Don’t focus on negative behaviors
There is a well-known fact that people who feel lonely tend to focus on negative behaviors and forget about their positive connections with others. The truth is that anxiety and stress occur especially when you are feeling lonely and this intensifies your negative thoughts. As an effect, when you start to feel this way, your mind tries to find a rational explanation and invokes reasons that are not necessarily real – namely it will make you focus on what the people around you are not actually doing, such as not encouraging or complimenting you, and you will forget about their positive actions that really matter.Â
“Many of us get tunnel vision when it comes to affection and intimacy, in that we ‘count’ only certain behaviors while discounting others,” says Professor Floyd. “I might notice that my friends don’t tell me they love me, or don’t ‘like’ my social media posts, but I overlook the fact that they always volunteer to help when I have a home project to do. When people expand their definitions of affection and love to include a wider range of behaviors, they often discover that they aren’t as deprived as they originally thought.”
