452. How to get better at being alone

0:04 Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology.

0:24 Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here, back for another episode as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. A quick reminder, this episode and many others are now on Netflix in video form, and if you want episode transcripts and bonus research, you can find them on substack Everything, or be in the episode description. So I'm going to begin this episode with a question, when was the last time you were fully, truly alone for longer than twelve hours? When was the last time you spent a whole weekend by yourself, a whole day by yourself even, and more specifically, when was the last time you did that and enjoyed yourself. Our

1:18 relationship to loneliness, but more specifically just being by ourselves, just being alone, maybe not lonely, but alone, impacts our twenties in ways that you cannot imagine, or maybe you can. It influences the partner we choose. It influences the friendships that we keep naturally, of course, but also the jobs we refuse to leave, the cities we never moved to, the dreams we never pursue because they might require us to spend some time by ourselves. Sometimes, our biggest decisions, without us even realizing it, aren't driven by what we truly want, but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. It might seem funny, it's kind of ironic even to say that we have a relationship with loneliness, But we do, every single one of us.

2:13 There are some people who jump for joy at the thought of uninterrupted time by themselves all weekend, all week. They could do it forever. But if you're like me or the average person, I think solitude feels less like a blessing, more like a second best option at best, a punishment at worse. Today, though, I want to talk about how we can get over that, and how we can truly transform our relationship with loneliness to not just be something that we tolerate, but something we deeply enjoy, perhaps even benefit from in its entirety. I also want to talk specifically about what you will gain from loneliness or from solitude, and some very practical ways to get there, because if you can choose your reaction to solitude, to isolation,

3:04 to being alone, you gain a psychological power and a psychological flexibility that very few people have, especially in this day and age where everyone is connected to each other at literally every hour, every minute of every day. So, without further ado, I'm very excited for this episode, let's get into the psychology behind how you can get better at being alone. So to begin, why does feeling alone feel so just like iky and feel so weird? Why do we at times feel like we need to run away from any instance of solitude or alone time or isolation.

3:45 Let us do the simplest explanation first, and one that you've likely heard quite a few times from me. Being alone goes against deep survival instincts to stay with the herd. Those survival inste influence us unconsciously to always gravitate back towards the group, back towards being around people. Some people even have such an intense instinct towards others, or such an intense fear of being alone that it can develop into a phobia. It's called autophobia or monophobia. This creates intense anxiety, intense panic about being by ourselves, or intense fear around not being around other people. That's the first explanation in my opinion, And I know I mentioned the evolutionary explanation for loneliness quite a bit, But the older

4:40 I get, the more I'm kind of leaning away from this theory. I think this idea that we only hate loneliness because it goes against survival instincts is a little bit outdated. It doesn't really consider the role of introversion. It doesn't really consider why some people actually like being by themselves. It doesn't explain why loneliness persists even when we are constantly around people physically, especially you know, nowadays considering the availability of smartphones and like how far we've come from roaming the world or roaming the planes and tribes like, it doesn't really seem as applicable, like there is another element to this going on. Additionally, a fun fact for you. According to the UN, sixty percent of

5:24 the world lives in densely populated spaces, and that would mean sixty percent of people shouldn't be lonely, right. It's very easy to see other people, it's very easy to be around them, to feel enmeshed in a tribe. So this idea of just physically being alone feeling threatening is inaccurate considering that a lot of us aren't physically alone.

5:46 It is the sense of being emotionally isolated and emotionally unsupported that feels scary, and yes, there may be an evolutionary explanation for that, it's not the entire thing. I think why we should shrink from our alone time really comes down to an impending sense that this could be our new normal, and that any further slow escalation of this solitude could leave us entirely isolated before we even realize it. Before we know it, one night in turns into a month of complete isolation, and we won't have any say in the matter. I don't think it helps that in this day and age, we seem to both culturally and socially villainize solitude and loneliness, and I think this is for a few reasons as well. Firstly, there

6:34 is the most common but largely fair assumption that people any person you see who is alone isn't alone by choice. They are alone because nobody wants to spend time with them, that is the assumption that we make. This of course, then makes us feel more fearful of being alone ourselves, because we think that others will see us at the movies, out for dinner and think something is wrong with it, something has gone wrong in their life or recently, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology actually conducted a study in twenty twenty two on these social costs of seeking solitude, and their research showed that others assume that solitude seekers people who like spending time alone actually don't care much

7:20 about belonging to a group. They might assume that they're less friendly. Importantly, these negative impressions were often very incorrect, but the snap judgment persisted anyways and influenced how people treated those of us who seek solitude. A critical way that this happened is that people see others on their own, they believe that these people want to be left alone.

7:45 That leads to them being left out, therefore creating what we think will be a self reinforcing cycle, one that we don't want to happen to us. You know, we voluntarily spend time alone. Soon it's not going to be so voluntary anymore. It's going to be something that happens all the time. The other way that we villainize solitude is through the language that we use to describe people who spend time with themselves, and it's not very nice language.

8:11 Think of the phrase, you know, lone wolf to describe somebody who just like suddenly goes and shoots up a school because they are aloner. Another word that's not particularly nice. Women are often branded as like, you're a crazy cat lady, you're a spinster if you choose to live alone, particularly if they are romantically unattached, if they spend time by themselves, as if they are alone because they are undesirable, and being undesirable is the worst thing in the world. All of this language, and that's just three examples, you know, influences our decision to pursue solitude or not, because we don't want to be disapproved of. We don't want to be seen in a way that is negative by our peers or by other people, and that we see other

8:54 people treated. Researchers have also argued that solitude has gotten a very bad reputation because we haven't made a deep enough distinction between solitude and loneliness. They are seen as anonymous when they are so different. We know loneliness has some serious health consequences. It has even been compared to you know, smoking a pack of cigarettes a day in a very famous study. We know loneliness just feels awful when we're in it. It's not something we want to subject ourselves to. But solitude doesn't feel the same way and doesn't have the same health impacts. You can feel incredibly socially connected and still really enjoy being alone. You can have two three really good relationships, spend most of

9:41 your time by yourself, and still not categorize yourself as lonely or experience the health risks that lonely people do. So spending time alone has a bit of a pr problem, I would say, even though, to be honest, like we rarely are truly alone anymore, Like it is very rare, like the question I asked at the beginning, to spend time by ourselves emotionally but physically. We are all, in some way or another, keeping tabs on those around us.

10:09 We have a sense of what other people are doing at all times through social media, through texting, through the news cycle, which tells us what somebody in a far off place is doing Whilst we're cooking, there is this constant, deep sense of social interconnectedness. It has never been more overwhelming, and it heightens our need to be seen as social, to be seen as busy and popular, because it seems like everybody else's. This is really apparent in our twenties, of course, because we feel this need to live up to this depiction of this decade as the busiest, most social years of our lives. This is the social peak.

10:48 That's what people want it to seem like. This is what people claim it to be like. You are never going to have more friends than you have than you have now, you are never going to be as busy as now, so you better lean into that. Being alone can definitely feel upsetting deeply when we are truly lacking connection.

11:06 But in my opinion and from what I'm seeing more and more, the negative reaction it gives us is just guilt and shame, as if we are not making the most of our lives, as if we aren't worthy of being around people all the time. We're ruining this period when we should have the most connections, which means we run back to connections that don't make us that happy either.

11:27 So what do we miss when we neglect our loane time? What do we not get to enjoy? Number one when we flee time spent by ourselves, We just never get adjusted to our own company. We never feel calm within ourselves. We never feel just like comfortable doing things alone, going to the movies, going to the markets, going out for coffee, because they are simply, you know, the things that we should be doing with other people. We constantly have this like or this sense of a camera or some social surveillance on us that's going to come down at any moment and say, you're doing that by yourself, you must be lonely. If we constantly rush to fill our social calendar or days or lives because we want to avoid

12:15 this feeling, we also experience this rebound effect where more and more being alone does feel like a punishment. It does feel like we're doing something wrong. The less practice we get it being alone, the less we can cope with it when it does incidentally or inevitably happen, meaning that in those moments alone time feels more threatening because we just don't have the practice of being by ourselves.

12:42 We haven't gotten used to it, So it creates this cycle of like avoid this more because when I do experience it, it's so bad. Because I never experience it, you also never get a proper chance to regulate. Humans emotionally regulate in a lot of ways, but typically in two directions. We either coregulate or we self regulate. Simply put, we either use other people for regulation and steadiness. We rely on their presence to help us calm down. We center our thoughts based on them. They make us feel okay, that's coregulation, or we use internal strategies to do that independently.

13:21 We see that we're not feeling well or feeling in distress, we go for a walk, we speak positively to ourselves, we do our breathing, we do our self care. We can bring ourselves down, and we can also bring ourselves up. If you always borrow your regulation from other people, alone, time is going to begin to feel more and more dangerous because when presented with an uncomfortable emotion during that time, when you are by yourself, you have fewer and fewer and fewer internal resources to self regulate or to process it. Alternatively, when we spend time on our own, you know, we can also foster better emotional independence. This is something that we gain through alone time, because we are forced to

14:07 become our own primary source of validation, primary source of comfort and stability, not all the time, but in times when we really need it. This contributes to another kind of issue, which is that when we are surrounded by others constantly, we also just have less mental space to self reflect because we are forever getting social input on everything that we're doing. This might include, you know, others opinions about what should we eat, what should I wear?

14:37 What do you think about this?

14:38 What should we do?

14:40 Even subtle cues are like, when you're around people, you act differently because you're monitoring your behavior. You're trying to fit in.

14:47 Even with your.

14:48 Best friend, you're still trying to abide by social norms. You may not think you are, but cogdively there is a tax. There is a tax when you're around people of understanding that they are perceiving you as you are perceiving them. There is this very notable ted talk from Susan Kin. She is the author of the book The Power of Introverts, where she basically says that if you want to find out how you really feel about something, whether it's a relationship, a choice an opinion, you have to seclude yourself to some degree for some period of time.

15:24 She emphasizes that solitude, even introversion, like isn't something that needs to be cured. This isn't something that needs to be avoided. You need to understand that the ability to be quiet and to look inwards and for silence and to just be by yourself allows for greater understanding. And it's a lost art, it's a lost skill to just sit with yourself and be like, what do I think?

15:49 What do I want? How am I going to cope with this? There's also a lot of evidence that the more you not just tolerate, but actually enjoy alone time, which is a practice we know. But the more you enjoy it, the more emotionally intelligent you may be, the more creative you may be, and the more discerning you may be as well. I want to talk about one piece of research on this specifically, it's from the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. We talk about him all the time, and it's his idea of it's just called the capacity to be alone. He first spoke about this concept of the capacity to be alone in the nineteen fifties.

16:29 He wrote about it in a paper of the same name, and he essentially said, if I'm looking at somebody and I want to know if they're going to end up being smart as an adult. If I'm looking at a child and i want to know are they going to be successful, I'm going to look at whether they have a capacity to self regulate and whether they have a capacity to self entertain. Now, obviously he didn't want to see it go too far, but what he basically said is that when he saw children, toddlers, even teenagers who could feel good enough within themselves, who could see that like maybe their presence wasn't wanted, and they could go off and self entertain, go off into their own minds, think critically about something, who seemed to really enjoy their

17:13 own company. Those were the people that he said often ended up becoming very creative and very intelligent because they didn't require the presence of others to entertain them, and they didn't require the presence of others to confirm their reality or to confirm their existence. Now this is from a little while ago, so it's been revised a few times, and I think a lot of people in the modern day understand it. You know, this was at a time of like very intense individualism, and everybody was like, you need to be this like solo individual You are, you know, a boat in the ocean. And now we understand that it's a lot more complex than that. But I do still think it raises a really important point. At some

17:55 stage in your life, you are going to be lonely. You are going to be alone, going to experience solitude if you have never practiced that sensation before, if you think of that purely as punishment or that you're doing something wrong, there is a lot that you can gain from that that is just simply not going to be accessible for you. So I think that's a better kind of interpretation of Winnicott's theory. Interesting. Nonetheless, Okay, we're going to take a short break here, and then we're going to discuss three of the other benefits that you have to gain from regular alone time if it's not already part of your kind of social diet, and just how to get better at it when maybe, like me, it's not something that you are naturally good at.

18:41 So stay with us.

18:48 Alongside the links between spending time alone and intelligence, the other thing I briefly mentioned right before the break was creativity. It is no coincidence that so many writers and painters and musicians talk about these periods of intense solitude in their lives, All these periods of like needing to withdraw or needing to center themselves to really find a deeper well before they produced amazing art. That's why so many great albums came out during COVID or after a breakup, or after long retreats from public eye. Studies have shown that as long as your alone time isn't driven by fear and isn't driven by avoidance, it deeply stimulates creativity.

19:30 Because there is this increased looseness to your thoughts, our brains start to entertain themselves, start to get more imaginative, and in the absence of social pressure or social stimulation, like they just start to feel a little bit more at ease. There was an Italian study from two thousand titled Solitude as a Positive Experience, and it found that solitude creates more conditions for authenticity, imagination, fascination, and obsession, all of which help with creativity. They were also able to distinguish why loneliness doesn't do the same thing for people.

20:07 In their words, solitude is characterized by presence, which makes creativity easier. Loneliness is characterized by absence and longing and rumination, which makes creativity harder. Not impossible, because a lot of lonely people also make great art, but harder. Another paper from the University of Texas also found that solitude promotes creativity because it allows for what they call, and I love this phrase, the incubation of ideas. Basically, ideas have time to settle, They have time to grow and to develop in isolation from other people before they kind of out and present it to the world. There's a couple of other mental processes they say contribute. They talk about this thing called the enhancedability for the mind to wander.

20:58 They talk about drifting tension. It all links back to when you are by yourself, some of the walls come down and creative insight is channeled through you. An added bonus to being alone, too, is that we become much more socially selective. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves. Nobody else can take that from you.

21:21 We really do start to realize, like what I previously accepted, why did I accept that those people didn't like me, those people weren't nice to me. I don't want to be around those people. I was just afraid of being alone. And so we're really able to cultivate a deeper sense of self worth when solitude stops feeling like a void that you are desperate to feel. I think it becomes a filter instead. It becomes a way of testing whether people and certain commitments in your life are actually worth it to you. Because if you've got this great alternative of like, I'm going to spend some time by myself and that's amazing, not doing that requires something really special, and so it means that the things that you let

22:05 into your life, the standard for them is higher. When being by yourself feels so amazing. I think it just takes a bit more to drag you away from that, and so your life might get smaller, but it gets bigger in terms of quality. The irony is I think our ability to be alone actually creates healthier relationships, which people don't always talk about. When we get better at being solo, we really start to be selective about who we're choosing to join us. Relationships are always in necessity.

22:35 We don't want to be completely hyper independent. But now we're in this state of abundance rather than desperation. It's like, well, of course I want to have great friendships. Of course I want to be around people, but I know that I can get that and have that, and maybe need less of that than I previously did, because my inner well is so deep, and because the joy I get from being around myself is so valuable that if somebody isn't going to add to that, I actually don't think I'm going to be pained. Whereas previously, if you were somebody like me, it was just like anybody I can get.

23:10 If that means I don't have to be by myself and I don't have to face a single raw thought, good enough for me. You could literally insult me, you could literally talk about me behind my back. As long as you were between me and my own feelings and thoughts about something, you were doing a good job. This is such a crucial point to be made before I go into how to actually prioritize and enjoy your solitude.

23:35 I will say this is a very critical point that we need to make right here, right now, before we go into how to actually prioritize and enjoy our solitude. You don't want to go far too far the other way been there as well, I'm sure some of you have. Also, You're not meant to constantly be around other people. You're also not meant to be hyper independent. Sometimes when we get really good at enjoying our own time and space, it molds it and it evolves into this thing where we're only relying on ourselves, and we really get this attitude of like, I don't need anybody, I don't need help with this. I can do this by myself. Other people are just gonna drag me down. We're aiming for healthy dependency here. That is balance. Balance is like at

24:20 the core of human existence, we are striving for relationships that fill us as deeply as our lone time does, and striving for relationships where you feel equally Yeah, I guess fulfilled by them, but also you find that it gives you good thoughts to go away from. That makes your alone time easier because you know that you have the support network and you have these people who love you, and so again there's not this desperation of like, at any point I could be cast out, at any point, these people might not like me anymore. So I better take what I can get, you lose that feeling, and I think both of the interconnected things of connection and solitude become richer because each is becoming more fulfilling on

25:08 its own. Hopefully that makes sense. So how exactly do we do that? How do we achieve this nice symbiosis? Firstly, we need to work on a fundamental mindset shift, which is learning to not fear loneliness or being alone, even when it doesn't feel voluntary. Treat your solitude with intention, perhaps even with forced excitement, and it will become exciting.

25:35 If you look at your calendar and it's looking pretty empty, I know the inclination is to panic and fill it instead. I want you to ask yourself, like, what does this give me the opportunity to do instead? What is something that's always just like a little bit better to do? Mind myself anyways, what's something that I do when I kind of am like I probably shouldn't have invited somebody to do this with me?

25:57 Do that now?

25:58 This is not a punishment. You have not failed. This is an opportunity. And it might sound cliche to label it as such, but we know that fundamentally, how you experience things begins with how you perceive them, so targeting that aspect first, targeting perception brings more acceptance and enjoyment further down the line. If your perception is I am so excited for this, I'm so happy that I get this opportunity, enjoyment will increase. Something I try and always think of is that you know, at some point in the future, I may have kids, and my partner will be sleeping next to me in bed every single night, and I'll have people needing things from me every hour, and I'm most likely not going to have much time

26:45 to myself in those moments, like when I'm irritated and maybe like a little bit sticky and tired and overstimulated. I am going to be thinking back on my twenty six year old self, Gemma right now, right here, on how scared she was of spending a night alone. I'm going to beg her to appreciate what she has been missing.

27:08 I'm going to beg her to be like, just you don't know what you have, like say in tonight, romanticize the privilege of silence and the privilege of solitude. Enjoy this time for what it is. Whatever you have to say, do think believe it in order to flip that switch in your head from panic to enjoyment when you have a weekend free or an evening free. Do it whatever philosophy you need to believe, believe it. It's also so critical to examine what you're really resisting when you refuse to be by yourself. We speak a lot about this idea that big emotions like fear or anxiety often hide more nuanced secondary emotions that are harder to cope with, like insecurity or instability, or emptiness or boredom or existential fatalism,

28:02 all these things. And I think that our fear of loneliness is a prime example. I don't really think you're afraid of being bored. I think you know that you can cope on your own. I don't think you're afraid of feeling lonely. I think we all know deep down like you're capable of entertaining yourself. The secondary fear that you are experiencing is what if I get too comfortable with this, or what if this is a sign of worse to come? What if I lose my agency in my own loneliness or solitude. I think we treat alone time like it's this diagnostic test. Free weekend is not neutral.

28:40 It is evidence that we are becoming these lonely people, you know, if we can't feel it, if we're not busy, this is the end, Like our mind is building this case, this very fearful, anxious case that like I'm never going to find anybody ever again, Like my friends are disappearing. This is, as I said, the beginning of the end for me, Like I better, I better get out of here.

29:04 If I don't get invited now, I'm never going to get invited again. The deepest fear is a fear of not just missing out. I think it is that fear of never being invited back in and of constant exclusion and not having agency in that. And that is very powerful stuff. Be aware of that, because it's also not reality.

29:24 Not getting an invite one weekend doesn't mean your social life is dead for the rest of your life. Another secondary fear that our aversion to alone time is hiding is the fact that when we're alone we have to confront things that are normally busy social lives conceal for us. All these other things are going to start coming up without the presence of a distraction and not just questions to do with your friends or to do with loneliness, but deeper questions to do with your career and life and purpose and money and trauma. Being around people constantly means just less of that. It just means that all this stuff that's like really loud feels a little bit quieter. Again, goes to show how much our fear of being alone

30:11 isn't just a fear of being alone. It is wrapped up in psychological avoidance, and it's wrapped up in a pain point that we just really don't want to push. I would also like to include here that being alone also includes being comfortable with silence and not feeling it with music, not feeling it with podcasts, I hate to say it, not feeling it with podcasts or audiobooks or TV.

30:35 And that is something that I would say all of us are really bad at, but in fact the science has shown is very good for us. I have been going on and on about this for a hot minute, So if you're somebody who knows me personally, please just skip this next part because you've heard it over a couple of years at the pub. I'm sorry, I've been really on my high horse about this. But there is all this research coming out about how the average human will not experience silence ever in their lives. Ever, unless they like go death or something happens like, they are never going to experience silence. And the sad thing is, though our brains really like silence. A study from two thousand and six from the University of I think ParvE

31:26 E're somewhere in Italy revealed how much our bodies.

31:29 Do really appreciate it.

31:30 The researchers were investigating something very different. Actually, they were investigating music and how different types of music across all genres affected stress and affected blood pressure and heart rate and breathing, and how music could be used to like emotionally regulate through biological systems. And just by accident, they included a two minute silence randomly between tracks just as a control measure. Then it became part of the experiment because it turned out that listening to this silence elicited the lowest stress marker of all, even lower than during the five minutes of rest before the test started, where people were kind of just listening to sounds around them.

32:16 People had their headphones on and it was complete silence, and they really liked it. Now, what does this have to do with being alone? I guess I think being alone is more than just not being around people. I think if you want to stretch this muscle more and get even more tolerance, it's also about being alone with your own thoughts. So challenging yourself to, yeah, have an evening by yourself and not have something playing on the TV, have a little date night, not play music, cook, don't have YouTube in the background, eat, don't have YouTube in the background, or when you spend time alone. And again, I'm kind of I will say I still I'm not great at this, but I'm trying. When you spend time alone,

33:01 don't replace people with other people's voices through a screen. Just be with your own thoughts for a little bit. They're not gonna bite you, they're not going to hurt you. Something that equally eases us into the enjoyability of being by ourselves is finding something we can genuinely obsess over. I will say this, My alone time became so much more enjoyable when I knew what was waiting for me was really fun. And when I knew that on my table where my watercolors and my cool Japanese watercolor paper, my photo albums and my art projects and my fun things that I found so much more enjoyable, and quite frankly, nobody else was talking to me, and nobody else was around.

33:42 Basically we're talking about hobbies. Solo hobbies will help you so much in these situations because it offers up this inner world that's just for you that you get to step into and get wrapped up in, and you come out of four hours later and you're like, where the frick to the time going? You can politely forget how long you were I don't know, doing terrible watercolors for and suddenly alone time doesn't feel so scary because you get to experience this enhanced flow state you actually can't experience with other people. I've just found that like anything that ritualizes my alone time so that I have a routine to it, I have an exact thing I love doing the most when I'm alone, makes it so much more special because it's.

34:25 Like a date.

34:26 I'm like, it's a date and I've been in I'm in a long term relationship. Like dating my boyfriend is fun. Dating myself right now is like so novel and so new and so yeah. Sometimes it's hobbies. But also it's like he was away for a little bit in Belfast and I was like, I'm gonna go to the movies alone.

34:42 I'm gonna get the lux Saint and I'm gonna smuggle in all my snacks, and I'm going to get passer and wine and I'm gonna bring my journal. And I was like, this is the funnest thing I've done all year, because I made an event of my solitude. I made actual plans with myself the way that I make plans with my friends. You know, when I make plans with my friends, there are activities and outings, and there's normally a couple of stops, and there's food, and there's things to be excited about. I think part of our aversion to alone time is that it's often time spent indoors with ourselves, often in our own home, and it's kind of boring, right, It kind of feels monotonous. If we really want to embrace this, I am my own best friend.

35:23 I love my solitude mentality your friend. If you're your own best friend, your friend wouldn't just always ask you to come and hang out at.

35:30 Their place and do chores.

35:32 Maybe they would, but not every single time. You know, that's a lazy friend. If every time your friend wanted to hang out with you, they were like, so my place, my place, my place, and let's just go on our phones and do nothing. That's not quality time. And so if you want to be your own best friend, you can't be the friend who makes those kinds of plans.

35:50 You need to be the friend who's like, hey, I've organized like a three stop date for you, and I like, we're going to go to the comedy, we're gonna go out for come back, and we're gonna do else we're gonna do. We're gonna do quality time. If you're to date yourself, you've got to be somebody you would want to date. So somebody who puts an effort, somebody who really like wants to raise the bar for yourself. Basically, what I'm saying is, if you value quality time with your friends, promote it with yourself as well as your own best friend. You want to take this even one step further, you can also have a location you go to that is your so called church of solitude. And I saw somebody talking about this concept the other day.

36:33 A church of solitude is a place where you bring no one, nobody knows about it. It's something that you have a personal connection to, and when you want alone time, you know you're not gonna run into anybody there, and you go there and it's just for you. When I was living in Sydney, there was this massive tree deep in Centennial Park and I swear I saw somebody there like twice, and it was very much like they saw me.

36:57 I think they knew what was up. They gave me space went the other way. I did usually have my dog with me, and she's pretty fricking massive, so I think they were probably a bit like scared, but maybe played a role. I think maybe they just knew and maybe we had the same alone space. Like a church of solitude is just like amazing practice. Whether it's a cafe, whether it is a spot in your local park in nature like somewhere up a bookcase and a museum, I don't know, like a place that you preserve just for you.

37:30 That signifies solitude and all that that can bring. And I think also the value of having a place like this psychologically is that when you go there, your brain feels queued up right. It sends a signal of like this is what we are doing right now. We come here for this, this is the practice that we are practicing.

37:52 We're going to spend time alone. Let's sit here, let's enjoy it, and all those positive parts of this mental state and positive part of this experience that we spoke about, you know, creativity, the wandering mind, the intelligence, the imagination all come back more strongly because it doesn't take as much time to get into this state when your brain knows that this is what we do when we are in this place, when we are in our church of solitude.

38:18 So think of a place right now that you could go to that is just for you. Schedule in some time and go there more regularly. Okay, we are going to take one more short break before we discuss this final kind of element of this, which is, am I spending too much time alone? The opposite problem?

38:39 Stay with us.

38:46 Okay, So maybe you are listening to this episode and you are thinking, I've done all this. I actually was too good at this. I took this advice too seriously, and I've gone in the opposite direction. I spend too much time by myself. Is that a problem? I think the biggest question to ask yourself is do you think you have a problem? What do you think? Are you actually lonely or are you just enjoying a more independent error?

39:18 Because those two things are very different things, and the research does back that, It backs up this idea that voluntary versus involuntary alone time are very different. There's this man.

39:32 He's a researcher.

39:32 His name's John Carpaccio, and he actually, fun fact, co founded the field of social neuroscience decades ago. He also spent a lot of time studying loneliness, and he made that same distinction, that very important distinction, that loneliness isn't about how much time you spend alone. It is about the gap between the social connection you have and the social connection you want. Hence why it is so subjective.

40:01 The number of hours you spend by yourself isn't actually as diagnostic or helpful as you think. Your subjective experience is much more helpful. Hence that question, do you think you have a problem? You're the only one who can tell. Are you happy the way you are? Do you feel like you get enough social input? If so, maybe you do only need two to three days a week or even less of seeing people. That being said, there is a point where solitude can tip into something else, and researches or a very helpful line here between solitude as a state, onsociability as a personality trait, and social withdrawal as a symptom. Solitude is temporary and it's voluntary. You can slip in and out, you can make choices about it,

40:49 you can enjoy it. Unsociability is a preference. You also enjoy it, but it's more of like you know, you don't always choose it because it's just who you are. You very much rather read a book than go to a party. Even if you're invited. Maybe you'll go. You enjoy yourself, but your preference is to be alone. Social withdrawal is different. It's when you are pulling back from people because social interaction feels very threatening or heavy or exhausting, even though that is not typical for you. And social withdrawal is what we really want to look out for in these situations. I think it often indicates that there has been some experience, some broader pattern in the past, recent passes, pushing you into a space or into a

41:38 pattern of behavior that you aren't actually comfortable in. I think we see this a lot of time after a bad breakup where you're just like I just cannot be around people, or when you're going through grief or a bad friendship situation has left you a little bit traumatized. You have an innate desire for connection and for more social interaction, but interacting with other people just feels harder than it ever has before. You just can't do it.

42:00 You want it, you don't, You want it, you don't no matter how tricky it feels. We have to remember social skills, like most skills, can atrophy and kind of break down with disuse. There's a lot of research suggesting that prolonged isolation can actually make future social interactions feel more and more effortful and more and more anxiety provoking because we're out of practice, and so then that reinforces the need for withdrawal. It reinforces the fact that we shouldn't be around people. It's called a biosocial psychological feedback loop, a lot of fancy words to basically say that when we get into the habit of not being around others because we think that it's scary or hard, the more scary and harder it becomes. So again, you know, best

42:48 sit with it.

42:49 A bit.

42:50 And if you think, you know, I'm just in an independent error and I'm trying to find my balance and I'm just swinging this other way for a little while, maybe you're all right. But if there's been this gradual avoidance, if there's social anxiety behind this, remember that being around other people is often a lot harder in imagination than reality.

43:12 Remember that there are a lot of people out there who do really like you, and really enjoy you, and really really enjoy your company, no matter what your brain is trying to convince you right now, even if it's thirty minutes with a friend, just make sure you have something on your radar. Make sure that there is something that you like to do that is social, because I want to remind you of that kind of very critical thing we said earlier. The better you get at spending time alone, the better your relationships should become, and the better your relationships are, the less being alone should feel like a punishment. Really, they operate in unison. So if you're spending a lot of time alone but your relationships

43:53 really aren't improving, something's kind of off balance. If you're spending a lot of time with other people, but loneliness and a lone time starts to feel like this abyss that like you can never step towards something's also off balance as well. But that, my friends, is our episode and kind of my guide to how to get better at being alone semi colin without going too far. I think the concluding summary headline if this episode is really if you can control your relationship to solitude, you can control so many of your other reactions. Loneliness no longer feels like a threat. It no longer feels like something that is held over your head by bad, unfulfilling relationships.

44:40 Doors open because you can go through them alone and reveal more opportunities to do things. Because you don't need a partner, You don't need somebody else there to be your companion or to coregulate you. Through that, you may even experience, as we said, greater levels of intelligence, greater levels of creativity, which is very rarely talk about. Each of us has that set point of time we need to spend around others. So respect that need. Respect your introversion, your extraversion. Don't entirely deny yourself friendship and connection. But if you're sitting with a sense of guilt or fear that you don't have as many plans as other people do, that you're wasting your twenties, that you should be busier.

45:24 I think that this is your permission to let that fear go a little bit and to know that that's actually really, really normal. And no matter what you see online, people are spending a lot more time by themselves then you think and doing so opting into that. That's your choice, but you do have a lot to benefit. So thank you for listening, Thank you for making it all the way through. Thank you to our researcher Lucy Davidson for her contributions. Hey, if you have made it this far and you're listening on Spotify, leave a comment down below.

45:56 What is your church of solitude? What is the place that you go all by yourself that nobody else goes to. I gave you mine, I did. I gave you mine, so I'd love to hear yours. Make sure to check out an episode on Netflix as well. The full I Guess transcript article version of this is now on substack. If you want to join us over there. It's popping off.

46:20 I will say there are a lot of people hanging out with us on substack, and I would love for you to be one of them. Instagram, my book. Everything else is in the description. But I loved this episode. I loved getting to talk to you guys about this, especially my little rant about silence in the middle. Thanks for enduring that, but I hope you'll enjoyed it as well and learn something. So until next time, be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. Thank you for tuning in.

46:44 We will talk very very soon.