Holidays can feel distancing, but taking a proactive approach can help manage loneliness and your bipolar disorder.
The holidays can often be the hardest time of the year for dealing with loneliness and the mood shifts that can accompany it.
This year may be the perfect opportunity for a new personal project or tradition of sorts — and I’m not talking about a new hobby. I’m talking about learning to take a proactive approach to meet our own emotional needs and maintain our mental well-being and stability — especially when confronting difficulties and emotional stress.
This is something I’ve been working on for a while now. Because the upcoming holidays are challenging in different ways, they can help us face the hard feelings of loneliness and isolation and meet them head-on with new coping tools, renewed dedication, and a proactive mindset.
A Proactive Approach to Loneliness
To avoid the “holiday blues” and being pulled into any void that could lead to loneliness, unhappiness, or the darkness of bipolar depression during this holiday season, we will need some important skills.
Doing this really means having self-awareness, making the effort, and setting yourself up for success by being strategic and proactive — preparing as much as possible in advance.
A proactive approach up front can keep us out of the pitfalls and lows that we know we can run into around the end-of-year holidays. Even if there will be fewer and smaller social gatherings this season than in years past, we can still take a proactive approach to combat loneliness and maintain our mental well-being. This is a need we can be responsible for meeting.
Progress vs. Perfection With Personal Growth
I’ve found that it’s most helpful if we avoid perfectionism when starting this new “project.” In my experience, it takes time to learn to cope with loneliness and to meet our own emotional needs.
It’s an ongoing process with successes and setbacks.
The most important thing is simply to make progress. And we do that by aiming to do our best under the circumstances — not by expecting ourselves to“fix” the hard feelings entirely or never feel lonely again. So, as we start out, remember to aim for doing your best and making progress.
Opportunities to Focus on and Prioritize Our Well-Being
Having the awareness that the holidays are approaching and the desire to avoid loneliness gives us the opportunity to be focused and proactive. It allows us to prioritize this important need for the holiday season.
What do you want for the holidays? If you think about it, it’s probably not a physical gift or a present.
If you’re like me, what you really want is not to feel lonely, down, or left out. You want to be festive, stay in good spirits, and enjoy the holidays.
With this goal in mind, we can set out to achieve it. And the skills we learn, I’ve found, can help us at other times when we feel lonely.
Another goal or personal project for this holiday season, if you find yourself alone and down, is to try to keep yourself out of a downward spiral that leads to depression.
How I Avoid the Loneliness Trap
Like I said, this upcoming holiday season is an opportunity to meet this challenge of loneliness head-on. The best way to do that might be surprising — but it also just might be effective.
Throwing ourselves into the holiday spirit, finding gratitude, peace, and joy, being festive, and focusing on the good are all actions we can take and attitudes we can try to adopt. Even if it feels forced, uncomfortable, or inauthentic at first, doing these things is often more helpful than allowing ourselves to slip into loneliness and the “holiday blues.”
We cannot be happy and lonely at the same time. We cannot entertain negative emotions while we are focused on the good, staying festive, or actively seeking out and finding gratitude, peace, and joy. If we can occupy ourselves in happiness, it literally keeps us out of the blues.
Bipolar Depression and Loneliness
Before I was diagnosed with bipolar, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. I know how hard it is to muster up the energy to try something new and challenging when feeling overwhelmed and/or in the depths of depression.
The good news is that working on our happiness — finding what makes us feel a small sense of joy or gratitude, and then gradually building it up, making progress — also helps us to overcome depression. The emotion of happiness literally creates feel-good chemicals in the mind, and that helps us during hard times and depressive episodes.
Also, once we find ways to avoid the pitfalls, it helps us to learn some new coping tools and effective ways to stay happy. This is important because when living with depression, anxiety, and bipolar, it is too easy to stay in fear, stay in our thoughts, stay in our heads, and stay out of happiness. That keeps us stuck in a dangerous place.
For me, this was a big motivation. As a means to combat the depression I found myself in, I wanted to grow — to challenge some of my thinking patterns, approach my relationships differently, and learn ways to be more present and open to happiness. Over time, this proactive approach helped me start to feel good about myself and build my self-confidence.
When you think about the holidays and feel an impending sense of loneliness and dread, try to think of it this way: Coping with this year’s holidays could be the stepping stones to long-term growth and happiness.
Being Alone vs. Feeling Lonely
One more thing about loneliness to consider during the holidays is that sometimes loneliness can be more about our own emotional needs not being met than the physical state of being alone.
Maintaining our mental well-being is a need. Loneliness is a lack of a need being met and an indication that we can address this need ourselves. Being alone does not automatically need to create feelings of loneliness.
It takes practice, but we have to start allowing thoughts that serve us to fill our minds — not thoughts that only make the loneliness worse. I do this by focusing on mindfulness and practicing meditation.
It creates space between thoughts and emotions and allows some distance to decide whether thoughts are helpful or not, worth engaging in, or worth letting go. Then we can start to think productively. This means purposefully thinking thoughts that make you feel good — even when you’re by yourself.
In other words, it’s during the times we find ourselves alone that we need to discover how to be our own best friend. It’s true what they say: “If you make friends with yourself, you will never be alone.”
How Can We Be Our Own Best Friend?
For our mental well-being, this is very important. Taking a proactive approach to loneliness also means finding ways to occupy your mind and time when you find yourself alone. Finding something that feels meaningful, soothing, or personally satisfying can make a real difference. This will, in my experience, take your mind off being alone, so you don’t generate those strong feelings.
It’s also true that we can engage ourselves during times of actual loneliness. By interacting with ourselves — reading a book, learning something new, being creative, writing, exercising, and more — we can decrease the feelings of loneliness and isolation, even when we’re on our own.
This works because it’s taking our focus off our loneliness. Loneliness is a common default emotional reaction and a negative pattern; breaking the default thinking, creating new, productive thinking, or finding ways to occupy the mind helps tremendously in hard times.
For me, an easy go-to when thinking about my thoughts is to purposefully focus on my dreams, goals, and vision. Thinking about how I can help myself or come up with solutions to any sort of problem. It’s all about discovering what naturally engages your mind or feels meaningful to you.
The best way to not end up in loneliness is to keep our thoughts out of it. It’s about learning to master our minds (gradually, as an ongoing process that takes time and effort).
Though this holiday season may be a time of careful risk assessment, with a proactive approach, we can all still make the best of it. It takes effort to grow and break problematic patterns. But it’s totally doable and well worth it. Stop the loneliness pattern for happiness and a safe, happy holiday!
UPDATED: Originally posted November 24, 2020