ReThinking Mental Wellbeing

How to feel you belong

• Andre Jackson

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We all possess a fundamental human need to belong that is deeply ingrained in our biology and closely linked to our need for connection, serving as a survival mechanism that evolved over thousands of years.<br><br>• The need for belonging is as important to our biology as food and shelter<br>• Being part of a group served as a survival advantage for our ancestors<br>• Social rejection activates the same region of the brain as physical pain<br>• When we don't feel we belong, we develop "belonging uncertainty" that keeps us on edge<br>• We often change ourselves to fit in, sacrificing our authenticity in the process<br>• Belonging shapes almost everything we do, from academic achievement to workplace performance<br>• There's a crucial difference between fitting in (changing yourself) and belonging (being yourself)<br>• Connection can be a gentle gateway into developing a sense of belonging<br>• Seek groups with shared activities, values, or identity to foster true belonging<br>• Finding your authentic tribe happens when belonging aligns with your true self<br><br>Email your questions for future episodes to rethinkingmentalwellbeing@gmail.com.<br><br>

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to another episode of Rethinking Mental Wellbeing. This is our community podcast where we can talk about everything related to depression and anxiety. So my name is Andre and I want to thank you for being with me over the next half an hour as we share this space of lived experience where we can talk about how to live the best version of our authentic life. So if you're ready, then I'm ready. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome back to Rethinking Mental Wellbeing. If you're here for the first time, then welcome to the show. If you've been here before, then welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1:

We all have a need to feel we belong. This need to belong that we all possess is a fundamental human need. It is closely linked to our need for connection and is ingrained into our biology. This need to belong is a drive to be part of something, to be accepted, to be included and to be connected, and to be connected is as important to us and to our human biology as food and shelter. This need to belong has an evolutionary survival purpose, because being part of a group wasn't just optional. It was essential for our survival. And back in our hunter-gatherer days, we quickly understood that to be alone was to be vulnerable to the dangers around us. So, in order to have a greater chance of survival, we needed to depend on what is known these days as group membership, which means we needed this feeling of belonging so we could hunt and gather food where we could protect and raise our children. Safety in numbers meant survival. The ability to cooperate and work together and to belong was a survival instinct that we still carry today.

Speaker 1:

The instinct to be a part of something and to belong hasn't disappeared. It is still hardwired in us and we are built to go through life together, and so our brains evolved to seek closeness. These days, it's not so much about survival but for meaning, and so we are still wired to feel fulfillment with a sense of connection and belonging, and this is why being a part of a group still plays a major role in our mental and emotional and physical health. When we feel we belong to a group, we feel secure, we feel grounded. Belonging gives us a sense of protection and safety and of comfort. It's a kind of internal ease and internal peace and internal satisfaction that comes from being accepted and feeling like we are a part of something, and this shapes the way that we behave. It shapes the way we learn and how we interact with the world around us. There is a comfort that comes with being part of a group, whether that group is a family, a team, a circle of close friends.

Speaker 1:

And when we don't belong, it rubs up against this ancestral genetic need that we have, where we don't only feel unwanted, we feel unsafe and feeling out of place, which leads to a discomfort that is painful, because this just doesn't hurt emotionally, it hurts physically. Social rejection activates the same region of the brain as physical pain. Exclusion is more than a feeling. It is a signal to your body that something is wrong and it matters to our health, both mentally and physically. When we develop a strong sense of belonging, we become more resilient and life becomes easier. But when the sense of belonging is missing, this may lead to chronic loneliness, which in turn may lead to anxiety or depression or social withdrawal, and the body responds to prolonged isolation, and it does this with inflammation, making people more vulnerable to illness and sickness.

Speaker 1:

When we don't feel that we belong, then this leads to a sense of what we call belonging uncertainty, and this is the sense that you may not be accepted or you may not fit in and therefore leaves you always on edge, and when we perceive threats to our sense of belonging, we tend to interpret ourselves and other people and our life in a very protective way. We quickly start to infer that we are incapable or that we are not meant to be in this situation with those people, that we will not be understood or we will not understand. We are less inclined to accept challenges that pose a threat. We are less inclined to accept challenges that pose a risk of failure, because this may reinforce our disconnect from the people around us. This constant self-doubt is what eats away at our confidence and, in turn, makes it harder to focus and makes it harder to reach out to people, to speak up, to engage or even relax, and so, in this state, we will often shift into a kind of protective mode. We stay guarded, we become hesitant and we will withdraw, not from a lack of caring, but because we don't feel safe. So this belonging uncertainty prioritises our feelings of danger and vigilance. And because we seek out people or communities or groups, whether it's a club or a team, to meet this need, we will often adapt ourselves to be accepted.

Speaker 1:

We may change how we speak, how we dress, even what we believe, just to feel included, but sometimes it comes at the cost of our own authenticity and our own truth. For some of you who have heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchical needs pyramid, which talks about our human motivation to get our needs met and how we are seeking fulfillment and change through personal growth, he places and positions this need for belonging just after safety and survival. So as we understand that without this need of belonging being met or satisfied, we will struggle to move forward and then life becomes a lot harder than what it needs to be. And some psychologists call this a fundamental human motivation, and for good reason, because the sense of belonging shapes almost everything we do. It also shapes how we feel, because a strong sense of belonging brings comfort, it brings confidence, it is reassuring and makes us more emotionally stable. When we feel accepted, we feel valued, we feel seen and heard, and when we form new meaningful relationships, the emotional rewards, like joy, excitement, happiness, are immediate. And you can see this at schools, for example. A sense of belonging directly influences student engagement. It influences mental health and even academic achievements. Students who feel that they belong are more likely to participate, more likely to take risks and more likely to stay motivated. And in the workplace the same is true. We perform better when we feel accepted and included.

Speaker 1:

As children, our sense of belonging starts when we know that someone has our back, that a group of people have our back consistently, where we should feel safe with this group of people. The sense of belonging with this group is what allows us, as children, to explore, to learn and to connect. This group of people that I'm talking about is, of course, our family unit, the one place that we should feel that we belong and the one place that we should be seen and heard and valued. And, of course, we know that's not always going to end up being the case, and without it the child's brain remains stuck in survival mode. Because when we don't feel protected within the group we're in, we spend life with one foot out of the group as we emotionally embrace for the rejection, for the exclusion, for the invisibility that we will inevitably expect.

Speaker 1:

And sometimes we are in groups that aren't that good for us, and we often stay within these groups because our fear of being alone or our fear of being left out becomes the priority. But this leads to the emotional cost of being in a group that we feel we don't truly belong in, but it costs us our truth, and there's a beautiful quote that says if it costs you your truth, it's too expensive. And the result of being in a group where we don't feel that we belong but we are trying to fit in to avoid the feelings of not belonging, is that we feel hurt, we feel resentful and inadequate and lonely, and this is why feeling alone in a crowd of people can feel painful. Brene Brown has this nice way of putting it and she says this fitting in is one of the greatest barriers to belonging. Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be, or changing who you need to be. But belonging, on the other hand, doesn't require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are, and what she's talking about here is the difference between contorting ourself or changing ourself in order to fit into the group at the expense of our values and truth.

Speaker 1:

But to feel we can belong and that we can show up and be who we truly are, holding on to our authenticity and our own truth as we are accepted and heard and valued, is the heart of feeling belonging, which leads into this need for connection, because they are closely linked together. Connection is about relationships and interactions and forming bonds within these relationships. Belonging is the deeper feeling of being accepted, feeling valued and feeling safe within the connections that we've built. When we connect, we build the potential to belong within that space. But, as we all know, not all connections equal belonging.

Speaker 1:

A crowded social media feed or having hundreds of friends on social media does not necessarily mean that we feel we belong. So to foster true belonging, especially if we have experiences of being isolated, rejected or even disconnected, requires not only effort but, for some of us, extreme bravery. But we have to step forward into the unknown by joining groups, by taking social risks. It also means creating space for other people, noticing those who feel left out, showing people that we see them and we hear them. As we show up with our genuine, authentic self, as others feel safe within their own vulnerability to be seen by us and to be comforted by us.

Speaker 1:

And when we reflect our own core values, when we are clear about what matters to us within our own values, the stronger our own life becomes by living out our values, which is, by the way, the voice of your authentic nature wanting to be expressed into the world around you. So if you don't feel that you belong to the group that you are in, that does not mean that we are never going to find any group to fit into. We just haven't found the right group. And when we find a group that anchors to our own values, it creates a sense of internal belonging. And this kind of belonging doesn't seek outside of approval on its own, because when we don't approve of ourself and this could be for a variety of different reasons we are then forever trying to get other people to approve of us as we try and validate ourself through the interpretation of others, and this becomes extremely exhausting and literally almost impossible to achieve, and we end up performing for other people, so we can devour all the little bits of approval and acceptance that they throw back at us as we interpret as appreciation because we've performed to their standard of approval. And for a lot of us, we learn that this is the more achievable way to not feel, as we learn to minimize the feeling of disconnection and we learn to minimize the hunger, pain of loneliness and isolation.

Speaker 1:

I want to spend a bit of time now talking about the different ways that we can feel the sense of belonging, both within us and the world around us. So I think the first thing that we need to know and the first thing we need to understand that this need of belonging has to be met. This is a human need. It's not a human option, it's not based on self-worth. Our biology will point us towards getting this need met by the friction that we feel, by the emotions that we feel that are designed to move us in the direction of getting this need met.

Speaker 1:

This is really helpful to understand because, as I've talked about in previous episodes, there is a big difference between living our life and in a way that suppresses, minimise, distracts and even anaesthetises the hunger, pain of not getting our needs met and, in this case, the need of belonging and moving in the direction of getting this need met, of getting this need satisfied, that we can put structures in our life that enables us to meet this need of belonging. So the analogy that I use often to demonstrate what this feels like is that if I give you nothing but hamburgers to eat for the next six months, you're not going to feel hungry, but it's not going to be any good for you, and if you're eating hamburgers just to stop the hunger, you're not giving your body what it actually needs from a nutritional point of view, it's ultimately not going to be healthy for you. And in the same way, if we live our life trying to stop the uncomfortable emotions of hunger from an unmet needs point of view, as our emotions lead us towards getting our needs met, but instead we're just trying to stop feeling uncomfortable, it doesn't mean the need is getting met. It just means we've learnt ways to suppress it, to put a narrative and a story behind it, and particularly of self-worth, of why we don't feel we deserve to have this need met as we desperately try to construct our life in an attempt to try and stop the pain of the emotions of an unmet need. This is extremely hard if we've been living in suppression mode for most of our life.

Speaker 1:

But when we understand that not allowing ourself to feel like we belong is often a safety mechanism that we have employed to keep ourself as safe as possible, because that's our primary objective in life. But by doing that we become hypervigilant to the perceived dangers that we think go around us and in doing so we miss out on opportunities to both connect and belong. So we have done the best we can to keep ourselves as safe as possible. But now we can learn to keep ourselves safe while getting our needs of belonging met, as we learn to adjust our life and lean towards getting this need fulfilled and getting this need honoured by us, as we put structures in our world and in our life that allows us to meet this need. And we do this because we need to give ourselves permission to do so, because, as well as to be safe, it is possible to be both safe and connected with a sense of belonging at the same time. It should not be a trade-off of either feeling safe or having a sense of belonging. So that's the first rule is to understand what direction we have to go in and what direction we have to lean into.

Speaker 1:

The second thing that may be helpful to find a way to get this need of belonging met is to practice, but starting with something that's easier to practice but is as close as we can to this feeling of belonging. And we can do this by practicing connection first. This is often an easier place to start because these two are very closely linked together, as we talked about earlier in this episode. So connection isn't something you do, it is something you feel. Connection is an internal state of being and by learning to connect, which is the focus of our relationships and a more authentic, meaningful life, we need to practice what we call micro-moments of connection, as we learn to practice feeling bonded to other people without having to feel that we're exposing too much of our vulnerability by looking out for little opportunities, small but significant connection points. For instance, it could be opening the door for someone, it could be letting someone in traffic, it could even be walking in nature and saying hi to people as you pass them, which, by the way, is a great place to practice connection, because there's a commonality, there's a link of shared experience that we can tap into. You could find opportunities in your day. We can look for all of the opportunities to demonstrate connection in small but significant ways. So connection can be a gentle gateway into learning how to belong.

Speaker 1:

And if you want to further practice the sense of belonging, do something or go somewhere that contributes to a sense of belonging, specifically somewhere that has these three headings a shared activity, like hobbies or interest groups, or shared values. Somewhere we can participate in a group that has the same beliefs and values as us, or a group that significantly contributes to our sense of community and belonging within the group, and also shared identity. This is where sharing the same religion, culture, tradition and identity with other people that share the same, these play a significant role in our sense of belonging. So, within your community, wherever you are, find community services, community organizations, hobbies or interest groups, social groups, groups that have a specific purpose, or even creative groups that you can attend, that you can be a part of something greater than yourself, to contribute to something within yourself in ways that gets this need or belonging met. So it's important to know that I've mentioned the word practice quite a few times in this episode, because that's what you're going to do. You're going to practice.

Speaker 1:

So start off in a place that is the most comfortable for you, because you're retraining your safety program by practicing, leaning into the uncomfortableness of getting this need met. You're not after perfection, you're after progress, allowing yourself the permission that you need in the space that you're in now to go out and start getting this need of belonging satisfied. This is where it's really important to find the right people to be around, with the shared values, shared beliefs, shared identity or shared purpose. Find your tribe, your group that you can relate to with one or more of these shared experiences. And your sense of belonging, combined with feeling accepted and appreciated by others within the group that you find, becomes even more powerful when it lines up with your authenticity, with your truth and with your values.

Speaker 1:

Because if we're looking for a group only to feel like we're accepted, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's complementing our authentic nature or our values. It's not necessarily meaning it's a healthy thing, because sometimes our need for belonging is confused with our need for acceptance and we find places that we can feel accepted, but it costs us our truth and our authenticity. And if that happens, then we've replaced our hunger to get our needs met with our effort to find acceptance as a priority and as a main focus, while our needs cry out in hunger for something more sustainable. So that's all I've got for this episode. Thank you for joining me today and I hope that you've got something useful from this discussion, and if you have any questions you would like us to discuss on future episodes, then please email me at rethinkingmentalwellbeing at gmailcom. I'd love to hear from you. So until then, go well, go in peace, have a great week and we'll see you next time. Bye.