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Hello and welcome to the next episode of the Single Girls’ Guide to Life, your weekly guide to embracing the single life in your twenties and thirties. Expect conversations around living and being alone, heartbreak, dates, and preparing for love and most importantly, how to make the most of the opportunity of single life. I'll be sharing insights, wisdom, and knowledge that will help you navigate your single life status and do it with confidence. I am Chantelle the Coach, a quarter-life and confidence coach that helps women who are single, separated or divorced to overcome doubt and uncertainty through their quarter-life crisis or other life change so that they can work out what they want, make decisions with confidence and take action towards living a life that you can thrive in.
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In today's episode, I wanted to explore the idea of connection. I specifically want to refer to a book called Lost Connections by Johann Hari. I want to talk through the ideas he presents regarding disconnection and I want to link that to the feelings of loneliness that I've previously spoken about on this podcast. Also, I therefore want to talk about the ways in which you can make sure you're still connected in real life. This can still be useful for you even if you don't inherently feel lonely, but there might be an aspect in your life that you're not completely satisfied with. It's very possible that you're not fully connected to it, and there's a disconnection and you need to find ways to reconnect with it. That's the kind of idea that I want to talk about in today's episode.
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When you're going through a crisis and a crisis is an intense period of time where you're feeling overwhelmed by the experience that you're having and the feelings that you're going through, during that you can feel quite worried, confused, and lost. You don't really know what's going on. It feels like life might be moving past, but you're not really moving with it. It's just kind of going on around you. Particularly, you can imagine this or remember this even when you first break up with someone and everything still has to continue even if you've had to move, but there's still that element of almost like an out of body experience to a degree like you're there, but not there. It's that where we start to “lose ourselves” in the questioning of our identity. That's when you realise that you're a crisis point. That's why it can be called that is because you are considering who you are now.
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From a breakup, particularly a long one or one that was very involved where maybe some of your identity or a good chunk of your identity was the presence of that other person and who you were together, once they're then gone, the idea of who you are on your own, as yourself, is put into question. It means that you're disconnected from yourself. You don't know who you are anymore. You don't necessarily know who you are as a full, complete person. I still think it's important to remember in moments like that, that you are. At any moment, you are always a whole complete functioning person. Just because you're not certain of a particular area or a number of areas in that case doesn't mean that you can't work out and feel that again. It's at that point when you might have lost your spark, or it's just dulled down a little bit, and you have to now work out who you are without this person. It's not just relationship breakups. This can happen if you changed jobs or fired from a job, if you have to move home, you can even experience it in a slightly different way.
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You probably experienced it when you went to uni, because you got to define who you were again. Whilst a lot of people were like ducks to water with that, some people can feel confused and lost about who they are without their family around. It's something that they may never have experienced. In some scenarios, depending on the extremity of what's happened, or just the way that you react to it and how your mind and body cope with it, you might end up questioning at certain points, “Is this depression? Am I depressed?” Depression is one of those mental health conditions and illnesses. It's the predominant mental health problem worldwide. According to the Mental Health Foundation, we often hear of depression and anxiety sometimes going hand in hand, but often being quite common. It's very easy to start questioning whether that is or isn't something that you're going through in that time.
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Some people would be like, “Of course I am. This is how it feels.” Other people are like, “Don't be silly.” I think the line of inquiry is valid because if you're waking up, you don’t have your spark. You feel like you're just going through life. That could be early symptoms of that or signs of that. Now, this isn't official medical advice. I'm not a medical expert, but I have made sure that I've read up on some differences. I think it's important as well to not throw the term depression around because that and anxiety can sometimes get used so frequently now and so casually to describe what is simply worry in the case of anxiety or low points in life for depression. That's because of what depression and anxiety both are, but there's a distinct difference between someone that can probably tell you that that's a medical condition rather than something that you're going through.
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Actually, there are two different types of depression. There may be more, but there is a distinction between situational depression and clinical depression. Situational resolves with time. That doesn't mean to say that you are depressed or you're a depressed person. However, it would be right to say that you may be experiencing a very low point in your life. There is a crossover with how that looks. Clinical, from what I read, is much more severe and it's much more difficult to resolve. Whereas with situational, it resolves with time. To me that sounded similar to what you could therefore cross over with this idea of a quarter-life crisis, because we know that we can get through any kind of quarter-life crisis, an intense period that happens between your twenties and thirties by moving through it, by taking action, by making changes in your life.
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The majority of people that go through a quarter-life crisis actually benefit from the experience. That often happens with having taken that action and make changes to find out who they really are and adapt to that situation. The answer may actually be yes to that, “Am I depressed?” But in that context of situation, or maybe now, obviously if you feel that you are depressed and it's not something that will go away with time, and even if you're not sure if it will or won't, seeking medical advice is the right thing to do here, to get people on board and to get help. Some people find that very difficult to do, and it's important to note that lots of people are going to deal with that differently.
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Now during my own crisis of leaving my marriage, getting divorced and kind of starting over, I asked the same question because I still was showing up to be fair. I still had some level of life in me, but there were points at which you get very upset or you're very confused by how you're feeling. There are questions that come from other people like, “Does this need to be looked at?” That's only people coming from a place of love. I never sought specific medical advice on it because I didn't feel I was. For my own experience of therapy, we discussed it prior. I used the question she'd asked me at the time to kind of determine if I felt I wasn't. I just went through that kind of process. She asked, “Do you think you are?” I remember at the time replying, “Not that when I've looked it up, it doesn't look like I can't get out of bed in the morning and find it difficult to get through a day. I can get through a day. It’s just not as bright and sunny as it normally is.” It's that kind of vibe.
As I say, I think there's a very distinct difference between depression. I don't think I'll be able to comprehend that because I don't believe that I had that. However, my decision in terms of how to get through this intense period of time, whether it's labeled with anything or not was to turn to self-help, which is effectively sometimes listening to a podcast like this is about it. It doesn't have to be that you're going through something particularly difficult. You just want guidance and you want ideas. I intensely went through that. One of the books I came across was Lost Connections by Johann Hari. It's called Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How to Find Hope. I was intrigued by the idea of this because of the hope element. To me, that meant that there was a solution.
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Within the book, Hari explores and talks about his own experiences of depression from quite a young age and how he had tried different medications. He actually goes into the book as to the non-drug-based kind of solutions. He looks at the causes and the reasons why we are maybe increasingly or just finding that a lot more people are depressed or it's just ongoing and not getting any better massively. He then looks at the ways in which hope can be found to come out the other side of that. Within his research and work, he introduces the nine reasons for disconnection in our lives. Those are disconnection to meaningful work, of the people, meaningful values, childhood trauma, status and respect, the natural world, a hopeful or secure future, and then he combines the last two as gene and brain changes.
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Now, when you listen to that list, maybe one of those stood out to you or a couple of them even. To me, considering the average millennial and particularly the average single millennial woman, it's very possible that a number of those disconnections are present in your life. They don't have to be either, but I wonder if there's an element of potentially being prone to some of those things. When I've previously discussed loneliness, that's a disconnection from other people being a primary concern for millennials. The fact that we don't know necessarily how to develop strong friendships with people because we're so reliant on technology, we've disconnected from actual people. I think the other thing is that our values are skewed and I'm pretty sure this is where some of my ideas come from on this, which is the concept of social media valuing the wrong things.
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The way we look rather than life as an experience, rushing to get ahead as opposed to enjoying the journey. Loss of community also feeds into both of those in terms of values. We don't necessarily value one another. We don't necessarily value teamwork so much and being there for one another. I don't know what situations different families are in. You've also got, when you look at that list and consider it, meaningful work. It depends if you're in a job that you love and you see the work as meaningful, even if it's not a helping job. A helping job is caring, nurses, teaching, anything like that where you're helping someone else, which is very clear to see the purpose in it. There are still people that can see purpose and meaning in them going to work in just let's say a supermarket. As long as you can find purpose within what you're doing and that there is a meaning behind it to you, that's the important bit. It doesn't inherently have to be that the most meaningful by everybody's perception as it were. You can still help and you can still have meaningful work by working in a supermarket. If you don't do your job, people wouldn't be able to have food, for example.
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There's another one in there that I think strikes a core possibly with millennials, which is a hopeful or secure future. I think times have changed very much now in that we don't know what's going to happen so much. The path we were led to believe maybe that we should follow or at least try out and that might lead to success isn't all that secure. The housing market's a really interesting one for millennials, I believe because how many single millennials now buy a house or are able to? Some do, don't get me wrong, but at the same time, the prospect of it for some is so far off. It makes it seem infinite that you're going to end up staying with your parents forever.
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The thought of moving out to rent seems a waste. The thought of trying to save up and ever have a wage secure enough to get a mortgage seems even more difficult. I can imagine there are elements of this for millennials, that when you read the book entirely and go into each of those in detail and what it explores would really speak to you potentially, but during a quarter-life crisis, you’re disconnected from yourself. It doesn't say that in that list there, but I think that's the bit where you find the conflict between what society wants you to be and who you want to be. Maybe that falls under meaningful values. Maybe your values and society's values don't match up, but you end up having this vision of what you see for your life. Whether that's traveling, working from home, living abroad, just not doing the nine to five, but everyone around you is doing it and is successful doing it potentially too, but it isn't really what you want. Waking up at six, getting out the door at seven, being at work by eight and just going through each day, just to be able to retire or to eventually go on holiday might not be something that you want to do.
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It might be that disconnection from meaningful work. As I said, values, maybe it's the future element. It’s a combination of the things that Harry exposed in his book. The idea that if you don't continue doing that means that you won't get success means that you feel like you're trapped in it. When in actual fact you just have to find a way to be connected to what you're doing again. For some, that would mean changing what you're doing and going out there to do the things you're doing. In Johann Hari's book, he talked about the hope of the other side.
Disconnection's key. If through the various studies, I'm not going to go into it again. It's all in that book and it's in-depth and in detail, I might add. It’s a fantastic book. It’s one of the first ones I've ever mentioned on the Instagram page. He talks about the seven ways that you can reconnect to your life. Quite simply, they're almost like the opposite of the disconnection. The seven connections that he mentioned are the connection to other people, to social prescribing, to meaningful work, to meaningful values, sympathetic joy, and overcoming addiction to the self, overcoming childhood trauma and restoring the future. It's this idea that we have to connect and understand ourselves, other people and what we're doing.
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You can't take on that list all in one go. You can't sit there and go, “I'm disconnected from this. I’m disconnected from that. I don't feel like I fit in this. I don't feel like I'm in the right place here,” and expect to turn it all around within a day, a week, a month, because that's unrealistic, but we do have to find that connection depending on your life. It depends on what area needs the most attention, or just needs that little bit of extra attention so that you can sort it out. Throughout this podcast and the various episodes, there's hopefully going to be more self-awareness going on that you reflect on what's going on in your life. You learn more about the potential things that might be causing disconnection in your life. I really liked the way of looking at this, being disconnected from something and how to reconnect with it. For example, my work is something that I'm very, very rarely ever disconnected from. It is one of the strongest things that I have a connection to ever since I moved from being in the theater world to the education world, and now into the personal development world, I suppose, there's always a purpose and a connection to what I'm doing in that sense.
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As from that trajectory, I'm not afraid to try new things and explore new ideas. There's some confidence within that, but at the same time, there are other elements, quite simply other people. That's coming up in a future episode in terms of how to actually make friends and keep those connections. It's really difficult. Making those friends and developing a friendship and keeping it is a lot easier said than done because life's now different. At school and university, it was very, very easy to find people to spend hours together and to have friends. Even if you're not friends with them now, it felt like you had friends and people around you, a support network, a group that you could get on with. Now, finding those people is so much more difficult. Everyone's busier. Everyone's got their own lives and to actually have an experience where you spend enough time with them to know them, to decide you like them and want to talk to them more, see them more and go and have adventures together and then actually trust them is so much more difficult unless you work with them. If you have work that is meaningful, that you enjoy and that you go to, and you've got a team that you work with, it's very possible that your friends are colleagues.
Now, one particular area that I think gets overlooked within friendships and just connection, in general, is the idea of empathy. Connecting with someone, someone else is not an easy thing to do. We should always be trying to understand the people around us rather than change us. There are some people in this world that you're not going to get on with as naturally as others. You may never get on because you have different backgrounds, beliefs, and systems, but this idea of actually getting to know people and connect with them and connect with yourself is really important.
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Empathy is being able to understand where they're coming from even if you don't quite know what it feels like. It’s being able to validate how they feel and also forgiving them to a degree or not judging them based on what's happened, what they've gone through, what they've done. It's seeing it from maybe how they experienced it. This was important for me because in terms of connecting to other people, it meant being vulnerable. It meant being open myself. It meant having empathy towards myself, I suppose. In that sense, I had to understand other people and I had to understand myself as well. There's an experience or an exercise that Johann Hari mentions that I had learned before I read the book and has since come up a number of times. It's mentioned in a Feel Better, Live More episode. That's a podcast by Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. It’s a wonderful podcast.
He is talking to Dr. David Hamilton. I refer to him as the kindness guy. He does a lot of work on kindness. He was talking about kindness and the Mother Theresa effect, which is a study on the act of empathy raising the immune system. The exercise that he mentioned within that podcast episode was the loving-kindness meditation. Now, Dr. David Hamilton's version of this is as follows. He's posted it on Instagram before and spoken about it. It's four lines. It's, “May you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be at peace?” Mine's very similar to that. Mine goes, “May you be happy, may you be healthy, may your life be free from suffering, may you be at peace.” It’s very, very seminar. Once you get yourself into a point at which you can sit and be still without distraction, you can say them out loud or do it internally. You repeat that, but direct those words towards different people.
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In the first instance, you direct them to yourself. You say, “May you be happy, may you be well, may you be safe, may you be at peace?” Then, you go through that again. You're just saying it quite slowly that you mean it when you're internally saying it or saying out loud. It's not rushing through it. You say it to someone that you love, someone that you have a very good relationship with, a good friendship, something that's strong. Then you repeat this a third time and you direct it towards someone that's kind of anonymous that you don't know at all but that you know of. I use always use the idea of like a cashier or someone that you've walked past, but someone that you remembered well enough, just someone random, but you have no connection to them. Then the last one that you do is you direct it towards someone that you don't get on well with, that you don't necessarily have the strongest relationship with.
This is the kind of exercise that takes five minutes. I very simply did this every single day for a while. It's that idea of forgiving others, forgiving yourself as well, being at ease with yourself, wishing yourself the best. The phrasing for me, “May you be free from suffering,” was quite a nice one to do within those things. It's that kind of idea of if you go back to Buddhist beliefs of man's suffering, it's that kind of releasing from that. As you work through this, the two at the end can be quite a challenge. Aiming it toward someone that you don't really know feels odd because you don't know them. You've got no context. And somehow you have to sort of imagine and connect with this person through the words that you're directing to them.
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The last one, which is from what I have known, the one that people find more difficult to do, means that they've got to well-wish someone that maybe they haven't got all my for a long time. It causes a bit of an internal conflict. You never have to speak to that person. You never have to direct those words actually to that person, but it is the idea of moving past that, reconnecting to yourself, to other people and to forgiving others and developing this empathy and this idea of kindness no matter what. No one is asking you to go out and be friends with that person again, but there is an element of moving towards kindness, openness, and connecting, understanding others, being empathetic. As I said, no, one's asking you to be their best friend. All you're trying to do is reconnect.
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Now, that's not the only thing that's in the book. The book itself, Lost Connections: Why You're Depressed and How To Find Hope was just the prompt for starting to consider this idea of connection. I think there's a lot more to this in terms of how we connect, how we can develop true connections, how to connect with those different things in the world. I hope that that's given you an idea of the areas in your life where you may be disconnected, where it might be useful to you to consider reconnecting and the ways in which you can.
Just to recap, because as ever, one of those that makes it difficult, the disconnections that Johann Hari describes are disconnection to meaningful work, other people, meaningful values, childhood trauma, status and respect, the natural world, a hopeful or secure future, and then combined, he's got genes and brain changes. Then the ways to reconnect, which he has researched and gone through the different things that made a difference in people's lives helped them find that hope and to get reconnected and to fill themselves again, was reconnecting to other people, social prescribing, meaningful work, meaningful values, sympathetic joy, and overcoming addiction to the self, overcoming childhood trauma and restoring the future.
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I highly recommend you go and check out the book itself. It goes into it in a lot of detail and explains all of those different elements that you can have a little look at. You can also, which is the way that I found out about Harry's work was listened to yet again another Feel Better, Live More podcast episode from Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. I believe it's episode 51 or 52 that have been put together to form number 94, which is called, Is Everything You Know About Depression Wrong? The episode featured this quote, “Home is where people notice when you're not there.” That really struck a chord in the sense of connection, what home is, what home means and what family really means in that sense.
I hope that that's given you an insight into why connection's important, how connection can be affecting your life, potentially. Look out for the areas in which you feel disconnected. Try out that exercise, the loving-kindness exercise. Try and use to develop that kind of empathy towards others and moving past it and finding a way to reconnect to yourself. If you've enjoyed this episode, please make sure that you subscribe or follow to make sure that you get your weekly dose of single girl listening. I would love to hear any thoughts, realizations, or reflections that you've had throughout this episode. Head on over to Instagram, @ChantelleTheCoach to share those. Until next time, keep thriving.