And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the Personal Development

podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you

can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols and this is episode 202. It's titled, Loneliness. And if you're

ready, we'll start the show. How are you doing, you beautiful people? It looks as if we're

slowly getting back to something resembling normal, doesn't it?

Rightly or wrongly, COVID restrictions are supposed to be lifting in the next few days,

or rather there'll be no legal requirement anymore.

You just have to be sensible.

Which if watching the reactions to the England-Italy game last week, he's anything to go by,

being sensible isn't so easy to do

when you're passionate and emotional. And meeting up with people again is going to be emotional,

isn't it? It's been a lonely 18 months for a lot of us. But even before COVID, there were

plenty of people saying that they were lonely and didn't have many

opportunities to connect with people. Last month had the Loneliness Awareness Week campaign

hosted by Marmalade Trust, which is a Bristol charity. That was the brainchild of therapist

Amy Perrin in 2013 as a way of getting people to share their Christmas dinner with

someone who lived alone and this year was its biggest campaign yet. Despite everything being virtual,

it still had over 200,000 organisations involved and reached over 270 million people,

raising awareness of the loneliness problems we have in our so-called

better-connected world. And we've known that this problem exists for a while now. There's

an often quoted study from 2004, which came out of the general social survey that showed that one

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