Why Being Alone Might Be Better Than You Think | The Happiness Lab Podcast

Key Takeaway

The way we talk about loneliness matters profoundly. Research shows that people who believe being alone is inherently bad experience significantly more loneliness, anxiety, and stress when solo—while those who view solitude positively actually feel less lonely and more relaxed. Simply reframing 30 minutes of 'isolation' as 'me time' led participants to experience increased positive emotions and think more about personal growth. The language we use shapes our reality: solitude and loneliness are not the same thing, and recognizing this distinction can transform our emotional experience.

Episode Overview

This episode explores how our cultural messaging about loneliness may be counterproductive. Historian Fay Bound Alberti reveals that loneliness as we know it today didn't exist before the 19th century, emerging alongside individualism and urbanization. Psychologist Michaela Rodriguez's research demonstrates that our beliefs about being alone directly shape our emotional experience—and that solitude, when properly understood, offers significant benefits for emotional regulation and well-being.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Why Being Alone Might Be Better Than You Think | The Happiness Lab Podcast from The Happiness Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

If you're a fan of The Happiness Lab, you've surely heard about the powerful benefits of social connection, as well as the dangers of its opposite, loneliness. loneliness. loneliness. Loneliness is strongly associated with an increased risk of heart disease and dementia, depression and anxiety. This is Dr. Vivek Murthy. Back in 2023, when he was Surgeon General, he famously issued a landmark public advisory to sound the alarm about the negative effects of loneliness. Vivek joined us on the show a few years ago for an episode about the dangers of isolation.

During that conversation, he referred to our country's lack of social connection as an epidemic, one that he argued was deadly. And if you look at the degree of life shortening, it appeared similar to the mortality impact of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and greater than the mortality impact of obesity. Vivek also told us that the health problems associated with loneliness were growing. growing. growing. One recent report by the World Health Organization found that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness. loneliness. loneliness. And Vivek found that rates of loneliness in our own country can be as high as 22%.

22%. 22%. And just to put this in context, 22% of adults in the United States is more than the percentage of adults who smoke cigarettes. It's more than percentage of adults who have diabetes. So, this is exceedingly common. common. common. It's no surprise then that news reports these days are brimming with scary stories about the terrifying costs of the loneliness crisis. I mean, the World Health Organization has argued that loneliness is linked to an estimated 100 deaths every hour. hour. hour. Scary stuff, right? Well, that's why this week's happiness hot take is bound to be a very, very fiery one.

Because today's happiness hot take is this. Lately, I've been starting to think that all this talk about the dangers of loneliness might be a little overblown, or at the very least counterproductive in ways that our lying minds don't realize. Today's happiness hot take is that we desperately need to change how we think about and how we talk about loneliness. Because the science shows that there are lots of unexpected benefits that can come from a little more alone time. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. When you think about loneliness, what comes to mind? I was studying at the University of York, and there were lots of Canadian geese geese geese outside my bedroom window, and they did that honking noise, which still fills me with dread.

with dread. with dread. For Dr. Fay Bound Alberti, a historian at King's College in London, loneliness conjures up the sounds she remembers hearing when going through a rough breakup as a college student. And it made me feel a very kind of profound and physical sense of loneliness that linked to other times I've heard those geese, and the sort of the isolation attached to that. Fay is the author of A Biography of Loneliness, The History of an Emotion. I'm also a historian of medicine, emotion, and the body, and I write about feeling between the classical period and the present day.

I came across Fay's work one day when I was scrolling through social media and saw her tweet asking what loneliness sounds like. sounds like. sounds like. And the responses were really interesting. Some people said when they were alone in their flat at night and they hear that click click noise when the radiators start to turn themselves off. off. off. Some people talked about hearing a whistling down the chimney when they were alone in their flat. Some people found the sort of morning bird call, the twittering of the birds in the morning, isolating because it reminded them that yet in the day they were waking up alone.

alone. alone. Other people said, "Oh, when they're walking past a pub or a bar and and you can hear people chatting inside." And often you get that blast of warmth, don't you, at the same time as you walk past. And that's another kind of sensorial feeling. And it all of which is like, "Oh, I don't have that." And so those are the kinds of things it was wanting to open up a conversation about physical experiences of loneliness. I love you sharing the pub example because it feels so visceral to me.

I spent a year in the UK in grad school in Bristol when I didn't really know anybody and I had that exact experience like walk by the pubs and you hear the sort of din of chatter and you just feel this deep sense of not having social connection yourself. It's so sad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not just the sound, but also for me I have the smell. Like when you're walking by and you get this blast of sort of old beer smell that like you could be in there with those people, but you're not and you just kind of feel so by yourself.

yourself. yourself. It's really interesting, isn't it? I think there's nothing like other people's relaxed sociability to make you think, "Ooh, I miss that." Loneliness is very much part of the body as well as the mind. And I think that about all our emotions. And one of the things that I know as a historian of emotion is that with the rise of scientific medicine we separated out mind and body. It was also seen as a physical thing before the rise of scientific medicine. We made the body a machine that produces and the mind this kind of complex organ which we reduced to brain.

And we tend to think of emotions like loneliness as being cognitive processes, but they're very felt. We feel them in the body both in terms of our emotional reactions, but also in terms of our memories, the ways in which memories of experience get locked into the body. In order to understand what we might be getting wrong about the loneliness crisis, I wanted to better understand where this feeling comes from in the first place. first place. first place. And that's why I was so excited to have Fay join me for this episode.

Because Fay's take on the historical origins of loneliness differs from that of a lot of the academics I hang out with. You see, my colleagues have long assumed that loneliness is a product of biology, an emotion that has been shaped over generations over generations over generations by natural selection. Humans are, of course, social primates. We rely on one another for survival. Loneliness can therefore be thought of as an evolutionary signal, one that's built to help us avoid the dangers of isolation. Loneliness is there to alert us that we need to return to the safety of the tribe.

tribe. tribe. Under this view, one would predict that our species has been experiencing this yucky feeling for a long time. But Fay argues that that's not the case. Her historical analysis has found that loneliness, at least as we think of it today, didn't really exist before the 19th century. I think often people think about the history of emotions as being people felt the same, just the landscapes were different, but the emotions themselves were changed by the landscapes. And Fay says that being lonely before the Industrial Revolution meant something entirely different than it does today.

does today. does today. Loneliness was used interchangeably with waneliness, and it just meant being alone. It just meant being solitude. There wasn't anything like the emotional weight that it has today. So, when Wordsworth talked about wandering lonely as a cloud, he just meant he was alone. At that point, you could be wanly or you could be lonely, but you would not have that sort of sense of emotional loss and lack that we have today. I find this so striking. That ache that I got while walking by a crowded pub back in grad school, or that sense of invisibility that newly rejected Fay felt listening to those geese.

Fay says that people didn't really experience that feeling for most of human history. human history. human history. If you imagine in the early modern period when God is always there, you're never actually alone. If we are aware of something bigger than ourselves, we are less likely to feel lonely. And so, it's only when you have the decline of religion as the only explanation for why we're in the world, and the rise of urbanization, and economic individualism. All of these kind of transformations make us into smaller parts, and they don't give us that kind of sense of the collective or collective identity.

So, round about 1800, you do get more and more people talking about loneliness. People aren't any longer feeling that they are enough on themselves, with themselves. We've got the rise of the individual, the decline of the collective. So, those are the broad patterns, I think, that affect our emotional state. emotional state. emotional state. They point to two famous stories of isolation that nicely illustrate the different emotional reactions that people had to solitude before and after this rise of the individual. Story number one, the old-school version of solitude, is from Robinson Crusoe, the famous novel by Daniel Defoe, published in 1719, in which the main character is shipwrecked on a remote island for 28 years.

Story number two, the more modern notion of solitude, is from Cast Away, the award-winning movie released back in 2000, in which the actor Tom Hanks survives a plane crash and spends four years struggling to survive on a deserted island. deserted island. deserted island. So, Robinson Crusoe, when he's kind of cast adrift, it follows the convention of being this sort of testing, this spiritual journey, this notion of being in isolation or solitude as a way of understanding oneself better. And if you compare that to Cast Away, it's very much about the loss of other people and how do we cope?

And for me, that's such a sort of fantastic transition in what's happened across the period that I'm talking about. We are not alone with God anymore. We are alone with ourselves, which for many people is quite terrifying, because what do we do when we look inward? Psychologists have been looking at what happens when modern people get stuck alone and have to look inwards, and it's not pretty. Take one famous study by psychologists Matt Killingsworth and Timothy Wilson. They brought subjects into the lab and asked them to sit alone in a room without distractions for 15 minutes.

No cell phones or internet access, not even a pen or paper. The one thing subjects did have access to was a machine that gave out a mild electric shock. shock. shock. Participants were not told to shock themselves, but when faced with the boredom of actually sitting alone with their own thoughts for 15 minutes, 25% of women and 67% of men voluntarily chose to shock themselves. They thinks that part of our aversion to sitting alone with our thoughts in the modern day comes from how we talk about what it means to be alone.

We have this language of loneliness, which is global now. We talk about it as an epidemic. So, we have produced this medicalized problematic notion of loneliness as something bad. And what happens is that people think, "Oh, that must be what I'm feeling." And I think that that also increases loneliness. If we say that loneliness is one thing that's a negative thing, we medicalize it, so it's like a disease that comes from outside, not a product of how we live, then what we're doing is we're massively over simplifying it.

This is Fe big concern with the idea of a quote loneliness epidemic. It makes loneliness sound like one single condition, something you either have or don't have. don't have. don't have. When in reality, Fe argues, loneliness is much more complicated than that. I talk about loneliness really as a cluster of different emotions because it's not a single emotion. It's a peculiar state that might be composed of grief and sadness. It might be composed of resentment or anger. And so, the particular emotions that make up loneliness depend on where we are in our lives.

There are pinch points where we might, for instance, get married, get widowed, get divorced, or even be a teenager going off to college. And we feel some sort of transitory sense of loneliness, which is in relation to our circumstance, and actually a very positive thing because it means we're ready for the next stage, and what do we want? And that's different to the kind of chronic loneliness that can settle in when people aren't able to connect. And maybe they're disadvantaged by health, or economics, or geography.

Those sort of nuances, I think, are very, very important. Otherwise, we start thinking that a widow who's just lost her husband of 30 years is going to be feeling exactly the same kind of loneliness as a sort of teenage boy who is online all the time, but has no friends. I mean, it just seems to me obvious that these are not the same emotions. So, we can't have a one-size-fits-all approach. I think that a lot of the emotional experiences we have are opportunities for growth and development.

If your psyche and body is saying something is missing, it's an opportunity. If we treat it all as a bad thing, what we're doing is we're closing down the opportunity for growth. We're closing down the opportunity for connection. connection. connection. And we're really taking away what are the different complex kinds of emotions that are going towards this state. We need to really drill down into that, because it's so subjective. So, our interventions need to be tailored. When we get back from the break, we'll meet a psychologist who's trying to follow Fay's advice.

Someone who's trying to drill down into the language we use to talk about loneliness, so that we can fight this feeling more effectively. She'll break down what we get wrong about loneliness, and what we can do better, when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment. When I first started studying this topic, I actually really struggled to be alone. I had this perception that being alone is loneliness. You know, I had never considered that these two are separate things. One moment that really comes to mind is in college, I had sort of a lunch plan that fell through, and I thought, "Okay, well, I guess I'll just go to the dining hall and eat by myself." Now, I walked in the dining hall, and I realized that pretty much everybody was chatting with others.

I remember feeling in my body pretty anxious, like, "Oh my gosh, I have to sit by myself." And how are other people going to perceive me, right? This is Michaela Rodriguez, a new colleague of mine in the psychology department at Yale, and an academic expert on what we tend to get wrong when it comes to loneliness. I mean, it's a little embarrassing to say, but I did worry are other people going to think that I'm weird, that I have no friends. And so, anyway, I found a spot in the very back of the dining hall that was a little bit more sort of secluded where other people wouldn't really see me, and ate my lunch, but just sort of felt kind of awkward the whole time.

Michaela's interest in the psychological effects of loneliness began back when she was a college student. This is really, I think, common, especially in in that age, right? And often on social media, seeing that other people are, at least seem to be having these really rich social lives, and traveling, and going to parties. It feels like there's this expectation that we also need to be very social, and that if we're not, that there's something wrong with us, that we're doing something wrong. I think there is this understanding that, well, if you have, for example, depression or an anxiety disorder, it's not necessarily that there's something wrong with you, right?

It might be something's going on in your brain. There's this chemical imbalance, as people say, right? There's other genetic, environmental factors. But I do think that when it comes to loneliness, there still is this perception that if you're lonely, it's something about you, you know, you're not able maybe to make those connections. You're not socially skilled enough. And so, it does feel like there's an extra level of sort of shame that's attached to loneliness that maybe we're not seeing anymore with these other sort of mental health your negative sort of emotional experiences.

And studies have shown that the stigma associated with loneliness can have big consequences for people who happen to be a bit solitary by nature. When American adults are told about a hypothetical person who likes to spend their time alone, those people rate that person as less desirable as a friend, less attractive, less competent. We make these sort of negative evaluations and negative assumptions about that person. And Michaela says that these negative assumptions have only gotten worse in the last few years. There are so many articles.

I feel like I see one every single day on the dangers of loneliness. But even in sociology, philosophy, public health, these related fields, we see that the vast majority of research on these topics is looking at sort of the dangers of being alone and the serious risks associated with loneliness. And I recognize that, you know, these messages are intended to be helpful and to encourage people to go out and seek social connection, which of course, as we know, is very important. At the same time, a few years ago, I sort of wondered whether these messages that we're receiving might have unintended negative consequences.

Might they be counterproductive? counterproductive? counterproductive? Michaela decided to test this directly. She had subjects read a news article that either discussed the risks of being alone, like most news articles do these days, or one that talked about the benefits of alone time. She found that the simple act one article about the downside of solitude changed subjects' beliefs about the dangers of being alone. The participants who read the negative news article assumed that being alone would feel less enjoyable, that it would make you less hopeful, and that overall, you'd be less healthy.

Okay, so makes sense, right? The information that we get from the media, we know influences our beliefs. But how do these beliefs that we hold about being alone actually influence our day-to-day experiences? experiences? experiences? To test this, Mikela recruited a different group of subjects. She first surveyed their beliefs about alone time, and then divided her subjects into two groups. Those who had positive beliefs about alone time, and those who thought more negatively about solitude. She then used a procedure known as experience sampling, in which researchers ping people at random times of the day and ask how they're feeling, to test what happened when the two different groups of subjects got stuck in short moments of solo time.

People who believe that being alone is bad, right? That it's inherently lonely, that it's harmful for their well-being, whenever they were alone in their daily lives, Laurie, they felt significantly lonelier, more anxious, more stressed, more bored. They felt worse, right? Interestingly though, when we look at people who viewed being alone as a positive experience, we see the opposite. We see that when they spend time alone, they actually experience a decrease in loneliness, and a decrease in stress, and a decrease in anxiety and boredom. Not only that, they also experienced increases in positive emotions like contentment and relaxation.

relaxation. relaxation. These findings are pretty incredible. How we think being alone is supposed to feel influences how being alone actually feels in the moment. And Mikela has observed this striking effect again and again. again. again. Take for example her recent study exploring cross-cultural differences in people's perceptions of loneliness. We recruited participants from nine countries, and this was spanning six continents. Every continent except Antarctica. Really hard to find people there to take our study. So, almost every continent, I will say. And so, we had, for example, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, South Africa, couple others.

And essentially, we wanted to know how adults in these different countries view being alone, to what extent do they think being alone is positive or negative, right? Beneficial or harmful. We see that in countries like the US, the UK, the UK, the UK, Poland, in other words, countries that are more individualistic, people view being alone as more negative, as more unhealthy. Whereas people in Japan and Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, two very different countries, but both are we would consider collectivistic countries, countries, countries, viewed being alone as significantly more positive and healthier.

What are some of the hypotheses for why collectivist cultures value solitude more? more? more? One of the things we know about more collectivistic cultures is that people view the self as more interdependent. So, what I mean is that people view themselves as an individual as intertwined with their family members, their friends, their community. In other words, who I am is linked to who, you know, my friends and family are. And so, I think that actually changes what being alone means, right? Because when I'm physically alone, yes, I'm by myself, but if I have this sense that my identity is always tied to my loved ones, then maybe that aloneness is actually less threatening.

Because even though I'm physically by myself, I'm carrying my mom, right? I'm carrying my dad, I'm carrying my two little sisters with me all the time. I'm carrying these sources of meaning with me wherever I go. go. go. Whereas in more individualistic cultures, we know that the self is really viewed as a distinct entity that is not connected really to anybody else, right? We're unique, we're our own person. I will note, you know, it's not that that's inherently better or worse. These are just sort of different ways of viewing oneself.

But if we do see the self as independent and not linked to other people. other people. other people. Then I think when we're alone, we really are sort of disconnected, right? And so I think there could be this sort of protective effect of having this more interdependent view of the self. Michaela's work seems to be bearing out what historian Fay Bound Alberti said earlier. That how a culture thinks being alone is supposed to feel influences how being alone actually feels. In this and so many other studies, Michaela has found that if you believe alone time is going to suck, then your alone time will feel yuckier and lonelier.

and lonelier. and lonelier. And that is a very worrying conclusion, especially for someone who hosts a podcast that talks a lot about social connection. social connection. social connection. So much of our modern public health messaging tries to teach people about the negative effects of loneliness, but that messaging might ironically be making the loneliness crisis even worse. And Michaela says that this stems from a specific thing that many news articles get wrong when it comes to loneliness. loneliness. loneliness. We see the vast majority of of news articles using loneliness and solitude interchangeably, which interchangeably, which interchangeably, which I think is not only inaccurate, I think it's also harmful.

These experiences are distinct. Being alone is not loneliness. We can think of loneliness as a feeling, right? It is a subjective experience of feeling disconnected regardless of whether you're physically by yourself or with other people. You can feel lonely even when you're in a crowd, right? In a party. And actually, what I found in my work, we see that the most sort of intense or painful loneliness often comes when we're with others because we have this expectation that we should be feeling connected to them. them.

them. But for one reason or another, we don't. And so how correlated are loneliness and solitude? solitude? solitude? We've seen from decades of work that loneliness and solitude are actually weekly correlated, and the correlation is around .2. So, just for those listening, you know, we we think of correlations as a strength of a relationship between two experiences. Zero means there's no relationship at all. One means that they're the same thing. They're completely related. When one goes up, the other goes up. And so, .2 is I mean, it's not nothing, right?

We know that in general, when people are alone, especially for longer periods of time, it is common for them to experience loneliness. That said, .2 is still not super high. And so, there are many, many instances in which people are alone and not lonely at all. So, loneliness is this subjective feeling, whereas solitude we can think of as the objective state of being alone. And so, solitude in that sense is not inherently a positive or negative experience. experience. experience. Solitude is inherently neutral, but Michaela has also found that more effective alone time can actually make us happier.

us happier. us happier. We're taught so much about how to interact with others, how to work as a team. We're not often explicitly taught how to be alone. It's something we sort of have to figure out on our own. I really view really view really view solitude as a skill. You know, it takes practice, it takes time to really cultivate this positive relationship to solitude. solitude. solitude. What are some of the best benefits of solitude? solitude? solitude? One of the I would say biggest benefits of spending time alone is emotional deactivation, where essentially when we spend time alone, you know, in general, our intense negative emotions, as well as our intense positive emotions, become less intense.

The emotions become a little bit more neutralized. We know, for example, that when we spend time with other people, that presence of others can amplify our emotional experiences, right? Being with others makes anxiety often even more intense or can make excitement, happiness even more intense. And so, when we're alone, we don't have that sort of feedback from others and often there's less stimulation in the environment and so it can help sort of deactivate intense negative emotions. I've run several studies where I've had participants come into the lab, indicate how they're feeling in that moment, and then they spend 10 to 15 minutes in one study we had them spend 30 minutes by themselves without actually any laptop, any phone, any device, with no activity, just truly by themselves with their thoughts sitting in a chair.

And even then, we see that both positive emotion and negative emotion decreased. Emotions became more neutral. Michaela has found that being left alone with our thoughts, without the option of electrocuting ourselves, can be useful for regulating our feelings. Honestly, this result surprised me a bit. Whenever I'm feeling an intense emotion, my instinct is to reach out to a friend so that I can talk through what I'm experiencing. I'm experiencing. I'm experiencing. I hadn't realized that being by myself could also be helpful. There are many situations in which, for example, seeking social support and talking to others can help.

Other people can help shift our perspectives or they can just give us a hug and remind us that everything's going to be okay or they can help normalize our experiences. There's lots of things we can gain from talking to others when we're feeling upset. upset. upset. But, sometimes when we're in this really hot emotional state, people want to be by themselves and I think that's not inherently a bad thing. Stepping back and spending some time by yourself can help you sort of cool off a little bit, just like when, you know, people are in the middle of an argument, whether it's a romantic couple or friends, sometimes it's like, "Hey, let's take a minute.

Let's go into our rooms and then let's come back, right?" To just sort of relax for a moment. That can be really powerful. powerful. powerful. And for those who are uncomfortable with being alone without any distractions, Michaela has some good news. To reap the emotional benefits of alone time, you don't necessarily just have to stare into the void. Being alone isn't just have to be sitting by yourself thinking, reflecting on your life. It can, but you can do so many different things. You can take a walk, you can read, you can tidy things up, you can cook.

And so, you know, when people engage in these different activities when they're alone, it can both serve as a sort of distraction from what's going on, and also just help them kind of relax, right? And even physiologically help their body sort of recover from maybe a stressful experience, stressful experience, stressful experience, which really I think stands in contrast to a lot of what we're hearing now in the media, and also a lot of what psychologists are studying. Your research has these really clear implications for public health messaging.

If coverage of loneliness might be making things worse, what should media, you know, this podcast included, honestly, be doing differently? differently? differently? I think that we should be emphasizing the importance of social connection, while also communicating to people that being alone can be okay, that it can be good, that there are situations in which it can promote our well-being, and not just our well-being, it can promote our social lives and our relationships and enhance them, right? I think if we had messaging that better sort of portrayed both social connection and solitude as good for us, then I think we're in the situation where no matter what people are doing, whether they're by themselves or with others, they can make the most of that experience.

experience. experience. You've also done some fascinating work on how the language we use matters. Tell me about that work. I ran this really simple study with my wonderful collaborator Scott Campbell at The Ohio State University, and we essentially asked participants to report their perceptions of and beliefs about and experiences of five different words for being alone. So, we had solitude, being alone, time alone, me time, and isolation. Words that are often used interchangeably, but they have very different connotations. And indeed, we found that people viewed me time as the most positive and they viewed isolation as the most negative.

I also want to mention a really interesting finding which was that people viewed time alone as more positive [clears throat] than being alone, even though it's so easy to just say this interchangeably, right? But, I think the idea there is that time alone is maybe this like evening that we're spending by ourselves. Whereas, being alone feels a little more long-term. Michaela ran an experiment to test how these different phrases affected people's mood and behavior. She split a group of college students into two experimental groups and asked them all to spend 30 minutes by themselves.

The only difference between the two groups was in the instructions they received. they received. they received. Half of the participants were told to spend 30 minutes in me time. The other half were told to spend 30 minutes in isolation. So, what we found in this study is that people who spent those 30 minutes in isolation experienced a reduction in their negative emotion and also a reduction in their positive emotion. So, like I was saying earlier, right? We see this deactivation effect where people are feeling less bad, but they're also feeling less good.

In the me time group, we see something different. We see that positive emotion significantly went up and negative emotion went down even more so than it did in that other group, right? And so, the me time group felt better after those 30 minutes. Not just that, we asked our participants to report what they had thought about in that 30-minute period and also what they did. Interestingly, Laurie, we didn't see any differences in what participants reported doing in those 30 minutes between me time and isolation. We did, however, see a significant difference in what participants reported thinking about.

So, in the me time group, participants were more likely to think about personal growth, whereas in isolation, they were more likely to think about work and school. And so, it is a little interesting, right? How even just the words we use can maybe shift what we do in this time. So, to recap, loneliness and being alone, two very different things. And how we think about and describe these concepts matters a lot. Because neither loneliness nor solitude are inherently bad. Being alone can leave you feeling calmer, clearer, and more emotionally grounded.

And that ache of loneliness can be a helpful signal that you need to make changes or as a push for personal growth. growth. growth. Now, does that mean that social connection isn't beneficial or that people experiencing chronic isolation don't require serious intervention? Of course not. But what these findings do mean is that we might all benefit if we change the way we discuss feelings like loneliness and solitude, both on a societal level and as individuals. Michaela's research demonstrates that talking about these experiences differently might prevent a lot of unnecessary suffering.

unnecessary suffering. unnecessary suffering. But Michaela's work also shows that alone time is a skill, one that we need to learn to use more effectively if we want to get more of its benefits. Which raises a question, what does embracing healthy solitude actually look like in practice? After the break, we'll speak to a world-renowned advocate for alone time. We'll hear her tips for incorporating more well-being boosting solo moments into our day-to-day lives. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Hi, how's it going? Good, good. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this.

I'm really excited. I love your show. I don't have my podcast anymore. So, every time I do it, I'm like, can I remember? But, it sounds like you can hear me okay. So. okay. So. okay. So. This is Emma Gannon. Emma is a writer, podcaster, and the author of a new book, A Creative Compass: Finding Your Way to a Creative Life. Life. Life. She's written extensively about the connection between loneliness and solitude. And that's in part because Emma is a huge fan of alone time. It's such a nuanced topic because loneliness and solitude are so different.

You can be lonely in a crowded room. You can be lonely in a marriage. You can be lonely at a party. When you're feeling lonely, I believe it's because you're really disconnected from yourself. You feel lonely inside yourself. Like, you feel lonely because no one understands you and you don't even understand you. And so, in my solitude, I don't feel lonely. I've chosen it, and I honestly think that some of my favorite memories are of me being alone, and sometimes I feel like it's controversial to say it because we're meant to like be on our deathbed and think that our best moments in life are with our loved ones.

And of course, that is true. I'm not saying it's not. But, I think I'm also going to be on my deathbed thinking, that trip was amazing that I had by myself. Like, I went to New York by myself for a month 2 years ago, and I think about it all the time, and I want to do something like that again. again. again. When you think of an experience like traveling alone or dining alone, how does that differ when you're with another person? another person? another person?

It's a totally different experience. So, when I'm with a friend and having dinner, I'm super focused on them. I'm focused on the experience, and I want to be present, and I want to be listening, and I want to be conscious of it being kind of reciprocal. You know, it's a dance and it's enjoyable and I love it. But when I'm in those environments, I'm not looking at my surroundings as much. I'm not tasting the food as much because I'm you know, my attention's on the other person.

So when I'm on my own, I'm having a sensory experience. I'm taking in everything and looking around and people watching and I absolutely see it as an essential thing for my nervous system. I can like regulate myself back to my default setting, I think. Like I just went away for three nights last week by myself to a little town called Rye in England. It's an hour train from my house, super easy to get to. And um within maybe about half an hour of just getting off the train, being by myself, putting my bag down in the hotel room, lying on the bed, no one was going to get me for three days, and I had this like joy that went through my body, but more than that, I had this just sense of taking the mask off and like completely relaxing my whole entire body.

And whenever I come back from those trips, my husband is like, "Wow, it's like a medicine. It's not something that you should think about as a luxury. You should think about it as as like a mental health toolkit. Once a month, I need to do something." And it doesn't have to be, you know, as expensive to go away. I'm not saying that, but it needs to be at least like a long walk in silence or something like that. Emma does admit, however, that spending time alone is not always super easy in a society that's biased against loners.

Busy restaurants Busy restaurants Busy restaurants treat a solo diner as sort of less important because they're not making as much money from you. They'll sit you at the bar a lot. You know, you're like shoved in the corner a little bit or you're ignored. I've had that a bit actually, where I haven't really been sort of checked in on. You know, you're sort of left and you're trying to get the bill and then you want another drink and then it's too late. So I think it would be great for kind of restaurants or whatever to understand that you're still having an experience and you're still trying to have a lovely time.

When I was in my 20s, I was more sort of unsure of myself and I think people would come up to me more or you know, you'd get men being weird or you would get people thinking you wanted company when you didn't and I felt self-conscious. But people don't come over to me as much. Like I'm older now and I'm confident and I'm like don't come near me. Like like I give that energy of like I'm busy and I'm eating. So we talked about traveling alone and dining alone.

I'm curious about some of the other activities you've done on your own. Can you share some of those with me? me? me? Yeah, so I do like going with my friends to things, but I also actively choose moments to go alone. So I love going to the cinema by myself, especially to see something really moving. I saw a film called H is for Hawk recently, which is about grief and relationships to animals and had some deep themes and I just knew I wanted to watch it alone.

I just wanted to really immerse myself. I didn't want to talk to anyone afterwards. I wanted to just go for a walk and really digest the film. Like I really don't always want input. I love sitting and like reflecting. I'm so glad you brought up that example of going to the film by yourself because I don't do that often, but there was this one period in grad school where I did it a lot. I was over in the UK. I was studying at the University of Bristol and I just like didn't know that many people.

There was like great indie cinema in Bristol at the time and I'd walk there by myself and I'd watch the movies by myself. And I did have that feeling of feeling like a little bit of like a freak if someone see me by myself. They'd be like who's that weird person? But I remember walking home from those movies and having such interesting thoughts about them. I just kind of like sinking into them in a different way. And even now when I think about the specific films that I watched back then, I remember them in a really different way than like the last movie that I watched in the cinema with my husband here.

You have a connection to the things that you experience on your own and that that's It's of special. It really is and I think it kind of preserves your individual experience. Like I remember once going to see this film, and I loved it. I was crying at the end. Like I had such a relationship with it. And then the person next to me who I went to watch the film with just turned to me and said, "That was awful, wasn't it?" They were like picking it apart for apart for apart for certain reasons.

And I was like, "Oh, you've kind of just burst the moment I was having with it." So, I think sometimes it's just nice to kind of sink in. And I did go to a concert by myself recently as well, which was a first, I think, actually. And I was like, "Oh, this is um going to be a bit weird going by myself." Cuz you're really aware of how alone you are when you're in those big stadiums. And then I was wedged in the middle of two couples.

And they were having like a date night. And I was like, "Oh, this is really challenging." But I had a good time. I got into it. You've also written about something that you've called artist dates. Where does this concept come from, and how do artist dates work? Yes. So, this is from Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way and many other books. And I love it, and it's something that I do every week, actually. And it's essentially a solo date that you go on where you you have to do something just for the joy of it.

So, you know, her thinking is that it really helps you come up with new ideas, but you're not really hunting for them. You're just having a little day out by yourself, essentially. And she has a list in The Artist's Way to sort of prompt you. And there are things like go to a pet store, go for a walk, go to an art gallery, go to the cinema. It's so joyful coming up with ideas for artist dates. And I think her thinking behind it is like, "You can't really be a creative person if you're not refilling the well." You need to go and do things and live out things for you to have ideas.

Any good artist dates that you've been on recently? on recently? on recently? I mean, something that I do do is I go on Google Maps and I'll type in independent bookstore, and I'll just see what ones I haven't been to within like an hour's walk or whatever. And there's a little bookstore in London which is on a canal boat. And I I just thought, I'm going to walk to the canal boat. I'm going to, you know, see what's going on in this part of London. And I'm going to go to the bookstore.

And then I'm going to walk home again. And that was my artist date for that day. I'm curious, do you still ever feel lonely when you're on your own? Well, when I was in New York for a month, I had moments of feeling a bit lonely. There is a tipping point of too much alone time. A month was long. My husband did come and visit me right in the middle for a few days. So, it broke it up a little bit. But there were just a few nights where I was like walking down the Hudson River path or whatever.

And I would see like a group of four girlfriends laughing their heads off. And I would be like, okay, I really miss my friends right now. Or I would see then like a romantic sunset and someone taking like a selfie with their boyfriend. And I'd be like, oh, actually, I you know, I really miss my partner. But I think that's just normal. And then those feelings would come and then they would go again. So, it's such a normal human emotion. And so, I just let myself feel it, I think.

And so, you mentioned this idea of the New York trip was starting to feel long, right? Any advice on getting the balance right between the kind of effective alone time, but not too much alone time? Yeah, I think it's about really understanding your own self and your own mind and knowing when and this is a huge one that I'm still trying to work out is like sometimes what I need is a night in by myself. And sometimes I need to put my shoes on and I need to go out and see a friend.

friend. friend. So, So, So, yeah, I think it's about thinking about what you need in that moment. Any ways that you've gotten insight into what that looks like over time? I think over time, it's like making a note of how you feel. For example, recently, I just got over an an illness. And um I kept being like, "No, no, no, I should stay in again. I should stay in again." again." again." And I was like, "No, I know what I need. I need to go out with someone who makes me laugh, like one of my funniest friends." friends." friends." And that's what I did and I felt a million times better.

Like it kind of was like helping me heal my illness. And so, yeah, it's like being very intentional with what you need and we go in and out of being a caterpillar and being a butterfly, don't we? You know, but at the heart of all of this, I've got to say I always need a bit of solitude. solitude. solitude. And so, for someone who's listening right now who might be really afraid to spend more time alone, what do you think that fear is really about? It's the same reason why maybe we're scared to put down the alcohol in the evenings or I don't know, sit in a room and think about something.

I think there's a quote that's like every person's problem stems from being unable to sit alone in a room. The quote is actually from the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. alone. alone. So, it's like for all the reasons we're on our phones for like 14 hours a day, it's the same thing. Like we don't want to be alone with our thoughts. I would assume it's because there's something that's not quite right and if we stop, we have to confront what that thing is.

Whether that's that your marriage is falling apart or that you hate your job or or or you don't like your life. I mean, it's easier to plug the gap, isn't it, than go and sit by yourself and figure out what's going on. And I don't blame anyone for that. The first time you do it in part because taking this time to be alone can cause you to notice all the stuff that you've been avoiding. It can be very uncomfortable. And so, any advice for kind of getting over that hump so that you can get to enjoying it more?

I mean, I mean, I mean, I don't think it needs to be this whole like I'm going to be a Buddhist monk for the weekend and only be with myself and my thoughts. No, I don't want to do that. that. that. That's too much. I start the day with my morning pages, which is like the Julia Cameron thing of journaling, writing three pages out. And honestly, if I do that in the morning, I'm kind of done with the introspection. I don't need to spend all day kind of, you know, meditating or whatever.

It's not an exam that you need to pass, and I think it's too daunting sometimes to have to be with our thoughts all the time. Solitude for me is about pleasure and enjoyment and joy. Enjoy it and celebrate it and take up space even if you're on your own. Loneliness can be painful, especially when it's chronic and leaves us feeling disconnected both from other people and from ourselves. But loneliness can also be a totally normal and totally temporary feeling, temporary feeling, temporary feeling, one that signals the need for change or an opportunity for growth.

And that is the logic behind this week's happiness hot take. We need to think how we talk about loneliness, and we need to fight our urge to treat solitude as something suspicious. something suspicious. something suspicious. That way we can enjoy the benefits of social connection while also making room for time alone, a skill that many of us never learned to practice, but one that can help us regulate our emotions, reconnect with ourselves, spark creativity, and even strengthen our relationships. our relationships. our relationships. Next week we'll wrap up our happiness hot take series with one final ever so hot happiness hot take.

We should all bother each other a little more often. I'm going to try to borrow $100 from a stranger. Excuse me, do you think I can borrow $100 from you? That's next week on Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.