You Really Need Some Alone Time

Solitude is mentally and emotionally invigorating, so long as it doesn’t make you feel lonely

Solitude is the state of being by oneself. Loneliness is a feeling, the sadness of being lonely. The latter is awful, the former is crucial — for many of us — to emotional stability, mental productivity and overall happiness.

I like Aldous Huxley’s take on it: “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude,” the English philosopher once said.

We all need time alone — even if we don’t realize it. Or at least most of us do.

A new survey finds 56% of US adults say time alone is important to their mental health. My bet is the other 44% either get too much alone time, and therefore feel lonely, or perhaps they just don’t recognize the value of solitude and what to actually do with alone time, and how relaxing and useful can be.

“By taking a brief pause alone, our nervous system can settle, our mind can settle, our body can settle,” said survey team-member Sophie Lazarus, PhD, a clinical psychologist at Ohio State University. “And I think that can be important.”

Why some people prefer solitude, others not so much

What for me is a year-round mental-health challenge — avoiding people — becomes acute this time of year. I’m a natural recluse, an introvert who can play the game of extroversion when I need to, but it eventually exhausts me. My happiness, creativity and productivity depend on having time to be alone, to think creatively without distraction or to just do nothing. I crave solitude. When I’m by myself, I can work through whatever stress and anxiety I might be feeling — emotions that are, often as not, caused by... people.

Seems I’m not alone: 46% of the survey respondents said they don’t get enough alone time during the holidays. However, the amount of solitude we need varies by individual, other research has shown. According to Susan Cain, author of the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, somewhere between one-third and one-half of people are introverts. And society places expectations on introverts that go against all the fibers in their being that demand large doses of solitude.

“Extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation,” Cain explains, “whereas introverts feel at their most alive, and their most switched on, and their most capable, when they’re in quieter, more low-key environments.”

Where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum can play a role in your appreciation of solitude and your tendency to feel lonely. But it’s just one factor among many. In fact, young adults who have lots of social connections — a sign of extroversion — are more appreciative of their time alone. Yet people who value solitude are happier even without a lot of social connections, one study found.

Digging in further, the same researchers found that the people most likely to seek and enjoy alone time aren’t necessarily introverts, but instead rank high in dispositional autonomy — being the person they want to be and who explores their own experiences and emotions, and who resists pressure from others.

A small study by another research team confirmed the influence of dispositional autonomy. Volunteers kept diaries for 21 days so the researchers could analyze their moods in relation to their time spent alone or socializing. For some people, more alone time was linked to more loneliness. But that wasn’t the case among people whose alone time was a choice, or when it didn’t last for many days in a row.

“Those who were generally alone were not, on the whole, lonelier,” the researchers concluded last year in the journal Scientific Reports. “On days in which people spent more time alone they felt less stress and greater autonomy satisfaction (volitional, authentic, and free from pressure). These benefits were cumulative; those who spent more time alone across the span of the study were less stressed and more autonomy-satisfied overall.”

How to be alone

Solitude is a skill, one that can be developed. Margarita Azmitia, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has studied the difference between solitude and loneliness.

As I wrote previously about her findings: If kids or young adults seek solitude because of social anxiety or awkwardness, it can be a risk factor for loneliness and depression. But if they choose solitude just as a preference, there’s nothing to worry about.

“Solitude has gotten a lot of bad press, especially for adolescents who get labeled as social misfits or lonely,” she said. “Sometimes, solitude is good. Developmentally, learning to be alone is a skill, and it can be refreshing and restorative.”

Lazarus, the Ohio State psychologist, offers suggestions to help busy people find their solitude:

“Try putting your phone in a totally different room when you decide you’re going to spend alone time, knowing how hard it is to resist picking it up, the pulls on our attention and on our priorities,” she said. “Or take two or three minutes in the car before you go pick your kids up or before you go back into the house after work to just be alone.”

There’s no right way to be alone, of course. For some people, anonymity in a crowd does the trick. “Some people might experience alone time from going to a movie by themselves or going to a park where there’s a lot of people, or going to a coffee shop,” Lazarus said. “It can also be this absence of having to perform or interact socially in a more direct way.”

Alone time is, by nature, self-serving. But like putting on an airplane’s oxygen mask before aiding a child, your time alone ultimately serves those you love and care about. “Just because you’re prioritizing yourself at this moment doesn’t mean that you’re selfish and doesn’t mean that you always make the choice to prioritize yourself over others,” Lazarus said.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go don my social oxygen mask and disappear for a while.

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