Recognizing the Four Warning Signs of Dangerous Loneliness

Social isolation is deadly. Isolation and loneliness are to be avoided. We learned a major lesson during COVID. I have found four warning signs that indicate loneliness is around the corner and, unless corrected will lead to a permanent and damaging condition. You may find others, but these give us a start.

1) Your current friends are the same age or older than you are

Every day there are fewer and fewer people in the world your age or older. The remedy is to make younger friends.

Fourteen years ago I joined Toastmasters. A world wide organization, Toastmasters members are often younger professionals who want to improve their speaking and leadership skills. Many of these folks dive into the Toastmaster educational program, achieve their goals, and move on. Thriving Toastmaster clubs around the world prioritize finding new members.

What that means for me is that I’m engaged with younger people. Weekly. We interact and challenge one another for better performance. I am working as a team with younger people to achieve mutual skill building.

Our club’s motto: A fun and friendly place to meet and speak.

And we do have fun in addition to meeting educational goals. All of this is valuable social interaction for a 80 year-old.

Besides social interaction, we have a proven track record of helping folks get over any fear of public speaking.

2) You stop making new friends

Two years ago my wife and I moved to an independent living center in a retirement facility that also includes assisted living and medical care components.

In the particular facility where we live, the environment encourages making friends. We have every opportunity to meet people because we often eat together. You can invite a friend to dinner, or in our facility, the hostess will often seat you with new residents or residents you don’t know.

The facility also provides many social, recreational, and educational activities. These opportunities provide ways to be engaged with others.

Not everyone avails themselves with these opportunities to meet new people, however. Not surprisingly, these folks often complain of loneliness.

During COVID my wife and I felt the drain on our well-being because of the isolation. It was a clear transition moving into our new residence as to how much better we felt just having potential friends around. People we hadn’t even met yet!

Not every retirement facility offers this hospitality. You can “go down to dinner” but nobody there will help you meet new people. You go alone, with family, or take your meal home. We go in order to meet people, and build life-enhancing relationships.

3) You are no longer able to get up and out

Potential friends don’t wander through your living room. You have to go out and make friends. The less able you are to get out, the more likely will be your isolation and loneliness.

Our retirement facility has an assisted living facility built in. Because residents need help with some items on the activities of daily living (ADL) chart, they are where the caregivers can help meet needs. To help avoid isolation, the facility treats its residents like family. Residents eat together. They play together. They watch movies and do other activities together.

You can always hire help in your home to provide assistance for those ADLs. Having help come in may not solve the isolation problem.

4) You are no longer mentally flexible

I have hearing loss. It took a good minute to find a correct hearing-aide setting so that I could converse at the dinner table in our residence without the ambient noise of the room or the diners nearby overwhelming my hearing aides.

One night my wife asked why I wasn’t participating in the conversation as I once did. And I told her that I couldn’t hear the responses or questions. This experience draws attention to the fact that you can be surrounded by people and still be isolated. I knew what was going on and my audiologist kept adjusting things until we found a solution and I could hear once again and therefore participate.

My daughter’s mother-in-law has severe hearing loss. She realized that not being able to hear was going to isolate her so she did something about it. She asked people to use a hand-held microphone she so she could hear what they were saying. When she could no longer go to visit her friends she kept up by using her phone. When hearing enough through the phone became a problem, she became a champion of texting. At age 88 she opted for a cochlear implant to help. These hearing devices are an important way to stave off isolation.

My Toastmaster club did a quick pivot the first two weeks of COVID and started using Zoom to hold meetings. Now we have many members who can’t come to the meeting in person. So we now run a hybrid meeting that blends in person and remote members at the same meeting.

If you lose your ability to pivot to new remedies, often new technologies, you may become isolated even if the room is full of people.

Isolation is deadly. Paying attention to these warning signs for yourself and others may help you avoid loneliness. Share this post with your friends and family and, if you haven't already done, start the conversation. Please share your thoughts on early warning signs.

Ed Zinkiewicz

Your Aging-in-Life Strategist

#MentalHealth #Loneliness #Wellbeing #Connections #RetireTo