Why Loneliness Has So Much Control Over Your Behaviors, Drives, and Causes So Much Inner Turmoil
At a certain point in my journey, I found myself in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria.
I was having dinner with a few women I met earlier that day and was telling them about my travels.
One of the women asked, “Don’t you ever get lonely?”
At the time, the question didn’t really register as I didn’t. In fact, I was having so much fun traveling, I didn’t even think much about loneliness.
But after traveling to enough places, loneliness did start to creep in.
Though I had a bit of an ego and thought I was above it. I thought I could beat it, and so I kept traveling.
I traveled far. I traveled so far I went to the furthest reaches of the globe, to the most isolated places on earth, to places you can’t imagine even exist.
In doing so, I used every trick that I knew to overcome the loneliness, and eventually I broke.
I broke in ways I can’t really describe, and it took some time to put myself together, and I don’t think I fully ever recovered.
It wasn’t until then that I began to understand just how powerful loneliness is and how much it drives what we do.
What is Loneliness?
Loneliness is the gap between the connection and contact your mind and body are built to receive and actually receiving it.
It is different from simply being alone. You can spend a lot of time by yourself and feel perfectly fine. At the same time, you can be surrounded by friends, coworkers, or family and still feel lonely.
For the purposes of this article, loneliness is the pain that arises from not being around and receiving connection with others.
Just as hunger creates pain for food, loneliness creates pain for social interactions, belonging, and intimacy.
In fact, loneliness is extremely painful for us humans. The kind of pain that can make a person go crazy.
Why Is Loneliness So Painful?
The brain requires a lot of energy and resources to function.
In an average adult, the brain makes up only about 2% of total body weight, but at rest it uses roughly 20% of the body's energy, oxygen, and blood pumped by the heart.
As we humans were evolving and our brains were getting larger, something had to give.
And something did, and that is our bodies became slower, weaker, and less agile.
On August 16, 2009, Usain Bolt broke the 100-meter world record to become the fastest man in the world. A record Usain still hods today.
Yet both a house cat and an elephant are still faster.
Our advantage in the wild doesn’t come from our strength, speed, or even intelligence. It actually comes from our numbers.
That’s because on our own, we are not fast enough to catch most prey, but in numbers, we can be strategic in our attack.
On our own, we are not strong enough to fend off predators, but in numbers, we are much stronger.
On our own, we are not resilient enough to withstand Mother Nature, but in numbers, we can build shelter, make clothing, and specialize in skills. Some can cook, some can weave, some can make tools, while others can hunt.
Therefore, in order to survive, it was critical for us humans to stay in groups. As a result, we evolved with various characteristics to make sure we stick to the pack at all times. One of those characteristics is the pain of loneliness.
Loneliness ensures we never leave the pack, and if we do, that we immediately return.
Effects of Loneliness
Loneliness has a profound effect on both the mind and body. Research has linked chronic loneliness with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline, dementia, and even premature death.
These are some of the more widely known and talked about effects of loneliness. In this blog, I want to focus on the effects that receive far less attention, particularly the ways loneliness shapes our behaviors, struggles, and everyday challenges.
Loneliness Drives Motivation
Since loneliness is so painful, it creates an overwhelming drive for attention, affection, and approval.
Loneliness is the reason we chase nice cars, big homes, respected careers, and attractive physiques. It’s to make ourselves “attractive” and “valuable” enough to keep people around and not have them leave us.
Therefore, it convinces us that we need to work hard, make money, look pretty, or create value for ourselves in other ways—just to reduce any chance of being rejected or abandoned in order to not have to face loneliness.
Even our motivation to gain popularity, speak on stage, and become an authority, celebrity, influencer, or politician are because of the need for attention, affection, and approval driven by loneliness to keep people around us.
Loneliness Fuels Controlling Behavior
In an effort to avoid loneliness, the pain causes us to control people in weird and manipulative ways.
Our desire to be kind and generous is an unconscious way to control how people think about, respond to, and treat us.
The sob stories we tell are ways to control people from judging us poorly and to get them to still accept us.
The stronger the feelings of loneliness, the stronger our need for attention, affection, and approval, and the more sensitive we become to the thoughts, judgements, and reactions of others.
As a result, the more we resort to controlling people and their thoughts, judgements, and reactions—again, to ensure we receive attention, affection, and approval.
Loneliness Causes Inner Turmoil
Our stress, anxiety, worry, nervousness, and overwhelm are not so much about bad things happening, but how those things will affect our ability to avoid the pain of loneliness.
Losing a job, for example, is not only stressful because of the financial consequences, but it can also threaten how competent, successful, or respected we feel in the eyes of others.
Being rejected by someone we are attracted to hurts not only because we did not get the relationship we wanted, but because the rejection can make us question whether we are desirable or worthy of affection.
Even relatively small events can stir up significant emotional turmoil when they seem to threaten our connection to other people.
A friend taking longer than usual to respond, someone appearing uninterested in what we are saying, or being excluded from an invitation can quickly trigger worry about whether we will be abandoned and left alone.
Loneliness Leads to Destructive Habits
Loneliness is so painful, it’s at the root of our destructive habits and behaviors.
When the brain does not feel safe pursuing connection directly, it may look for other ways to reduce the discomfort.
That can mean turning to television, social media, food, alcohol, drugs, or other destructive behaviors that provide a temporary escape.
These behaviors can become especially attractive because they offer some of the emotional benefits of connection without the same risk of rejection.
Social media can provide attention without putting ourselves out there. Television can create a sense of companionship without the possibility of being judged. Substances remove the pain altogether.
Loneliness Is More Painful Than Physical Abuse
Loneliness has been shown to activate some of the same neural systems involved in physical pain.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness and social connection stated, “Lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.”
If you’ve ever wondered why people stay in abusive relationships, it’s because to the brain, loneliness is often more painful than physical abuse.
The brain is forced to pick between two options: staying in a relationship that causes harm, or leaving and facing the harm of loneliness. More often than not, it chooses to stay in the relationship.
How to Deal with Loneliness?
The obvious answer to loneliness is to spend more time around people. But if loneliness were simply a matter of being around others, it would be much easier to solve.
As mentioned, loneliness is not just about being around others. It’s about receiving attention, affection, and approval, and also about being seen, heard, known, and to matter. So, you can have friends, coworkers, a partner, and a busy social life and still feel lonely.
This means dealing with loneliness requires more than increasing social contact. It also means understanding what may be preventing you from receiving it.
For some, the problem is that they want connection while simultaneously being afraid of it. Past rejection, criticism, and bullying may have taught the brain that getting close to people carries a risk of pain.
Others struggle with low self-worth and assume they are not interesting, attractive, or successful enough to be accepted.
Yet others grew up unseen, so they learned they have to perform and prove themselves to receive attention and affection.
In other words, loneliness is not always caused by a simple lack of people. It can come from the beliefs we form, the habits we develop, and the way we see and protect ourselves from discomfort.
Loneliness Is Just a Feeling
At the end of the day, loneliness is simply a feeling or sensation.
Releasing the intensity of the feeling can release the intensity of the pain it creates.
As that pain decreases, so does the effects of loneliness on our drive for approval, need for control, as well as the inner turmoil and destructive patterns.
