(EQ): Explained By An Average Idiot

General Public Health

I'm 16. I don't have any friends (like none at all). Could that be bad for my health? Everyone says I'm too closed off, but I'm unsure how to fix that. What are some suggestions?

I've gone through this. My best advice, and you might just have to work your way up to this, a few steps at a time. Meditate on what a good friend looks like to you, and then go befriend someone who looks like they could relate to you, be the friend that you wish you had.

How would you describe your feeling of loneliness?

Isolated unrelatability. unrelatable is one of the lies we tell ourselves to rationalize or explain feelings of isolation and loneliness.

We have heard of fairytales where princesses locked in towers so that means they will feel lonely and isolated. But what are the physical and psychological effects on her (before and after being freed or died an old lady in that tower)?

This is clever. So the psychological and physiological health from a life confined to a room in a tower would primarily depend on a persons routine, diet, and habits. Though other factors, such as the size of the room and accessibility to fresh air, or access to reading and writing materials are also going to have significant impacts on a persons over-all sustained health.

In a small room with no access to fresh air, no reading or writing media, a poor diet and no exercise, a persons mental and physical health would begin to deteriorate over time. A large part of mental health is brain health, and a large part of that is having a healthy diet. You can see how combining malnutrition with lack of exercise could begin to exacerbate those feelings of loneliness and isolation. The less physical contact you have with the environment; the weaker your immune system becomes, because it's no longer being exposed to different pathogens that it would typically be storing antibodies for. Having a poor diet would also impact the already under-stimulated immune system. After enough time, a person would eventually succumb to atrophy and persistent sickness, so I think it's safe to say the definitely wouldn't age well.

With a good diet, a fair-sized room, literature, access to a balcony, and having healthy habits; all of these factors that have beneficial impacts on mental health, a person would be able to sustain their over-all health while confined to a tower.

Authors opinion; Just do your best to not be the person confined to a room

What specific situations or events are causing you to feel frustrated and fed up?

The feelings of frustration and exasperation can be triggered by a multitude of different factors, and generalizing these emotions, or building a framework where they can only be addressed in a specific context can ultimately undermine a persons attempts of connecting dots, making sense of the chaos, and the resolve that they're working towards. Generalizing these unwanted feelings can lead to a misunderstanding of self and others, and it can also lead to the mismanagement of a given situation or set of information. And using the word specific does not always free a statement from having a generalized nature.

As we live our lives; situations and events are on a constant path of change, and if they weren't going through those changes, a most-likely result would be our inability to perceive the psychological arrow of time (Stephan Hawking). It feels kind of silly, then, that change is one of the most common shared fears of humankind, as a whole.

A helpful approach to processing feelings of frustration and exasperation will always begin with self-reflection, or a deep meditation of self in relation to the world that surrounds us. Often we begin to discover that many of our assertations and assumptions about situations, about others, and about ourselves are either entirely false; or at the very least, composed primarily from thought and feeling-based beliefs that we've been taught, or developed within ourselves.