How to know if you need to socialize more

As someone that has a history with isolating myself because of a spiraling mental health I really wanted to make a post about the topic of socializing. Today we’re talking about how to know if you need to socialize more.

You’re daydreaming a LOT

This is something a ton of people do in their lives. Most of the time it can be a good coping mechanism for self reflection and to see what you desire and in connection to that what you need to work on in life. You see where this is going? If you do too much of any coping mechanism it’s a sign of something being off in life. With daydreaming it often is socializing. While I love having the coping mechanism of having an imaginary person calming me when I have a panic attack when I’m alone, it gets obvious that I need to socialize if that same mechanism is going on way too much outside of situations I really need it. If you’re spending tons of time dreaming up a life you should probably get more of a life yourself.

If you feel like you can’t stop you should research into “maladaptive daydreaming”

You don’t see people outside of work a lot

If you have a work environment with other people you might think that is enough human interaction but it’s not. You need to have the same kind of connections without the connection to work being involved. It’s even more necessary if you work from home and don’t have a group environment at all. Meeting with people 2-3x a month on a saturday for 1-4 hours adds more to your life than you might think and I’m working on that habit myself. Let’s do it together.

If you work from home and most of your friends are online

I’m super guilty of this and it’s actually the reason why I catapulted myself into isolation. While online friends can be a great way of stress relief in a mental sense, you also need offline friends to get the stress relief in a more physical sense. Hugs, the presence of another human, their actual unfiltered voice and other little thing you only experience in real life make a big difference in how you get rid of stress and feel more connected. There is probably tons of psychological studies on why this is a thing.

If you start feeling depressed or anxious and have intrusive thoughts

This should be an obvious red flag but I needed to include it cause I needed to get to that point to start actively working against being isolated (which is not an easy journey but worth it). I have anxiety disorder and can handle most of it very well after 5 years of living with it. Then a phase of bad anxiety symptoms hit me without a clear trigger and it took me a while to see that all potential smaller triggers go back to isolating myself too much. Not only that but I also started having depressive intrusive thoughts. Even when I had depression a few years back, I didn’t have these. That really alarmed me and pushed me on the way to recovery through socializing and it’s still going on.

This is how to know if you need to socialize more. Those were the main points I experienced and noticed while going through isolation. I still have these problems but less intense and as I mentioned my main goal of this year is/was to socialize more and more.
If you want to learn more about caring about yourself and for yourself I suggest you to check out my self care eBook “MIND, BODY & SOUL”. You can get a free chapter called “What’s good for your mind?” in my freebie library that you can access by being a part of my newsletter squad:

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How to know if you need to socialize more by Rabea