How To Fight Loneliness With Proper Emotional Hygiene

One of the most difficult things I had to endure while I still suffered from social anxiety disorder was loneliness. Because of my avoidant behavior I quickly ran out of friends or better yet they ran away from me. They started to avoid me and I quickly found myself to be pretty much alone. And being alone can be just fine you know. You have all the time to do whatever you want to do and no one bothers you with anything. But the problem with being alone is that you can quickly become lonely and this is a very destructive feeling. Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound that distorts your perceptions and scrambles your thinking. Loneliness makes you believe that those around you care much less about you than they actually do. Even when they care but don’t show it in a way that you would want them to show it, it makes you feel very sad and depressed. It makes you feel lonely. This distorted perception of the world makes you really afraid to reach out because why would you set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand. Loneliness really shouldn’t be taken lightly. Some studies have actually shown that chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14%, so in a way loneliness kills. And it actually impacts your health in a very negative way. Loneliness causes high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. It even suppresses the functioning of your immune system, which makes you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. Some scientists actually say that loneliness can be almost as dangerous as smoking and we all know how bad smoking is for your lungs. We all know that smoking causes cancer. We even have labels on the cigarette packs that tell us that smoking is bad. But no one ever tells us that loneliness is bad. No one ever tells you that loneliness can cause all sorts of diseases. That’s why it’s extremely important that you start paying attention to your emotional pain. You Must Prioritize Your Psychological Health We all practice personal hygiene. We all try to take care of our bodies in some way or another. We brush out teeth because we know that if we didn’t we would soon lose them. And we all know that if we get a cut on our skin we need to put a band-aid over it in order to protect it from getting infected. But very few of us practice emotional hygiene. So that’s what I want to encourage you to do… to start practicing emotional hygiene. I came across this term when watching a brilliant video by Guy Winch on TED Talks and I simply had to share this concept with you because I believe it can help you out. You can watch this video here. You see, we get emotionally hurt more often than we get physically hurt. Emotional injuries like rejection or loneliness cause us a lot of pain. And these injuries can impact out lives in dramatic ways and yet it doesn’t even occur to us that we should treat these injuries. But we should, because if we ignore them, our emotional health can drastically deteriorate. So start paying attention to emotional pain you experience and start treating your emotional wounds. Way too often we don’t even notice how lonely we are. We just feel the feeling of loneliness and we feel bad about ourselves but we don’t make anything about it. We keep spending lots and lots of time being lonely, feeling sorry for ourselves, being sad because of the situation we’re in, and focusing on the negative thoughts that are caused by loneliness. This kind of behavior can eventually lead to depression and can be a cause for all sorts of diseases. The problem is that we think that the light bulb will suddenly shine all by itself and that we’ll get an incredible insight all of a sudden and that we’ll be able to change the way we are. But unfortunately this doesn’t happen by itself. Every change needs to be driven by you. You need to stand behind every change. Now I’ve already talked a lot about what to do to overcome social anxiety so I won’t say anything about it in this post, however I want to give you a quick tip on what to do when you catch yourself engaging in negative thinking. What To Do When You Catch Yourself Engaging In Negative Thinking I want to give you a tip on how to stop this process of negative thinking that can lead to depression so you can get yourself out of it and do something about your situation in the future. You see, if you’re engaged in negative thinking you can’t really initiate a positive change in your life. You can’t be rational and you can’t start any other process that would help you change the way you feel right now. That’s why you need to pull yourself out of your negative thoughts. So here’s what you can do. Each time you have a worrying negative thought force yourself to focus on something else. Just make sure you focus on something positive and not on something else that is equally upsetting. You’ll notice that you’ll become much happier. So make sure to distract yourself with something positive whenever you find yourself thinking negatively. Start practicing emotional hygiene and you will notice incredibly positive changes. Now, since social anxiety makes you engage in negative thinking quite a lot, I would also advise you to take action and do something about your social anxiety. Stop waiting for things to change on their own because they won’t. It doesn’t work this way. However, there are ways to overcome social anxiety and people have done in the past. I overcame social anxiety disorder myself and I’m not the only one and I’m not the first one who did it either. So if I did it and hundreds and hundreds of other people before me were able to overcome social anxiety, so can you. You just need to take the right kind of action. And I’ve written an article that will show you the right moves to make. So click here, read the article and watch the videos that fully explain the concept of overcoming social anxiety. It will probably take you about 10… maybe 15 minutes but after finishing that article you will know exactly what to do to overcome social anxiety for good. You will know what you need to do to get rid of your social fears that hold you back right now and prevent you from living the life that you deserve to live. Every one of us deserves to live a full and satisfying life that’s full of happiness, positive emotions and things that make you want to wake up early in the morning. So check out that article and learn how to overcome social anxiety. You will find out what actions I took to beat my social phobia for good. It’s a process that anyone can follow to achieve similar results. And of course, if you have any questions, you can always email me and I’ll do my best to answer your question as soon as possible. I’m here to help you. I want to help you overcome your social anxiety and I will help you! But you have to have the desire to change first. Your desire to live a life without social anxiety has to be strong enough to pull you into taking action. Once you decide to do something about your social phobia… once you decide to change the way you live right now, it will get easier because you’ve got all the tools you need to overcome social anxiety available to you and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. So if you’re serious about improving your life and you don’t want to deal with emotional pain that is being cause by your anxiety, then read this article on how to overcome social anxiety disorder now.