Chapter 1: I Am Alone: Introducing Solitude Chapter 1 I Am Alone Introducing Solitude
It turns out, all I needed to know about solitude I could have learned in kindergarten.

When I was a graduate student training as a developmental psychologist, my thesis research focused on the different ways that young children play at school. Consequently, I spent countless hours observing the day-to-day activities at preschools and kindergartens. I would show up each morning, armed with my clipboard and stopwatch, and spend the day sitting on one of those tiny child-sized chairs in the corner of the classroom, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Sometimes children would come up and ask what I was doing there or invite me to play. But after a while, everyone got used to me being there, and I just kind of disappeared into the background decor.

You can learn a lot about children just by watching. Most previous research about young children’s social behaviors focused on how kids learned to get along well with others, which is a primary task of growing up. And, of course, getting along well with others remains a critical task for adults too. Historically, developmental psychologists have also been really concerned about the implications of children not getting along well with others. So, when they sat and observed young children together at school, they paid a lot of attention to episodes of conflict and aggression. This is not at all surprising, because these types of events are noisy and disrupt the classroom for everyone. And in the case of aggression, someone can get hurt. That is also why we pay so much attention to these same sorts of episodes among adults.

But I was interested in something different. I wanted to learn more about how children got along with themselves. For me, there was something fascinating about those children who played alone despite being around so many other potential playmates. So, I watched, and then I watched some more. Of course, every child is different. But after a while, some patterns began to emerge. I noticed that I could often classify the various children who tended to spend a lot of time alone at school into different specific types.

Some of these children seemed to be quite content to play quietly alone, building with blocks, drawing pictures, or doing other solo activities. When other children approached to invite them to play together, they often said yes. But when those social opportunities played themselves out, these children would happily return to their solitary activities.

Another type of child I noticed appeared more uneasy when alone. They would spend a lot of their time watching their classmates play but refrain from joining in. They certainly seemed interested in what other kids were doing and gravitated toward opportunities to make a social connection. However, the closer they got to the action, the more their growing discomfort seemed to push them back. So, they hovered on the edges of social circles, rarely moving past the periphery.

Yet other children who played alone were more boisterous. They tended to be somewhat socially clumsy and, as a result, were frequently rebuffed in their efforts to play with others. These children appeared frustrated when they ended up having to play by themselves. They did not want to be alone, and you could see it on their faces.

I also took note of the most outgoing children, who flitted around the room, constantly seeking social stimulation and engagement. In the rare moments when these children found themselves alone, it was clear that this was not a place they wanted to be. They quickly moved on to the next social thing.

At the time when I was conducting this research, I thought I already knew a lot about solitude. Today, I can look back and understand that not only did I not know a lot, but I had no idea how much I didn’t know. It was all there right in front of me, though. The kindergarten classroom was the perfect microcosm for understanding the hidden complexities of solitude. These children were models of the many different relationships we can form with solitude. Maybe if I had looked harder, if I had opened myself up more to what these children might be thinking (“I wish someone would play with me” versus “What color should I paint this tree?”) and feeling (sad versus content), I would have understood that these children’s different experiences of being alone were key to understanding the complex and even paradoxical links between solitude and well-being.

I guess this would be a better story if, during one of those observation sessions, I had experienced a sudden revelation about the inner workings of solitude. But alas, that is not what happened. Nevertheless, it was those many hours spent just watching children play that first sparked my interest in the idea that solitude is more complicated than we might think. I didn’t get my moment of true scientific revelation until almost thirty years later. But that is a story for later.
We Are All Alone
Solitude is a part of the human experience. According to the American Time Use Survey, at age fifteen, Americans spend an average of more than three hours per day alone. In our twenties and thirties, time spent in solitude rises to about four and a half hours per day. As we age, each passing year brings more time alone, and by age seventy, we average more than seven hours a day in solitude. Solitude is an experience we are all deeply familiar with. It is a fundamental aspect of everyday life. So, it is somewhat surprising that we know so little about it. And perhaps it is for that very reason that so many misconceptions, myths, and downright fallacies about solitude persist.

Solitude tends to evoke a wide range of reactions. In part, this is because each of us experiences it differently. As a result, we all form our own unique relationship with solitude. Relationships are tricky to predict and understand because they have what are sometimes referred to as emergent properties. This means that the full nature of a relationship is more than the sum of its parts, or the individual characteristics of the people involved in the relationship. Have you ever tried to play matchmaker with two of your friends? You might know both of these people quite well and feel certain that they will hit it off. But when the time comes, the date is a disaster, and your friends end up asking how you could have possibly thought they would be a good match. There is no need to feel bad. Relationships take on their own unique properties and are often unpredictable, even if you know almost everything there is to know about the two people involved.

Similarly, there are emergent properties at play in our unique relationships with our own company. For some people, this relationship is nourishing and intimate, and solitude makes them feel good; for others, this relationship is frustrating and exhausting, and solitude tends to make them feel angry; for others still, this relationship can be unnerving and ambivalent, and solitude often makes them feel anxious; and so on. But just like other relationships, our relationship with solitude can have both good and bad aspects, and if we really want our relationship with solitude to be healthy, we have to be willing to work at it.

One of the pervasive problems with solitude is that although it is often a regular part of our day, we don’t pay much attention to it, and as a result, we neglect how important it is to our well-being. A friend of mine told me a story about an interesting conversation he had with the person seated next to him at a wedding. (You never know whom you will be sitting with at a wedding.) His tablemate was a physical therapist who specialized in the pelvic area and was passionate about his work. He mentioned that although serious problems in that area of the body eventually get dealt with, most people probably have some type of minor dysfunction that is negatively affecting them in ways they don’t realize. He went on to say that this was likely because, although the pelvis is a critical part of our body in terms of our health and wellness, it can feel taboo to discuss: people just don’t generally like to talk about pee, poo, and sex. His main lament was that if people just paid a bit more attention to their pelvis, and made even some minor adjustments, their lives would noticeably improve.

This strikes me as a good metaphor for what I think is going on with solitude—and it gets at the crux of this book. Most people probably don’t think that much about solitude. We sometimes read about solitude in the news or come across the topic scrolling through social media. But these are usually extreme examples, stories highlighting the dangers of the growing loneliness epidemic or the trials of a solo adventurer who spent months alone in the wilderness. But I have learned that we need to pay more attention to solitude, our relationship to it, and how it impacts our health and wellness. Because just like our pelvis area, many of us probably have some type of minor dysfunction in our relationship with solitude, and it turns out that even small tweaks are likely to lead to noticeable improvements. In short, we need to talk more about solitude.

A classic and prescient quote about solitude comes from Blaise Pascal, a seventeenth-century French mathematician, inventor, and philosopher, who wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” How about we give this a try. Go find a quiet place and sit by yourself, alone with your thoughts, for fifteen minutes. No sleeping, no technology, no distractions: just you and the inside of your head. Set an alarm to alert you when fifteen minutes is up, but don’t check the time remaining. Stop reading now and go do that, and then come back and pick up right here where you left off.
Fifteen Minutes Later
How did it go? Be honest. Did you cheat? Did you make it through the entire fifteen minutes? Did you check your phone? Did you fall asleep? Some people find this experience peaceful and relaxing, are surprised by how quickly the time passes, and feel refreshed when the alarm goes off. For others, it is just okay, and they were mostly bored. For yet others, sitting alone and unoccupied is unsettling; they just cannot seem to get out of their own head. And for many people, this exercise is excruciating and stressful. They count down the seconds until they can at last be released, if they even make it that far. So, every reader of this book might have been sitting alone, but each had their own uniquely personal experience of solitude.

What you just undertook was the basis for one of my favorite research studies about solitude. In 2014, the University of Virginia professor Timothy Wilson and other psychology researchers conducted a series of experiments in which they asked college students to sit on a chair, alone with their thoughts, in a small room with the door closed for fifteen minutes. Afterward, the students answered a series of questions about how they felt during this time. There were several variations to the structure of the experiment and to the context. For example, in some cases, the students completed their solitary time in a lab room at the university, and in other cases, students did this at home.

When I asked Wilson to tell me more about this study, he disclosed that his colleagues and students were split over what they thought would happen. Wilson himself believed that participants would generally enjoy this scenario, based on his own personal affinity for solitude. He admitted to being pretty surprised by the results: overall, and across all the studies and scenarios, students reported a strong dislike for this experience. They also recounted being very bored. Among the students who participated from home, about one-third confessed that they had cheated and failed to last the full fifteen minutes (so do not feel too bad if you didn’t make it through the exercise yourself).

In one variation of the experiment, all the student participants had the chance beforehand to try out what it feels like to get a painful electric shock.I They were then given the same instructions to go sit alone with their thoughts in a lab room for fifteen minutes. But these participants were also told that they could receive the electric shock again by pressing a red button in the room. Amazingly, the majority of participants in the lab found the experience of sitting alone doing nothing so aversive that they chose instead to fill the time by self-administering a painful electric shock. Think about that for a minute: most people would rather inflict pain upon themselves than just sit alone for fifteen minutes with nothing to do but think.

As an aside, most of the participants gave themselves one or two shocks. But one male participant apparently self-administered 190(!) shocks to himself in a fifteen-minute period. I will not speculate here as to why he might have chosen to do that…II

Of course, this experiment was not just about solitude per se; it was also about being alone with one’s thoughts. In this way, I would suggest that this experiment likely tells us more about college students’ ability to cope (or not cope) with boredom and being cut off from their smartphones than it tells us about typical experiences of solitude. However, a few years later in 2018, the same results were found in a much more diverse sample of several thousand participants across eleven countries. So, I think we can conclude that people generally do not like sitting alone with their thoughts. As we will discuss, solitude has a long-standing poor reputation, and studies like these reinforce it. These findings also underscore a major challenge in “selling” the potential benefits of solitude: some people just have an immediate negative reaction to being alone and cannot even imagine how it might be personally helpful. For them, almost any solitude feels like too much. Yet there are also people who crave solitude, and for them, it often feels like they are not getting enough time alone.

With that in mind, take a moment and answer this question:

Overall, the amount of time I get to spend alone each week is:

(a) definitely not enough

(b) somewhat less than I would like to

(c) just about right

(d) somewhat more than I would like to

(e) definitely too much

Did you choose “just about right”? If so, consider yourself part of a lucky minority. Over the years, I have asked this question to thousands of people, and fewer than one in three people select this response. The results of the other responses are distributed relatively evenly across the other options, with slightly more people typically choosing “somewhat more than I would like to” or “definitely too much” than “somewhat less than I would like to” or “definitely not enough.” This means that more than two-thirds of people are dissatisfied with how much time they spend alone, either seeking to avoid feelings of loneliness and isolation (too much solitude) or craving the comforts of more “me time” (not enough solitude).

Of course, how much time you spend alone is only one component of your relationship with solitude. There’s also the question of how you feel when you are alone (are you bored? anxious? calm? focused?); what you do when you are alone (do you meditate? pursue hobbies? get stuff done? scroll through social media?); and the reasons you are alone (are you trying to avoid stressful social situations? trying to recharge your battery after a busy and “people-y” day at work?). But no matter how you define or evaluate it, most people are dissatisfied with their relationship with solitude. The good news is it turns out we can do something about that.
The Promise(s) of (This Book on) Solitude
It has never been more important to understand the costs and benefits of solitude. Another finding from the American Time Use Survey is that the average amount of time spent alone across adults in the United States gradually increased from 2003 to 2019. This was before the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time alone increased much more dramatically around the world. More than four hundred years ago, the philosopher Francis Bacon famously wrote, “Knowledge is power.” In this book, I will draw upon what I know from more than thirty years of studying solitude to empower you to establish and cultivate a healthy relationship with solitude. Regardless of whether you get too much alone time, not enough alone time, or just the right amount, this book is going to explain how you can get more out of solitude and why. Drawing from the most recent research in psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and evolutionary biology, but also combined with real-world experiences and what is trending on social media, I will help you unlock the potential of spending time alone as a positive force for your mental health and well-being.

In the first part of the book, we will take a deep dive into the science and psychology of solitude. We will learn about the duality of solitude and how and why it can be both harmful and helpful for our health and well-being. And along the way, we will answer all sorts of questions, ranging from “Is it solitude if I am with my pet?” to “Why does not getting to play catch with others sometimes feel like physical pain?” to “Why does walking alone in a forest make me feel calmer?”

In the second part of the book, we will apply this newly acquired knowledge about the complexities of solitude to help you optimize experiences of being alone across various domains in your life. This section is sort of like a user’s guide for solitude, and we will address questions ranging from “How does solitude spark creativity?” to “Are married people really happier than singles?” to “How do I find the right balance in my life between time alone and time with others?”

So read on, and let’s explore together when, why, how, and for whom solitude will be helpful versus hurtful. Because sometimes, it may be important for us to be left alone.

1. I. This was done so that if they self-administered a shock later, it was not likely because of curiosity.
2. II. … although it did make me think of Bill Murray’s cameo in the dentist scene of the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors… just saying…