Loneliness Researchers Best Advice For Those Feeling Alone

For a lot of people loneliness is a terrifying thing. However, it’s something that everyone experiences throughout life. Although most people avoid loneliness, a researcher named Sam Carr has learned to embrace it according to CNBC Make It.

Carr is a lecturer at the University of Bath and has been studying loneliness for six years, interviewing over 100 people. His most recent project, called the Loneliness Project, involved interviewing individuals from different countries that were all 80 or older to find out what loneliness meant to them.

In Carr's book, “All the Lonely People,” he writes “I think it’s only recently that I’ve realized that loneliness is a big part of all human suffering.”

Carr says that many people view loneliness as something that we need to get rid of. However, he sees it as an “inevitable part of life,” that doesn’t need to, and can’t, be avoided.

He expressed “loneliness will come and go, quite often as it chooses, over the course of human life, quite apart from our efforts to run away from it, or deny that or pretend that that’s not true.”

For those who are feeling lonely, Carr suggests that you don’t ignore the feeling or try to push it away. Throughout his research he has realized that the best way to deal with loneliness is to acknowledge the feeling and talk about how you’re feeling with others.

He says that loneliness is similar to grief, both are emotions that can only truly improve if you “move through it.”

Discussing our own loneliness with others can be “a critical driver for empathy,” says Carr. It can remind us that there are also others out there who suffer at times and help us to feel less alone in our struggles.

Curr declares that “to be alive is to be lonely.”