Alone Not Lonely: My Method for Reframing The Meaning of Being Alone

We were in our new house for about six months when my dad touched the knob of the door from our family room to the garage for the last time. He had a few belongings under his arms and he said goodbye to me, age six, my sister, age eight, and my mom. In an instant I was lost. The only way I can explain it is that I was swimming in a thick soup of loneliness, confused and worried about what would happen next. My sister went to her room, and my mom went to hers. I wondered what they were doing in their rooms and whether I existed.

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on loneliness. How does loneliness arises in me; how, despite not wanting to experience it, I can fuel it; how I can manage it; and why I’m capable of feeling lonely in the first place. I am sure a lot of it goes back to moments in childhood like when my dad left, and I’ve handled lots of that in therapy - highly recommend doing this by the way.

As I’ll explain below, I’ve chosen to not ask why these days, so much as “what now?” Because the data tells me that, regardless of the reason, as an American adult man, I’m not alone in feeling lonely. According to the Survey Center on American Life, only 27% of American men have six or more friends. That’s wild - nearly one out of every four guys is only friends with six or less guys? That’s not wild, actually, that sucks!

But here’s what I’m driving at - my journey with loneliness has not been about adding more friends; it’s been about reframing the meaning of being alone so that I can thrive alone. Specifically, when I am alone from 7:45am to 6:30pm every day as a solopreneur, building a coaching practice by myself in my home. I’m married and have an energetic attention-hungry Border Terrier. So it’s not like I’m alone all the time. It’s just those work hours when I can fall into doubting myself, my plans, and my vision because I don’t have that familiar feeling of other people to bounce off of.

I was put in daycare when I was nine months old. Eventually I was in schools, at summer camp, on sports teams, contending with roommates, collaborating on business teams, participating in men’s groups, volunteering, organizing music and entertainment projects, and fumbling my way through romantic relationships. Those are just the nine inter-relational settings I can think of off the top of my head let alone many others, I am sure, in which I found an escape from loneliness. 

To put it simply: I grossly underestimated the impact alone time would have on me, despite working “alone” while leading a team remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, I’ve been engaging with teams, friends, enemies, and everyone in between ever since I was a baby. 

If you’ve noticed discontent in recent months and aren’t quite sure whether it’s loneliness, or why you’re feeling it, I’ve outlined a few tips just for you, because they work for me.

Ask Why Later

Despite all my many interactions I can still be lonely. Why does loneliness get invited into my heart or mind, like a stranger snuck into my home? 

As I often tell clients, we will have a lifetime to dissect the why’s of our past. And even when we get a clear answer, it might not be all that satisfying or useful. What I’m most interested in discovering with my clients is how to close the gap between today and an ideal future state. The gap I personally needed to close with loneliness was re-setting my mindset when I’m alone.

Alone does not equal lonely

To everyone out there that knows that being alone does not equal being lonely, congrats! To the rest of us who still need to reframe cognitively, and re-design behaviorally, in order to manage loneliness, it’s good to see you. I got your back.

I teach a self-management process that in its simplest form is a cycle of Reflection, Decision, and Action, practiced at high frequency and in all aspects of life. This cycle creates confidence and momentum for more change on your terms, regardless of the many external factors that constantly inundate our lives.

Here’s how I’m using self-management to embrace being alone:

1. Notice: I have a very clear set of behaviors and narratives when I’m lonely. It doesn’t matter what they are for me; it matters that you begin to notice what they are for you. Once I was able to notice the specific behaviors and interpretations of a scenario and myself were directly and only associated with loneliness I was able to use them to my advantage.

2. Reflect: I will admit that I give the loneliness narratives space to breathe. I allow myself to feel fully lonely for a moment. It’s almost like the more I can feel it, the more I can point to it. It’s like I’m calling it out from hiding, and it can’t control me. With loneliness out in the open, I can observe it and decide what to do with it.

3. Decide: being a husband, a solopreneur, and a coach who helps others overcome obstacles, I am not a huge fan of flailing around helplessly in unproductive emotions once I know they’re dominating my space. So, my decision invariably is to swiftly disassociate from the loneliness once I’ve given it a fair amount of time to be noticed.

4. Act: Disassociating from loneliness in a practical sense means that I tell myself, “being alone does not obligate you to feel lonely.” I say that a few times and logic generally kicks in. But often times I have to occupy my mind with something declarative and positive. So I have recently started writing down desirable states of mind that can be evoked by being alone, and it looks like this: 

1. I am alone and at peace

2. I am alone and content

3. I am alone and creative

4. I am alone and artistic

5. I am alone and building

6. I am alone and growing

Google or ask ChatGPT to pull up information on “Coping with Loneliness” and your results will be lists of things to do. I think that’s reasonable, to some degree, and lots of people including myself do need to be doing something in order to overcome something. I get that. 

But I also want to encourage you to consider that there is nothing wrong with feeling lonely, there’s nothing to do, and that you are enough to be in a room alone with you. 

I have to remind myself of this fact five days a week. I’m a very forgetful person, so if I can do it, so can you. 

BONUS: Cold Showers

Cold water exposure is being covered a lot these days. I’m proud to say that I was experimenting with the positive effects of cold showers back in 2015. At least in this one practice, I was ahead of the curve!

As of December 2022, I’ve returned to using cold showers, sometimes twice a day. They force me to: 

1. Control my breathe

2. Decide on my mindset

3. Endure discomfort

4. Slow down when my instinct is to speed up

5. Test my mental toughness on a daily basis

While I’m in a cold shower my mind can use it as a metaphor for something else I’m worried about wont end, such as loneliness. And when I’m out of the shower and feeling discomfort, such as loneliness, I remind myself I can endure it, just like the cold shower. This reminder triggers other positive self-talk, such as: 

1. This is temporary

2. You are capable

3. There is something to be gained

4. You’ve done this before and you can do it again

My daily ritual and the positive reframing and positive self-talk that it evokes has been hugely beneficial to me. I highly recommend experimenting with a couple weeks of cold showers. Your default mental settings, and your grit, might surprise you. 

Conclusion

I have spent years bopping around inside of and between groups and have felt lonely. And more recently I’ve spent seven months being alone, and have felt lonely. At this point, the common denomenator is me, and that’s a good thing. There’s a whole lot I don’t control but I do control me. Specifically, my mindset and my relationship with alone-ness. Maybe that’s what I’ve been searching for this whole time - to replace loneliness with the very fact-based, dispassionate reality of alone-ness, and how wildly different that is than loneliness. I’m becoming pretty cool with alone-ness and I hope you can be too. If you need help, let’s talk.

Anxious? Here’s One Signal and Six Tips To Reclaim Your Attention

Does a certain type of infuriating friction arise when you become anxious? For example, do you get clumsy? Does time stop moving at its normal speed? When you’re under pressure, do your sentences become incomplete or incoherent? When you lose your sense of control, or when perfection kicks into overdrive, do you become forgetful and terse with coworkers or family members? If any of these experiences are true for you, you’re not alone. 

The good news: it’s happening because you envision more for yourself or those around you and you’re driving towards it, often as a high-achiever and a leader. The even better news is that you can leverage this friction as a signal to slow down, and use behavioral skills that shift your attention from imminent threat to calmly thriving. 

The Leader’s Instinct

If you’re a C-suite executive, a solopreneur, entrepreneur, do-er, creator, manager, or a problem solver you’ve likely experienced a similar compulsion as me. When a situation feels unsettled you work tirelessly to resolve it. In a business setting, you rush to feverishly gather resources, and mobilize colleagues and vendors to get to the bottom of your dilemma.

If this is your instinct at work, then it is likely the instinct you rely on at home, and even for your own body. You might work out more, feverishly write notes, chase leads (sales, information, or otherwise), burn the midnight oil, change diet, buy products online. Anything to attack the problem full force. Since you are a leader, you know instinctively that with enough effort, you can solve any problem. 

The Leader’s Choice

I have been wrong about throwing the kitchen sink at my discomfort more times than I can count. So I say the following to you with total humility: if you’re doing the same, you’re doing it wrong. Speeding up is not the antidote to screwing up, in fact the opposite is more often the case. See the graph below, for reference. 

When we are anxious, our fight or flight response kicks in. Special Forces Operators and First Responders receive exhaustive training to manage this instinct under pressure. However for most of us, when discomfort increases, time feels longer. When certainty shifts to the unknown, our resources feel more constrained. We want to act fast to take care of ourselves, or we freeze. 

There is another way.

Six Behavior Techniques for Slowing Down and Reclaiming Your Attention

When we slow down, we begin to notice reality with greater objectivity. We begin to notice that we are not operating in extreme scarcity, rather in a balance of scarcity and abundance, pros and cons, helpful and unhelpful. This attention to balance that results from slowing down helps us make decisions and behave in ways that are healthier and kinder to ourselves and those around us. 

Here are six behavioral techniques for slowing down and reclaiming your attention: 

1) Acceptance

Accept that things - as absolutely terrible or wonderful as they may be - are exactly the way they are. Accept the possibility that you have no or little control over the situation you so desperately want to change. Accept that your body is reacting to an uncomfortable or unfamiliar situation. Accept that your body may be associating a past experience with a present one, regardless of the fact that they are different.

2) Breathing Techniques

You can find breathing techniques via Google, Spotify, Calm App, Insight Timer App, and books related to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, PTSD, Anxiety and Panic Disorder, and Mindfulness Meditation. You can also do these simple steps in cycles of 5: 

• Place hand on belly and breath in through nose with a focus on expanding your belly (diaphragmatic breathing); you will feel your belly expand under your hand

• When full of breath in belly, hold for a count of four

• Exhale through a small space in your lips

3) Body scan

Body scanning is a mindfulness practice that brings your attention into your body. Because attention is finite, centering yours on your body helps to declutter the mind of external worries. At the risk of sounding cliche, worries are thoughts about something not yet in your control. Therefore, they do not serve you, especially in turbulent times. Having a mindful, active awareness of your body on the other hand, serves you immensely. 

To self-administer a body scan you can follow the script below taking between 5-7 minutes for the full body scan. The body scan creates an opportunity for you to come out of your mind and into your body; and for many people it helps us move from worried fiction to present moment truth - facts about what we actually feel here and now in our body. 

Body Scan Script 

• Find a comfortable seated position

• Close or open eyes, whichever is more comfortable

• Breath calmly, ideally from diaphragm

• Begin noticing bodily sensations by intentionally starting at the top of your head

• Move through your forehead, temples, eyes, nose, ears, cheeks, mouth and jaw

• Move through the front of your neck, the back of your neck, then move to your shoulder blades

• Move your awareness now down your inner arm, outer arm, over your elbows, and over your forearms, to your wrists, palms and finally fingers

• Now bring your awareness to your chest, sternum, ribs, torso, gut, lower back, pelvis and hips - notice feelings inside your body as well as on the surface of your skin

• Shift your awareness slightly now to your lower body, beginning with your buttox and groin, inner thighs, top of your thighs and lower thighs

• Move down your thighs to you knees, and now underneath your knees

• Roll down your knees to your shins, moving down your calves now and to your lower calves, outer ankle and inner ankles.

• Now roll down under your heels, to the top of your feet, the bridge of your feet, and finally through to your toes.

You can also reference the sources listed in the Breathing Techniques above for body scan recommendations. 

4) Mantra

Mantra, originated in Buddhism and Hinduism, is a word or sound used repeatedly to aid concentration in meditation. In business and team sports, mantras are often used to focus energy and attention around a shared principle. Think of the Notre Dame Football team’s “Play Like a Champion Today” plaque, courtesy of “Rudy.”

A mantra costs no money, it’s entirely your own, and simple. For these reasons and more you can consider a mantra like a trusted friend, always there to help pull you through a difficult moment. The practice of repeating your mantra will help you dial into the present moment, uncluttered with worry, and boosted with a greater sense of control.

To use a mantra, quite literally repeat the word, phrase, or sound that suits you best over and over again. It’s that simple. You can combine mantra repetition with breathing techniques, or rubbing a token (for example a string of beads, a keychain, a pebble, or an object on your desk). Here’s the key: do this mindfully. What does that mean? Countless books have been written on the topic of mindfulness, but to keep it simple for you here, it means to repeat your mantra with your attention fully focused on the words, sounds, intentions, and/or bodily sensations associated with your mantra. Much like doing a body scan or a breathing exercise, this turns your attention to the one absolute fact you know to be true: you are alive, present, and caring for yourself in this moment. 

5 tips to find a Mantra

1. Use a motivational quote that genuinely inspires or calms you

2. Make up a silly, focusing, or playful sound that pulls you into the moment

3. Ask a friend or family member for three adjectives that describe your best qualities

4. Reference song lyrics, poems, or movie quotes that center you

5. Be still, listen to yourself, write down a simple statement you can experiment with.

To encourage you to think personally and creatively about your mantra, I’ll share mine. During times of overwhelming stress, I turn to “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there,” which I stole from the Radiohead’s, “There There.” This mantra reminds me that while I may be feeling or assuming something to be true, it may or may not be so. By reminding myself of this fact, I am able to check-in on other facts, and get objective about a bigger picture issue. Once I get objective, I can begin to plan, make decisions and take action. 

Please: If you don’t have one already, find a mantra, try it out, and share what you notice!

5) Positive Self-talk

A mantra will ground you. Positive self-talk will propel you. Yet, positive self-talk is one of those behaviors we tend to think of as rather cringe. If you do not practice positive self-talk on a regular basis because you’re embarrassed or unfamiliar it’s time to start. Here’s the thing I embraced in my late twenties that I’m going to directly challenge you on: you need to rely on yourself, full stop. 

Examples of positive self-talk statements

“I have done this before.”

“I am limitless potential.”

“I am loved, respected, and admired.” 

“I am capable of surprising myself.” 

“Five ways my friends describe my best qualities are …”

“You got this, [your name], here’s why …”

There comes a time when we all have to move out of our comfort zone with self-management. That’s not work talk, by the way. That’s life, in general. We have to self-manage because as adults most of our peers are busy with their own lives. They don’t have time to bail us out of every anxious, or worrisome moment. And as I’m sure you know, there are a lot more anxious moments in adulthood than easy ones. Next time you’re in a pinch, don’t be bashful about learning and doing positive self-talk on a daily basis. 

6) Fact-check

Finally, bolster your positive self-talk with indisputable evidence. Recall the real results you’ve created for yourself in similar situations. Are you facing a specific situation for the very first time? Great. Consider the qualities of your character that are transferable and find the proof that you can tap into those qualities again by reflecting on your actions and outcomes. Here’s what it sounds like to pair positive self-talk with fact-checking: 

“I may not have had this exact experience before, but I can rely on these three traits to get me through it…I know I possess these traits because I saw them in action when I handled [your real-life example(s)].”

Conclusion

My father often reminded me that I need to be more prepared for boredom and stress than for fun. As high-achievers, leaders, spouses, or parents, we all need to and can relatively easily adopt behavioral skills that help us through anxiety, lack of control, and change. I’ve provided just six coping and self-management skills, among hundreds of others at your disposal. If you would be so kind as to share your own tips for in-the-moment stress management, my readers and I would be grateful to hear from you.

If you would like to explore an ongoing coaching relationship to shift your energy from overwhelm to purposeful action, please contact me.