for renewal. Pray, rest, read, enjoy time with family and friends, play, create.

Journal. There are lots of ways to journal. There’s the quick “5 things you’re grateful for” at bedtime journal. There are prayer journals and journals that are brief paragraphs on the events of the day. Maybe it’s that annoying journal assignment your therapist gave you. The act of writing – more than just “thinking about it” – brings more of your brain into the process. This way, for example, you benefit more from noticing good moments during the day, recollecting them in the evening, writing them down, and seeing your words on the page.

Positive stress safety behaviors are simple, common sense…but they can appear to be just one more thing to keep you from getting things done. If you think, for example, that a short walk is just a waste of time, that you’d be better off using those fifteen minutes for the big mess at hand, well, that might be true if that were, in fact, what would happen. But if the thing that would actually happen was a big sigh or a venting of angry frustration and the welcome distraction of a text message from a friend – well, then, the short walk to breathe deeply, move quickly and focus yourself for action might be less of a time-waster than it seemed.

If you’ve taken a look at the task manager window on your computer, you know there are dozens of programs running even though you may be only engaged in one. Start clicking on random programs to turn them off and watch the warnings pop up that this will interfere with the proper functioning of the computer. It’s the same with these sleep and stress safety behaviors. The people who do these things do them consistently, even when things are smooth and rolling along just fine.  These habits operate like a background program, always running. They keep the system working properly but without a big fuss. Turn off, or pause, those background programs and the system stops working properly, or perhaps just shuts down entirely.

Even good programs need updates. Taking that weekly break gives you a chance to notice if you need to make changes to the routine. Ignoring necessary updates usually makes the whole system a bit glitchy.