Do not confuse loneliness and time spent with yourself
If loneliness can be painful, or even cause damage to your physical and mental health, spending time alone with oneself is not only inconvenient.
“It’s not that loneliness is always good, but it can be good”, says Thuy-vy Thi Nguyen, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University, who studies loneliness. Provided do not automatically think that spending time alone is a nightmare, as it is often the case in Western societies.
Arguing that loneliness helps us regulate our emotions and can have a calming effect that prepares us to better engage with others, Thuy-vy Thi Nguyen and his colleagues assert that “loneliness does not really harm social life”.
It all depends on whether you can choose to spend time alone or not. And when society conveys the idea that there is nothing more unpleasant than loneliness, difficult to choose calmly to go to the cinema alone or not to go out with friends on a Saturday night. However, better identifying when we need solitude to relax and reflect can help us better manage negative emotions, such as stress and burnout, says psychotherapist Emily Roberts.
To know how to be alone
But you still have to be able to do it. “Historically, loneliness has always been very poorly perceived,” sometimes because it is associated with some form of punishment, says Robert Coplan, a professor of psychology at Carleton University.
The experience of loneliness can be synonymous with suffering: research shows that people are less appreciative of certain activities when they do them alone, especially because they fear being judged.
Finding yourself alone with your thoughts and hearing only your inner monologue can be intimidating, sometimes even boring (it all depends on the quality of your thoughts). “When we are alone, what makes us uncomfortable is the lack of stimulus, because we can not rely on other people to shape our experience”. says Thuy-vy Thi Nguyen.
Isolating oneself is part of people’s physical and mental needs, even though they may confuse the desire for loneliness with anxiety, stress and exhaustion. It is important to be able to detect signals that warn us that we simply need to distance ourselves from others. By resisting the social pressure that requires us to always be surrounded, “choosing to be alone can help you develop who you are, your sense of self and what really interests you,” says Angela Grice, a speech-language pathologist who has conducted neuroscience research at Howard University and the Neurocognition of Language Lab at Columbia University.
On the other hand, do not be fooled, scroller on Instagram is not one of the solitary activities that will help you reconnect with yourself.
