Do You Feel Lonely? Watch This.

I talk a lot on this channel about how you can surround yourself with people that you really like and who like you back. But the truth is, no matter how charismatic you are, you're going to spend time alone. In fact, probably a lot of time. And I don't want you to feel like that's some kind of boogeyman. So whether you're alone for a Friday night just once, or you're feeling alone because your friends all have significant others and you don't, I want to talk in this video about how you can be alone physically without necessarily feeling lonely. And I want to do this without needing to rely on reaching out or connecting with other people. Because the truth is, you don't need to connect with another individual to deal with loneliness. That's the first mindset. It's that loneliness doesn't have its opposite in being surrounded by people, even people who love you. I don't know about you, but there have been times in my life where I was sad and my friends, in an attempt to cheer me up, took me out. And I can remember sitting there eating food with all my friends all focused on me and feeling incredibly lonely and isolated. On the converse. There have been times where I've been alone in my apartment. Nobody's texting, nobody's calling, got no plans, and I haven't felt that at all. It's because the opposite of loneliness is connection. And it doesn't mean connection to a person. That can be connection to a really interesting idea. It could be connection to nature. It could be connection to an animal, connection to the world at large, or even just connecting to yourself. But this is what we're looking for when we're trying to deal with loneliness. It's not to surround yourself with people. You will feel lonely if you make that your goal. You can be surrounded by people your whole life and still feel incredibly lonely. So how do we do this? Because the truth is that we're often compelled to do things that just make us feel more lonely. We surround ourselves with friends that aren't really close friends in an attempt to stave off loneliness. It doesn't work. How do we know what we should do? That's the second piece, and it's something that I call the prediction spreadsheet. This comes from cognitive behavioral therapy, and it really helped me deal with some of the lonely feelings that I would have. I have become quite an extroverted person. And there were Friday nights when I first moved to Santa Monica before my other friends got here, where I was alone and in an Empty apartment. There was no furniture. And I was very, very nervous about that. And I remember on Wednesday going, nobody's here. I don't really have any friends in town yet. What am I going to do? And getting anxious about it. But this spreadsheet helped me because what I was doing at this time was writing in on the spreadsheet. You can use your phone notes to do this. All the activities that I had lined up for that day. So it might look like I have, you know, lunch with this person that I'm going to meet. I might have this walk in the park, maybe I have a haircut. And then hanging out alone at night with nothing to do. The second column, the thing that you write next to that is your predicted satisfaction out of scale of 1 to 10 that you're gonna get for that. So maybe I thought lunch was gonna be a seven. Cause I'm gonna meet someone, maybe even an eight. The haircut was gonna be a six. A little bit boring. But then when we got to the nighttime and I was alone, well, that was gonna be a three. That was gonna be terrible. And what you see when you do this spreadsheet, first off, is how you anticipate the emotions of your day going and all the anxieties that you build into your day just by default. And. And the second thing you realize is how completely off these are. Because as you're going throughout your day, you're actually taking mental notes, and you're going, as usually at lunch with this person, you go, how am I feeling? Is this a seven? An eight? Yeah, this is an eight. Great. The haircut actually wasn't so bad. It was just a seven as I sat here. And then you get to the night and you're expecting a three like I was. And all of a sudden, it was awesome. It was an eight. I was alone in my apartment with my guitar. I had a Kindle. I was reading and playing music, and I felt fantastic. The weird thing is, without this spreadsheet, I'm not updating my software. Part of me thinks that, oh, no, that was a fluke. And it's not until I started writing this stuff down that I realized, holy cow, I actually do enjoy my alone time a lot more than I expected. And that takes me to the third piece, which is, yes, I learned that I enjoyed my alone time, but I also learned that I spent a lot of time looking forward and doing things that didn't make me happy. By far, the number one thing for me was using social media. Media. Now, for you, I don't recommend skipping that spreadsheet. Do that spreadsheet. Find out what genuinely makes you surprisingly happy and what genuinely surprises you that it makes you upset. But for me, using Instagram, Facebook and any sort of amount where I'm scrolling the feed was torturous to my mental health. And I don't mean to be hyperbolic here, but it was probably the worst part of my entire day, any day that I did it. So instead what I did was I deleted the Facebook app and and I got Newsfeed Eradicator, which is this. I think it's an app for Google Chrome that allows you to not see the newsfeed when you use Facebook so you can still check your updates once a day. Instagram, I keep it. I have a business and I post once a month on there. But what I have done is not allow myself to scroll the feed. When you cut the feed out of these, you realize that you're no longer trying to connect with an app because when people scroll these, I think part of them is trying to form a connection with these photos in these other people's lives and it's just comparing and feeling like, like crap. So I really, really recommend explore reducing or removing social media. And the ones that I've seen that are the greatest offenders, and I believe I've read studies that have backed this up, are Instagram and Facebook. Luckily YouTube, as I believe, was on the bottom of that list, because it doesn't necessarily need that social component to work. Now the third thing that I would say after this is you've got these list of things you don't want to do. You want to build habits of the things that surprise you with how fun they are. For me, some of them that shocked me walking, I think nature is so underrated by so many of us, especially people like me who work on the Internet, spending time outside, feeling the sun on my skin. Absolutely amazing. If you have cold weather, but you can take a walk, whatever it is, do it for me. Also music, I don't play it enough, but I have guitars, I have microphones, I can plug my loop pedal in and I have a blast whenever I do that. And the last thing that I saw was just reading. I used to love reading, but for some reason I didn't spend as much time doing it when I was working. Now that I've built more time into my day that I can read, I actually just feel happier throughout my day. And being alone doesn't have that feeling of, oh no, what will I do? I get excited because I Have this book lined up. This takes me to the last piece. So you realize that loneliness is really about connecting. And you cut the things out of your life that are giving you this false sense of connection and leaving you empty. And you start to build more habits in that make you feel connected. But from time to time you need to do something special. And this is what we do with significant others and friends. We plan dates, right? We go to the movies sometimes. We get a massage, we get a. We draw a bath and we have candles. We do this special stuff that just treats that other person nice, but we don't do that with ourselves. We think it would be weird to go to a movie by ourself even though there's something that we really want to see. Or to draw a bath by ourself would be too romantic to do just by ourselves. And to get a massage that would be self indulgent. Whatever it is for you, think of the things that you really enjoy about dates. Maybe it's going to a really tasty restaurant and you only get to do that when you're with someone. As a significant other, you will learn to crave that relationship even if you don't need it because you only give yourself those treats when you're in a relationship. So what you need to do from time to time to improve your own mental health and the future relationships that you get in is take yourself dates, splurge, be self indulgent from time to time. I think it has been very, very fantastic for my mental health. I go to these foot reflexology places I write. Honestly, a lot of these videos come to me when I'm just sitting there relaxing and I have a great time. So if you are alone right now, I hope that this has helped you to feel connected. I hope that some of these videos help and if not, do the prediction spreadsheet and find what does. So thank you guys for watching this video. I apologize for having so much goofy little scruff, but I'm growing it out for for what I hope is going to be the most fun Halloween costume that I've done in years. So I'm looking forward to that. Have a wonderful day and I look forward to seeing you guys in the next video.