Why Midlife Women Feel Isolated - And How to Reconnect (Ep. 17)

0:00 When I really hit midlife, I found myself with more time than I had when the kids were growing up and we had lots of activities and that kind of thing. And I think that happens to a lot of people. Of course, we always stay busy. We always kind of fill our time naturally, but it's a change. And at times I started feeling a little bit isolated and I think that's also something that is common and maybe you're feeling that way right now or maybe you're feeling happy with the amount of time that you spend with other people. I'm not talking about being happy when plans cancel at the last minute.

0:44 I think we're all happy about that sometimes. I'm talking about overall, do you have a sense that you have a really nice balance of alone time for yourself or with your spouse versus time with groups of friends or time with a variety of friends doing various activities, social time? If you feel good about that balance, that's fantastic. That's where we want to be because we need both. If you don't, let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time.

1:25 Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies, and oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife Podcast. I work entirely from home. You can do so much online right now. Oh my goodness. I do corporate training around the world. I do a podcast, you might have heard.

2:09 I do life and mindset coaching. So much can be done from one chair at one desk at home. It's incredible, especially for you and I who grew up in the 70s, 80s, maybe early 90s. It was a very different time then. And then we had the pandemic. And during the pandemic, we even started socializing online, I guess because that was all we could do. I used to have regular Zooms with friends that lived all around the country. But it's still not the same, whether we're talking about work or socializing, it's still not the same thing as being together with people.

2:50 Every now and then, I actually sit down and wonder, who are my friends who live nearby? Have I seen them lately? Have I forgotten about them? Should I make a list? Why can't I remember? And I'm going to link for you an episode of OMG Teach Me, the prior podcast, where I interviewed Alex, who is a friendship expert. And we had a pretty fascinating discussion about friendship in general. And she absolutely said, making a list is fine. I kind of felt like, am I a bad friend if I have to make a list of who I want to keep in touch with? But she said, that's normal. So for you, that's normal.

3:32 I have a couple of friends I see all the time, but there are many more whom I never seem to see and I would like to, I think. So do I want to make new friends? Do I like my schedule as it is? Do I want to change? This might be going through your head as well. We reach a point, as I said a minute ago, where. The activities change that are going on in our day-to-day lives, and maybe where we have some really big, dramatic or traumatic things happen. So today's episode, I want to help you and help me, I'm certainly not perfect, to understand isolation in midlife and then to see if we can move forward in a productive way with our mindset about how to help ourselves and also with some really practical tips that you could do, now, as soon as you finish listening to this. So here we go.

4:40 This feeling of isolation in midlife, where does it come from? Well, obviously, for you, it might be very different than me. Every person is going to have different experiences and different life situation, but there are some common things. And first of all, there's certain sort of happenings and events, life transitions, let's call them that, that happen around midlife. And we could define midlife as late 30s to 60s, define it how you want. And it depends on how long have you been married? Are you married? How old are your kids? Do you have kids? Have you changed jobs? Are you retiring? So many variables, right? So we're being quite general here.

5:23 But during midlife, at some point, if you have kids, they will leave and go live on their own. And so that brings something that we've even given a syndrome name to, Empty Nest Syndrome. And yes, I will definitely do an episode on that. Maybe your relationship has changed. Maybe you were in a marriage, you're not anymore. Or maybe you weren't, but now you are later in life. Or maybe you're on your second marriage, whatever, your relationship may have changed in some way. Maybe you've changed your career. Maybe, as I said, you're actually able to retire early. Maybe you're dealing with some traumatic events with the older generation of your family.

6:07 As they're getting older and may be ill. And that's certainly the case for me. So when we're having all these changes that can be difficult, sometimes we withdraw. And it's a self-protection thing, and there's nothing wrong with it. And quite frankly, you might need some time to yourself related to some of these things. I know that's been the case for me. Sometimes I I want time to myself. And sometimes I just want to escape. And my escape, I don't know if I've said this on the podcast before, I definitely have on social media, my escape is almost always reading novels. Happy ending is a must. So I'm reading novels.

6:50 That's how I escape. And it helps me to give myself some time on my own. And I really think my brain is kind of processing things in the background as I do that. You may have a different way that you withdraw. Maybe you meditate. Maybe you pray. Maybe you sleep more. Maybe you get involved in a series on TV. Maybe you write in a journal and you write and write and write and write. It's okay to withdraw and do that self-care. I mean, having self-care is good. And at the same time, that can be part of the reason why we feel isolated, right? So I'm not saying it's wrong. It's probably needed.

7:34 And because it's okay and normal, sometimes then we're creating a situation where we're isolated because we're not reaching out to our friends and we are taking more time on our own. And maybe our friends don't know how to help us. So in episode three, I'll remember to link this in the show notes as well. I was talking about toxic positivity and how to speak to someone who has had a major loss. And I think this applies here as well. So we're going to go through some stuff in midlife. And as a mindset coach, I struggle to make that statement because I always want you to know that it's about how you look at it and what you focus on.

8:17 But the reality is we're going to go through some stuff with our parents or other people in the older generation. There's just going to be stuff. And if your friends are going through stuff, sometimes you might not know how to help them, right? And oftentimes, your friend may not really want your opinion. Maybe there's a tricky situation with your friend's kids, or maybe your friend is upset trying to figure out something related to their parents with their care or a will or who knows, so many tricky things that we may be dealing with, they don't necessarily want your opinion or my opinion, quite frankly.

9:00 And so sometimes as a friend, we don't know how to help them. And so we might pull back from our friends. Because we are trying to be a good friend, but we don't know what to do, right? I don't think anyone has a negative intention in most of these situations. And as a side note, what we talked about in episode three is when someone has a terrible thing happen, you can say, I'm sorry. You can say that stinks. You can say, I'll be praying for you. You can say to a good friend, Can I help you in any way? But that's it. We don't get to say, oh, this happened to me and here's how I felt.

9:41 And we don't get to say what our opinion is about what they should do unless they ask. Side note, important. But again, if we don't know what to say or we don't know what to do, we might withdraw. And they might do the same towards us. And it's not a lack of friendship. It's just a we don't know. now the other thing that happens in midlife is the we're having all these transitions and so I guess this is part of the transition but there's this scaffolding that typically is going to change and here's what I mean by that when I was in my 30s and 40s I was and along with my husband of of course, raising kids.

10:23 And those kids are amazing. And those kids were involved in a lot, a lot of activities, sports, scouts, school, all kinds of things, clubs, different things, different times of the year. And a lot of my social interaction came from these I don't know. Activities that I was taking the kids to or that we together were taking our kids to. And I made a lot of friends, and my husband did as well, we've talked about this a couple times. With the parents of the other players on the team or with the parents of the other people in the scout group or whatever it is. And we saw each other a lot.

11:10 And maybe sometimes we actually did do things outside of that scenario because we really did become friends. But when that scaffolding, when that kind of structure is taken away, then some of those friendships are probably going to fall to the wayside because they were sort of from being nearby. They were like location related, almost like a situationship, if you've heard that term. They were friendships happening because it was convenient for it to happen. And that's not a bad thing. It's quite normal. And when those convenient pieces change, maybe your kids have gone to college or they've moved somewhere farther away.

11:56 Well, they're not playing the sport four times a week or they're not doing whatever else they were doing. Or maybe you're not out in the neighborhood with your younger kids anymore and speaking with the other parents. That was always a favorite thing of mine. when those things stop happening then sometimes we really feel the loss of that and we feel like we're isolated now we might be telling ourselves we're isolated and we still have plenty of things going on in our lives it's the change right it's the change from all this stuff happening and all this interaction with all these people to now it looks very different and i'm going through this myself. Absolutely.

12:39 And for those of us whose kids were leaving the house, whether college or post-college or whatever, during COVID, it was even more complicated. And I know it's been years since then, but there are lasting changes about how we interact with each other. It was even more complicated then because sort of all the scaffolding of everything went away. And now we're trying to rebuild, and we're not sure how to do that. So I'm going to talk you through the mindset of rebuilding friendships, whether they're existing or whether they're going to be new friendships. You have to believe you can do it first. And then I'm going to give you some tips.

13:20 But I just want to really underscore why this is important. So we've heard, let me make sure I organize myself, we've heard why it happens that we feel isolated. This is a time of change. It's a time of, unfortunately, potentially some hard or dramatic things in life happening, and we've lost that structure that gave us kind of presto friends. So why is it important that we move through this and we really make an effort if we allow ourselves to stay in isolation without a lot of social interaction it it has risks to our health and of course our mental state i was looking at the cdc web website in fact and i looked at all sorts of articles to do this podcast episode, because I really wanted to see what people were out there saying.

14:18 So on the website, it said, one in three adults in the U.S. Report feeling lonely. One in three. That means if you look at two other people in addition to you, one of the three of you is feeling lonely right now. One in four U.S. Adults report not having social and emotional support. So maybe they have people in their lives, but they don't feel supported by them. Or maybe they really just don't have people in their lives supporting them. Now, that wasn't midlife specific, but that kind of makes me concerned even more because I feel like this period of time we're in might be a particularly difficult one related to these issues.

15:01 So what does that mean? If social isolation means that we're cut off from interactions with other people, that would give us social and emotional support. Loneliness is a different thing. Loneliness, you could be feeling that when you have a lot of social interaction or when you don't. It's a feeling that you're all alone. And they could both happen at the same time or they could happen separately. So what are the risks? Why do we need to help ourselves out of this? Well, mental health-wise, when we are isolated, when we don't have support from other people that we would like to have, there is an increased risk of depression.

15:42 There is an increased risk of anxiety. And I feel like that kind of makes sense. If we don't have something and we want it, I could see how that could lead us down a path. I also read, and I didn't know this, that social isolation is being associated right now. People are learning this could be associated with cognitive decline. And we just last week talked about music and how important that is as basically a brain boost, a brain exercise, and emotional support. And so let's continue that. Cognitive decline is something that we want to minimize now as much as we can, right?

16:25 So that we have 20, 30, 40 more years to enjoy in strong, I don't even know how to say it, with a good brain, with a healthy brain. There we go. And then the physical risk. So physical health, if we are socially isolated, we don't have that support of a social network, there is a higher likelihood of heart disease. There is a higher likelihood of stroke. Now, higher likelihood doesn't necessarily mean cause and effect, but it's a pattern that makes us pay attention. There is an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, and I didn't read into why that is, so I'm not going to make any guesses, but that is something that they found.

17:09 And apparently, elevated mortality rates. We might not live as long. So I don't want to scare you. Have I scared you? I don't want to scare you. I just want you to know that. Even if it feels a little bit nerve-wracking and scary to say, okay, I want to get out of this isolation. I'm going to try to make friends. Even if that feels a little bit scary, it's really powerful and it's really important. So if we agree on that point, now let's take a few minutes to figure out, well, okay, what do I do? How do I do it? I'm going to give you the how-tos. I keep promising that I haven't done it yet, but I will. But first, this is mind your midlife. We want to go behind the scenes, behind the curtain, in deep into the brain, because your self-belief, your subconscious beliefs about yourself and about midlife are directing you and me, us.

18:08 And they're often the real culprits here. It's what we're telling ourselves that's holding us back in so many of these situations. And I coach with clients regularly who are feeling frustrated because they feel isolated and they don't know how to create a new network of friends, how to feel accepted. They've had a major life change and they're trying to figure out what to do. And if that's you, go to Cheryl P. Fisher dot com slash coaching and let's set up a call. It's free. Let's see if coaching would be a fit for you. But if you have beliefs in your deep subconscious mind about whether you could still make friends at this point in your life, maybe not, maybe those friendships wouldn't be strong because only friendships that we made earlier in life and held on to would be the strong ones.

19:03 It's the history that matters. Maybe there's something having to do with your parents or other figures in that older generation that you're maybe continuing a pattern. Maybe you saw them be isolated at this age. You saw them get maybe a little bit more sad or just not have as many friends. And somehow that created a belief for you deep in there that you may not even realize that that's how it is at this point, at this stage in life, you might be continuing that pattern. Maybe you have a belief hidden in there that you can't really go out on the town with friends at this stage of life.

19:45 That's just kind of, that's not what we're supposed to be doing, that the 20-somethings do that, we would look silly. Or maybe you have a belief that you're not even as fun now. Maybe you have a belief that this period of life is the time that you need to calm down and you need to be more serious. There could be things like that hidden in there, and that's what coaching helps us to figure out. And you can also just kind of observe yourself, observe your thoughts. The Story Cycle resource may help you. CherylPFisher.com slash StoryCycle. So the first step is to figure out, am I telling myself something that's basically self-sabotaging?

20:29 Am I behaving in a way based on these subconscious beliefs that come from observations and things I've heard and been told that tell me how my midlife period of life should be? If we can recognize that, we can usually debunk it, right? If you can recognize that there is a thought in your head when you say, oh, I'd like to make some new friends. If there's a thought in your head, for example, there could be a million things that says, oh, it's too late to make new friends. If that thought's in there, recognize it and ask yourself, is that really true? And let me just tell you for that example, of course that's not true. Of course that's not true. You can make friends at any point.

21:10 Look at women who go into assisted living facilities in their 80s and overall are still healthy, they're making friends. They're playing cards and they're having movie night and whatever they're doing. They're making friends. You can make friends. So my point is, the first thing is to recognize are there thoughts and these subconscious beliefs sticking in my head that are talking to me and telling me that I can't do this. Now, some tips for you besides recognizing those thoughts. I want you to decide to be a friend. And at this stage of life, it takes some intention to do this. You certainly have some friends from earlier periods in life, whether it's this time of life I was talking about before where we have this scaffolding of kids' activities.

22:02 Maybe it's from those. Maybe it's from college. Maybe it's from high school. You've kept up with them on social media. That's the great thing about social media. Maybe it's family that you had kind of not been in touch with as often because life got busy, but you always, you know, really loved that cousin or whatever. It's time to consider reconnecting with them. You have to do this in an intentional way, but sometimes we have to take the initiative, particularly if we're not going to just run into this person. So what if you texted them and said, wow, it's been a while. How are you? Hope you're doing well. Say it in your words. Sound like yourself.

22:42 It doesn't have to be anything more than that. Call out the elephant in the room. It's been a while. Say, I just wanted to hear how you were. Or maybe I thought of you today, so I thought I'd reach out. Now, I used to say call, but I think we're a little weirded out, aren't we, when people call that we haven't talked to in ages. So maybe the text, maybe it's a card that you send in the mail. Maybe that's what you love to do. I have a friend who decided that she was going to be sending cards in the mail all throughout this year to people that she really felt strongly about having in her life. Last year, this same friend. Was emailing people throughout the year when she thought of them and telling them how powerful they were in her life.

23:22 You can do it no matter how you communicate. It's intentionally being a friend, and that doesn't have to feel scary, I don't think, because you don't even have to ask them to do anything with you. You just reach out and say, I was thinking about you. It's been a while. How are you? Or I hope you're doing well. And then maybe a conversation starts. I definitely am more in touch with some of my cousins now than I used to be because we're all kind of in a similar stage of life. We have a bit more time and we actually started talking to each other. And that certainly wasn't happening before. Now, the person might not get back to you or they might get back to you and just say, I'm great. Hope you are too. And then it kind of fizzles out. That's okay.

24:05 Just intentionally make the effort to be a friend and to be social. Number two, do things. This, I think, might be the most, well, you know what? I was going to say it might be the most powerful. These are all powerful. We're not going to say that. Do things. So find yourself something to do that you enjoy that involves other people. For me, it's Mahjong. I started four months ago, three months ago. I took a lesson and I have played many times since then. Now, I'm probably not ever going to be playing in major competitions or anything. I'm just doing it for fun and to force myself to be out there chatting with people. And I've met really cool people doing it.

24:49 For you, that might sound horrendous. Maybe it's knitting or some other hobby craft where you could go to a group or a class or you could go to some scheduled event. Maybe it's a sport. Maybe you always used to play a sport, and now there is a group that you could play for fun locally. Go look for that, because it probably exists. Just make sure that it's something that you would enjoy. Because the first time you go to whatever it is, is going to be nerve-wracking. It's okay. You're going to be okay. Probably most of the other people there feel the same. Remind yourself of that.

25:31 You're going to an organized event and people want you there. But we'll still sometimes get a little nerve-wracked about it. So make sure it's something that you really enjoy doing. And maybe some friendships come out of that. I can see that starting to happen for me. And it might take time. Just be interactive. Just be yourself. Be kind. And you never know. And at the very least, now you're socializing. One step, right? One step at a time. so I want you to check your thoughts I want you to intentionally be a friend and I want you to do things and the pieces that go behind that is is really being willing to take a risk because when you are reaching out to someone you're taking that initiative it's not a big risk it's not a scary risk but sometimes we tell ourselves that it is so you have to be willing to do that now one of the things I found is really an amazing way to get to know people and kind of see whether you want to get to know them even further is to meet for coffee.

26:37 Low key. It's like the meet for a drink in the dating world, right? Now, this is a very common thing if you go to networking groups. You meet someone at a networking event, like a networking happy hour, and then you maybe exchange contact information or business cards, and then you say, hey, let's meet for coffee. And on the surface at a networking event, it's to tell each other about your businesses and see how you can help each other. But it's also to get to know each other. And so when you are at a social event, and you find that you're really enjoying getting along with someone, maybe they'd like to meet you for coffee. Wouldn't that be fun? Maybe on a Friday. Hey, you want to have coffee on a Friday?

27:17 Very quick, simple, easy. And even if they can't do it, they probably think it's cool that you ask them. And no, you don't have to drink coffee. Or maybe some of your texting with your old contacts, your old friends, has kind of gone back and forth quite a bit. And you say, hey, I'd love to catch up on the phone. Can I call you this weekend? It's still a little bit of you being willing to take a risk, and it might pay off huge. And then the last thing I'll say is we kind of need to train ourselves to pay attention to other people in a social way. And that could be as simple as going for a walk around the block and actually, and I say this because I live in an area where it doesn't happen very often, your area might be different, actually looking at each other, maybe even smiling real quick.

28:08 Right? I mean, do the thing that's appropriate where you are, but say hello to your neighbors when you're out at the mailbox. Put yourself in situations where you can say hello to people walking their dogs. Practice prioritizing social interaction, even in tiny ways, and it will start to sort of refocus your brain on the idea that interacting with people is a good thing, is a positive thing. And when we're going through stuff, which we're all going to go through, even if you're not going through it right now, we're all going to go through it. We need people. We need to feel like we're supported. We need to feel like our friends would be there if we reached out to them.

28:54 And so now, before we get into those situations, let's see if we can create some of those connections. Be patient. It might take time, but trust your gut. If I could say anything else, you're texting, you're having a coffee, you met at the Mahjong game or whatever, trust your gut as to whether you'd want to spend more time getting to know that person. I think you kind of know, you get a sense. And it's okay if you don't. Look for the ones where you will, because there are some if we put ourselves out there. So my OMG, oh my goodness moment for you that I want you to hold on to is if you believe you can make friends in midlife, you can make friends in midlife.

29:36 Do things, be intentional, be friendly, give it time. And if you need help, reach out to a friend or reach out to a coach. So I hope this was a helpful and interesting episode for you. Come hang out with us in the pod squad on Facebook. You never know where you might make new friends, right? Grab the link in the show notes. It's the Mind Your Midlife pod squad. We have bonus interviews and trainings in there. You get to ask some questions ahead of time that I ask to my podcast guests. And we have fun. I love laughter too. So come hang out with us and then make sure you've hit the follow button in your podcast app because next week we are going to be talking about sleep in midlife.

30:22 This is such a highly requested topic. We're going to wind it into perimenopause as well. We need help with our sleep. So you will love the guest who is joining me next week. Oh my goodness. Let's keep creating confidence and success. Music.