How to Deal With Loneliness

How to deal with loneliness splits into two questions wearing one sentence: what changes tonight, and what changes over months. The honest answer is that the first list is short and modest in size, while the second list holds nearly all of the movement. Working out which question you actually brought is worth more than any single tactic.

Key Takeaways:

• Tonight-scale relief is real and small: it takes the edge off an evening, and no evening tactic touches the state underneath it
• People heading to work who were put into conversation with a stranger ended the ride in a better mood than people left to themselves, and commuters polled beforehand had bet on the opposite result (Epley & Schroeder, 2014)
• Cacioppo and Patrick’s account treats loneliness as an aversive state with a job to do, in the way hunger has a job to do (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008); if that account is right, distraction postpones the signal instead of answering it
• Voice closes the gap in a single evening in a way text cannot, because the reply arrives while you are still feeling the thing you said
• The months-scale half runs on recurrence rather than intensity: one repeating hour with the same person outperforms four memorable one-off outings

How to Deal With Loneliness Tonight, and What That Can Realistically Do

Tonight, you can shift the intensity. You cannot shift the condition, and any article promising otherwise is selling you something. A good evening tactic takes a bad night down a couple of notches and leaves the underlying shortage exactly where it was, which sounds like a failure until you consider what it is competing against.

Getting the size right matters more than the tactic itself. People try a suggestion, feel better for a while, notice the feeling come back around 11 p.m., and conclude that nothing works on them. Nothing was supposed to work on them, not at that scale. An evening tactic is a painkiller, and painkillers are useful precisely because nobody expects them to fix the tooth.

Set the target where it belongs, at an evening that is easier to get through rather than a state that has changed, and small results stop reading as personal failure.

The Short List That Moves an Evening

Four things reliably do something tonight, and they share one property: each puts you into live, two-way contact with another human being, at whatever depth you can manage.

Voice outruns text by a distance that surprises people. Ten minutes on the phone with somebody who already knows you does more for a bad evening than an afternoon of typing, because the answer lands while you are still feeling the thing you said, and no delayed reply can do that. Call the person whose call you would pick up at 10 p.m. without checking the screen first.

Being physically among people does something even when nobody speaks, and the forecast you make about it is what to distrust. Epley and Schroeder tested this on people heading to work: the group asked to talk with whoever sat down next to them ended the ride in a better mood than the group asked to keep to themselves, while commuters polled in advance had bet on the reverse (Epley & Schroeder, 2014). Hold onto the fine print. Everybody in that study had already agreed to be in it, which is a long way from talking yourself out of your own apartment on a bad Tuesday. What carries over is the direction of the error: your estimate of how unpleasant leaving will be is wrong the same way every time.

Doing something with your hands next to another person occupies a third slot. Cooking while a friend is on speakerphone, a workout with a training partner, repairing something with a neighbor standing there. The task removes the pressure to produce conversation, which is the pressure that makes a lonely person cancel.

The fourth is smaller and worth naming anyway: cut off the comparison feed for the night. Scrolling other people’s Saturday during your own empty one is the one input that reliably makes the next two hours worse. If it is always the same empty evening, Sunday nights especially, that regularity is a handle: a recurring low point can be headed off with a standing plan.

Pick one, do it before 8 p.m., and judge it against a realistic bar rather than a cure.

Advice That Sounds Right and Does Not Hold

Several standard suggestions survive because they sound wise, and they fail in ways that are predictable enough to name.

“Sit with the feeling” is the worst of them for this particular state. On Cacioppo and Patrick’s account, loneliness is built to be unpleasant because its job is to send you back toward people, not to be studied (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). Sitting with hunger is a legitimate practice for some purposes, and it still does not produce dinner. An evening spent observing the feeling attentively tends to end with a person who is lonely and now also tired.

The self-care evening is the second one. A bath, a candle, a good series, an early night: every item on that list is solitude with better production values, and the shortage was never a shortage of comfort. It reads as taking care of yourself while changing nothing about the input, which is why people report doing it faithfully for months with no effect. Learning to enjoy solitude is worth doing in its own right, but it is a separate project from answering the shortage this evening named.

“Go out and meet new people tonight” fails for the opposite reason. It is the highest-effort move available and it lands at the worst moment, because a lonely evening is exactly when your reading of strangers’ faces is least generous and your tolerance for a flat exchange is lowest. Meeting new people is a months-scale project that people mistakenly attempt as an emergency measure.

Two more, briefly. Alcohol shortens the evening and lengthens the following morning, and filling the calendar with obligations answers a different shortage than the one most people have. Busy and accompanied are not the same thing, any more than loneliness and being alone are.

The line runs between things that improve the quality of being alone and things that end it for an hour. Only the second group is answering the question you brought.

The Half That Only Works Over Months

Everything on this side runs on recurrence, and recurrence is boring by design. One hour with the same person every week does more than four excellent evenings scattered across a year, because familiarity accumulates by repetition rather than by peaks, and a standing arrangement removes the need for anybody to keep deciding. This side is also where chronic loneliness has to be met, because a state that has stopped being situational never yields to one good evening.

Which is why the first move is a slot, not a person. Pick the hour and the day first, then work out who goes in it. Nearly every attempt runs the other way round, starts from a name, produces a warm exchange about how you two should really catch up sometime, and stops there feeling like progress.

Make the invitation specific. “Been thinking about that terrible drive back from Maine. Free Thursday the 14th?” A date in the message is what separates a pleasant exchange from an actual meeting, and pleasant exchanges are where most of these attempts quietly die.

Nobody can tell you how long this half takes, and any figure quoted in weeks was invented by whoever quoted it. What you can watch instead of a calendar is the count of repeating contacts in your week, and if that count is zero it explains most of the rest of this. Whether the feeling follows the schedule, and how far behind, is not something anyone gets to promise you in advance.

Which Question You Actually Brought

Three different questions arrive dressed as this one, and they take different answers.

The first is tonight being unusually bad, meaning a specific evening that has become hard to get through rather than a general state. Coping with loneliness on the bad days deserves its own tactics, and they are narrower than anything in this piece.

The second is wanting the interventions ranked by how much they actually reduce the feeling, which is a genuine research question with a genuine answer, and a different piece of writing from this one.

The third is the one this article addresses: a person who is functioning, wants something practical, and has been given a mixture of good and useless advice with no indication of which is which.

One boundary applies to all three. This article describes experience and mechanism, not care. If things have turned toward not wanting to be here, that belongs with a clinician or a crisis line; in the US, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

FAQ

What can I do about loneliness right now, tonight? Make a voice call to someone who already knows you, or put yourself somewhere with other people in the room, and do it before 8 p.m. rather than at midnight when the options have closed. Expect a reduction in intensity for a couple of hours rather than relief, and treat that as the tactic working, not failing. Text does considerably less than voice, because the delay breaks the part that helps.

Does going out actually help, or does it make it worse? It tends to help more than the forecast you made about it, and that gap between forecast and outcome is the documented part (Epley & Schroeder, 2014). Where it backfires is at a high-stakes venue on a bad night, since a crowded party while you are feeling raw supplies plenty of proximity and no contact at all. Low-stakes and repeated does more than big and one-off.

How long does it take for loneliness to lift? There is no reliable number, and any timeline quoted in weeks was invented by whoever quoted it. Loneliness that came in with a move or a breakup often eases as contact rebuilds, and the spread between people is far too wide for an average to tell you anything about your own case. Count repeating contacts in your week rather than weeks on a calendar, because that number is the one you can act on.

Is it bad to spend a lot of evenings alone? Time alone is only a problem when it is not chosen, and the same Tuesday night can be restorative or corrosive depending on whether you would have preferred company. The useful check is whether you would swap the evening for a specific person’s company if it were offered right now. A yes points to a shortage, a no points to solitude you actually wanted.

Most advice on this subject fails by mixing the two time scales into one list, so the reader tries a months-scale fix on a Tuesday night and an evening painkiller against a two-year state, and both come back negative. Keep them apart and each one starts behaving. Tonight has a small, real answer, and it is allowed to be small. The larger answer runs on a calendar and a tolerance for repetition, and it does not announce itself on any particular evening. Judging the second by how you feel tonight is what makes people quit it.

On the tonight scale, where a voice call to someone who knows you does the most, Lona is a smaller option still, an AI you can talk to at midnight when the human lines have closed, and it does nothing for the calendar-scale fix that no single evening was ever going to settle.

Sources

• Epley, N. & Schroeder, J., “Mistakenly Seeking Solitude,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014
• Cacioppo, J. T. & Patrick, W., “Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection,” 2008