Alone time can help you reduce stress and manage emotions, but you have to be intentional about it, experts say.
I’m a person who craves regular alone time. At home, I take quick walks. At work, I sometimes disappear into the office supply closet, which is always deserted. I find the orderly stacks of notebooks soothing.
When I can’t grab these moments, I tend to get twitchy. Robert Coplan, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, describes this as “aloneliness”: the negative feeling that crops up when people get less solitude than they need.
And, most of us do require a balance of solo and social time, said Thuy-vy Nguyen, a social psychologist who runs the Solitude Lab at Durham University in Britain and is an author of the book “Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone.” Her research has found that spending time alone has physical and emotional benefits, such as stress reduction and mood regulation, and can lead to increased creativity and productivity.
With that in mind, I asked experts how to recognize when you need more solitude, and how to incorporate it into your life.
Take your “solitude pulse.”
Solitude is different from loneliness, said Virginia Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology at Middlebury College. The latter is the feeling that we’re not connected to others as much as we would like, which produces emotional distress. On the other hand, intentionally seeking out some time to spend alone, she said, is “almost always experienced positively.”
There’s no standard amount of time that people should be alone, Dr. Thomas said, so she recommends checking in with yourself and tracking your moods. Do you find yourself feeling irritable or depleted, and could you benefit from stepping away for a bit?