Another Mental Health Awareness Week is with us. This year’s theme is one that is possibly the most relatable for me. Loneliness.
Time moves on, and as this happens, I think we truly wake up to the fact that loneliness isn’t just something that could affect elderly people. We often hold this thought as it seems fairly legitimate that people of an older age may struggle to get out and about more than their younger counterparts. I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to point that out.
However, I have done some digging around for various information about this year’s topic for Mental Health Awareness Week. The biggest factors that affect a person’s chance of being lonely include: being widowed, being single, being unemployed, living alone, having a long-term health condition or disability, living in rented accommodation, being between 16 and 24 years old, being a carer, being from an ethnic minority community and being LGBT+.
Some of these are things are not things that keep you in that lonely category forever. But some of them make life more difficult and can be a bit soul-destroying at times. I’m going to be fairly explicit here and point out that the main factors which contribute to loneliness for me are that I have Dyspraxia and Autism, I am single, I sometimes look after myself completely and I’m at the latter end of the 16-24 scale. So essentially three and a half of the 10 factors affect me, and if you want to see it in a different context, 35% of me feels lonely, while 65% of me doesn’t.
Having additional challenges of Dyspraxia and Autism (with positives included of course) does make fitting in socially more of a challenge, and unfortunately does tend to make me want to hold myself back. It takes time to feel like I’m where I want to be in an interpersonal sense. I’m learning that and I am always trying to build my confidence to join in with any group related things or put myself into a scenario where teamwork is involved.
I could guess that not a single person out there is 0% lonely. But what I can say as a positive thing is that I have some incredibly encouraging people in my life. Some people have only been a part of it for a short time but have been very encouraging and helpful in making me feel seen and heard. The more systemic a world becomes (as in the more inclusive it becomes for everyone), I feel this helps us to decrease the impacts of loneliness.
Flexibility is a key concept to how loneliness is tackled. As we have reached the end of the Covid crisis of 2 years ago, people are now, at least to my mind, getting back integrating into society again. We need to be together again- that’s an understatement! Family Monopoly games need to be had, club dancefloors need to be filled while the joy of the music spreads across the room, and we need to experience the thrill of connecting with people who could become a new friend for life. Sports arenas and stadiums need that electrical energy to return to feed the athletes who bring us glory. I got a bit carried away there. These are just passions of mine. Especially Monopoly, I’m a born winner at that.
But it’s true though (what I said about flexibility). There are a multitude of ways that the world can become more flexible in how we reduce the amount of people who suffer with loneliness. Conversation is important wherever you are. At home or at work. Why not invest in some mood type faces or mood wheels with words on them? This could help us all identify how each other are feeling and also have that system readily in place to support someone who may well be feeling lonely. Loneliness itself can impact many areas of a person’s life and can make someone close themselves off from the world. #IVEBEENTHERE. Only recently during the bank holiday weekend, I lost track of time and therefore wasn’t able to see my friend and spent the day feeling low and not cheerful. This started the spiral towards low mood and poor processing of all kinds of important information elsewhere in life.
That’s my most recent story involving loneliness. I wanted to share it to raise awareness of the impact. The mood boards and mood faces I now use frequently are definitely a positive solution to helping people (particular I’d say people like myself) to rebound from an overwhelming experience and become our cheerful selves again. Let’s lessen loneliness!
Sam's Mental Health Blog 