Meditation

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Overcome Loneliness: Solutions to Feel Less Lonely and Build Resilience  

Anxiety Blog Coaching Depression Hypnotherapy Loneliness Meditation Solitude

Loneliness is an emotion that most of us face at some point, but its impacts can feel overwhelming. Loneliness is a feeling of disconnection, while solitude is the intentional choice to spend time alone for personal growth or reflection. While modern life often fosters isolation, it also presents opportunities to transform this experience into personal growth. By learning to embrace solitude, we can overcome loneliness, feel less disconnected, and develop deeper connections with ourselves and others.

This article explores how solitude can be a powerful resource to combat loneliness, offers strategies for embracing it, and discusses professional support options like hypnotherapy and coaching. 

The Positive Power of Solitude

Many people equate being alone with loneliness, but they are vastly different. Loneliness is the feeling of being disconnected, while solitude is the intentional act of being alone, often to recharge and reflect.  

Research shows that solitude enhances self-awareness, improves emotional regulation, and fosters creativity. By spending intentional time alone, you gain insights into your needs, emotions, and patterns of thought. This self-understanding helps build emotional resilience, making it easier to connect authentically with others.  

Strategies to Overcome Loneliness and Embrace Solitude

1. Mindfulness and Meditation

Practicing mindfulness teaches us to observe our thoughts without judgment, reducing the fear of being alone. Meditation, particularly those focused on self-compassion, can help reframe solitude as a nourishing experience. Try a guided meditation specifically designed to embrace solitude and overcome feelings of loneliness.

2. Journaling for Self-Reflection

Writing your thoughts in a journal helps process emotions and gain clarity about what truly matters to you. Use prompts like:

  • “What do I enjoy about my own company?”
  • “What makes me feel lonely, and how can I address it?”

3. Small, Intentional Steps

Start with manageable actions, such as taking a solo walk, dining alone, or spending a quiet evening reflecting. Gradually, you’ll become more comfortable with your own company.  

Connect With People and Community Going Through a Similar Situation to You

Embracing solitude is powerful and important and this can compliment human inter-connection. Furthermore you may be able to ally with, and learn from, others who are on a similar journey to you:

Join Social Groups or Volunteer

Engaging in activities like volunteering or joining clubs fosters a sense of community. Many organizations offer opportunities to connect based on shared interests, making it easier to meet like-minded individuals.

Explore Online Communities and Apps

Platforms designed for finding friends or connecting with others who share your interests can help combat isolation. These spaces provide a low-pressure way to form bonds. I have a small growing community on the meditation app ‘Insight Timer‘. You are welcome to join us!

Overcome Social Anxiety

Building confidence in social situations can take time. Start with small steps, such as practicing conversations or attending events where you feel comfortable.  

Professional Support for Loneliness

Hypnotherapy: A Powerful Tool for Change

Hypnotherapy has emerged as a highly effective intervention for overcoming loneliness. The therapeutic side of hypnotherapy can provide a safe space to address deeper emotional wounds. Studies indicate that hypnotherapy can help rewire negative thought patterns, improve self-esteem, and reduce feelings of isolation. By addressing the subconscious mind, it enables you to adopt a more positive outlook on solitude and social connections.  

Consider exploring hypnotherapy services at Change Feels Good to access tailored support for loneliness and related challenges.

Coaching: An Advocate for the Real You

Coaching can provide support, encouragement, challenge and accountability to action tailored strategies for personal growth.

Coaching support can also be accessed at Change Feels Good.

Both options are invaluable for developing emotional resilience and reducing feelings of isolation.

Meditation to Begin Overcoming Loneliness Now

Meditation is a practical way to embrace solitude and reduce emotional distress.

Guided Meditation

I have produced a free 20 minute guided meditation, available on Insight Timer and Bandcamp, titled: Overcome Loneliness By Embracing Solitude

Independent Meditation Practice Activity

Set aside 10 minutes daily to focus on your breath, visualize a calm space, and repeat affirmations like: 

  • “You are whole in my own presence”
  • “You embrace the quiet and find peace within”

Regular practice can shift your perception of solitude from something to fear to something to cherish.

Conclusion

Overcoming loneliness requires a balance of self-awareness and meaningful social connections. Solitude, when embraced intentionally, can be a powerful resource for self-discovery, emotional resilience, and ultimately, deeper connections with others.  

For tailored support, consider hypnotherapy or coaching through Change Feels Good. You’re also welcome to reach out with any questions or to explore how these services can support your journey.

The Sleep and Anxiety Cycle and How to Get Out of it

Anxiety Hypnotherapy Meditation Sleep

Anxiety can inhibit sleep and sleep can inhibit anxiety. Your brain may keep you awake until you deal with this cycle.

What is Anxiety and Do I Have it?

The WHO lists the following symptoms of anxiety:

  • trouble concentrating or making decisions
  • feeling irritable, tense or restless
  • experiencing nausea or abdominal distress
  • having heart palpitations
  • sweating, trembling or shaking
  • trouble sleeping
  • having a sense of impending danger, panic or doom

What Happens in the Brain During and After Anxiety?

During anxiety the amygdala is significantly more active (the pea-sized area in the centre of the brain, indicated in the above image with a red dot). The Amygdala represents less than 0.3% of the brain’s mass.

Increased activity in the prefrontal cortex (12.5% of the brain’s mass, indicated in the above image by the blue area at the front of the brain) reduces activity in the amygdala.

Temporary vs. Persistent Anxiety

Everyone experiences anxiety to some extent. The frequency and intensity varies on a spectrum from person to person at various stages of life and healing. If your anxiety goes away relatively quickly and happens relatively infrequently you can consider it as “normal”. Even “normal” anxiety can be reduced and there is nothing wrong with doing so.

Anxiety disorders are, in contrast, persistent. Some clinicians say they “never” go away. This can be interpreted as a life-sentence. What they mean is that they haven’t gone away so far. Healing progress from anxiety disorders can vary enormously from person to person. For example, a person with a damaged prefrontal cortex might have a much more gradual journey of healing than a person a typically functioning one.

Types of Anxiety

There are a plethora of interconnected influences on anxiety, from neurological, to beliefs about oneself, others and the world, to genetic, to environmental circumstances.

Understanding the influences on your anxiety can help you come to terms with its unruly nature and help you begin to manage, or overcome it.

Formal categories include (NIMH):

  • Generalised anxiety
  • Panic
  • Social anxiety
  • Phobias
  • Separation anxiety

The Sleep and Anxiety Cycle

Typically during the day our focus is occupied, we are distracted from our thoughts and emotions. The contrasting mental space that opens up at bedtime can set the stage for overwhelming thoughts and fears to become unignorable.

This can make it difficult to fall asleep and the harder it is to sleep, the more worrying and stressful it can be, making it harder to fall asleep.

An accumulated sleep debt can make it harder to function well during the day in every way and it can increase the risk of developing chronic physical health problems. 

This can result in perpetual sleep disturbance, called “insomnia” and insomnia can bring on more anxiety.

How Can I get Organised to Sleep Better?

As detailed in my recent blog post: “How to Sleep Well“, you can:

  • Go to bed in a dark, quiet, cool place
  • Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day
  • Estimate when you actually fall asleep and wake up
  • Eat at least 4 hours before going to bed
  • Stay hydrated throughout the day and stop drinking 2 hours before bed
  • Avoid alcohol, nicotine and other stimulants in your bloodstream near bed time
  • Associate sleep zone only with sleep (and sex). No screens, work, or exercise… or divide space functionality with rituals
  • If you wake up for longer than 20 minutes in the night, move to another, relaxing space and do something relaxing
  • 10 mins of bright light in the morning can help regulate your sleep/wake cycle
  • While lying down, breathe fully in, breathe fully out and repeat at least 3 times
  • Progressive muscle relaxation
  • Gratitude
  • Reading, or listening to a story
  • White noise
  • Binaural beats
  • Listen to something boring
  • Organise time to worry and add one solution to each worry
  • Journalling

Anxiety Treatments (and Better Sleep)

Interventions include:

  • Hypnotherapy – helps to vividly clarify triggers for anxiety and “glimmers” for moving beyond anxious feelings. Helps to relax deeply
  • Exposure therapy – gradually builds resilience and a sense of security in relation to anxiety-inducing triggers
  • Acceptance (e.g. mindfulness) – you may not be able to control anxious thoughts and feelings directly, but by accepting their existence you can release the one thing you can control – your resistance!
  • Commitment (goal setting) – following up acceptance with commitment to build habits that further demonstrate your lack of anxiety and increase your locus of control
  • Medication – prescribed and managed only by clinicians
  • Meditation – releases identification with anxious thoughts and feelings, increases locus of control, helps to relax deeply

Sleep and Anxiety in Summary

I would recommend getting advice/support from a medical professional, and/or qualified therapist to help you understand what my be best for you. Feel free to contact me to find out more about the Hypnotherapy services I offer.

Anxiety can be a powerful underlying issue preventing you from getting a decent night’s sleep and lack of sleep can contribute to anxiety.

It is important to address underlying anxiety in addition to organising your life and environment to sleep well.

Meditations to Help You Sleep

A Gratitude Rhyme To Send You To Sleep (FREE MEDITATION)

Sleep Meditation: Progressive Relaxation (Insight Timer Plus users)

Rhyming Sleep Meditation – Mountain Trees To Tropical Beach (Insight Timer Plus users)

Sleep Meditation – Gratitude For Your Amazing Body And Mind (Insight Timer Plus users)

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.

How to Sleep Well

Anxiety Depression Hypnotherapy Meditation Sleep

Why do we Sleep?

We spend a third of our lives doing something that leaves us defenseless to attack, unable to eat, drink, or reproduce! Sleep! We don’t know why, but it must be important and our lives can become seriously impacted when we’re not able to do it well.

Lack of Sleep

Lack of slumber is associated with diabetes, obesity, hypertension, pulmonary heart disease, memory loss, lack of concentration, poor mood regulation and can be an underlying factor in many psychological issues.

Furthermore being tired feels rubbish!

Managing Expectations

When we keep trying we usually succeed, right?

Not with sleep.

Lying awake at night and trying to sleep is actually an effective way to set yourself up for failure!

Your body knows how to sleep, so your energy would be better spent finding ways to step out of the way of your mind.

How Much do I Need?

We all need different amounts at different times in our lives. If you can function well during the day and you don’t find it too difficult to wake up at the right time you are probably getting enough.

Listen to your body and how you feel upon going to bed, waking and during the day. Estimate the time you spend asleep, when you feel well rested and when you don’t. You don’t need to feel guilty for getting as much as 9 hours, or deprived for getting only 6 hours.

Sleep Cycles

There are different levels wakefulness that we naturally cycle through, with very different levels of brain activity. It is normal to briefly wake up multiple times during the night and go back to sleep again.

The lighter levels are associated with dreams that we remember and are more vivid, the deeper levels are where the body grows and repairs itself and where new pathways in the brain are forged.

What Can I do to Get a Good Night’s Sleep?

Counting sheep

While the biggest contributing factors to sleep disturbances come from within us, you can make things easier for yourself by also setting things up externally for a good night:

  • Don’t count bed time as the time you fall asleep. Give yourself enough time to wind down, go to bed in a dark room, with low lighting and no screen time, with relatively low ambient noise. It may be 30 to 45 minutes before you actually fall asleep.
  • Aim to make this bed time procedure a habit to stick to. Eye masks, earplugs and guided meditation can help to reduce ambient light and noise.
  • If possible sleep in a bedroom with a temperature of around 18°Celsius, or 65° fahrenheit.
  • Eat at least 4 hours before going to need
  • Stay hydrated, but drink fluids no later than 2 hours before bed time
  • Avoid having alcohol, nicotine and other stimulants in your bloodstream at bed time
  • Build an association between your bedroom and sleep. Try to avoid exercising, or working in the same space. If you can’t avoid this, change the lighting and create other rituals that characterise the change in function of the space.
  • If you do wake up in the night for roughly more than 20 minutes, move to another space and engage in a relaxing activity with low light.
  • Soon after you wake up, spend time in bright light, preferably sunlight, preferably outside, without wearing sunglasses and without staring directly at the sun. 10 minutes should be enough. Light lamps, or any artificial light can be an option in the winter or if working night shifts

The Elephant in the Bedroom

A major cause of disturbance includes, of course, mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder, for example.

Addressing these issues through therapy and meditation, for example, may be the most effective way to sleep well.

Do You Want Help to Work Through Something That May be Blocking Your Replenishing Sleep?

Do you believe you may be suffering from anxiety, depression, or another existential issue, and that it may be preventing you from getting a good night’s sleep? You can learn more about my approach to Hypnotherapy and how it could help you here.

Meditations to Help You Sleep

A Gratitude Rhyme To Send You To Sleep (FREE MEDITATION)

Sleep Meditation: Progressive Relaxation (Insight Timer Plus users)

Rhyming Sleep Meditation – Mountain Trees To Tropical Beach (Insight Timer Plus users)

Sleep Meditation – Gratitude For Your Amazing Body And Mind (Insight Timer Plus users)

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.

Get Started With Affirmations for Manifestation Work

Meditation Other

It is important to start out with effective affirmations, so they support and charge your manifestation work, rather than inhibit it.

What Are Affirmations?

Affirmations are declarations. We are stating observations about ourselves, others and the world. They do not describe how we would choose for ourselves and the world to be, they describe ourselves and the world as already being how we would choose them to be!

This is a subtle, yet important distinction.

Two, or More, ‘Already Trues’

We may need to hold two paradoxical observations in our consciousness simultaneously.

For example, we may at first need to hold the following two truths and open our minds enough to see them both as simultaneously true:

  • “I feel insecure, anxious and frightened by social situations”
  • “I feel secure, confident and delighted in social situations”

If we deny the negative truth and pretend only the positive truth is true, the one we deny (or resist) can become more persistent.

We do not always consider the possibility of having two (or more) selves. Two or more realities and truths

Even for someone who has objectively high social anxiety, it is very rare to be anxious in every single social situation, with all people. There are nearly always exceptions, where we feel secure and confident. So for most people, there are already two, or more already trues. The difference is that these exceptions may not have been part of the story we tell others and ourselves.

Learn more about how hypnotherapy can help with anxiety.

When Crafting Your Affirmation

A notebook with an orange pen on top. In orange writing it says "I am the author of my story". The notebook is set against a background of a white knitted woollen blanket
  1. Create your affirmations intuitively. Ask yourself what would really bring you fulfilment.
  2. Design it to help you feel something you want to feel (“acceptance”, “fulfilment”, “gratitude”, “love”, for example). If the affirmations are what you enter into the satnav, the emotions are the fuel that gets you there.
  3. Design it so that it sparks your emotion and imagination to see, hear and feel yourself having accomplished it
  4. Design it so that what you affirm can be seen as true every day that you affirm it, as well as the day that you have accomplished it. Are you already a millionaire? If not, would you affirm, that: “you are a millionaire”, or “you have the abundant mindset of a millionaire”?
  5. Speak in the present tense (“you accept”, rather than “you will accept”). You are creating the conditions of your desired outcome here and now.
  6. Refer to yourself in the second person, as “you”, not “I” (“you joyfully help others live fulfilled lives”, rather than “I joyfully help others live fulfilled lives”). Imagine telling yourself “I love me” and see how it feels. Now imagine someone else telling you “I love you”. Which is likely to have more impact? We tend to believe and take seriously positive messages from others over ourselves.
  7. Keep it simple. Aim for somewhere between 1 and 25 words. As you become more adept at the manifesting process you can try adding more complexity and see how it works for you.
  8. Imperfect affirmations are perfect! Just get going with something that is good enough. If there are improvements to make they will come to you as you progress.

Begin Crafting Your Affirmation

Here is an affirmation that works for me. If you are unsure where to begin, you can take this and make it your own:

“You joyfully help others live fulfilling and satisfying lives”.

“You graciously accept the abundance that, hence, cascades into and flows through your life”.

Put some initial ideas for your affirmation in the chat now.

Do You Want to Start Manifesting?

Check out my free content, a great way to get started with manifesting:

Check out my course, guiding you through each stage of manifestation:

Do You Want Help to Work Through Something That May be Blocking Your Positive Manifesting?

Do you believe you may have acquired negative manifestations that get in the way of the life you would choose? You can learn more about my approach to Hypnotherapy and how it could help you here.

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.

What Could You Already Be Manifesting Without Realising It?

Hypnotherapy Meditation Other

To What Extent is Trauma a Form of Negative Manifestation?

Trauma can initiate negative manifestation. It can inhibit your self-esteem, your ability to move towards goals and to motivate yourself. Trauma that may have been picked up during the course of life can replay and loop after the event is long gone, during a variety of different external encounters. This can block our ability to think clearly, be creative and imagine.

Trauma can be encoded, even in the context of “perfect” parenting. The Still Face Experiment highlights how even a short moment of absent expression on the face of a parental figure can leave a child distressed.

You could be the greatest parent of all time. If a timely opportunity is not provided for the child to return to positive, comfortable interaction with the parent, the formation of a traumatic experience can follow.

With only a partially developed brain, a child can easily blame themselves for this, potentially holding this belief for a lifetime.

This can colour our relationships with ourselves and others, if not addressed in therapy, or meditation, for example.

Such interpretations function just like affirmations. However, they often contain a polar opposite message to the abundance, or confidence, or love you might choose.

So, whether or not you have obtained traumatic experiences, you may have a build-up of existing negative manifestations.

You may, or may not be completely aware of them, or any resistance they present to the manifestation process.

“Portrait of Carl Gustav Jung“, by Barabeke, under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED

It may be that this can be overcome through committed habituation of affirmations and foresense alone. On the other hand it may be that, significant emotional, or behavioural resistance arises and blocks you from effective manifesting.

In which case, you may choose to seek professional help in working through that resistance. The key here is not to try to push these feelings and interpretations about yourself and others away. As Carl Jung said “What you resist not only persists but will grow in size“.

The key is to learn to remain with them with calmness, to be curious and responsive, not reactive.

When you get help to overcome negative manifestation, you can reduce the fear enough to release its power and control over you, leaving you free to manifest as you would choose.

Do You Want to Start Manifesting?

Check out my free content, a great way to get started with manifesting:

Check out my course, guiding you through each stage of manifestation:

Do You Want Help to Work Through Something That May be Blocking Your Positive Manifesting?

Do you believe you may have acquired negative manifestations that get in the way of the life you would choose? You can learn more about my approach to Hypnotherapy and how it could help you here.

Do You Want to Take the Conversation Further – Ask Questions and Contribute Answers?

Join Believe – Relieve – Conceive, my Insight Timer group.