You’re Not Alone in This
It’s 2:13am. You lay there awake with a heavy feeling on your chest, a conversation you keep replaying, a decision you have to make. Do you wake your partner or face this feeling alone? You don’t want to be that friend who texts at 2am again. Not wanting to burden anyone makes you feel less shame in your next decision. So you open an app instead, and you start typing to something that will never get tired, never get annoyed, never need you to ask how it’s doing first.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone in it, and you’re not doing anything wrong by reaching for it. That impulse makes complete sense.
Why This Makes Sense
We’re in the middle of what the U.S. Surgeon General has called a loneliness epidemic. (U.S. Surgeon General, 2023). Nearly three in five Americans say no one truly knows them. On any given day, roughly one in five adults report feeling lonely. Against that backdrop, an AI that’s always available, never judges, and never has a bad day of its own is going to feel like relief. For this reason, of course it does.
But newer research is starting to show us something important about what happens next. A twelve month study following more than two thousand adults found that people often turn to chatbots because they’re lonely, but the more they lean on that use over time, the lonelier they tend to become, not less. A Stanford study published this year found something similar: people with smaller in-person support networks who sought emotional support from AI companions ended up feeling more isolated, not less. (Zhang et al., 2026). The researchers were careful to say this doesn’t mean AI is harmful by nature. It means AI doesn’t do the thing that actually resolves loneliness, because loneliness isn’t solved by having somewhere to talk. It’s solved by being truly known by another person, mess and all.
What Attachment Theory Can Tell Us
This is where it gets interesting from a clinical lens. How we relate to an always-available, endlessly patient AI often mirrors our existing attachment patterns.
If you tend toward anxious attachment, an AI companion can feel like the safest possible relationship: it responds instantly, it never pulls away, it never leaves you waiting for a reply while your nervous system spirals. But safety is also the problem. Real relationships require tolerating uncertainty, waiting, and the small risk that someone might respond imperfectly. A chatbot never asks you to build that tolerance.
If you tend toward avoidant attachment, an AI companion can offer a version of closeness that asks nothing of you in return. You get to disclose without being truly vulnerable, because there’s no one on the other end who might need something from you, disagree with you, or get too close. It can feel like a connection while quietly protecting you from the very intimacy that would actually ease the loneliness.
In both cases, the chatbot isn’t the problem. It lets us practice a version of relationship that skips the part where real growth happens: give and take, being known imperfectly, and staying anyway.
A Bridge, Not a Destination
None of this means the 2am conversation with a chatbot was a mistake. Sometimes we need a place to think out loud before we’re ready to bring something to a person. That can be a legitimate first step. The concern isn’t the first step. It’s when that first step becomes the only step.
The good news is that the skills for real world connection aren’t mysterious, and they aren’t fixed traits either. They’re built the same way any skill is built, through repetition.
Think about your first day at a new job versus on day 60. The first day, every interaction felt like an effort. You might have second guessed how to introduce yourself, whether a comment landed right, or whether you were being too much or not enough. By day 60, none of that required thought anymore. The skill didn’t change. Your exposure to it did.
The same is true for approaching people in everyday life, at the coffee shop, at church, at the rec center, in line somewhere. A simple, low pressure opener is often enough like a genuine comment about something in the environment, a question that invites more than a yes or no answer, or simply introducing yourself by name. None of these require charisma. They require repetition, the same way that first day of work did.
For anyone who wants to go deeper on this, a few books worth recommending:
Find Your People by Jennie Allen, a practical and faith centered look at building real community, especially resonant for readers coming from a Christian background.
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, on how to create gatherings, big or small, that actually foster connection instead of filling a calendar.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, still one of the most practical and timeless guides to building rapport and genuine connection with others.
And if structure helps, an app like Meetup can be a low stakes way to find recurring, in person groups built around a shared interest. The kind of repeated contact with the same faces that build real familiarity over time.
You don’t have to solve loneliness by tomorrow. You just have to take one step back toward being known by someone who can actually know you back.
References
Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community [Internet]. Washington (DC): US Department of Health and Human Services; 2023–. PMID: 37792968.
Zhang, Yutong & Zhao, Dora & Hancock, Jeffrey & Kraut, Robert & Yang, Diyi. (2026). Interaction with AI companions and psychological well-being. Nature Human Behaviour. 1-15. 10.1038/s41562-026-02516-2.
**Disclaimer: this blog is not a replacement for therapy. If you’re interested in booking a session please book a free discovery call, here.
