junk DNA @tum
Todays Topic : loneliness ( John Cacioppo has been studying the effects and causes of loneliness for 21 years)
“facing an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation.”
Cacioppo: First of all, let me qualify something. Living alone, being alone, and the size of your social network is only weakly related. Think about patients in hospitals: They aren’t alone, they have all the support they could ask for, but they tend to feel very lonely. There’s a difference between being alone and feeling alone.They’re so weakly correlated, we need to take objective isolation and perceived isolation and separate those two
loneliness, interestingly, is related to an increase in egocentrism. Self-preservation depends more on your attention to your outcomes when you’re lonely than when you have lots of connections. [Sometimes] if you talk to a lonely person, they’ll start talking to you and you can’t get away. So, how do you share rather than just barrage? It’s about interactions, it’s about synergy, it’s about mutuality.
Previous Topic:
https://nowandme.com/todays-topic-social-influence-if-you-say-one-IW-06d0lKfsaqRn
junk DNA @tum
Advice for people who feel lonely by John Cacioppo
One of the biggest misunderstandings is what loneliness is. They equate it with being alone, and that leads to attempts to solve the problem that don’t solve the problem at all. And if you try enough times, you start to feel like, “Well, I’ll never be able to solve this, I’m just a worthless person.” And that’s when you start getting social withdrawal.
The purpose of loneliness is like the purpose of hunger. Hunger takes care of your physical body. Loneliness takes care of your social body, which you also need to survive and prosper. We’re a social species.
One notion that people intuitively have is it’s just about being with other people, . The other thing is that it’s just about social support—“I need more support.” And that doesn’t work very well because the logic of that is it’s not mutual. This is one of the reasons why when we do something for others, we tend to feel good. If you go cook at a soup kitchen, all of a sudden you start finding out that people can actually be pretty nice, they’re responding with gratitude.
The third common thing is that it’s social skills, that people with poor social skills are the ones who are lonely. Well, guess what? That’s not the case. If you have really bad social skills, you’re more likely to be lonely, that’s true. But lots of people feel lonely who have great social skills. Millionaires, billionaires, tend to feel lonely. A lot of athletes often feel lonely. Lots of people want to be their friend, but how would you feel if all the people who want to be your friend, you had the alternative interpretation that they want material or social benefits that you could give them.
These are great. 💖
Thanks for sharing valuable info!! Helpful
Glad!
