--- title: What Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely description: Therapists share the low-effort steps they take in their own lives when isolation starts to creep in. canonical: https://time.com/6835564/what-therapists-do-when-lonely/ author: Angela Haupt article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2024-02-29T14:43:02.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:03:10.125Z article:section: Health og:title: 9 Things Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely og:description: Therapists share the low-effort steps they take in their own lives when isolation starts to creep in. og:url: https://time.com/6835564/what-therapists-do-when-lonely/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8a8d88e3fffd0b72/698a48f686f68e3f686f3b93/TherapistsLonely.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 9 Things Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely twitter:description: Therapists share the low-effort steps they take in their own lives when isolation starts to creep in. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8a8d88e3fffd0b72/698a48f686f68e3f686f3b93/TherapistsLonely.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # 9 Things Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely > Sponsored content. 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Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=c0c3bd0e-dc68-43dd-9d0e-beefa6574e11&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online [Watch (HLS stream): Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oxvh4VUE.m3u8) (4:07)  _Published 2023-08-24. The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. A modern-day remix might look like this: a person still on a couch, but at home, scrolling through a constantly refreshing selection of mental-health content on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram._  by [Angela Haupt](https://time.com/author/angela-haupt/)  ## Angela Haupt Feb 29, 2024 2:43 PM UTC  Illustrations by Brown Bird Design for TIME  by [Angela Haupt](https://time.com/author/angela-haupt/)  ## Angela Haupt Feb 29, 2024 2:43 PM UTC True friendships can take years to develop—which isn’t exactly comforting to the [1 in 3 U.S. adults](https://www.psychiatry.org/News-room/News-Releases/New-APA-Poll-One-in-Three-Americans-Feels-Lonely-E) who say they are lonely right now. But you don’t need to wait for a new BFF to feel better. Small acts can help give you immediate relief from loneliness, experts say. We asked therapists what low-effort steps they take in their own lives when isolation starts to creep in. ## **Join an easy group class** When Courtney Morgan, a therapist in Louisville, Ky., wants to be around like-minded people without having to try too hard, she goes to a yoga class. “Sometimes I want to feel connected without actively engaging in a conversation,” she says. She tells her clients to seek out structured programming that they’re interested in, too. If want to try a group class—whether it’s fitness-related, educational, something artsy, or in a different realm entirely—Morgan recommends searching for options through social media, email newsletters, or your local library. During your first class, aim to appear approachable, she suggests. Resist the [urge to look at your phone](https://time.com/6554322/how-to-use-social-media-less/), make eye contact with people, smile, ask a stranger if you can sit next to them, and thank the instructor. All are small ways to feel better connected. ## **Do a 5-minute loving-kindness meditation** We’re not always kind to ourselves when we’re lonely. That’s part of the reason why Suzette Bray, a therapist in Burbank, Calif., does a quick loving-kindness meditation, a type of practice that originates from the Buddhist tradition, first thing in the morning. “The idea is that you’re going to set your intention to cultivate compassion and send loving wishes toward yourself and others,” she says. Close your eyes and repeat a few positive phrases—first toward yourself, and then toward others. For example: “May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I live with ease. May you be happy, may you be healthy, and may you live with ease.” “You’re sending those wishes to neutral individuals like the barista, or your neighbor, or the person you drove past sitting at a bus stop,” Bray says. “Then, the really cool part is you identify people you struggle with, and you send love to them, too. It really is a reminder of our connection to the world, and that we’re all part of the shared human condition.” ## **Do what you used to love as a kid** A friend once asked Allison Guilbault, a therapist in Morristown, N.J., where she found community as a child, before life got in the way of making time for personal pursuits. The answer: swimming and dancing. So Guilbault revisited those long-neglected interests. Swimming more has opened up new social circles of like-minded people, and so has taking a dance class at a local studio. “It’s been absolutely incredible,” she says. “I enter the doors and find immediate connection. I legitimately have friends there.” ## **Flip through old photos** It’s so easy to forget fun, fulfilling times when you’re all alone. But looking at photos of favorite memories can help. “It immediately sparks joy,” says San Francisco therapist Erika Bent, who does this whenever she feels isolated. “Thinking of beautiful moments helps me remember that I’m worthy of connection.” It also helps “reignite the possibility” of feeling less alone, she says—which is sometimes the most powerful antidote to loneliness. ## **Go people-watching** When Samantha Bender, a social worker in El Paso, Texas, feels lonely, she heads to a local coffee shop where she can people-watch while sipping a saffron latte and reading the latest Stephen King novel. “Sometimes loneliness isn't about our direct relationships,” she says, “but how we feel in relation to the world around us.” There’s so much going on in public spaces—new sounds, scents, and sights—that it grounds her in the present moment and distracts her from tinges of loneliness. “You can soak it all in and feel like you're part of something without having to extend a lot of effort,” she says. “We don’t always have the mental energy and capacity to connect with others one-on-one.” ## **Try something new** Sometimes Bent gets stuck in the routine of heading straight home after work—but after many evenings doing the same thing, she starts to feel isolated. “Monotony makes me feel worse,” she says. In those moments, she takes out the to-do list where she logs new things she'd like to try: a bar to check out, a new salsa dancing spot, a hiking meet-up. Trying something new sparks a shift in her mood while fostering much-needed connection. The thought of going hiking with strangers, for example, had always made her anxious—but it stepping out of her comfort zone was “a beautiful way to meet people I otherwise wouldn't have.” Even admiring new scenery helps her break out of a rut. And then there’s salsa dancing. The first time she went, it felt hard, and it was certainly a social risk: Dancers were paired with strangers. “But it was so much fun,” she says, and the experience made it almost impossible to feel lonely. ## **Send a voice text** Audrey Schoen, a marriage and family therapist in Granite Bay, Calif., loves communicating via voice message. When she meets someone new and exchanges contact info, she sends them an audio message instead of firing off a text. And when she feels lonely, she reaches out to friends in the same way—or replays old voice messages that she saved. “I love receiving voice messages, and I love sending them,” she says. “They feel so much more personal,” and are an especially fun way to keep in touch with friends who live far away. ## **Connect with yourself** If Bender is lonely but feels like staying home, she turns to creative hobbies like coloring, journaling, or reading. “They help me connect to myself,” she says. She particularly likes to do these activities while sitting next to her husband: no interaction necessary. Simply being in each other’s presence, she says, is healing, and helps squash any inkling of loneliness. ## **Cuddle a pet** Spending just [10 minutes](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190715114302.htm) interacting with cats and dogs reduces levels of the stress hormone cortisol—so it’s no wonder Guilbault seeks out her pups when she craves company. “I find it hard to feel lonely in the presence of animals,” she says. “There’s love there, and there’s loyalty there.” Plus, pets open the door to social opportunities. After Guilbault enrolled one of her dogs in agility classes, she met a number of acquaintances and made one good friend. She takes her pups on frequent hikes and inevitably sees other people on the trail—helpful on days when she feels lonely but not up to engaging in drawn-out conversations. Guilbault once advised a client who was having trouble finding connection to take her two poodles to a local park and position herself in a way that was “really open.” That meant not scrolling through her phone and instead looking around and smiling. “Dogs are an invitation,” Guilbault says. “She didn’t walk away from this with her new best friend, but she had a really pleasurable afternoon where she made small talk with people who came over and asked to pet her dog.” Sometimes, experts agree, those small moments can make the biggest difference in overcoming loneliness. ### More From TIME ## Transcript For mental health issues you might be avoiding right now. One, you don't have the life you had before the pandemic. You never will again. When the pandemic was happening and everyone was experiencing lots of like mental health issues, it put a spotlight on mental health creators that were posting online. You can't love someone else until you love yourself as bullsht. Because one end implies that people with low self-esteem or mental health issues are incapable of loving others. Just so. With that, I have a disclaimer on my, you know, TikTok and Instagram that this is not therapy or my mental health pics are not specifically tailored to you. Sure, I'm a licensed therapist, but I'm not your lessons therapist. All the online spaces where I share content. Yes. Even those livestreams where you shoot me questions are not therapy sessions, so I want somebody to like taking my content and then think about it and analyze it. Therapy speak is a new way of saying psychobabble. They're usually more like vulnerable words that talk about like the primary emotions that you're experiencing. But there's other ways that people are using that language, hurt people or manipulate people or control people or sort of like shut down conversations. There's a difference between selfishness and grandiosity and narcissism. It's very rare that you would be diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder. They tend to believe everything is everyone else's fault, and it comes out of early childhood. There is a stage of development where your ego is separate from other people's ego, and you're able to see that both of those are important. Something is wrong and that development and it leads someone having a really hard time seeing other people's needs as important as their own. Gaslighting is a pretty popular term these days, and what it means is somebody is trying to manipulate you into believing in a reality that's not true. But sometimes people are like, What? You're disagreeing with me. You're not validating my experience, you're gaslighting me, which is not actually what they're doing. So if you say that somebody is a gaslighter, that can be like a pretty incendiary accusation. You and I think that everybody should clearly express what their boundaries are in relationships. It's sort of like a blueprint that you'll offer somebody. So a healthy boundary that somebody might create is I'm not going to continue talking to you if you start to yell at me a different way to use boundaries. That's not exactly correct is to try to control somebody's behavior and manipulate somebody's behavior. You're allowed to say, I don't want to go to dinner, right? That's a boundary. But to be like, you know, well, I'll go if you go to this kind of place, but I'm not going to go if you go to this kind of place and you can't tell me, I can't because I'm allowed to set boundaries. Right. You're now like over stating it. Five small but very brave green flags in a relationship. One you sense their connection with you throughout the day. We keep talking for decades and decades and decades in the field of how we can improve mental health. And the reality is, is that the way you improve anything is with education. Therapists and Instagram and YouTube could do a better job at verifying their licenses and degrees and trainings that therapists have. And if therapists and mental health professionals didn't have to talk about things in coded ways like eating disorders or social justice or anxiety or depression or suicidality, then I think that there could be like some really good education happening online. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6835564/what-therapists-do-when-lonely/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6835564/what-therapists-do-when-lonely/"},"headline":"9 Things Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely","datePublished":"2024-02-29T14:43:02.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T08:03:10.125Z","description":"Therapists share the low-effort steps they take in their own lives when isolation starts to creep in.","url":"https://time.com/6835564/what-therapists-do-when-lonely/","keywords":["Mental Health","Evergreen","healthscienceclimate"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8a8d88e3fffd0b72/698a48f686f68e3f686f3b93/TherapistsLonely.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Angela Haupt","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/angela-haupt/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt8a8d88e3fffd0b72/698a48f686f68e3f686f3b93/TherapistsLonely.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely","caption":"Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely","creditText":"Illustrations by Brown Bird Design for TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/mental-health/","name":"Mental Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/6835564/what-therapists-do-when-lonely/","name":"9 Things Therapists Do When They Feel Lonely"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Therapists Raise Red Flags About Using 'Therapy Speak' Online","description":"The classic vision of therapy revolved around a person on a couch, supine, tapping into their deepest and darkest hopes and fears. 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