What to do if you’re feeling alone this Christmas? 5 ways to feel better

My worst Christmas ever, alone in Vancouver, healing from calling off my engagement, down with Covid, unable to fly home and with a flooded apartment.

Christmas is meant to be a time filled with festivities, love, and lots of people around you. Whether it’s family, friends, colleagues at work parties or cosying up with your partner. But for many of you, this just isn’t the case. 

Some of you are physically isolated, either unable to be with loved ones, or don’t have loved ones to spend it with. Some of you are with loved ones, but feel alone - despite all the Hallmark merriment outside. And I don’t know what is worse, really. I’ve spent Christmassess feeling both. 

It can be a time of intense pressure and isolation, intermingled into a strange blur of feelings. 

In these past few years as we’ve seen more and more emphasis on mental health and anxiety alleviation, pop culture has jumped on the bandwagon of reframing solo Christmasses as times for empowerment and indulgence. Netflix films, magazines, and podcasts harp on about how those who spend Christmas feeling alone are the new cool kids on the block, the ones that can change the status quo and reframe Christmas from a family-time into an empowered solo-time. 

 A period of time where, in feeling alone, you’re told to be liberated into not caring what anyone else thinks, eating whatever you want, creating your own festive celebrations, and doing whatever the heck makes you happy. 

You’re also told to treat this time as a period of intense life reflection. 

What do I want out of life? What do I want out of the year ahead?

And so with all of these mixed messages, we feel a heavy weight of pressure.

A pressure to…do something. A pressure to make this Christmas into something.

Do I relax and say **** it to everyone?

Do I treat it as a period of transformation?

Do I just indulge and treat myself?

What the heck am I meant to do?

It’s a confusing, weird, hard time. 

Whilst everyone else who has family and friends to spend it with doesn’t really get a choice, they just have to do the festivities in front of them (and isn’t there a strange delicious liberation to not having that choice after all?),  you’re put into a spot of more pressure and more ‘doing’.

Thinking to yourself…

Am I meant to be relaxing, indulging, and watching Christmas films on repeat?

Am I meant to be taking a long solitary walk outside and reflecting on the status of my life?

Am I meant to be ‘empowering’ myself and journaling all day?

Am I meant to be saying heck with the traditions and making today my own?

It’s exhausting.

And this idea that feeling solo at Christmas can have its upsides is frankly, unhelpful. 

Because the reality is, you don’t want to feel alone.

You’re built and wired for connection.

Sure you can get by alone, you can do it alone, you can survive. 

But why should you?

You want to spend it with your loved one, feeling safe, warm, cuddled up and comfortable. You want to have your own joy. Your own relaxation - with another. You want to feel deeply grateful for the love in your life. 

Not alone.

So what do you do?

Well, if the stuff you read out there is depressing you, I am hopeful that this will not. 

Here are 5 things that might help:

1. Lean into how you feel and give yourself some self-compassion.

Far too often the advice we receive is about pushing away the painful feelings and overriding them with activities, with doing, with stuff. The problem with this strategy is that they don’t actually go away. They just get buried deeper into us and get stuck there. This, then becomes part of our psyche and something that we have to live with (like a micro-trauma) and unless we actively resolve it by bringing it up to our consciousness, it can start to rule our life. So you want to avoid burying things. 

What you want to do, is give yourself the space and time to just feel how you feel. Notice what comes up for you. Notice the thoughts you’re having. Notice how hard it feels. Notice all your emotions - your grief, your sadness, your depression. Notice them, and let them be there.

And after a few minutes of noticing them, and feeling them, can you extend to yourself a little gentle compassion?

Just a little acknowledgement of how hard it is right now - because it is. It really is. And anyone who tries to diminish that is disconnected from the pain of your big, beautiful heart. 

Can you give yourself a few minutes of care, gentleness, kindness? This is self-compassion.

The beautiful thing here is that even just extending a little of this to yourself can absolutely transform your life. Self-compassion is probably one of the strongest behaviours we can learn to build to support us in life - it literally transforms shame and guilt. 

So allowing yourself to feel the pain, and then meeting yourself to soothe that pain, is a game-changer. Don’t run from it. Sit with it. Cocoon yourself with it - and then make the choice to cocoon yourself with some acknowledgement, love and care. 

Watch it transform. 

2. Cocoon yourself with love and things you love.

One of the main reasons we love to be in a healthy and secure intimate relationship is because that partner is someone who often meets our needs. Humans have a terribly habit of neglecting our own needs - we tend to wait for someone else to tell us that we are worthy of them, or to give them to us. Often we don’t even know that we have needs. So a fast way to feel better about feeling alone, is to get curious about what it is that makes you feel loved. Is it delicious food? Is it wearing soft fabrics? Is it giving yourself time for an extra long workout? Write those down, and then do them. 

3. Reflect on what you want more of 

As you cocoon yourself with love, let yourself become aware of the things that make you happy, the things that you crave and yearn for. These are the things that you will want to start to make a plan to integrate into your new year. This isn’t about taking time out to do a big life audit or write new years resolutions - these often don’t work. This is about simply noticing, as you tend to yourself and start to meet your own needs, what strikes you as something that you’ve neglected? What is it that resonates with you? And how can you start to do more of this for yourself going forward? For me, years ago, it was as simple as acknowledging I need to cook myself more delicious meals more regularly and wear more beautiful clothes around the house, rather than my old raggedy tracksuit pants. This simple change increased my sense of self-care, agency, and choice. This then increased my self-esteem, which then led to further changes down the road (like choosing to prioritise my relationships, since I knew that this was a big area I wanted to figure out to find even more happiness). Little micro-actions can make a huge difference incrementally .

4. Forgive yourself

Forgive yourself for feeling alone. Forgive yourself for feeling rubbish this Christmas. Forgive yourself for finding things hard. The more that you can forgive yourself, just mentally or writing it down, whatever works for you, the faster you can let go of any emotions that are weighing you down. We all make mistakes. We are all human. We all struggle and suffer. Life is suffering. You are not alone in this - we are all doing it, most of the time. So can you forgive yourself? How much can you forgive yourself? And if there’s something blocking it, can you forgive that?

5. Extend love to others.

This is a big one that pop culture talks about that I do agree with. Volunteering, caring for animals, elderly or homeless folks, whoever in your community might be alone - is a brilliant way to transform your feelings of being alone into feelings of being connected and held by a common humanity. It doesn’t have to be a big deal or something big and scary that you take days out to commit to. It can be as simple as donating some money online to causes that you care about and informing yourself about how you can help. It might be connecting with neighbours or anyone else that you see on their own this Christmas. Just extending a bit of care and connection can do wonders. 

So this Christmas, even if you feel alone, it’s okay. It’s okay to cocoon yourself and feel the pain. There are millions, even billions of people who feel alone today. And in that, you are not alone. I am with you, and you can be with you too. 

DM me if any of this resonates. I will be here.