Over the last couple of weeks, I have been talking about loneliness. Firstly, a brief introduction to the topic, and then I wrote about a method of coping with loneliness.
There are various reasons that affect different people in terms of loneliness. One thing that may cause one person to be lonely may not affect other people at all. Some people prefer to be alone and find this peaceful and at the same time feel the prospect of being around a lot of people as lonely but do not enjoy this. For me I have isolated a main cause of my loneliness and that is not being able to speak the same language as the people around me. I am based in Asia and I am not as fluent in the language as I could be. But as my language proficiency increases, I am able to reduce the amount of loneliness I experience.
But enough about me. I always try to talk about something a little bit different and today I decided to talk about how loneliness can affect our self-esteem. Actually, it becomes a bit of a vicious cycle. Our lack of self-esteem can isolate us and cause loneliness and loneliness can contribute to our self-esteem. It seems like a trap that we can’t get out of, or maybe we can.
The key lies in our social skills. People that are particularly vulnerable to losing self-esteem from being lonely lack effective social skills. When they do socialize with people, they may have a feeling of rejection (whether real, or imagined) that could hinder future attempts at socializing. So, the take away from this is that we need to create bullet-proof social skills. This may explain why my lack of language skills could be creating loneliness for me; however, we don’t need perfect language skills to be sociable.
My advice is to join social clubs to be more sociable. There are plenty of clubs now running online because of the pandemic. Public speaking clubs are good like Toastmasters. You can find many other clubs on groups like meetup.com etc.
Self-esteem and loneliness
https://ejop.psychopen.eu/index.php/ejop/article/view/301/301.pdf
