WHY SOME OF US ARE LONELY ????

Close relationships play an important role in our lives. We all seek social and emotional support from our family and friends. Despite a need to establish relationships, many of us are unable to form strong bonds with others, the result is loneliness. Social psychologists define loneliness as an individuals’ emotional and cognitive reaction to having fewer and less satisfying relationships than he or she desires. In contrast, those people who simply do not want friends do not experience loneliness; they simply just desire solitude and tend to spend their leisure time in solitary activities.

The origins of dispositional loneliness include a combination of genetic factors, attachment style, and the opportunity for early social experiences with peers. By attachment style we refer to the degree of security we experience in our interpersonal relationships. It is initially developed through the interactions between infant and caregivers; it is then the infant acquires basic attitudes about self worth and interpersonal trust. Relationships that result in attachment style, which is either fearful-avoidant or preoccupied leads to negative cognitions like pessimism, self blame, mistrust of others etc. Individuals perceive themselves to be giving more than they receive. This perceived lack of reciprocity also leads to feelings of loneliness and not being sufficiently appreciated.

It is found that there is also some genetic component to loneliness. Some of us are predisposed to have more negative affects and feelings of depression, anxiety, unhappiness, fear of intimacy, feeling unappreciated etc. The third factor that results in loneliness is failure to develop social skills. We learn social skills by interacting with people. Researches show children who had attended preschool or had more play-related interactions were better at social skills and were liked more by peers. Without proper social skills people engage in self defeating behaviours like avoidance of others, stressful relationships or shyness or interpersonal aggression etc.

Well, it’s almost impossible to change one’s history by providing different genes or by altering what happened in early mother-child interaction. However, it is possible to learn and acquire new and more appropriate social skills. Some social psychologists suggest cognitive therapy where they try to alter the pattern of negativity which one has developed and encourage new thoughts, perceptions and expectations about social interactions. There are even social skills training where a person can learn how to interact with others in a friendly way, to avoid expressing anger and to make a casual conversation. Learning social skills definitely reduce loneliness to a large extent. While it is not easy to change long established patterns of behaviour and thinking but it can definitely be altered to a great extent with the help of a trained psychologist. As they say, if you want something you’ll have to try hard to get it because no one else is going to do it for you. Good luck J

LEARNED HELPLESSNESS AND DEPRESSION

Learned helplessness is a state where a person feels helpless to avoid a negative or unpleasant situation. This tendency is generally formed over several repeated encounters with an aversive stimuli/situation, which leads him to believe that he has no control over them. Sometimes the situation/aversive stimuli are escapable, but the person does not make any effort to get out of the situation. This happens because subsequently the person learns; all his effort will go in vain.

American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered this phenomenon of learned helplessness in an unexpected fashion. He and his colleagues were testing a particular learning theory on dogs, which involved giving electric shocks to dogs such that they couldn't avoid them. Later in the experiment, the dogs were put in open boxes from which they could escape, when given a shock. But, to the researcher’s surprise, the dogs made no attempt to escape i.e. when an animal is repeatedly exposed to an aversive stimulus which it cannot escape, it eventually stops trying to avoid the stimulus and behaves as if it is helpless to change the situation even when opportunities to escape become available.

Similarly in reactive depression a person faces series of negative uncontrollable events/stress (loss of relative/lover, failures, being dismissed from job etc). He/she feels they have no control over things that were happening to them. So, they give up trying. They learn that they are helpless and subsequently apply that piece of learning to any new situation too, even when they aren't helpless.

According to Seligman, people who suffer a series of such setbacks in life begin to believe that they have no control over any of the events in their lives’ and no matter what they do, things will turn out badly in the end. Therefore they give up trying, see themselves as failures and lose all motivation and interest in life.

The theory of learned helplessness also has been applied to many conditions and behaviours, including clinical depression, aging, violence, poverty, discrimination, parenting, academic achievement, drug abuse, and alcoholism , where a person shows a general inability or unwillingness to act, including low self-esteem, chronic failure, sadness, and physical illness.

In treating reactive depression cognitive behavioural therapy plays a vital role. The basic principle that underlies behavioural therapy is that if a thing can be learned it can be unlearned too. In case of such reactive depressions learned helplessness clearly explains why individuals may accept and remain passive in negative situations despite their clear ability to change them. Therapists here aim to break the conditioned conviction that “nothing will ever work”, by giving them simple tasks at which he/she can succeed, develop confidence and then move to harder ones.

Seligman says that the only way to help people who suffer from ‘learned helplessness’ depression is showing them that they can operate and deal effectively with their environment and are not mere victims of their fate. REMEMBER IT’S JUST A BAD DAY NOT A BAD LIFE!!!!!

HOW TO NOT LET OTHERS MAKE YOU FEEL BAD

There are times when others behave in a certain way that leave us feeling miserable. These emotions make you feel bad about yourself and others and take away your confidence.

Anger, jealousy and sadness are common natural emotions that we feel. These are completely natural emotional states and sometimes even serve a positive purpose like one that calls for a positive action, having rational expectations or considering pros and cons etc. It is rather how we respond to our emotions that lead to good or bad.

Our emotions and feelings in a way direct us and motivate us to process significant events in our life. They seem completely out of our control especially once they are triggered. Negative emotions are like viruses, they contaminate our normal “happy” thought processing and conditioning our mind to function on detrimental feelings and dominating our lives.

Situations like lack of money, a bad relationship, a rude boss, a hateful mother etc. are faced by most of us and its completely ok to feel bad about these situations. But this not how things go, our thoughts are constantly helping us to interpret the world around us, describing what’s happening, and trying to make sense of it by helping us interpret events, sights, sounds, smells, feelings. Without even realising it, we are interpreting and giving our own meanings to everything happening around us. We might decide that something is pleasant or nasty, good or bad, dangerous or safe. Here is when people create their own misery. We start interpreting the situation and end up feeling miserable about ourself.

We start from ....X ignored my hello... who does he think he is ... he always does this to me...everybody does this to me... everybody hates me..... I m so bad .... I hate myself .... why do I even exist and so on.

This is how we create a vicious chain of negative thoughts about oneself and others. When asked people they say it’s quite common for people to think this way and even completely out of their control and if their “others” were a little more considerate about their feelings or their behaviour could be fixed somehow, they’ll be happy.

But sadly we cannot control others, we might influence them to some extent but never control. The only person we can control is ourselves. As it is said nobody can make you feel bad without your consent, yes it is true...but it takes efforts to do so. Nothing good comes easy.

Our emotions are attached to our thoughts e.g. if you pick pink pencil colour you are bound to write pink and if you want to write blue you will have to change your pencil. This simple logic applies with us too. To feel good about a situation you’ll have to replace negative thought with a positive thought. First of all you’ll need to get hold of your immediate thought and feeling that is evoked by a triggering situation, now replace that thought with an alternate more positive thought and you’ll be left feeling better about a situation immediately.

This is a therapy which psychologists use with their clients, which I am going to write in my next blog i.e. detailed ways to control your emotions.