Feeling disconnected? What it means and what you can do

Do you ever feel like life is passing you by? Like you’re living to eat, sleep, work, repeat. Maybe you used to feel excited for life and passionate about things, but the same things just don’t interest you anymore. It's like you don’t have the energy to do anything other than survive, and when you have time to yourself, you want to mentally check out and escape.

This suggests that you’re feeling disconnected from yourself and the world around you.

Let’s look at a few more signs. How many of these apply to you? 

10 signs you’re feeling disconnected 

1. You feel like you’re just going through the motions day to day.
2. You lose time scrolling mindlessly on social media.
3. You’re consuming multiple forms of content at a time (e.g. watching a movie while scrolling on your phone) and don’t feel engaged in any of it.
4. Your free time is consumed by escapism (e.g. drinking, playing video games, mindlessly watching shows).
5. A general sense of dissatisfaction that you can’t quite describe or name.
6. Feeling numb.
7. Feeling isolated or lonely.
8. Feeling unmotivated or like “what’s the point?”
9. It feels like your peers are progressing, but you’re stuck in the same place.
10. You feel like your life lacks purpose, meaning or excitement.

Possible reasons why you might be feeling this way:

• It may be related to depression.
• You may have experienced trauma, which makes it feel unsafe for you to feel connected.
• You find it difficult to connect with people because you can’t trust people and find it difficult to be vulnerable around others.
• You don’t know what you want from life yet, or how to move forward, and you’re overwhelmed thinking of your next steps.
• You don’t know who you are, who you want to be, or how to find meaning in your own life.
• You believe on some level that life is meant to be hard or that you don’t deserve the life you really want.
• You might engage in escapism behaviours to avoid confronting difficult feelings.
• You might feel like you don’t know who you are after a relationship. You gave all your time and energy to that relationship, and you’re feeling isolated now.
• You suffered a loss, and you don’t know who you are without this person or thing that you lost.
• There’s a mismatch between who you are on the inside and how you appear to others on the outside, and you’re afraid to let people get to know the real you.

There are times in life when things are hard, and you might need to live this way to simply survive and get through it. But you don’t need to live this way forever. You can acknowledge that it's what you needed for a time, but maybe now you want more. Now, you’re ready to take back control and live life to the fullest.

Are you ready to feel connected, engaged and like yourself again?

Maybe you’ve never experienced this, or maybe it's been so long that you don’t remember what it feels like to get your spark back. 

When you feel connected with yourself, here’s what that can look like:

1. You engage in your hobbies and interests.
2. You maintain meaningful connections and relationships with friends, family and your community.
3. You feel like you belong.
4. You feel like you contribute something meaningful to the community or to the world, for example, through your work, art, creative hobbies, or the interactions that you have with people.
5. You feel curious about people and the world around you, and a desire to grow and experience new things.
6. You let people get to know you.
7. You’re not afraid to feel things deeply, whether that’s sadness or joy.
8. You’re intentional about the things you do every day.
9. You make changes in your life if there’s something that you’re not satisfied with.
10. You feel more alive and in control.

Reading that list, you might be thinking you can’t do those things because it requires energy and motivation, or it requires feeling pain, loss, heartbreak or other emotions that you don’t want to face, or it requires being vulnerable with people, and that’s scary. 

It might be overwhelming to imagine your life in this way. Maybe it feels safer to stay disconnected and not quite satisfied with life. It might take some time for you to decide that you’re ready to be connected and start living how you really want to live.

It’s OK to take things slow. Change rarely happens overnight. It takes small and consistent steps to create big changes. 

If you’re ready to take a small step, here are a few things you can do to start feeling connected again:

• Reach out to friends or family, the people who care about you, for support.
• Find ways to engage in your community or build a community.
• Spend some time outside, in nature.
• Do some exercise, whether it's going for a walk, going to the gym, playing a sport, or any form of movement that you enjoy.
• Engage in hobbies and activities that you used to love.
• Journal or go to therapy to explore what's going on for you right now.

Journaling is a great starting point for self-reflection, but a counsellor can keep you accountable, show you different perspectives and offer you some compassion when it may be difficult to offer it to yourself. 

Here are some of the many ways that counselling can help:

• We can talk about your values and what's important to you.
• We can look back at a time when you really felt like you.
• We can explore what’s changed in your life that has you feeling stuck or disconnected.
• We can explore how you really feel about yourself. Do you feel like you deserve happiness? Can you speak to yourself with compassion when things aren’t going the way you want them to? Can you sit with uncomfortable feelings?
• Where is all your time and energy focused right now? We can reprioritise and give you something to work towards and look forward to.
• We can look at the things you used to love, the things that used to give you a sense of meaning and purpose, and look into why that may not be the case anymore.
• We can discover how to get your spark back, how to get you feeling excited for life again.

Does this sound like something you’d want in your life?

Counselling isn’t always the easy option, but it allows you to grow and change in meaningful ways that make a difference to your life. You can learn to accept yourself as you are, know that a connected life is possible, and understand that you deserve good things in your life.