The Loneliness Epidemic - Thrive Global and Authority Magazine Interview Helen Kramer

According to this story in Forbes, loneliness is becoming an increasing health threat not just in the US , but across the world. Can you articulate for our readers 3 reasons why being lonely and isolated can harm one’s health?

The changes that have occurred in this country and across the globe have left us more complicated issues and less support to deal with these issues. We have been focusing on how to be more successful, more beautiful, with more money in the bank, and didn’t realize that as social beings, we need support and compassion to deal with both the mundane and significant problems facing us.

Nobody taught us that giving and receiving support and compassion are what make us strong. We are all pushing to do more, be more productive, and accomplish more. As a result, we are losing our humanity and our sense of connection to one another, our environment, and the planet. In this pushing and striving, we are disconnecting from ourselves, creating a more profound sense of loneliness.

On a broader societal level, in which way is loneliness harming our communities and society?

We’ve been given models of “success” that are antithetical to being connected to ourselves and others. Everyone I talk to expresses that they are feeling “overwhelmed,” which translates into living in fight-or-flight all the time. Our cortisol and adrenaline are ramped up, causing physical illness, anger, depression, anxiety, and compulsive and addictive patterns to deal with all the stress we are feeling. Remember, when we are in the reflexive fear part of our brain, we don’t connect well to our cognition and therefore tend to be irrational and create more stress and loneliness.

We are living like hamsters on a wheel, running faster and faster, creating more stress and disconnection. Without knowing how to connect to ourselves and each other with compassion, we end up trying to feel better by pushing ourselves to do more, becoming even more critical of ourselves for not attaining unrealistic goals. And even if people reach these goals, they don’t feel good because their well-being is contingent on how they are performing, moment-to-moment. Most people are judging and criticizing themselves and others because we have been socialized to believe that these behaviors motivate when they are contributing to greater feelings of loneliness. People are so used to being harsh with themselves that they have no awareness of the consequences of this constant, critical messaging. The only way that I can make people aware of how damaging their self-criticism is to ask them if they would say the same thing as they say to themselves to a precious child in their life or a close friend. With that perspective, most people are horrified by this thought and can’t imagine saying those things to somebody they love, yet they are constantly diminishing themselves with critical messages.

The irony of having a loneliness epidemic is glaring. We are living in a time where more people are connected to each other than ever before in history. Our technology has the power to connect billions of people in one network, in a way that was never possible. Yet despite this, so many people are lonely. Why is this? Can you share 3 of the main reasons why we are facing a loneliness epidemic today? Please give a story or an example for each.

1. People lack awareness on how we can function optimally — i.e., changing the brain to reduce undesirable reflexive reactions that don’t reflect our adult resources. As we rewire our brains, we can send stress signals into the higher centers of our minds; we can actually problem solve successfully. Until we reduce and even eliminate these hardwired reflexive patterns, we are going to behave in ways that only creates more stress.

When we respond with these hardwired patterns, we feel out of control and diminished, and this increases our sense of being undesirable or unworthy, which only contributes more to our feelings of loneliness.

2. People blame themselves and others for reflexive brain patterns. We have a brain that evolved for survival and not quality-of-life. We are not responsible for the incomplete evolution of our brains and is only diminishing us and our ability to connect to others when we blame ourselves and others for these unprotected responses. Whenever we criticize ourselves and others for these behaviors, we foreclose the opportunity to connect deeply to our common humanity. I would say that whenever we use the judgmental muscle, we will turn it on ourselves and also project other people are judging us as we judge ourselves. This judgement becomes an endless cycle, again, robbing us of an opportunity to see ourselves as biological organisms with physiological patterns that we can transform. None of us want to suffer.

3. People are not taught to transform their loneliness into power. Instead of blaming yourself and others, I recommend that you thank your brain for its good intention to protect you and let your brain know that you are perfectly okay. I had a patient named Susan with reflexive patterns like anticipating rejection in social situations. Truly understanding that these thoughts had no objective meaning, we worked together to allow her to overcome paralyzing anxiety. Instead of being upset with herself for being phobic, she was able to see that she was not creating these thoughts — they were simply reflexes. The more she was able to take the power back from these reflexive thoughts, the more comfortable she became and was able to see that this was a reflex and not something that she was deliberately doing. In reality, we don’t have to stop these thoughts; we just have to learn to see them for what they are.

Ok. it is not enough to talk about problems without offering possible solutions. In your experience, what are the 5 things each of us can do to help solve the Loneliness Epidemic. Please give a story or an example for each.

1. To transform loneliness, replace it with loving connection for new patterns. As I mentioned, the brain has evolved for survival but not for quality-of-life. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait millions of years for the brain to evolve so that we can enjoy the quality of life we deserve and desire. Recent research in neuroscience has taught us how we can all speed up the evolutionary process. When neuroscience studied brain mapping, they wanted to see what part of the brain was responsible for finger movement.

Scientists found that there was one particular region of the brain that had grown larger in pianists when compared to the normal population. But the fascinating discovery that occurred during an experiment in which they asked people to imagine that they were playing the piano, but in reality, these people never moved their fingers. What they found was that when participants imagined moving their fingers was that the brain reacted as if they had actually played the piano. Imagining finger movement affected the brain as if people were actually playing the piano. From these experiments, we learned that the brain doesn’t know the difference between actually doing something and imagining that you’re doing it.

To rewire our brains so that we are not constantly reliving painful experiences, we need to extinguish those memories and replace them with fulfilling and positive experiences. Specifically, you can replace feelings of loneliness and alienation by resurrecting memories of times when you felt a loving closeness with either a pet, a warm, nurturing place in nature, or a happy time with a friend or relative. The memory can be retrieved from childhood or can be more recent.

It is important to enter the memory, using all your senses so that this is an alive experience. When you are seeing, feeling, and hearing the experience of closeness, you are producing feel-good neurotransmitters and hormones and creating new neural pathways to replace the old painful ones. As you enter a loving and peaceful memory, be aware of your bodily sensations. You might feel a warmth in your chest, or relaxation in your shoulders or a smile on your face.

2. Connect to your resources. No one ever taught you that your brain has an overactive fight-or-flight fear reaction, so your brain will keep sending fearful messages — i.e. messages that you’re not good enough or that you are going to be hurt by other people, regardless of whether or not these thoughts reflect objective reality. Our “deification” of the brain has caused us to ascribe erroneous power and wisdom to these reflexive and fear-based thoughts. As a result, the world becomes an inhospitable place to live. How can we not feel lonely such a world?

These fearful thoughts trigger what I call “phantom emotions,” which are emotional patterns from when we were children. When these memories get triggered, they bring up the intensity we felt when we were young, vulnerable children. These phantom emotions do not reflect our reality today as adults. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn that our brain, to protect us, will keep us living as helpless children re-stimulating feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and unnecessary pain.

I recently met with Joan, a 75-year-old woman who had recently decided to separate from her second husband. She told me that she had abandonment issues because when she was a baby, her mother had to go to the hospital. That trauma in infancy got hardwired into her brain. Whenever her personal and professional relationships suffered, she went into painful and dramatic feelings of abandonment as if she was still that young, helpless infant. My experience with Joan is an unfortunate example of how our brain’s program for survival prevents us from evolving our emotions. Our cognition matures naturally as we age chronologically, but unfortunately, our emotions stay the same. The persistence of intense and dramatic language and feelings are one of the painful consequences of our survival brain.

To teach Joan how to evolve her emotions, I asked her to resurrect memories of loving connections with friends and times when she felt very creative in her work. It took a while for Joan to experience these memories because she, like most people, could talk about a loving memory with her friends, but not feel the loving connection. For the brain and nervous system to be rewired, we have to actually feel things; thoughts alone do not accomplish this rewiring. As Joan began to feel herself as a rich and resourceful human being, her depression and loneliness lifted.

3. Have Compassion for Yourself. It’s important not to be angry with ourselves for these reflexive patterns that perpetuate loneliness. Whenever we are triggered into obsessive, addictive, or compulsive behaviors, or whenever we feel anxious or depressed, it may be because the survival part of our brain has gotten triggered. Nobody taught us how to transform this reflex.

I suggest to people when any negative or fearful thoughts arise, they don’t fight these thoughts and don’t blame themselves for having them. Overcoming all of our painful feelings, including loneliness, requires compassion. Remember, your behavior is caused by a survival reflex, so you are not doing this intentionally. Part of my method for change is thanking your brain for trying to protect you, and then reminding this fearful, reflexive part of your brain that you are okay.

You are never trying sabotage yourself, and no matter how often you repeat painful patterns, you are not masochistic. In our culture, we have deified the brain, but the brain has no more wisdom than any of your other physiological reflexes. For example, when your doctor hits you under the knee with a rubber hammer and your leg flies up, this is a reflex that is not under your control. Unfortunately, when our brain reflexes result in emotional reactions, we tend to blame ourselves, making us feel diminished and less worthy. We all have hardwired patterns that are going to be triggered when we feel stress. In the examples I gave above, it is important to replace these fearful reflexes with memories and visualizations that celebrate who we are.

4. Develop an inner voice of love and support. Because our culture hasn’t taught us that power comes from being loving and compassionate, we have become obsessed with becoming powerful by being more physically attractive, having money, or being better than others. But even when we achieve these goals, they are only temporarily satisfying because they are not intrinsically empowering behaviors. Being better than others by feeding our ego only ends up frightening ourselves more. It’s like living on a seesaw — somebody must be on the bottom, and somebody must be on the top. Being on top is unsustainable as we are always vigilant for someone who is going to try to diminish us so that they can feel better.

Every infant and child deserves to be loved unconditionally, treasured, and appreciated for who they are at their core, not for qualities or attributes that are fleeting and temporary. Few people have had this kind of unconditional love growing up. Because our emotions don’t mature as we age chronologically, we keep looking outward for that appreciation and affirmation.

When I work with people, I often make a short audiotape that they can listen to and receive care and support that they can internalize and make their own. As they internalize my supportive voice and resurrect the voices of caring people in their lives, they learn how to feel loved and supported, and how to love themselves. When people learn this technique, they naturally attract and resonate with loving people.

5. To stay empowered, stop judging. To feel good about ourselves and have good relationships with others, we need to know the difference between power and weakness. We are all weak when frightened, and when we are frightened, we end up doing things that backfire. Not because we want to hurt ourselves, but because fear is not a good motivator, and when we are in the fear part of our brain, we have the brainpower of a young, helpless child.

Being judgmental is one of the signs of a frightened person. Only frightened people need to diminish others. A truly powerful person feels their own humanity and enhances their quality of life by connecting to the humanity of others. When I was working with myself years ago, trying to move past my own judgmental nature, I remember being on the subway and looking across at a woman who was wearing garish clothes and makeup. I found myself judging her, but then I looked again and experienced her somebody who woke up in the morning and wanted to look good. I could connect to that what wanting to have a nice appearance feels like, and I realized that what she was wearing did look good to her. By peeling the onion, I saw her positive intent in the morning to look good, so I was able to connect her humanity. When we experience this common humanity, we can’t feel lonely.

Read the full interview on Thrive Global or Authority Magazine. Big thanks to Yitzi Weiner and Fotis Georgiadis for the opportunity!