Did you ever wonder why you don’t like spending time by yourself?
I’m going to share with you how Chinese Medicine sees this and then take you through six simple strategies you can do to help work through your alone time.
Every aspect of Chinese medicine identifies how emotions and mental outlook affects your health. When it comes to your emotional and spiritual life impacting your health, most people know the Type A personality can create heart attacks. Chinese Medicine sees repressed rage and resentment as a significant player in breast cancer. Most of my breast cancer patients have high levels of repressed anger and resentment.
Chinese Medicine has your emotions and mental attitude as prequels to physical disease. Each of the five yin organs has the responsibility to express different feelings. These emotions can have a positive or negative effect on your health. The five emotions that can take away from your well-being are anxiety, sorrow, fear, anger, worry.
Most of the time, being uncomfortable when alone is about how you learned to treat yourself as a child. To get more info on this, check out my video, “Forgetting What We Were Taught,” or “Using Chinese Medicine to feel normal again,” on Youtube.
Spending too much time with these negative feelings changes your internal chatter. Your internal self-talk becomes critical. I call this internal chatter the three deaths: criticism, blame, and self-judgment. Three different and damaging ways you learned to communicate with yourself. Being that you can’t get away from yourself, negative self-talk can be very harmful. It’s like being around a bully 24×7. The only way to get away from the bully is by hiding with other people.
Criticism finds fault and disapproves of an action you’ve taken. You might say something like, “I could have done that better. I didn’t schedule my time well.”
Blame finds your actions unfavorably caused or influenced the outcome of a situation. When you see fault with your efforts, you might say things like, “If I hadn’t done that, this would not have happened.” Every once in a while, you might be at fault. More likely, you are blaming yourself for things that are out of your control. You have enough to do taking responsibility for your actions. You don’t need to own someone else’s actions.
Self-judgement is an unfavorable personal critique of you and who you are. You might say something like, “I’m always causing problems.” Or, “I’m a bad person.”
Self-judgement is a way to ensure you don’t interact with the world or try new things. Self-judgment isolates you from doing and trying to do something you want to do.
These three voices are a crucial reason why spending time alone can be so uncomfortable. The three deaths work together. You’ll find all three traveling around in your head at the same time.
Here are six simple strategies you can do to help avoid your alone time and the three deaths.
- Exercise can kick off the endorphins which boost mood. If you’re in a depressive funk, try jogging or some physical activity that pushes your limits. When the sweat starts rolling, so will the endorphins. With exercise, you don’t have to interact with others, but you’re not digging on being alone and want to release the emotions.
- Pick up a hobby. You don’t have to like the first one you pick up. Just pick up a hobby. Try it out and see if you like it. If you are uncomfortable meeting new people, maybe learn a new musical instrument. You can take one-on-one lessons and be around someone in a controlled environment with your small talk already identified. There is a time limit on how long you need to interact, and you don’t have to worry about making friends.
- Pick up yoga, qigong, or taichi. Each of these practices helps you get more in touch with yourself and helps to quiet your self-talk. The classes also give you an opportunity to meet others and practice small talk. Because a class is a specific amount of time, you can gain comfort in knowing a time limit exists. But, you have the option to try and make friends here, and can decide to get a coffee or sandwich afterward. To help ground yourself before going, try out one of my “Finding Balance” tools.
- Cruise Meetup.com. Meetup.com is a website that allows people to create online groups and organize in-person activities based on the group. You can find people with similar interests in your local community. You can attend an event. The benefit of meetups is about three-quarters of your “meeting new people” anxiety will already be addressed. You know what to small talk about, people have similar interests to you, and they want to meet other people. If you need help settling your nerves before going, try this powerful but simple breathing exercise.
- Try one of the geo-tracking games like Pokemon Go. Sure it’s a boomer thing, but you’re lonely, and you don’t like being by yourself. Besides that, boomers are usually friendly and easy to interact with. Sure, you might not want to go out and have a beer with them. But, you’re going to find you might enjoy talking with them and hearing some supportive comments from strangers.
- Search the web for local events happening around you. If you need to be around people and activity, this could be the one for you. If you want to make friends, this may be the most challenging option as you are trying to meet people in the wild. So, they’ll have their friends around them and their walls up. Unlike the previous suggestions that create a safe zone, meeting in the wild brings up everyone’s insecurities and defenses. To start doing some in-depth personal work on your insecurities, check out “Taking Back Your Power! How To Start Letting Go and Moving On from the Past.”
So, there you have it, six killer strategies to help you avoid your alone time and get you out of the house and out of your head.
At some point and time, you’re going to want to change how you see the world and how you talk to yourself. Check out my blog or Youtube channel for tools on using Classical Chinese Medicine in your everyday life to manage your emotions.
Or schedule a free initial consultation to learn how you can overcome your negative self-talk and sabotaging behaviors. Discover how you can create the life you want and how you can be comfortable in your skin no matter what the situation.
Either way, we are going to talk more about this in my blog and on my Youtube channel. We’re going to talk more about things you can do to help change negative self-talk!