Answer These 3 Questions to Boost Your Spirits

You will definitely feel less lonely.

Published February 19, 2026

Illustrated scene showing two older adults seated facing one another in conversation, surrounded by stylized speech clouds

Amber Day

When I started dating Dan, a 78-year-old widowed university professor, I noticed his congeniality. He’d say “hi” to everyone we’d meet, then move to “where are you from?” and “what school did you go to?”

Then he’d bounce out of the conversation — sometimes diverting to talk about himself, sometimes changing topics.

“You’re like a rock that skips over the water but never sinks,” I said to him early in our seven-year relationship. I had watched his conversation style so many times, I realized he wasn’t really paying attention to what the other person was saying. Or, if he was, he cut off a chance for deeper conversation by changing the subject.

His intentions were good — but his behavior limited the closeness of his relationships. By the time he met me, he realized how much this behavior had cost him.

You can Google my boyfriend’s name — Dan Fogel — and find a story he wrote for the HuffPost in 2023. The headline: “My wife of 45 years died. I thought I truly knew her — until I discovered her journals.”

In his essay, he describes how his beautiful and soft-spoken Sue and he had raised three daughters and built a long and loving marriage — but he didn’t really know her deepest feelings, because he never asked her, and she never offered.

After she died, he found her journals. In one, Sue had written: “I think I hate him.” Of course, she didn’t hate him — she was probably just mad because he had not paid attention. She might have been mad at herself too because she had not spoken up about her own needs.

His story is a “cautionary tale,” Dan says. He and Sue chose to “keep the peace” rather than discuss their deepest and most difficult thoughts and dreams. Now it was too late.

Within two days of publication, 3 million people had read Dan’s story. Hundreds of readers emailed him, including men who realized they did the same thing and had decided to really listen to their wives.

Building deep connections takes time and tools, and it’s scary because we risk rejection if we open up about our feelings. But without it, we risk much more.

The solution for isolation is to get outside, interact with other people and put down your phone. But the solution for loneliness is different. Loneliness is that feeling of “nobody knows me” — it’s the isolation of the soul that comes from unmet needs.

It happens when we’re afraid to show our true selves to the world, and when we can’t communicate in meaningful ways.

Pulling yourself out of loneliness is a skill that can be practiced and learned. If you want to feel less lonely, ask yourself these three questions:

How brave are you about showing who you are?

Listen to researcher and author Brené Brown on this: you will never have quality relationships unless you are willing to deeply believe in yourself.

“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness,” she says in her book, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. “True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”

Many of us try to “fit in” with a certain group. But “fitting in” — changing who we are to conform — is the opposite of belonging.

If you care more about what other people think than about revealing your true self, you will not be known — and you are more apt to be lonely.

So, how do we allow ourselves to become known? Read books, seek counseling, take small steps. One book that has helped me is The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz.

Ruiz writes: “Don’t take anything personally. By taking things personally, you set yourself up to suffer for nothing.”

Do you greet others with warmth or coldness?

People who open with warmth — eye contact, a smile, an outstretched hand — will find that most people respond warmly to them, David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person.

Warmth is a sign of empathy, and “highly empathetic people enjoy deeper relationships.” Brooks calls these observant people “Illuminators.”

“Illuminators” offer a “gaze that says, ‘I want to get to know you and be known by you.’ ... Respect is a gift you offer with your eyes.”

Empathy skills can be learned. Try it. Take yourself to breakfast at a diner and talk to people. Smile with warmth. Seek people who show you their humanity and show your humanity too.

Do you know how to navigate conversations?

In her 2025 book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, Alison Wood Brooks points out how people study their golf swings more than they study the quality of their own conversations.

“Relationships are about talking,” writes Brooks, who explains how good conversationalists move from “small talk,” or topics anyone can discuss, to “tailored talk,” subjects that many people would be interested in, such as grandparenting or golf, to “deep talk” — the topics “only close groups feel comfortable talking about.”

If you can “deep talk” with another person, you will rarely be lonely.

“A good conversationalist is always on the lookout for personal details,” she writes, “the topics that will open up another person.”

The hardest people to engage are “ZQs” — people who ask zero questions. Those people are apt to feel lonely.

Our fears of “being intrusive” often keep our relationships shallow, Brooks notes. But you can practice going deeper with your conversations.

Listen to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air — she is the master of taking a conversation from small talk to deep talk. Listen and practice.

As former Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy wrote in his 2023 report declaring loneliness a national epidemic: “Each of us can start now, in our own lives, by strengthening our connections and relationships.”

Dan and I talk frankly about how we communicate. When he cuts me off, I tell him: “If I’m sharing something important to me and you bounce out of the conversation, I feel you are not listening.”

When I interrupt Dan — which I sometimes do because I’m a fast talker — he says: “It feels like you rushed to judgment. Let’s discuss this more.”

With this kind of feedback, we risk not keeping the peace — but it’s worth it, because honesty is the only way to build meaning … and bust loneliness.

Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the co-author of Too Young to Be Old, the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen.”