The Benefits of Solitude: Self-Care Without the Guest List
Solitude isn't loneliness, and it isn't just for introverts. What the research says about time alone, and why fifteen minutes of it does more than you'd think.
This Friday is International Self-Care Day. It also shares the calendar with National Tequila Day, which feels less like a scheduling accident than the calendar offering you two schools of thought.
Regardless of where you sit on that, we'd like to point out the obvious.
You don't get an awareness day for something that's going well. There is no International Breathing Day. No World Blinking Awareness Week. A day gets invented when the default has broken.
We're pretty good about wellness these days. More switched on, more aware for the most part. But somewhere between the run club, the sauna social and the 6am coffee rave, feeling better got a guest list.
Everything's telling us to look after ourselves. We need a crowd. And that's not a bad thing. Community, a sense of belonging, it does what's on the label.
But in the rush to make every part of life social, we seem to have forgotten the other thing humans have been doing for quite a while. Getting away from each other. Which is probably why we need a day for this.
Being alone, with a +none or +1, removes the pressures modern life puts on you. There's no pace you have to match. No dinner you need to agree on. No need to be interesting, agreeable, wearing trousers.
The urge to peel away from the crowd isn't a character flaw. It's one of the better-studied instincts you have. Fifteen minutes alone will calm you down
Researchers who study solitude keep landing on the same first finding: it calms you down, fast. In one series of experiments, just fifteen minutes alone reliably lowered high-arousal emotions. Not because anything got solved in fifteen minutes. Because the thing holding you at that pace was, largely, other people, and you'd stepped out of range.
(Nguyen, Ryan & Deci, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2018)
Time alone is time to think
Most of your thinking happens in fragments, because most of our days are full of interruptions. The decision you've been circling for a month exists as 40 separate 90-second attempts, each abandoned when the next thing arrives. Alone, the fragments join up.
Studies of chosen solitude consistently find people report more clarity, steadier emotions, and feeling more like themselves afterwards. One catch: the effect largely disappears if you spend the time on a screen, with passive scrolling the worst offender. Alone in a room with your phone is just a crowd you can't talk back to.
(Weinstein, Nguyen & Hansen, "What Time Alone Offers", 2021; Thomas et al., "Alone and Online", University of California, 2021)
You don't have to be an introvert to benefit
When researchers went looking for the link between introversion and who actually benefits from time alone, they couldn't find one. What mattered was whether the solitude was chosen. Checking in with yourself, not hiding from something.
And its impact grows with use. A survey of over 500 adults found that people genuinely at ease in their own company reported less depression and higher life satisfaction. It's parallel parking. Nobody's born good at it. You just need reps.
(Nguyen & Weinstein, "Who Enjoys Solitude?", PLOS ONE, 2022; Larson & Lee, adult solitude survey, 1996; Winnicott, "The Capacity to Be Alone", 1958)
Solitude is not loneliness
Somewhere along the way "alone" got filed next to "lonely". They are not the same thing.
If you're all over the wellness-with-a-crowd but still can't hear yourself think, head out with your +none or +1 and take some time alone.
Your own private cabin. Easy to get to, hard to find. Nobody for miles - Find a cabin