How To Manage Loneliness When You Work From Home

How To Manage Loneliness When You Work From Home

One of the downsides of being a remote worker is the solitude and loneliness that often accompanies it. 

Remote workers often miss the lack of contact with one’s co-workers, the water-cooler banter, sharing a cup of coffee with a colleague at work, and, most of all, hanging out with work friends after work.

As a neuroscientist, John Cacioppo, put it, humans are wired for intimacy. Humans have a biological need to be in social groups and loneliness tells us we have a physical need for human contact.

It’s clear that the social distancing that characterizes the public-health response to COVID-19 is causing and exacerbating loneliness for people of all demographics. 

Understanding the history of “loneliness” could help you get through the pandemic. For instance, did you know that, before 1800 loneliness wasn’t even a word in regular use in the English language? 

Religious hermits secluded themselves in deserts and forests, but they weren’t lonely. Many artists and writers need solitude in order to create and for most introverts, being alone does not equate to being lonely. 

For loneliness to exist, two things are needed: a lack of meaning in one’s relationships (or lack thereof) and a sense of the self as separate from others.

Personally, I’ve often felt more alone when I’m in a relationship than when I delight in the pleasure of my own company. I’ve found that one of the best ways to mitigate loneliness is to learn to be a friend to yourself, a concept the Buddhists call Maitri.

Research has found that individualistic nations such as the U.K., the U.S., and much of Europe, until recently reported the highest levels of loneliness, by contrast with so-called collectivist cultures like Japan, China, Brazil. 

Some of the reasons why we don’t want to spend time alone, why being alone is such a scary place, are that we never learned to be comfortable in our own company.

In addition, for many Indian women, our self-image, especially as women, only exists in relation to other people. As the article here says, Indian women are never taught how to be alone, and that's a problem. 

“Usually we regard loneliness as an enemy,” says Buddhist teacher, Pema Chödrön. “When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or the left. We don’t want to sit and feel what we feel.”

She recommends the middle way and meditation as a way to stop resisting and struggling against our desire to make things work out one way or the other, and discover a fresh, unbiased state of being instead. 

“For to be without a reference point is the ultimate loneliness. It is also called enlightenment.”

For more emotional self-care tips, read my book Devi2Diva at Devi2Diva.