Ep #55: Loneliness

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:09.6] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Alpha Male Coach podcast. The only podcast that teaches men the cognitive mastery and alpha mindset that it takes to become an influential and irresistible man of confidence. Here is your host, certified life coach and international man of mystery, Kevin Aillaud.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:32.7] KA: What’s up my brothers. Welcome back to The Alpha Male Coach podcast. I am your host Keven Aillaud and this is the start of an emotion series that will last aa few weeks before I introduce a results series.

Now, what I mean by results is the results of cognitive mastery and emotional ownership and that is going to blow your mind and stay all the way to the end of this episode because I’m going to make you all an offer that you will really want to take because it will elevate you to a level in your life that goes way beyond listening to the podcast every week, which I know is already changing lives due to the response I’ve received via emails and comments and reviews.

You know what guys? Speaking of reviews, you know, I do every week, I’m just going to keep doing it. Go to iTunes, leave me a five-star rating, leave me a review. So many of you guys are doing this, I’m seeing a lot of it if you’ve already done it, I appreciate it, I love you guys for that. If you have not done that yet and you love this podcast, just jump over to iTunes, leave me that five-star rating, hit me with a real quick review.

All right guys, today we are talking about loneliness. And loneliness is not as serious as we think it is. I know that there are all kinds of pseudo-scientific reports that create a correlation between loneliness and health risks and I know a lot of you take loneliness very seriously, you think it’s a very big problem. I just want you to know, it’s not a problem.

That’s what we’re going to talk about today. It’s a feeling that a lot of my students struggle with a lot and I think it’s one of those feelings that we think would go away if we changed our circumstances. I mean, we always kind of think changing a circumstance will solve our problems but with loneliness specifically, I think we really think that.

[0:02:21.1] KA: Remember guys, a problem is always just a thought. Always, there is no problem that is not a thought. Changing a circumstance never solves a problem, only changing your thoughts about a circumstance will solve a problem. As you will hear on this episode, that is true of loneliness, especially. Let’s start at the beginning. Loneliness is a feeling. Now, I know that sounds obvious but I think loneliness is one of those emotions where it’s really important to be careful how you talk about experiencing it because we tend to say, I’m lonely, right? That’s the words we use, I’m lonely.

That’s not unique to loneliness of course because linguistically, you know, we say I’m sad, I’m happy, I’m mad and we do that with a lot of emotions and I think that somehow, lonely sounds more like a state of being. For example, we’ll say about someone, I think they’re just lonely, right? We mean like their whole life is lonely.

We don’t do that with other emotions, you know? We don’t say, I think he’s just mad and mean it to be that that person is always like in a state of anger. We think mad is kind of like a time limited emotion that you might have but lonely, we talk about it like it’s a way of life or like it’s an emotion meta state.

I call that a state of being. You know, in the Spartan Agoge program, we work on making indomitable self-confidence a state of being. A state of being that’s just ongoing. It’s like the kind of person we are or just the kind of life that we have.

[0:03:55.0] KA: Loneliness isn’t any of those things and you’re not a lonely person. You’re not having a lonely time in your life. You’re not lonely. Full stop, right? You’re a person who is having thoughts that are creating a set of physical vibrations in your body that we call loneliness. That’s what an emotion is, it’s a cellular vibration in your body.

Those vibrations differ from person to person. Remember guys, there are emotions and there are feelings so just a quick recap here. Emotions are chemicals that are released from the brain and travel into the body. Feelings are the effects of the chemical emotion entering the cells of your body and creating a change or a vibration

I think, loneliness is a form of sadness. Sadness is the universal emotion and loneliness is the feeling we get when we name specific vibration that occurs in ourselves based on our evolving language and ability to communicate. Loneliness is a feeling, it’s not a state of being or a way that you are. It’s just a set of physical vibrations in your body.

Now, what causes loneliness? You guys know this so let me hear you say it out loud, don’t be shy, whoever you are, shout it out. It’s a thought, right? Thoughts create emotions, all feelings are caused by thoughts. This is one of the feelings where I think we’re most likely to get that wrong. We think that loneliness is caused by not having enough friends or the right kind of friends or not having a partner, the right kind of partner, we’re not having a family or the right kind of family.

[0:05:30.7] KA: But it’s not caused by any of that, it’s a feeling caused by our thoughts. I think the most common thought we have that creates loneliness is, I’m alone which is pretty obvious and why it is a derivative of sadness, the cognition that creates sadness is I miss someone or something that I love and so the thought of I’m alone is a form of that.

What I think is fascinating about loneliness is that people who are physically alone can feel loneliness. But so can people who are physically around other people. Even more instructive is the opposite, right? That you can be alone completely by yourself and never feel loneliness. We often think loneliness has to do with having other people around us but it doesn’t.

Many of us have experienced the loneliness of being right next to someone and believing that that person doesn’t understand us or doesn’t love us. Then we feel lonely because we’re thinking we’re alone. When you’re in a relationship of any kind, romantic or friendship or family, where you’re creating feelings of alienation with your own thoughts, you may feel extremely lonely even when you’re near another person.

Even if you live with them and you’re around them all the time. I think that’s because humans evolved from small families in groups to tribe, large tribal societies and we don’t like to feel lonely. I think that’s because we usually associate it with rejection and that’s why I think we find loneliness so painful is that we often have it mixed up with rejection that we have manufactured in our own brain. If it’s not rejection by someone specific, we make it just sort of this blanket rejection of us by the world or community in general, right? Whatever our community that we’re feeling rejected by.

[0:07:18.3] KA: I think our brains think loneliness is going to kill us because in primitive times, you know, those hunter gatherer tribes, being left alone was actually pretty dangerous. You were probably not going to survive on your own and so the same way that our brains are susceptible to rejection and to taking rejection very painfully, I think we have the same thing with loneliness.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we have to feel terrible, right guys? It’s just a way of understanding why our brains may think that something is dangerous when it’s not. I also think society encourages this. Bear with me on this, understand guys that most of society is locked in the illusion of the beta condition where there is a constant emphasis on the external world, the material world as being the problem.

There’s all this social science talking about how loneliness is such a public health problem and is caused by social isolation and people who are lonely and isolated have worse health outcomes. I’m going to explain in a minute about how I think we should understand that social science research because I think it misunderstands the problem with loneliness. I think we all misunderstand loneliness.

Loneliness is not about not being able to be with other people. Loneliness is about not being able to be alone with yourself. The reason that we experience loneliness so intensely is that we believe we need other people to provide our feelings of connection and love and belonging and that feels so desperate to us because most of us are not creating that connection and that love and that belonging with ourselves.

[0:09:06.1] KA: I always like to think about how throughout history and think about this, throughout history, there have been religions and there still are where people go into seclusion for months or even years of meditative worship on their own. You know, Christians in the desert, there are Buddhist monks who do this, people do silent retreats, sometimes together but sometimes in isolation and they either do it for years.

Check this out, if being alone were fatal and a huge health risk, why would this be such a consistent part of human society, of human history? Furthermore, how is it that that religious aesthetics who withdrew from the world were able to be so happy, generous and loving, given that they were always alone. I think that the difference is that people who undertake those periods don’t feel alone because they’re communing with something.

They might call it god, they might call it awareness and they might call it themselves. But the concept is the same. Now listen, I’m not saying that we should all go live in the mountains alone, in fact, the separation from society is such a big part of that kind of meditative practice because it’s not for most people.

[0:10:23.1] KA: Also, you won’t be able to listen to the podcast, they don’t have WiFi when you’re in a cave all by yourself. You know, don’t do that. My point is that living alone or living separately is not a bad thing and has not always been linked to feeling lonely or desperate or to it being a bad thing or a problem.

I do think it would benefit us to think less about why other people aren’t connecting with us and think more about why we aren’t connecting with ourselves. Because when we feel lonely and we try to get other people to solve it for us, it’s a temporary situation. It’s like a Band-Aid.

It may distract us from our lack of connection with ourselves but as soon as we’re alone again, we’ll feel lonely again. Sometimes we’ll feel lonely even when we’re with those people we try to connect with because we’re relying on people outside of ourselves to make us feel okay about ourselves and that doesn’t work.

What is so fascinating is that even though it seems like the obvious solution, most people actually don’t react to loneliness by reaching out to create connection. If other people did solve loneliness, right? If loneliness really was a problem created by a lack of social interaction, then it would be simple for most people to deal with.

[0:11:43.2] KA: You know, you could call a friend, you could meet with an acquaintance for a drink, you could walk up to a stranger in the grocery store if you had to, you could walk up to a stranger on the street but that’s not what happens. When we feel lonely, a lot of us just sit around and usually, we buffer or we ruminate by ourselves because in our brains, we’ve already decided that we are alone. We’re already lonely, we’re already alone.

Why would we reach out to anyone? That my brother is because he same thought pattern that gives rise to loneliness, which is the lack of connection to yourself, is also the thought pattern that prevents connection with other people. Because it’s the same thing. When you don’t connect to yourself, you can’t connect to other people.

The thought that creates the thoughts that create loneliness don’t actually motivate connection to other people. They just produce more loneliness because if you don’t like being alone it is because you don’t like being alone with yourself and if you don’t like yourself, you can’t connect with other people either. So even though there are two thought patterns I see that create loneliness, they both boil down to really the same problem.

The first one is that you may not want to be alone because you feel sad or lonely when you are alone with your own thoughts because your own thoughts about yourself or your life are so negative. So obviously that is your thinking then being around other people is just a temporary distraction. If you don’t like yourself and you don’t like your life and you don’t think that being with yourself is okay then being with other people is not going to feel that great.

It is only going to be temporary for you anyway. In fact, it is like a form of buffering right? You don’t want to feel lonely because you don’t want to be with yourself. So being with other people is a way to avoid that feeling and then the other option is that when you make being alone itself means something bad about you. You believe that your loneliness comes from the belief that other people don’t like you or you aren’t good enough and that is the same problem in disguise.

You assume that other people are rejecting you because you are rejecting yourself. You already don’t think you’re good enough and you project that onto other people. It is all the same, you feel lonely because you don’t like your own company and because you don’t like yourself and that is the same reason that you can feel lonely whether you are alone or surrounded by other people. If you are rejecting yourself, if you don’t love yourself.

[0:14:08.3] If you aren’t connecting with yourself, it doesn’t matter how often you socialize or who’s around you. You will feel lonely because it is all your thoughts and you know what is so interesting? Is like my students will say things like I feel fine on the weekday nights but if I am home on a weekend nights, alone, I’m really lonely and that’s so interesting to me, right? Because really think about this guys, weekdays and weekends are at entirely arbitrary human invention.

That we completely made up, it is basically only existed in this way, this weekend-weekday way since factories were introduced in the labor movement. The only reason my students feel different is because they are giving themselves different meanings in their mind, right? You are thinking different thoughts about yourself and whether it is okay or normal or good enough to be home one night a weekday versus another, a weekend and what it means about you and if other people like you.

Check this out, I used to feel lonely quite frequently and it was interesting to put together this podcast because now I really can’t remember the last time I felt lonely and it’s been years. So it has really been a long time and I spent a lot of time alone. I still spend a lot of time alone and I never feel lonely and you know what? Feeling lonely is okay. There is nothing wrong with it. It is just a feeling it is not something to terribly avoid. I am totally willing to feel lonely but I just don’t feel it anymore.

It just doesn’t happen because first of all I love myself and I am connected to myself. I like my own company. I like hanging out with myself the same way I would like hanging out with a buddy, with a friend. I am connected to myself and so being alone with myself is like hanging out with a friend. It feels connected. I don’t feel lonely when I am alone because I am never alone. I am always with myself and number two, I know that if I do want to feel connected to someone else.

[0:16:09.4] Another person, another human being, if I want to feel part of a social community or part of a relationship with someone else, I just have to think about it because when you are hanging out with someone and you are feeling connected to them it’s only caused by your thoughts. It is not caused by them that is why you can be around lots of different people and still feel lonely or you can be around of people and feel really connected and energized. It just depends on the way you think.

So I mentioned that there are these studies showing that loneliness could be a health risk and the issues with these studies is that they show correlation without any actual causal relationship. I think that these studies misunderstand or don’t take into account what causes loneliness. It is not lack of a kind of superficial human interaction. It’s all your thoughts, the thoughts that cause loneliness make you less likely to go seek out human interaction.

Because you have already decided you are alone and the human brain will always make it’s thoughts come true. That’s the model, thoughts create results. You will always produce more of what you think. So if you think that you’re alone, if you think that you are lonely, if you think that you are isolated, if you think that you don’t have connections, if you think that no one likes you, if you think that no one wants to be around you, you will just make more of that come true.

And you won’t like being around yourself. Here is the thing guys, if we actually wanted to reduce the instance of loneliness or isolation then teaching cognitive mastery and emotional ownership would be one of the best things we can do. Mind management and learning how to connect to ourselves is always I believe going to be the first line of defense against loneliness and it is not even a line of defense because there is nothing wrong with loneliness.

[0:17:59.2] Loneliness is not a problem. It is just a feeling caused by your thoughts, which is nothing to resists or avoid and the ultimate cause is not being willing to be with yourself and not knowing how to like and connect to yourself, which is something that most people don’t know how to do. So the next time you are feeling lonely brother that is the answer. You got to connect with yourself. So ask yourself, how can you enjoy your own company?

How can you connect to yourself? And if you want to take a smaller step, how can you think about a relationship in your life that you feel good about even if that person isn’t around. It doesn’t matter who it is, focus on those thoughts of connection and you’ll be surprised at how quickly loneliness can fade and that will help you see that it is all a product of your thoughts. It has nothing to do with what is going on around you.

So you don’t have to be lonely. Don’t be lonely or look, be lonely if you want but just remember, it’s always created by your thoughts. So look, if you struggle with loneliness, past focused thinking, relationships, insecurity, impulsive behavior and you’re ready to commit to a process that will change your life, then go ahead and check out the Elevated Alpha Society Spartan Agoge Program.

I am offering this program to 50 men who are ready to commit to elevating their alpha and living the life they’re meant to live. Now I am going to talk a little bit about this program because I know you’re out there and you are ready to remove the barriers that prevent you from personal greatness and this program is the one that will get you there. So let me start by telling you this, the Agoge is a one-year program. I have set it up so you can pay for the entire year and save a little bit of money or you can just pay month to month.

[0:19:53.2] But either way, understand that this is a one year commitment that you make to yourself for 365 days you will be taken through daily self-study work, weekly focused questions aimed at a specific result, which I am going to talk about those results in just a minute but there is also monthly themes that bring awareness to your limiting belief. Now you guys can read all about the program and how it works on the website and I will put that in the show notes too so you can get to that easily.

What I want to talk to you about briefly is the results you can expect from one year of cognitive mastery and emotional ownership training. Now I told you I will do a full podcast on each of these results and explain to you the benefits of each in future episodes. For now, the four results of cognitive mastery and emotional ownership are future-focused thinking, amazing relationships, indomitable self-confidence and mastery over your behavior.

Future-focused thinking is training your brain to hold a strong mental framework around what you are committed to creating in your life instead of your brain ruminating on the past or using the past to predict your capacities in the future. So this has a lot to do with wealth and a lot to do with health and of course, it has to do with relationships as well. Amazing relationships means you take back the power in your relationships with people.

You determine how your relationships are demonstrated and how you show up. You create boundaries, you eliminate manuals and attract people to you like moths to a flame. Indomitable self-confidence is where I began as a life coach and as I mentioned earlier, indomitable self-confidence is a state of being. Self-confidence is an emotion but ISC is a total state that you live from and make your choices from and it relies on the three pillars of self-confidence.

[0:21:46.4] Which I discussed in podcast number three and finally, mastery over your behavior means you do the things you want to do, you don’t do the things you don’t want to do and you stop all impulsive or compulsive actions like buffering and procrastination. You are always in control of your actions when you are in control of your mind and emotions. Now guys like I said, I will do a full podcast episode on each of these results and explain to you the benefits of each of these.

Like stopping buffering and stopping procrastinating for example but what I want you to know not is that I am taking the first 50 men through a full year of their Agoge training and once we have 50 men in the program, I will start a waiting list for new participants. So don’t miss this opportunity to change your life and make it the way you want it. There is no secret scroll brother, there is no magic potion. You get the results in your life that you want through cognitive mastery and emotional ownership combined with effort and focus when you do the work, you develop the skills and you get the results.

It really is that simple so you can join the Agoge now and start your journey to have what you deserve, creating what you want and living the life of your dreams. There is nothing stopping you, nothing holding you back, except your own brain, except the thoughts, the sentences that are happening in your brain.

That is it and you are the master of your mind. So go check that out, go to thealphamalecoach.com and click on Elevated Alpha Society. It is right there on the top of the menu. That is what I got for you today guys. Until next week when we continue with the emotion series, elevate your alpha.

[END OF EPISODE]

[0:23:37.4] ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Alpha Male Coach Podcast. If you enjoyed what you’ve heard and want even more, sign up for Unleash Your Alpha, your guide to shifting to the alpha mindset, at the alphamalecoach.com/unleash.

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