6 Ways to Fight your Fear of Loneliness
Do you have a fear of loneliness? Have you been through several breakups and now you think there’s no hope for you? Did the people you used to think were your friends end up leaving your life? Have you reached a point where it seems like loneliness is your destiny?
Everyone goes through these types of situations. However, if these experiences have resulted in your fear of loneliness, you should put the following tips into practice.
How to Overcome a Fear of Loneliness
1. Stop criticizing yourself.
The first step to fighting your fear of loneliness is to take an honest look at yourself. To do this, take an honest look at the amount of times a day you put yourself down. Do you tell yourself that you’re insignificant, that you’re a bad person or that you’re too old or too young?
If you talk to yourself like this, you’ll constantly be in a bad mood and you’ll condition yourself to being alone.
Remember, what you say to yourself has a direct impact on how you feel. It’s as simple as that. If you program yourself to think positively, you’ll make yourself feel better about yourself.
If you’re being negative towards yourself, it’s time to learn to be kinder. Maybe someone in the past criticized you or abused you in some way or made you feel guilty. It’s time to stop letting them take control of your life.
On the other hand, maybe the problem is that you made a mistake in the past that you won’t let yourself forget. In that case, it’s time to turn off that voice in your head that’s constantly criticizing you. You have to tell yourself that you’re a valuable person despite your failures, and you have to believe it.
2. Improve your self-esteem.
Increasing your confidence and your self-esteem is vital to fighting your fear of loneliness.
Just think about it, if you can’t see the great things about yourself and you can’t love yourself, how can you expect others to do it? The way we see ourselves defines how we behave and the image of ourselves that we project.
Therefore, if you’re constantly focusing on your flaws and you only notice the negatives about yourself, those are the only things that others will notice about you. The more you love yourself, the more people will be convinced of how great and kind you are.
3. Accept that you have something great to offer.
What are your greatest qualities? Are you a sensitive, hardworking and/or honest person? Do you always want to help those around you? Are you someone that others can trust?
You probably have some of these qualities and many great others.
To combat your fear of loneliness, start by looking for people who admire those qualities and with whom you can share them. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean looking for these qualities in a partner.
Focus your attention on finding like-minded people who complement you and with whom you can identify. Remember that having good friends is vital to living a happy life.
After friendships, you can usually find love, but don’t obsess over finding it.
Read this article: Toxic Friendships: How to Identify and Distance Yourself from Them
4. Change your thoughts about the opposite sex.
A lot of people have misconceptions about the opposite sex. This may be the result of a bad experience that made you distrust them.
Do you stereotype the opposite sex like this?
- All men are pigs.
- Women only care about a man’s money.
- Men only care about sex.
- Women are too emotional.
- You can’t trust men.
- All women are gold diggers.
- All the good ones are in relationships.
These ideas are all wrong, because both men and women look for meaningful, lasting relationships at some point in their lives. Of course, there are always going to be some negative examples, but that doesn’t mean the entire sex is like that.
When you have these thoughts about relationships, it will be difficult to fight your fear of loneliness, because you’ll think that there isn’t anyone left for you. The truth is that the world is full of amazing people, you just have to let yourself get to know them.
5. Change the way you look at your fear of loneliness.
Are you jealous of those groups of friends that do everything together? Do you get sad every time you see a happy couple with their kids nearby?
Ask yourself if the problem is actually loneliness, or if it’s just social pressures that make you feel like you should have these same things in your life.
When you get carried away by other people’s expectations, being single or not having many friends may seem like a huge failure. In reality, however, it’s not.
If you feel this way, keep in mind that your worth is the same, whether or not you have a partner. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t get into a relationship of any kind just to meet someone else’s or society’s expectations.
6. Focus on what you have.
To overcome your fear of loneliness, you need to stop desperately trying to find a partner. Look at all of your family and friends that care about you, and make sure you appreciate them, even if they aren’t perfect.
Think about it. People won’t want to get close to someone who doesn’t appreciate everything s/he already has in life. Additionally, once you do make new friends, you’ll need to make sure they know how much you love and care about them.
Remember, if you work hard to establish new relationships but then you don’t strengthen them, you will have made all of that progress for nothing.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
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- Rico Moreno, Javier. (2014). Hacia una historia de la soledad. Historia y grafía, (42), 35-63. Recuperado en 19 de noviembre de 2018, de http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1405-09272014000100003&lng=es&tlng=es.
- Ríos Zapata, Paula Cristina, & Londoño Arredondo, Nora Helena. (2012). PERCEPCIÓN DE SOLEDAD EN LA MUJER. El Ágora U.S.B., 12(1), 143-164. Retrieved November 19, 2018, from http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1657-80312012000100009&lng=en&tlng=es.
