How Can Being Lonely Affect Your Mental Health?

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Loneliness and social isolation can have a significant impact on your mental health. Studies have shown that people who are socially isolated experience more stress, have lower self-esteem and are more likely to have sleep problems than people who have strong social support. All of these things can have a negative effect on your general wellbeing.

Being lonely can also contribute to mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression. Social isolation has also been linked to rarer mental health conditions like schizophrenia. If you are concerned that your feelings of loneliness are developing into a mental health problem, you may find it helpful to talk to your GP.

Sometimes feeling lonely can feel so overwhelming that you have suicidal thoughts. If this happens, remember that you can pick up the phone at any time of night or day and talk to the Samaritans.

How Can A Mental Health Problem Lead To Loneliness?

There are many different reasons that having a mental health problem can make you feel lonely. Your mental health problem may affect the way you see yourself or you may feel lonely because of how other people see you.

How You See Yourself

Mental health problems can often lead to low self-esteem and a poor
self-image. This may be part of your mental health problem, or it may result from stigma or discrimination you have experienced because of your mental health. You may not feel confident that people want to have social contact with you, or you may feel that people don’t understand you or see you as different or strange. This could lead you to avoid social contact and isolate yourself, making you increasingly lonely. See How to increase your self-esteem for more information.

If you have a condition such as anxiety or a phobia, you may find social contact or leaving the house difficult. As a result, you may become socially isolated, leading to feelings of loneliness.

Medication that you take for your condition can affect the way you see yourself. It may have changed your appearance or the way you communicate. You may have lost or put on weight, or your medication may make you feel drowsy. Some medication can cause shaking or slurred speech and you may worry that other people will make incorrect judgements about you. Or you may have to avoid drinking alcohol and find it difficult to admit this to your friends. All of this can have an impact on how confident you feel about meeting people socially, and cause you to withdraw from social contact.
 
How Other People See You

If you have a mental health problem, you may find that some people are reluctant to engage with you because of the prejudice they feel towards people they see as different. You may have found that your friends stopped keeping in contact with you when they found out about your mental health problems or that the way they reacted made you question your friendships. This may mean you become less willing to trust other people, and you may start to avoid social contact with others.

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