On last Thursday I met a 85 years old gentleman making great effort came to attend a meeting called by my colony secretary. While waiting for others to join the meeting, we both were talking for a while. He was kind enough with my broken Telugu! During the conversation I came to know that post retirement he and his wife are staying alone while kids are either in US or elsewhere. This gentleman is feeling loneliness. This used to be common in western world where beyond 18 your kids live alone. But, Indian family system is more closely netted family with parents and kids living in a same place. Now this disease is gripping India also!! This opens up a new area of illness which is very difficult to distinguish like physical illness, yes this is called psychological illness.
Loneliness
Loneliness creates a deep psychological wounds one that distorts our perception and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It makes us afraid to reach out because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand.
Loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. There is a lot of research on loneliness, and all of it is horrifying. Loneliness won't just make you miserable but it will kill you. Chronic loneliness increases chance of early death by 14 percent. Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It even supress functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable for many diseases. Scientists have concluded that long term loneliness has significant risk to your health equal to cigarette smoking. Cigarette packets come with warning that "smoking could kill you", but loneliness does not.
Thus it is import that we prioritize our psychological health that we practice emotional hygiene. Because, you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't know if you are injured.
Pay attention to psychological wounds, consult a Mental health professional (Psychologist or Psychiatrist).
Failure
In a day care center where three toddlers were playing with identical plastic toys, one need to slide the red button and a cute puppy would popup. One girl tried and her lower lip was trembling, another boy watched this and burst into tears without even touching the box. While the third kid tried everything possible and did not managed to slide the button and was screamed. Three different reactions to the same task for failure.
This happens in adults as well, in fact we all have a default set of feelings and believes that get triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks. Are you aware how your mind would react to failure? You need to be. Because if your mind convinces you that you are incapable of something and you believe it, then like first two toddlers you will begin to feel helpless and you will stop trying too soon, or you won't even try to all. And then you will be even more convinced that you can't succeed. This is the reason many in the society function below their actual potential. Because, somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it. Once we become convinced of something, its very difficult to change our mind. So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed.
You have to fight feeling of helplessness. You have to gain control over the situation. You have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins.
Our feelings and mind are not trust worthy friends as we thought. They are like a moody friend who can be totally supportive once and really unpleasant the next.
Rejection
Rejection is extremely painful. We think about all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were and what we wish we were not, we call ourselves names. This is because our self-esteem is already hurting, why would we go and damage further? We don't do physical cut, but we do all the time psychologically. Why? Because of our poor emotional hygiene. We don't prioritize our psychological health. Based on studies it is known that when your self-esteem is lower you are vulnerable to stress and anxiety that failure and rejection hurt more and it takes longer time to recover from them.
How to overcome? When you experience failure or rejection, first revive your self-esteem. When you are in any emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a true friend. Catch unhealthy psychological habits and change them.
Rumination
One of the unhealthy habit is rumination, that is replaying the scene over and over again in your head for days or even months. This can easily turn into a habit, very costly one for you. By spending so much time thinking about the event negative, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorder and even cardio-vascular disease.
The problem is the urge to ruminate can really strong and very important, so it is difficult habit to stop. Do you just two minutes of distraction is sufficient to break the urge of rumination in that moment.
By taking action when you are lonely by changing your response to failure by protecting your self-esteem by battling negative thinking you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience you will thrive.
Conclusion
Personal hygiene has helped life expectancy, by practicing psychological hygiene quality of our lives would improve.
If you need help, please contact your Mental Health Professional (Psychiatrist or Psychologist)
