In this episode of Breakup Peptalks, Sarah explores the loneliness epidemic and why breakups can make us feel more isolated than ever. She shares practical strategies to rebuild connection, from deepening friendships to creating meaningful solo rituals that turn alone time into self-discovery. By the end, you’ll feel empowered to embrace your independence while opening yourself up to new, fulfilling relationships.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk for you. I'm Sarah Curnoles your breakup bestie, a certified life coach with years of experience helping, helping people just like you turned your breakup into the that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk, to heal your heart. Let go of they claim your power. Get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together and lets you to a new right off the bat world. If you's feeling lonely right now, maybe you turned this on because you're feeling lonely and you don't want to feel alone and you want to have that feeling of somebody's talking just to you. Look, if you're feeling lonely, you're not crazy and you're not alone mean. I could go into the fact that our culture or society right now is in a loneliness epidemic, but we're going to talk all about the specific loneliness that comes after a breakup and how to handle it.
(01:19):
I will be totally honest. It's something I'm still working and building for myself, and I think I've come a long way. I remember I went on this solo road trip and it had been something I'd wanted to do for a really, really long time. I'm sure there definitely had been a fantasy of this is something I'll do with the guy I am dating. But I was single at the time, and this came at a time in my life where I was going through a lot of change. I had just started my training to become a life coach. I quit my day job thinking leap in the net will appear. I thought I was on this really great path of healing after a kind of toxic breakup. And so I went on this road trip and it was six weeks and I had some time sprinkled throughout that I'd be with friends or I'd be going to a conference and I thought that would be enough and that would be a great balance of some alone time and some together time.
(02:38):
I will say I really avoided feeling any kind of loneliness, which it's basically a full-time job if you are on a cross country road trip for six weeks by yourself and you are driving through parts of this country that it's just miles a straight road and there's nothing. I had a lot of audio books that was really my big companion and some great playlists. But yeah, I remember one day calling over my Bluetooth and my phone calling all my friends and I think it was a Saturday afternoon and I had been driving for a long stretch in the middle of nowhere and just feeling so lonely and wanting to avoid that. So I was doing what people tell you to do, call your friends, reach out, and I was calling and leaving a message and calling and leaving a message and it just that day I didn't get anybody.
(03:42):
And actually nobody called me back that day either. And it was a hard day because I started telling myself these stories of why am I such a loser that nobody's picking up the phone for me. Why doesn't anybody want to talk to me? Why aren't they there for me? What's wrong with me? Does nobody want to be my friend? Do I not have any friends? Where are they? They must be doing something so amazing that they don't have time for me. And it's interesting the way our brain, when we are lonely, spins these awful stories that just sink us deeper and deeper and deeper. And I kind of have a theory about this and I'm going to go into my theory, but I want to finish my story first. And what I did during that trip was avoid my loneliness at all costs. And what learned years later was loneliness just gets louder when we do that, which is true.
(05:01):
It was a persistent companion that whole trip. And it is nagging and it is like a black hole sucking your energy and your excitement pulling you down. So I understand if you're feeling lonely, I understand what that feeling is. And it really took this last breakup I had that has inspired many of the things I teach people. I really took a totally different route with my loneliness that helped relieve the pressure because I knew what that was like to feel like I was avoiding my loneliness, doing the things I was supposed to be doing to try to feel better, but it actually felt worse and it didn't really work. And I was telling myself these awful stories. And then to contrast that with what I ended up doing and what I'm going to tell you in this episode, very different experiences. So before I go into what to do about your loneliness, I want to talk about specifically why it hit so hard after a breakup.
(06:20):
And it really is like a black hole, which is just a void, a vacuum almost, of it's this empty space where there used to be someone who was your best friend and your romantic partner. That's a big part of your life. And now there is a void and we don't like having a void or a space like that, a big gaping space in our life and we want to fill it. We don't want the space. We want to immediately fill it, which is why sometimes people jump right back into dating and they try to get another partner as quickly as possible, or they try to stay as busy as possible. Or one of the other things that can go in that void are those negative stories I talked about of why am I such a loser or I'm alone and I always will be, or nobody's going to love me again.
(07:22):
It's all of these awful stories that might also come into the void and makes me think of the old Kool-Aid man commercials. If you're an eighties baby like me, if you lived through the nineties, you probably remember these commercials where the Kool-Aid man who was in the shape of a drink picture, he was bright red, would come busting through walls of, I remember there was one that was like a courtroom scene and he bust through the wall of the courtroom and he left this cut out of himself and he'd be like, oh yeah, anybody else remember that? Or is it just me? Anyway, there would be this cutout in the wall of the shape of the Kool-Aid man, and that's what loneliness feels like is a empty space in the shape of the person who used to be your partner, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, whoever.
(08:33):
Just this empty space that's like a sucking vacuum, sucking your soul, sucking your energy. It's a real loss and heartbreak scientifically, if you look at it often has many similarities with going through withdrawal from addiction because when you're in a relationship, you are having regular boost to certain brain chemicals, the joy and pleasure hormones, chemicals, chemicals of dopamine and serotonin. And those are regularly getting fed into your brain, creating great stimulation. And when you go through heartbreak, you are at a loss of those things. And oftentimes there is a spike in cortisol, which is the stress response, right? So your brain has lost big sources of pleasure and joy and it has increased in the stress. And if you are feeling like a junkie going through withdrawal of your and physical pain, you can't control your emotions, you can't control your thoughts. Everything feels like it's upside down. That is real. The withdrawal symptoms are real and it is because of the loss of the relationship.
(10:09):
So there are emotional reasons why loneliness after a heartbreak feels awful. There are physiological, biological reasons why the loneliness after a breakup feels so specific and so awful. And then there are also the stories that we're telling ourself that are making it worse. So whatever your flavor of those stories might be, and it might be interesting for you to sort of eavesdrop on your own thoughts like you're trying to lurk and listen to what are the stories and telling myself that are reinforcing my loneliness. And maybe you can relate to some of the ones I said before of I'm such a loser, nobody's going to love me again. Where are the people that love me? I'm all alone. Nobody understands me.
(11:09):
So if you're going through this, I want you to know there's a good reason and there is something that we can do about it. So I want to talk about what to do with loneliness, and it's going to be really different than what most people tell you because most advice will tell you reach out to a friend and stay busy. I do think there is part of that that is helpful. It is good to reach out to friend. One of the first pieces of advice I tell somebody after a breakup is to put a couple friends on alert of, Hey, I'm going no contact or I'm not texting my ex as much. Do you mind if I reach out to you instead? Or do you mind if I call you just to have somebody to say goodnight to while I'm going through this really hard time? Those are great things to line up, and it's one piece of the strategy. It won't be the only one that helps you with loneliness.
(12:21):
So the piece that I think is different that nobody's really talking about, but it actually had the biggest impact on my life was I decided to befriend my loneliness. And this came from I was rereading, eat, pray, love, and she had a scene, I think she was in Italy, and her loneliness and her depression were persistent. She had been on medication for those things. And there's nothing wrong with being on medication for those things. I can't remember the details, but she had decided that she was taking herself off it, which she does not advise, but it's what she had done and decided to try like, well, what if instead of trying to kick these guys out all the time, what if I try to befriend them, invite them in, I'm already laying on the floor and I'm at my lowest. How much lower could I possibly get? And that's what I decided to do. Instead of running away from my loneliness, I thought, what if I sit with this feeling and invite it to my experience? It's already here. How much worse can it possibly get?
(13:46):
And what I found is that my loneliness, it's sort of like a rejected part of myself, of I have been running away from it for so long it so desperately just wanted to be invited. If you think about God bless those cartoons, oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the name inside out where it personifies these big emotions. And loneliness is just a character too. It's just a part of us. And she's always feeling validated because we're always pushing her away and telling her, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want anything to do with you. Go away. I can't handle it. Go, go, go. And that makes her feel even more lonely and even more isolated, which makes the feeling feel even bigger and more insurmountable.
(14:49):
So as challenging as the feeling of loneliness is, what if you just sat with it and you let the ache and the longing be there without trying to change it, without trying to fight it or make it go away or make it better or change it? What if you just sat with it and you let yourself feel it without telling yourself a story about it or saying, I'm going to get stuck in this forever or letting it define who you are. I feel lonely now, so I'm going to feel lonely forever. Don't let it define you, but what if you just let it be there?
(15:38):
The interesting thing is when we do that, it often will move away fairly quickly or it will shift to something else, but give it a try. You could even set a timer of, I'm going to sit with it for two minutes. I'm not even going to make myself do it for too long. I'm going to do two minutes and just be with it. So that's one idea of how to handle your loneliness, is to befriend it, be with it. Another way that you can be with your loneliness is if you start practicing micro connections. I think sometimes we put this pressure on our major friendships that all of our conversations have to be big, deep heart to hearts because that's what we feel like we've lost in our relationship, that we need to have now these big connections. And we're scared to reach out for that because we're worried we're going to be a burden.
(16:41):
And I could do a whole other podcast on how that's not true, and maybe I will, maybe I will someday. And those deep conversations are lovely. But there's also research that shows that the power of a weak tie, which are just the small, tiny, tiny, tiny connections that we have with people that you see, but you don't really have deep conversations with the person at the counter, at the gym or your Starbucks barista or the person who brings you up at the grocery store. Those little micro conversations that we have, those are called a weak tie. Those can actually have a significant impact on how connected you feel. So why not take this time when you're feeling a little isolated and take all the pressure of emotion or big connection out of it and just have a surface level mini conversation with the person who makes your coffee. Hey, how's it going? Did you the game last night or been busy for you today? Or It's a great color on you. It looks beautiful. Or these little tiny conversations actually can make you feel more connected to your community and help you feel less alone.
(18:13):
Another way to handle with your loneliness is sometimes loneliness is coming from a place of overfocus on ourself. I'm so alone, nobody understands me, and it can sometimes take a little bit of a jumpstart to shift out of it. And a way to do that is actually to volunteer. A friend of mine tells me this story that I found so inspiring that when she went through a big breakup in her life, after she had gone through some significant grief and mourning and she started to want to be a part of things again, she decided to volunteer helping kids with martial arts because she loves the martial arts and it really helped her feel good again. And I think she specifically was helping girls because she went through sort of a traumatic thing with her ex. And so it felt really good to teach these girls self-defense and ways that they get to feel empowered because she felt her power was taken from her by her previous relationship. And she was sort of passing on this wisdom to young girls of like, don't do what I did, but in a different context. And it really helped her reconnect to joy and connect to people again, connect to giving back in this greater sense of purpose, and it shifted her out of feeling so alone.
(19:56):
So those are three ideas to work with your loneliness and to look at it from different angles and perhaps embrace it or shift it in a way that might feel more empowering to you than simply just pushing it away or being scared of it, running away from it. So I hope that you learned something today and at the very least, as alone as you feel, as lonely as you feel, the interesting thing is it tells us this lie that we're so isolated that nobody understands us. But the funny thing is it's actually a universal feeling that so many people go through and so many people are experiencing that you're not alone is so relatable. We all know what that feels like, and you are not alone.
(21:00):
Maybe this is an invitation to deepen your connection with something else that's meaningful. I maybe that connection with yourself or your community or your friends. I really hope this resonated for you and helped you shift the way that you look at your loneliness. I would love to hear your feedback, so please feel free to leave a review of this podcast if you liked it. You can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to connect. I'm at Sarah Kernos, just my name. And if this really resonated with you, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend and pass this message along, share it with them and be like, Hey, there's some great ideas here. Maybe we could be loneliness buddies for each other, or we could go volunteer together, or we could try some of this. It's a great way to start building the bridge from you to another person to build that connection.
(22:15):
And if you are catching this on the day that it drops February 13th, the day before Valentine's Day, I am doing this episode very much on purpose so that you have it in time for Valentine's Day should you need the reminder about loneliness on a timely day that often overp prioritizes romantic couples. This is the last day of my Love Yourself more three day challenge. It's a three days of workshops that are all focused on building yourself love so that you can be your own best Valentine and take that pressure off of, like I said, the romantic, the coly, the stuff that feels icky right now perhaps. Anyway, I want to really turn that focus in on you. So I hope that you will still come join me for the final day. You can sign up over at Forget your ex now.com and the link will be in the show notes. I hope you will come join me. I would so love to have you there. Alright my friends, remember that your heart is so much stronger than you think and you are so much more loved than, alright, take good care of yourselves.
(23:39):
Bye for now. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Breakup Pep Talks. If you're ready to take the next step in healing your hearts that you can feel better, build confidence, and turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened, I'm currently accepting applications for new one-on-one clients. So head on over to forget your ex now.com to start your application and we can schedule a time that we can have a little chat and see if coaching with me is the right fit for you. Please don't wait. I only have a limited number of spots in my calendar and I want to make sure I have space for you. If this is how you want to start your next chapter of your one wild and precious life. All right, I will see you next time. Friends.