Course Conclusion and Next Steps

Course Completion and Next Steps

Congratulations on completing this course about caring for yourself! We hope that this course has shown you how you can be your own best source of comfort and strength. We hope it has provided you with practices and tools that will be useful and valuable in your own life.

Now that we're reached the end of this course, you have the tools and resources to better understand the following:

1. How loneliness and social isolation can affect our health and ability to thrive
2. How stress (including loneliness) affects our ability to reason and regulate our emotional states
3. How mindfulness can provide mental focus and discipline and help defeat stress
4. How compassion and gratitude can help us be better friends to ourselves and others
5. How mindfulness can help us develop resilience and protect ourselves against loneliness and other stressors in life

The mindfulness exercises, reflection questions, scenarios and activities throughout this course have been designed to help you on your journey to better understand yourself, your relationship to loneliness, and how you can build relationships with both yourself and others to overcome loneliness.

Next steps

Now that you've completed the course, we hope you'll continue to use the resources included. Specifically, the questions for reflection are useful to periodically revisit, and the exercises included in Mindfulness: Learning Tools can be incredibly valuable lifelong practices. These are the core of this curriculum and the key to your ongoing success in overcoming loneliness and other stresses. We strongly encourage you to adopt the sample practice sequence included in A Note on Mindful Practices or to adapt a regular mindful practice of your own and make it a part of your daily ongoing life.

We also recommend you start building your resilience toolkit by completing the final module in this course, Solving Loneliness: Creating Your Plan.

• In Self-Reflection: How Do You Cope?, you'll reflect back on strategies for stress management or loneliness that you've tried in the past or were using when you first began this course. You'll also consider those exercises and suggestions offered by this course. Just as loneliness is experienced differently by every one of us, we'll each find different practices and solutions more valuable than others. This is your opportunity to assess those you've encountered and determine which you'd like to try moving forward.
• Then, in Self-Reflection: What Does Loneliness Feel Like, you'll reflect on what happens to you physically, emotionally and behaviorally when you experience loneliness. Now that we understand the reasons we react the way we do under stress and have learned to recognize our own triggers and stress fingerprints, we can create our own plans to address them.
• Finally, considering your past and present/future coping strategies and the way loneliness affects you, you'll write a 'prescription' for overcoming loneliness for yourself in Creating Your Own Prescription.

As you continue your journey into mindfully navigating your loneliness, we encourage you to keep the following tips in mind.

• Take one of the self-assessment quizzes periodically to see how you are doing, tracking and monitoring your scores to see any changes. These are great ways to see tangible evidence of how your mindfulness practice is helping, of if you might need to fine-tune your approach. Refer to Resource: Assessing Your Loneliness or check out other assessments in Supplemental Resources: Assessments and Tools.
• Remember, the more you exercise your mindfulness 'muscle', the better it becomes. Try to do at least one mindfulness practice every day consistently. You can keep a structured routine like those in A Note on Mindful Practices or try something different every day.
• Keep a journal or notebook like the one you recorded your reflections in throughout this course. It is great for charting your journey and seeing how far you have come over time. It's also a great place to record and reflect upon scores from the loneliness assessment and resilience assessments found throughout this course.

Try out these new skills and see how they can make a difference in your life.  Take some time to sit with this information. Come back to it whenever you need to. Thank yourself for being kind to yourself and others!