As an introvert, I get lonely from a lack of connection, not from a lack of people. And that's a lot harder to solve.
Being alone and being lonely are two entirely different things. I love my alone time, and it's something I need to have every day—often multiple times a day—to recharge and reset. I never feel lonely during that time.
But I'm also energized by a meaningful one-on-one connection with a good friend, and I crave that just as much as solitude and quiet.
We've never had more ways to reach people, and it has never been this hard to actually be known by one.
You can open your phone at midnight and have a conversation with an AI that answers instantly, never gets tired of you, and never once asks anything hard back. For a lot of situations, this is amazing, but it’s not true connection.
You can scroll on social media for ten minutes and you've "seen" fifty people, but that’s not connection either, and there’s a good chance you set your phone down feeling a lot worse and more alone than before.
That's the paradox so many of us are living inside of right now. We are more reachable than any generation before us, and so many of us have never felt harder to actually reach.
The Surgeon General called this a loneliness epidemic a few years back, and nothing about the data since suggests it's letting up. Introverts can feel it especially hard, because everything about this noisy, always-on world quietly drains the exact energy we need to build something real.
To create the connection we crave, here are three things introverts can do when we're feeling lonely. They've worked for me, and I hope they'll work for you, too.
3 Ways to Combat Loneliness as an Introvert
1. Go deep with fewer people
Making friends as an adult feels hard, and there’s a researched reason behind it. Communication professor Jeffrey Hall found it takes roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to become real friends, and more than 200 hours before someone becomes a close friend.
It probably is no surprise that Hall also found small talk barely moved a friendship forward, no matter how many hours were logged. What actually worked was what he called meaningful talk: sharing opinions, feelings, and personal information, along with laughter.
I'm part of an in-person book club, and it's deepened my sense of connection in the most fulfilling ways. The format does the work Hall's research points to: the same small group, meeting regularly, with something meaningful to talk about.
If you don't have a group like that yet, I highly encourage you to start one.
2. Open up your journal and write to process all your emotions and thoughts
Journaling is another way to create connection, this time, with yourself. It's easy to find the source of our loneliness when we feel disconnected from our dearest friends, but it can be harder to identify when we're disconnected from ourselves.
Writing has always been my go-to for processing and working through things, especially the deeper stuff, and this is true for many introverts. Plus, research has found that there are many health benefits of journaling, from boosting your mood to decreasing symptoms of depression.
When it comes to our deepest feelings, like loneliness, sadness, and disappointment, the only way out is through. The best way to release these emotions is to give ourselves time to process them, uncover where they're coming from at the deepest level, and then feel our way through them to the other side (no matter how challenging it may be).
Even if you don't think you're making progress by journaling about your thoughts and feelings, over time, you'll see that you are. It's just like therapy: you may not feel as though you work through something in one session, but it's the culmination of many sessions that gets you from point A to point B.
There's a reason, and often a lesson, behind everything we feel.
3. Be of service to someone else
I learned this step from Gabby Bernstein, and it's a powerful one because it shifts your focus.
When we're feeling lonely, regardless of the reason or circumstance, our focus is on ourselves, and we have a very limited view of the way out when we're in that headspace.
By reaching out to someone we can help—whether that's a friend who lives alone, a coworker who's going through a rough patch, or a family member who would love to hear from us—being of service to that person becomes our focus instead of our loneliness.
I'm talking about a quick text or email, not a phone call (unless that's a call you want to make). Sometimes, a text is all it takes to make someone's day and replace your loneliness with a sense of purpose and connection in the process.