That is the kid this article is actually about. Somewhere between fifth and sixth grade something in me changed, and it took about fifteen more years and an encounter with Jesus before it changed back.
If you have ever eaten lunch somewhere on purpose so nobody would notice you were eating it alone, this one is for you. God loves you and made you for relationship.
Trust me, I know it can be hard, but it’s worth it…
Dr. Z here...
Before I was a husband, a father of seven, and a man who talks to strangers for a living, I was a kid who could not figure out how to be around other kids.
Somewhere between fifth and sixth grade I changed and stopped feeling comfortable with anyone my own age. My best friend was five years younger and lived two houses down, because in that era you played with whoever lived on your street and I was not allowed to go anywhere else.
I love my mother and I do not blame her for a minute of it, but she was a victim of abuse as a child and grew into a woman filled with fear, afraid of many things and most of all afraid for us. So there were no friends’ houses after school, no field trips, almost no birthday parties, and no travel team sports even though I was athletic and invited to play.
Then middle school started handing me things. I was play fighting with a kid named Ken and caught an elbow that chipped my top front tooth clean in half, and that tooth has followed me ever since.
Eighth grade brought a move to a district where I knew nobody, right as the acne started and we had no money for the jeans everybody wore in the early nineties.
By high school I was more or less the running joke, and lunch became the hardest hour of my day, so I spent it in the library playing chess on the computer and met a few kids every bit as uncomfortable as I was.
I was never beaten up. I was never really bullied.
I was ignored, and I have come to believe that is worse.
So when I say I understand the “I have no friends” trend, I am not speaking from a distance. If those videos had existed when I was fifteen, I would have watched every one and felt understood for the first time in years.
Which is why I have to tell you the rest of it.
Somewhere along the way, being alone stopped being my wound and started being my identity, until doing everything by myself became a badge I wore the same way grinding yourself into the ground has become a badge in the church.
A badge hurts less than a wound, which is exactly why we pin them on, but it heals nothing, and where mine led was a young man who could not name a reason to stay.
This article is the practical, do-it-today companion to our deep teaching, Biblical Affirmations for Relationships, where we hand you the twenty declarations, the printable card, and what the research actually shows about connection and how long people live. You can read that here…
What follows is the how.
We’re not here telling introverts they are broken, and we’re not about shaming anyone in a lonely season for how they got there. It is about letting Scripture expose the pattern of isolation that quietly shapes our health, our decisions, our homes, and our faith.
What an Isolation Stronghold Actually Is
Something is happening on TikTok and Instagram right now that we cannot stop thinking about.
There is a whole genre of short videos where the creator opens by saying, plainly and without apology, “I have no friends.” What follows is usually sentimental and deeply moving.
She walks home, takes her shoes off, makes dinner for one, cleans a spotless apartment, does her skincare, pours soda into a wine glass, and goes to bed. The Cut has started calling these creators loneliness influencers.
The Atlantic, more gently, calls them solitude influencers.
Lana Isa, a twenty-four-year-old in Toronto, told The Cut that her first video of this kind drew around two hundred thousand views back when she had roughly a thousand followers. Read the comments under any of them and you will find hundreds of people saying the same thing: “that is exactly my life,” and “I thought I was the only one.”
We want to be careful here, because skimmers will miss the heart of our message and call us out as “haters” or for being “judgmental.”
We’ll be the first to tell you that the trend gets something genuinely right. Pretending you are not lonely has never once healed loneliness, and there is real courage in saying out loud what most people will not admit at church on Sunday.
Confession breaks shame, and that is not a secular idea borrowed into the church but a Biblical one the church gave the world.
The danger is what happens when a season hardens into an identity, when “I am alone right now” slowly becomes “I do not need people,” and a temporary wound gets decorated, filmed, and moved into permanently.
That is a stronghold, and Scripture is specific about how strongholds work.
An isolation stronghold is not the same thing as being an introvert, and it is not the same thing as a hard season.
Some of you are recovering from a betrayal that was real.
Some of you moved to a new city, lost a friend group when you got sober, or watched the whole thing dissolve after a divorce you did not want.
Some of you are caring for a parent and have nothing left at the end of a day.
None of that is sin, and Scripture never once shames a person for being alone in a valley.
The stronghold is the belief that grows in the quiet afterward.
Isolation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The distance you rehearse shapes the invitations you stop extending and the calls you stop returning, until your own withdrawal produces the very emptiness you were afraid of in the first place.
And the culture has an answer ready, which is why we are naming it.
The world’s fix for loneliness is a better version of being alone.
Curate the apartment, protect your peace by protecting nothing, find a creator whose voice keeps you company while you eat, and call the whole arrangement healing. It borrows the language of boundaries and self-care while quietly removing the one thing God said you needed.
We are not telling you to be less discerning about who you let close. We are telling you that a screen full of people is not a table full of people, and your body knows the difference even when your mind has made peace with it.
A stronghold believes and speaks things like this:
“Everyone already has their people, and the door closed before I got there.”
“Reaching out first would make me the desperate one.”
“I am too much for people, or not enough, and eventually they figure it out.”
“My spouse and my kids should be enough, so wanting more must be ingratitude.”
“I am not isolated, because my phone is full of people.”
The heartbreaking part is how spiritual some of that can be made to sound. We have heard believers describe a slow retreat from the Body of Christ as discernment, as protecting their peace, as finally learning to depend on God alone, and we understand every bit of the impulse.
We are still going to tell you what is underneath it.
Solitude carries you toward God and then returns you to people.
Isolation carries you away from people and eventually away from God, and it uses the language of solitude the whole way down.
Seven Ways Isolation Destroys Your Life
Being alone does not just make you lonely. It does quiet damage in seven directions at once, and most of us never trace the symptoms back to the source.
It removes the person who was supposed to pick you up. Scripture says woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up, and the verse assumes the falling. God never promised a life without stumbles, He promised somebody within reach when one comes (Ecclesiastes 4:10).
It talks you out of the gathering right when you need it most. Hebrews tells us not to neglect meeting together, as is the habit of some, and the writer already knew people would drift. The weeks you least want to walk into a room full of believers are the weeks that room was built for (Hebrews 10:24-25).
It leaves you carrying weight designed for two. Paul told us to bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, which means somebody else was assigned part of what is sitting on your chest right now. Carrying it alone is not strength, it is a job you were never given (Galatians 6:2).
It keeps your sin in the dark where it grows. James connects confessing to one another, praying for one another, and healing, and he puts them in that order on purpose. A struggle you have never said out loud to another human being has never had to survive the light (James 5:16).
It convinces you the Body can function without your part. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, and the reverse is just as true, because your absence is not neutral to the people God put around you. Somebody is missing what you were given (1 Corinthians 12:21).
It quietly rewrites who you belong to. Paul says that though we are many, we are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another, which is a statement about belonging and not just attendance. Isolation does not simply keep you home, it teaches you to think of yourself as unattached (Romans 12:5).
It dulls the edge God meant other people to sharpen. Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another, and there is no version of that verse where the iron sharpens itself. Growth you cannot get alone is exactly the growth isolation costs you (Proverbs 27:17).
Add up all seven and the pattern is hard to miss. This is not a personality quirk or a passing season, it is a stronghold that reaches into your body, your struggles, your growth, and your understanding of who you belong to.
And most of us are living somewhere inside it. The American Psychological Association’s 2025 Stress in America survey found that fifty-four percent of American adults felt isolated often or some of the time, and half said they felt left out or lacked companionship.
The World Health Organization now puts it at roughly one in six people worldwide.
That is not a niche struggle hiding at the edges of the church. That is the pew you are sitting in.
“It is not good that the man should be alone.” — Genesis 2:18
That was spoken in a garden before anything had gone wrong, over a man walking with God in person who had not yet sinned. Perfect environment, perfect fellowship with his Creator, and God still looked at him and said something was missing.
Read that again if you have ever been told that needing people is weak faith.
Renewing the Relational Mind
Here is the sentence this whole series stands on. Read it slowly, because it is not merely an inspiring thought.
It describes the pattern of transformation.
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” — Romans 12:2
We are transformed through the renewing of the mind, and that renewal does not stay trapped in the intellect. What you believe about people shapes who you text back, which invitations you accept, how you read a friend’s short reply, and how long you will sit alone before telling somebody the truth.
Your brain adapts around what you repeatedly practice.
Somebody who has rehearsed rejection for years may have deeply worn pathways that fire the moment a message goes unanswered, and those grooves run both directions, because repeated truth, prayer, worship, wise action, and actual time with actual people can lay down healthier patterns over time. This is exactly the brain science we unpacked alongside this same verse in Neuroscience Is Catching Up to Romans 12.
A 2025 study in Nature Communications lands right on this. Researchers found that what people believe about being alone changes how being alone actually feels, and that people holding negative beliefs about solitude showed a sharp rise in loneliness after time by themselves, while people holding positive beliefs felt less lonely after the same amount of time.
Read that carefully, because it cuts both ways and we will not pretend otherwise. Solitude can genuinely be reframed and made restorative, which is real and good, and there are seasons where God does some of His best work in a quiet room.
It also means a person can get very skilled at tolerating a life God never designed them for, and skill is not the same thing as health. A man can learn to carry a weight for so long that he forgets he is carrying it, and that is not strength, it is adaptation.
This is where the Seven R’s quietly do their work.
Repent of the agreements you made about whether people want you.
Renew the mind with truth spoken on purpose.
Remove the inputs that make staying home feel like enough.
Replenish with Scripture, food, water, movement, sleep, and honest conversation.
Rest in a God who called you His before anybody else did.
Restore what got broken through forgiveness, including the friendship you have not forgiven yet.
Revive hope by expecting God to set you in a family.
Unpack the Seven R’s more in Christians Are Drowning in Health Trends…
What you are reading is the why. What comes next is the how.
“I’m grateful to be here, receiving encouragement, recipes, and whole-body transformation. Even after trying times, I trust you and Mama Z. The spiritual aspect completes the system: body, soul, and spirit.”
— Ellen D.
God Sets the Lonely in Families
The promise on the other side of this is more specific than most people realize, and it is not a promise that you will feel better about being alone.
“God settles the solitary in a home.” — Psalm 68:6
The Hebrew behind that line carries the sense of God taking a person who has no household and placing them inside one. He is not offering a coping strategy for solitude.
He is saying He puts people somewhere.
We want to be honest about what that looks like in real life, because it is rarely dramatic. God has almost never handed us a friendship.
What He has done, repeatedly, is put us in a room and then ask us to be the one who spoke first.
That is the part nobody wants to hear:
The answer to isolation almost always requires the isolated person to do the very thing isolation has convinced them not to do.
Start With the Room God Already Gave You
Before you download an app or research a club, look at what is already in front of you.
Here are a few ways to be intentional about building relationships that have worked for us and others over the years…
There is a church within driving distance that meets every week, and there is very likely a midweek group inside it where eight people sit in somebody’s living room and actually talk. That is not a consolation prize.
Weekly gathered worship plus one midweek group is the most reliable structure for real friendship God has ever given His people, and the early church ran on exactly that combination of teaching, meals, prayer, and ordinary time together.
You do not have to love it in month one. You have to keep showing up long enough for somebody to learn your name and notice when you are missing.
“Thank you so much for everything you all do, and especially today for the Scriptures. I really needed those today.”
— Mary G.
Add Something That Puts You Around People
Friendship needs repetition and shared activity more than it needs good intentions.
Find something Biblically healthy that you enjoy and that happens on a schedule with other human beings present.
For Dr. Z it has been pickleball, which is not a spiritual discipline and does not need to be. It is a standing reason to be around the same faces often enough for something to grow.
For Mama Z it has been group fitness classes and pageantry, which gives her an opportunity to serve others and build deeper friendships.
One of the creators in that very trend, Devon Noehring, did exactly this. She joined a pickleball league, kept turning up week after week, and eventually one of the players she kept running into became one of her closest friends.
She has an audience of more than three hundred thousand people watching her be alone, and the friendship came from a court, not a comment section.
We are not going to pretend that is a coincidence. ;)
Be the One Who Goes First
Somebody has to suggest it, and the reason your calendar is empty may simply be that everyone in your circle is waiting for somebody else to make the plan.
Go first, and text the person you thought about last week and never messaged. Invite one family for one dinner that does not need to be impressive.
Ask a question at group instead of nodding through it. Tell one safe person the true answer when they ask how you are doing.
Every one of those is small, and every one of them is exactly what an isolation stronghold will tell you not to do.
Why Biblical Relationship Affirmations Matter
Not because words are magic, and not because repeating a phrase forces God’s hand, but because Scripture tells us to renew our minds, take every thought captive, love one another earnestly, and speak life.
An isolation stronghold has been talking to you for a long time, and it has had no competition. It speaks in your own voice, at your own volume, using memories you actually have, which is what makes it so convincing.
Biblical affirmations give you a way to answer it out loud with what God has actually said about whether you belong, which is why we built the twenty declarations and the printable card into the members-only toolkit.
Get started here...
A Prayer for You. 🙏
Heavenly Father, thank You that You never designed me to walk through life alone.
Thank You for setting the lonely in families and for every friend, neighbor and church family You place around me.
Give me courage to reach out first, to open my home and my heart, and to be the friend someone else is praying for.
Knit my relationships together with Your love, and let my life reflect the community You created me for.
Amen.
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Follow Jesus, not trends, in every area.
As always, our hope and prayer is that you experience the abundant life.
~ Dr. Z & Mama Z
References
American Psychological Association. Stress in America 2025: A Crisis of Connection.
The Harris Poll, 3,199 U.S. adults, November 2025. https://www.apa.org/pubs/reports/stress-in-america/2025
World Health Organization. From loneliness to social connection.
Commission on Social Connection, June 30, 2025. https://www.who.int/news/item/30-06-2025-social-connection-linked-to-improved-heath-and-reduced-risk-of-early-death
Rodriguez M, Schertz KE, Kross E. How people think about being alone shapes their experience of loneliness. Nature Communications.
2025;16:1594. doi:10.1038/s41467-025-56764-3
Pick R. The Loneliness Influencers. The Cut, June 2, 2026.
Hill F. The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influencer. The Atlantic, June 2, 2026.