Loneliness - The Unheeded Mental Health Pandemic

Loneliness is totally different than being alone. It is a feeling of vacuum & emptiness inside and When we feel, we need somebody else to fill that gap and to make us feel okay. We can feel alone in the crowd, even with our spouse, parents, siblings, and other friends and family. Because loneliness is about having a dearth of or sometimes even absence of emotional connection not physical presence. It has no relation to how many friends we have or what our social life looks like in the real-world or digital world. It also affects our physical and mental health like it can cause depression, stress, etc. Whereas being alone is when you are okay with being yourself and there is a sense of peace within yourself.

 Let's try to see What are the main cause of it?

Nowadays, it’s very easy to spend your whole day without interacting with any human. We do WhatsApp and social media to express ourselves  like saying  “I love you,” “happy birthday,” "miss you"  etc. Everybody is so much into their mobile phone like children are into games, few others are into Netflix and remaining are into WhatsApp and Instagram. List is endless we have countless things to which can keep us indulge 24*7 into our devices and totally divert us from the real world around us. When someone even tries to start a conversation, other people started feeling like getting disturbed.

People feel happy when they have more followers on Instagram, more number of friends on Facebook etc. But the reality is that it is the virtual world. When they want to share their emotions then as human being they need real people and that time they find a scarcity of emotional connection around them. Its high time to understand that likes on social media will never be able to replace the love and connection with people and nature.

It's not because of the lack of people but because of a lack of conversation with real people. No doubt technology is a blessing for all of us, it is helping us to get connected throughout the world and in fact now due to this Covid situation, most of the people know how it is helping to connect with people when almost the whole world is in lockdown state. But the same technology turning into a curse to those who literally becoming a slave to it and totally disconnected to the real world which leads to emotional disconnection in our own relationships.

Second most common reason is, in earlier days we could see the more joint families than now.  When you are around with more people you will have more conversations, more conversations lead to more emotional connections but nowadays 90 percent of the people live in a nuclear family because almost everybody is trying to get the materialistic success without thinking about emotional fulfillment and finally when you don't feel emotionally connected to anyone then loneliness become the by-product of it.

 There are many more reasons for loneliness but now let's discuss possible solutions to it.

 Education Minister of Delhi, Mr. Manish Sisodia started happiness classes ( no political agenda here ) in schools, we need more programs like this not only in school but on every single layer of society to fight and avoid loneliness. why not we should think about starting a happiness hour ( on weekends or any other day) within a family level itself?

      

 In our families, we can make a culture of having dinner together despite of busy schedule of the family members. It was prominent earlier in Indian families but this trend is also vanishing in the rat race.

We as an individual also have a responsibility to make sure that Our spouse, parents, siblings not feeling the same, you must aware of them. You can easily sense it because you will see the change in their pattern like eating patterns, sleeping patterns, etc.

Most people talk about keeping yourself busy in activities outside the world to combat the loneliness. But what they forget is it is a void which is actually within not in the outside world. I would suggest to stop this pattern of filling up the loneliness with the outside world. Just try to connect with yourself. For this you can choose many things You can also opt for healthy food, medication, exercise which will help us to fight with this on a hormonal level.

 Loneliness is the choice you, You can choose not to feel lonely from today itself.