Your Happiness Factor

  How To Grow And Deepen New Friendships I found a great site on how to make friends and develop your social skills.   SucceedSocially.com is a collection of articles related to improving social skill and making friendships. It deals with shyness, and working around the problems that come from feeling that you do not fit comfortably into the norm.   Here is an extract of the writing on that site; it is about deepening and strengthening new friendships. "Just spend more time together I'll break this down further soon, but simply spending more time with someone is the backbone of becoming better friends with them. A close relationship isn't something that happens in a few hours. You need time to get to know the other person, have fun together, and become more comfortable with each other. You need time for all the relationship-enhancing things I mention below to happen. Additionally, it usually takes a while before we start thinking of someone...

Overcoming loneliness To feel lonely is to be overwhelmed by an unbearable feeling of separateness, at a very deep level. From our earliest childhood, as awareness of our separateness dawns on us, the need to seek relationships begins. We need other people throughout our lives. And all of us, at various times, may feel anxious, abandoned, unloved and insecure. In other words, when we feel lonely. It's possible to overcome loneliness, if you really want to. But it will take time and energy. You will need to think about why you feel this way and what steps you can take to overcome it. Learning to be alone Are you someone who panics when left alone? Do you feel an overwhelming need to seek others out just to avoid inner loneliness? Then, you might need to spend sometime learning to feel relaxed in your own company. But it will mean facing difficult feelings that you've been trying to avoid. You may need to focus to on what kind of person you really are, and wh...

Image via Wikipedia Enforced loneliness has been a   punishment  throughout history. We are social animals and most of us need the company of others for a lot of our time.  I remember my mother, the eldest of ten children, feeling horrified at the prospect of one night alone when my father needed to visit a relative and they couldn’t spare the time to go together. Robert S. Weiss  has categorized loneliness into two ways:   emotional loneliness and   social loneliness . Emotional loneliness feels like the pain we feel when a romantic partner is missing. Social loneliness is when you feel like you are not part of a community and you feel you do not have   friends   to rely on. The other important distinction is between   transient   or chronic loneliness, also known rather cruelly as state and trait loneliness. Transient loneliness passes and is often caused by something external to us – it is ...