Does Meditation Help You Overcome Loneliness?

Meditation can teach you a lot about yourself, even going as far as helping you find your true purpose. When meditation is done under a profound state of focus, you can reach a level of tranquility you didn’t know you were capable of experiencing, as well as helping you detach. 

Detachment can be towards others or anything that doesn’t serve a purpose in your life. Many second guess the idea of detaching from someone else, even if the person they’re detaching from, in question, makes them feel lonely. 

Forming a small circle of high-quality emotional connections is far more important than the number of people that are in our life that we label friends, even when upon inspection, these people wouldn’t meet the basic threshold for friendship. 

Meditation helps you see the true colors of others, which may result in detachment but, on the flip side, forming better connections that suit your purpose. Even meditation alone can help you feel less lonely by making you enjoy your own company. 

There’s nothing wrong with being alone by choice, but when you’re lonely for circumstances that are outside of your control, and thus, negatively impact how you feel, it’s unhealthy and something to address as soon as possible, as it can pose a danger to the individual in question that’s lonely. 

For instance, loneliness has been associated with a reduction of overall performance and creativity, as well as affecting people in other areas that are even more grave. 

We’ll explain how meditation can help someone overcome their loneliness, or at the very least, reduce it. But this isn’t a guarantee. 

Loneliness is a serious matter so this will not apply to everyone. But for those that want to adopt meditation as a habit in their day to day and at the same time, want to make the best out of their situation, I’ll present some of the ways meditation can help. 

Meditation helps you connect with your true self, and have a deep feeling of peace where you feel happier and have an easier time forming connections. 

Learning to enjoy your own company makes you less dependent on others, something meditation teaches you. At the end of the day, the only person that will stick with you no matter what is you. You might as well learn to love that person. 

Now, that’s not to say that you can live a life of complete solitude with zero human interaction, but being someone that enjoys my own company, when I back in the day couldn’t bear the thought of being alone, I can confirm that getting to know myself and spending a substantial amount of time with myself has helped me identify who serves a purpose in my life vs. who is there merely to fill the blank. 

A common characteristic in the greatest inventors is that they spent a lot of time alone. The popular image of someone being alone tends to be pretty negative, but there’s a major difference between being alone and loneliness.

You can feel lonely with other people but you can feel accompanied by being on your own. With meditation, you’re able to have a deeper emotional connection with people. 

You become more compassionate and adopt traits that make you someone attractive to form bonds with. 

It’s also easier to wheel out who’s in your life only because they need you and who’s in your life because they genuinely care about you. 

These are trivial things in becoming less lonely, as well as the quality of time spent with others.

It’s easier to get people’s vibes with meditation, but the beauty is that you apply the non-judgment principle in your day-to-day life, assuming you practice non-judgment Meditation, one of the most common forms of meditation where you observe thoughts without judgment. 

Meditation tends to be something we do solo, but it’s also that way we have the freedom to experiment with ourselves which meditation works best, whenever we want. Meditating with others doesn’t give you the same luxury, but on the flip side, you may learn to connect better with that person and even the meditation experience becomes less lonely. 

However, something you can do, at least to start with, is finding a like-minded group of people to meditate with and get a deeper sense of collective consciousness. For many, this does the trick in making them feel less lonely.

The Relationship Between Superficial Relationships, Deep Relationships, and Feeling Lonely

The sooner you focus on the number of people in your life, vs the quality of people in your life, the better off you’re likely to be. 

I can see the notion that having a bunch of friends would make people feel less lonely, but it’s superficial. You can only form so many genuine connections before the quality starts decreasing. Genuine friendships require some form of maintenance. 

But if we’re talking about a relationship, it’s even more important that you both connect on an emotional level. This will drastically decrease the risk for you to feel lonely as even forming a relationship with the wrong person can make you feel lonely. At that point, you are better off by yourself. 

There’s the attachment of course, but fortunately, most meditations tackle attachment and help us to detach. 

Detachment when used at the right time can benefit you and make you feel less lonely overall, by closing one door but opening another, better door. 

One thing is certain, the more you learn to love yourself and accept yourself for who you are, the more you can do something about it and the more likely you are to form genuine bonds with others that are likely to last. 

And while you can build lasting relationships with others, none will last as long as your own, which is why your relationship with yourself is a crucial component to a good relationship with others and keeping loneliness at bay.

Rejecting Loneliness and Embracing Being Alone

If you enjoy being by yourself, it’s difficult to take away your independence and freedom. 

However, if you feel alone and meditation alone isn’t serving you a purpose, you would need to seek help by other means. Now, meditation helps a lot of people in both an indirect and a direct way to combat loneliness. 

At the very least, with meditation, you spend a lot of quality time with yourself and get to know yourself at a deeper level. 

The better your relationship is with yourself, the easier it will be to form good relationships with others. 

Being alone by choice gives you room for trying new things that would lead to your growth, without asking anyone for permission. Being alone can be liberating, but for those that are unacquainted with it, the amount of freedom can be overwhelming. 

By our very nature, we still have a crew mentality, and we can’t survive without others. On the flip side, we can increase our reliance on ourselves and what we once needed others for, which we can reach by ourselves. 

Being by ourselves doesn’t sound fun at first, because we have to face a side of us that can be rather uncomfortable. 

But once that part is dealt with over time, other things start falling into place, and where once, being alone was seen as debilitating now provides a source of strength, deep thinking, and new ideas, much like our greatest inventors. 

Now, there’s a time and place for relationships and connections and being by yourself, it’s all about finding a balance that works for you. 

You may not enjoy being alone to the same degree someone else does – that’s okay, at the end of the day, meditation is a journey where we can learn about what makes us happier. We’re all different, but finding a balance is achievable for a lot of people. 

The best way to approach a relationship with yourself is to treat yourself like your best friend. 

And since how you treat yourself correlates with how you treat others most of the time, the more of the loving and kind energy you spread with others the less alone you are likely to feel. 

What Else Can You Do? That Meditation Helps You With

First and foremost, with meditation, you shouldn’t attach any expectations to the practice. It may or may not go how you had planned, but as long as you enjoy the act of meditating, you’re more likely to stick through. 

Meditation is by no means a direct substitute for loneliness, even if it can make you less lonely. If you, however, find that you can’t feel less lonely by natural means, you would obviously need the assistance of a professional.

Supplementing meditation with other activities is one of the ways meditation works best. 

For instance, if you meditate and decide to step out of your comfort zone, go for a walk, try new things or pick up new hobbies, you would be spending quality time by yourself, that you can end up enjoying and ultimately associate those activities with spending time with yourself. 

Meditation can help you overcome many fears stemming from social anxiety, for instance. The more confident you become, the easier the day-to-day becomes. All changes happen inside with meditation before they start showing on the outside.