Mental Health
Nick Jonsson on Making Amends to Overcome Executive Loneliness
The author of Executive Loneliness explains how repairing old relationships, a nightly review and a morning gratitude list moved him from isolation back to connection.
Strategies To OVERCOME LONELINESS | Nick Jonsson | Conversations With The Loneliness Coach
Video from The Loneliness Coach.
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How can making amends help leaders overcome loneliness?
Nick Jonsson says unresolved resentments are baggage that keeps people disconnected. In his recovery he listed everyone he felt hurt by or had hurt, then apologised in person where he could, or by message or letter where he could not. Repeating the habit each night and keeping a gratitude list, he says, lowers anxiety and rebuilds connection.
Nick Jonsson, the author of Executive Loneliness and co-founder of EGN Singapore, joined host Nathan on Conversations With The Loneliness Coach to describe how he climbed out of addiction, depression and isolation. His answer was not a single breakthrough but a set of plain habits that anyone living under pressure can start this week.
He traces the loneliness he writes about to a loss of connection with yourself, the kind that lets someone sit in a room with family, friends and colleagues and still feel alone. For Jonsson, that disconnection was fed by alcohol, a divorce, a resignation and years of telling nobody how he really felt inside.
The conversation keeps returning to one practical idea from his recovery: clearing old resentments by making amends. Alongside it sit two smaller routines, a nightly review of the day and a morning gratitude list, which he says keep his relationships clean and his mood steady. Together they form a working answer to loneliness rather than a slogan.
Key takeaways
- Loneliness at its worst is losing connection with yourself, so you can feel alone even when surrounded by family and colleagues.
- Old resentments are baggage; listing them and making amends, starting with the hardest one, brings the biggest relief.
- When a person cannot be reached, a message, a letter kept in a drawer or a prayer still lets you clear your side.
- A nightly review of the day and a shared morning gratitude list keep relationships repaired and anxiety lower.
1. Why speaking up came first
Jonsson describes a point where his body was breaking down. Alcohol was running his life, he had divorced, resigned from his job and moved between countries, and he had lost confidence in himself. He was so unwell that he began writing his will, not because he wanted to die, but because he believed his life was over and did not want to leave a mess for his son.
The turn came when he told his new wife how he felt. She was shocked, because she saw a successful man who seemed to have everything together. She took him to a doctor and then to an anonymous support group, where he spoke honestly about his life for what he believes was the first time, in a confidential room where he felt safe.
He kept returning every day. After about three months he found the confidence to tell close family members and friends, who were surprised but did not judge him. As he shared his story, he says, the loneliness disappeared and he began to feel connected again, a journey from barely being able to move to feeling full of life.
2. The can of soda and the practice of making amends
One step of his recovery was to repair relationships. Jonsson made a list of everyone who brought up resentment, hurt or sadness when he thought of them, then set out to fix each one. That meant going back to childhood friends and incidents from 20 or 30 years earlier and saying sorry for things he had not really meant.
The example he gives is small. At a family lunch his sister offered his three-year-old son a soda without asking, and he pulled the boy from the table and stormed off. He avoided her for some time afterwards. When he finally raised it with her over lunch, she could not even remember it, though it had played on his mind for years.
Clearing it felt like putting down a weight, and he did the same with every relationship he could think of. He says he now has no broken relationships. Where someone cannot be reached, he suggests a text, an email or a passed-on message, or a letter written and kept in a drawer, so that you have cleaned your side of the street.
3. Daily habits that keep connection alive
Jonsson now treats amends as a daily affair. Before bed he thinks back over the day and asks whether an email, a message or a remark landed wrongly. If so, he sends an apology that night and offers coffee or a call the next day, so he can sleep well and not wake up anxious about a relationship that has gone wrong.
He also keeps the gratitude list from his recovery programme. Writing a few things you are grateful for each morning, he says, trains the mind for appreciation, and sharing the list with a small group of five or six friends adds accountability. On the morning of the interview he had cycled up a small hill in Singapore before sunrise and shared a photo with a friend.
His advice to anyone stuck on the couch is to talk to someone, write an honest inventory of what is not going well and deal with each item one by one. His book, Executive Loneliness: The 5 Pathways to Overcoming Isolation, Stress, Anxiety & Depression in the Modern Business World, sets out the five pathways behind that approach, and his message is plain: ask for help before things go too far.
