Alone isn’t lonely. Psychologist Robert Coplan, author of The Joy of Solitude, coined aloneliness—the distress of not getting enough time to yourself. Psychologist Thuy-vy Nguyen, co-author of Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone, discovered the “deactivation effect”—just fifteen minutes alone turns down the volume on your emotions. Peter McGraw talks to them about the science of solitude and answers questions, such as “What actually happens when you sit with yourself? And how much solitude is enough?” The answers might surprise you.
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Listen to Episode #261 here
The Psychology of Solitude
My guests have spent decades studying something my Solo audience knows intimately. What happens when you’re alone? Not lonely, alone. Turns out, as there is with most things, there’s a science to it and it’s far more nuanced than solitude good, loneliness bad. My first guest is a Psychologist who’s been studying solitude for more than 30 years. He started by watching kids on playgrounds, figuring out which kids who played alone were thriving and which were struggling and has since expanded his research across the entire lifespan.
He coined the term “aloneliness”, which I had never heard of before the Solo Project, and that’s the distress you feel when you don’t get enough alone time. It’s the mirror image of loneliness. He’s the Chancellor’s Professor of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa and his new book is The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World. Welcome, Robert Coplan.
Thank you, Peter, it’s great to be here.
Congratulations on the new book.
Thank you.
My second guest is an Experimental Psychologist whose landmark finding is what she calls the deactivation effect. Spending just a few minutes, about fifteen, I think, is the magic number, of sitting alone dials down your emotional intensity both positive and, more importantly, negative and I’ll be honest, I really needed to do that this morning. It’s been one of those days.
It’s not the solitude that makes you happy or sad, it turns out, but turning down the volume can be exactly what you need. She’s the Principal Investigator, and I like a good scientific lab, of the Solitude Lab at Durham University, the Founder of the Charles Darwin Center for Human Studies and Co-author of Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone. Welcome, Thuy-vy Nguyen.
Thank you for having me.
Solitude: What Does It Really Mean
It’s great to bring the two of you together. I do some Solo episodes solo, but they’re not nearly as popular as when I have two guests. I think we’ll start with a question for the two of you and it’s this. Do you two agree on a definition of solitude?
I would say good start with a nuanced question because I don’t think there’s a single agreed-upon definition of solitude but I actually don’t think that that’s a problem. If I wanted to give a very general overview, I would say that some people historically have focused on physical separation as their definition of solitude, so being far enough away from people that there’s a physical barrier to some degree in terms of establishing your solitude. Others have focused on perceived separation. That’s this idea of feeling alone in a crowd and what really matters is if you feel like you’re alone, not so much if you’re actually physically alone.
There’s a great sociologist named Goffman who talked about feeling alone as being like offstage where you are not necessarily in front of an audience anymore and so there’s the relief from those kinds of stressors. There are all these different kinds of differences. Thuy-vy and others have coined the term “companionate solitude,” which I love, which is the idea of being alone with someone else, almost like having a little bit of a solitude bubble with a close intimate companion.
Some people talk about pure solitude, which is being alone but not doing anything, just sitting alone with your thoughts. All these different kinds of conceptualizations are out there and I don’t think it’s really a question of right or wrong. It’s just a question of clarifying exactly what you’re studying and how you’re defining and operationalizing solitude so that when people are doing the same kinds of studies they can they can compare apples with apples instead of apples with oranges.
Yeah, and I think I agree with that. I think this is not just a problem with solitude, it’s a problem with most phenomena that we study in psychology is that we might have different definitions. Sometimes it’s lay definition, sometimes researchers we find out that how we define certain concepts is very different from what the lay people would define the concept.
I think what’s important is what Robert mentioned is that like anything, from the definition then we derive the operationalization of the concept, how to measure it and how to make it observable in our studies. I think both Robert and I we take different approaches to study solitude. From my experience, it’s all come down to also the design because social operationalization is just more possible for certain designs than others.
All right you nerds, I get it. I think for our purposes in this episode, is it fair to at times narrow this definition to two phenomena. One would be you’re alone. I’m in my apartment alone right now and when I turn this off, I’ll be truly alone. The other one is being out in public alone is the other one, like you’re moving through the world without a companion there. Robert’s moving his head in a way that he does not want to agree to this.
I would say historically that would have been a perfect definition but of course with modern technology that doesn’t apply as much because you can be physically alone and inside and literally having a face-to-face conversation with someone on your phone. Some people have also talked about solitude as more about now just the lack of social interaction. When you are not interacting with people, whether that’s in public or whether you’re by yourself in private, there’s another layer that gets added to it. One thing I think that Thuy-vy and I would agree upon is that it’s important to make the distinction between solitude and loneliness.
We talked about how some terms have lay definitions and people in the general public might think one thing and researchers and scientists will think something else. I think out in the general public, although it’s getting better, a lot of people still equate those two things and they think that if you’re lonely then you’re alone and if you’re alone then you’re lonely. Of course, loneliness is this bad feeling that we get when there is this mismatch between the social life that we want and the social life that we have. If you’re not getting enough time with others, if the quality of that time is not so good.
It’s not intimate, it’s not satisfying, those needs that we have to belong, our need for social connection. If that’s not working, if that’s not enough, if it’s not satisfying our needs, loneliness is like this emotional alarm bell that goes off inside us and says, “Get out there and make some connections and be with other people.” As someone who studies the positive aspects of solitude, I too often get asked, “Are we overblowing the loneliness epidemic? Is loneliness something that we really don’t need to pay so much attention to because of course it really has drawn a lot of extra attention over the last few years?”
I’m always really careful to say, “No, we really do need to pay attention to this phenomenon. Loneliness is awful and there are countless studies now to show how bad it is for our mental health and well-being and even our physical health.” I really think it’s important to make that distinction because of course you can be in a room full of people and still feel lonely and you can be completely by yourself, as your readers would know and want to shout from the rooftops, you can be alone and not feel lonely at all. I think of loneliness as a bad feeling and I like to think of solitude as a place, a place that if you particularly if you choose to go there, I think is a place where there’s as we all would know here, there’s some potentially some good things waiting for us there.
Indeed, and I want to talk about choice in just a moment. Thuy-vy, what do you think?
No, definitely, because I think what you touched on earlier is what we would call private versus public solitude. There are words for it. Yeah, and then the introduction of technology. In fact, I had a conversation with my students, the introduction of AI, how is that going to change the way we relate to solitude in a way. Yeah, I think like I said earlier, then that really make it challenging to when we study solitude and often times, we have a lot of comments from reviewers of like, “Is it really solitude? What about this and what about that?
Actually, another aspect of it is some people actually believe that solitude is a very quiet place where it’s equated to quietude. It’s when you need to just be by yourself and not doing anything. Definitely in the lab I have previously, we have people in the lab not doing anything when they are alone. It’s mainly just for practical reason is that because we don’t know what noise activities going to introduce into that time but then some participant actually believe that that is where they find solitude. It is the space to be quiet. If you spend the time alone, which I do a lot working, then that wouldn’t be solitude because you’re still obligated and have some social responsibilities that you are dealing with.
I think we’re off to a complicated start, but I think we can manage all of this. There’s a bunch of layers here, the public/private, activity/non-activity and so on. Obviously, the digital stuff introduces this ability to be connected to other people even though you’re physically alone in private. I think we’ll be okay. I think this notion of choice, both of you in your research find this to be a key variable. The thing I like to point out is that forced solitude is really unpleasant.
If you think about it, you put people into prison and you want to punish them within prison, you force them into solitude. That’s can be really painful emotionally for folks. Where’s this line between chosen/default? I think a lot of people in the Solo community choose a lot of solitude and they don’t experience loneliness as a result of that, for example.
For me, I think choice is actually talking about nuances. Choice also have a lot of nuances because for example, choice can be the options that you have in your solitude and can be options of activities, options of what how you can move around the space. When we talk about the lack of options, you can think of experience of a lot of homebound individuals when they have less option of what they can do even within their home environment. At the same time, because I was trained more during my phd is the self-determination theory, we think of choice also as a mindset.
You coming into solitude because you think that this is something you have to do, you should do, or because people exclude you and that’s why you are alone or is the mindset of going into the space because this is what I want, this is the space that I enjoy. That’s when we start talking about intrinsic motivation as the facilitator of that choice. Even so, then you see choice as the number of options and then choice as the basically your mindset, your frame of mind when you go into solitude.
Thuy-vy’s quite right. Even the choice/not choice is complex and nuanced and poor Peter, we’re going to give you such a hard time with all the different nuances that we’re trying to talk about here. For example, you might choose to spend time alone but the mindset, as Thuy-vy, mentioned behind that choice is not like you could choose to approach solitude because it’s a place where you want to be and maybe because you enjoy yourself there or maybe because you might think it’s good for you or it’s a source of pleasure or relaxation. There you’re moving towards solitude because you’ve got an affinity for it, you’ve got an enjoyment, you’ve got it’s something that’s important to you and valuable.
You can also choose to be in solitude not so much because you want to go there but because you’re avoiding other things. You might avoid social situations that you find stressful because you’re somewhat socially anxious or maybe you don’t derive a lot of pleasure from social interactions. The scientific term for that is social anhedonia. It doesn’t make you as happy as other people to be around other people. In these kinds of situations, you’re ending up in solitude but it’s not so much that you want to go there. It’s that you don’t want to go to the other place and you’re avoiding the other place.
When you choose “solitude” as an escape, as a way of avoiding a situation that you feel stressed, I would say that is more likely to lead to that solitude experience to be more empty, and then you fill it with unpleasant things like rumination and worry. It’s not a place that that is full for you. It’s an empty experience in a in a void. Even choosing, there’s good reasons and not-so-adaptive reasons for choosing solitude and so again, the more we drill down the messier it gets.
What Solitude Means For Our Desire To Belong
One of the things that I have thought a lot about with regard to the Solo Project in general was our early life as humans as hunter-gatherers, living in a tribe. That is a very social place and it needed to be social for survival reasons. This notion of loneliness can really be in many ways baked into our DNA, into this notion that being alone is dangerous. You need some alone time and you get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger because there’s no one who has your back, so to speak.
I have to imagine that aloneliness was the problem, the more common problem among our hunter-gatherer ancestors than loneliness per se. I’m guessing that to be the case. I’m just wondering like is it the case like that we weren’t able to live optimally as humans because we needed to survive. Once you remove survival concerns, that you can move through the world safely alone, that you don’t need other people to eat, now you have DoorDash. You can go to you can go to Whole Foods, you can make your own meals, etc., like in this way, it opens up possibilities. I’m just wondering, I know you’re both psychologists but I’m asking you to be cultural anthropologists for a moment here. Do you think about these things? Help me understand this notion.
I think I would say a lot of evolutionary psychology’s about the fit between the characteristics of the individual and the demands of the environment. Certain traits, certain characteristics that are good fits with environments they stay stick around. It’s the classic example of the giraffe with the longer neck who could get to the leaves at the top of the trees and then of course mated with another taller giraffe and eventually over time you had these really big-neck. Of course, gross oversimplification.
I always think about that like there’s huge individual differences in people’s responses to solitude. To this very day after all these years of evolution, there’s still some people who really like and enjoy spending time alone and there’s still people who hate and avoid and don’t ever want to be alone. To me, that means that both of the sides of that coin are still have some adaptive purposes and that the environment is complex enough now and very varies enough now that there’s room for both of those things to survive and thrive.
I think that’s actually a really important message for people to understand. There are these huge differences. You’re right. Back in early age of human development and evolution, if you were spending too much time alone you were less likely to survive because you weren’t going to find a mate, you weren’t going to survive a saber-toothed tiger attack as you said and access to food, etc.
Now the opposite could be true. You can be in your apartment and never leave if you wanted to because everything could be delivered to you. You could have very little human interaction. I think from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s become pretty clear that humans need social connection but I think humans also need solitude and it’s really the combination of those two, the balance between those two things that’s most important but I think the key secondary message to that is that not everybody has that same balance.
There’s pretty good evidence to suggest that if someone is making a prescriptive statement like, “Everybody needs ten hours of social interaction a day or else,” that might be true for some people but certainly not true for everyone. Everyone needs 15 minutes of solitude versus 3 hours of solitude a day. Again, not even a little bit true for some people. It’s that balance, I think, that’s the most important and that from an evolutionary standpoint now our we can control our environment enough that we can make those balances at very different combinations effective and helpful for us, depending on our circumstances.
I might be a stickler on this because cultural anthropology happens to be one of my favorite thing. The thing is I’m very hesitant to call solitude a need because if we go back to the very beginning of when we talk about basic drive, biological drive, we have food, water, sex. That’s the basic drive. It’s very biological and physical. We do have a lot of research to suggest that we do, as humans, at least just human species, we do need social interaction, and like everything that you guys have mentioned, it’s good for our survival. Although back in the day hunter-gatherer, there are situations where being alone actually can have an advantage, especially when you are hunting.
With too many hunters around, it can give away your location. When you hunt alone, it can be efficient. A lot of hunter-gatherer societies, I don’t know if they would need solitude back in the day because actually, people are completely fine sitting around with others in silence. There’s actually a lot of idle time built in their lifestyle. Whereas nowadays, we don’t have that mindset of idle time. If you live in like a metropolitan area just people just go, go, go all the time. I wonder that’s why solitude has become what we usually think as like a “need.”
However, when it comes to like needs, I hesitate to say that it’s a need just because even in quantitative studies we haven’t really found evidence for that balance. Usually, balance, researchers talk about it in the form of the Goldilocks hypothesis, not too much, not too little. We try to find what is that sweet balance of when it’s enough time for solitude.
We actually find a more linear correlation so just more solitude time correlate with loneliness. That suggests to me is that when it comes to something studying solitude as a need maybe solitude is just a byproduct for certain biological needs and lately, I have explored more in term of the balance in term of because I study emotional arousal.
That is really like in the form of stress and an explanation for that is that we do have the concept of homeostasis, for example. We don’t want to be too stressed as animals, as humans. If we too stressed, we need a way to bring that down and solitude just fit in as a very sweet way to do that for us humans nowadays just because we so bombarded with so many social stimulation. I tend to think of solitude more as the byproduct of whatever other needs that required of us.
I think yeah, it’s unfair to put our values and to think about the way we think about life as that of hunter-gatherers. I imagine myself going out hunting alone a lot but that’s because I’m living this life, my busy urban go-go-go life and yet hunter-gatherers have lots of quiet time, lots of leisure and this notion of just maybe being with others but in parallel to the point that Robert was talking about at the outset.
I went on Netflix and I saw a Netflix TV show that just came out called Alone. I thought it’s about solitude so I clicked on it and watch a few moments. It’s actually about survival alone. It’s really like the idea of alone somehow get a lot tied into like a survival idea, I think.
How Solitude Helps With Emotion Regulation
You were saying about this emotion regulation. We live in this these stressful worlds and sometimes having others around can be useful. Someone who puts their arm around your shoulder, shoulder to cry on, someone to listen to your problems and so on. However, there’s the classic thing, and I think a lot of people intuit this, is you just say, “I just need to be alone”. You’re pissed off, you’re having an argument or whatever there’s other people around and you’re like, “I just need to be alone,” and Thuy-vy, you actually let people do that. You bring them into the lab and you let them be alone and do nothing so to speak just to sit and think.
There’s this famous study that made it out into the media, you see it all the time, it really annoys me, about people. The short answer is like rather than sit alone in a room doing nothing, people would rather shock themselves and evidently, men I think are even more likely to shock themselves. The problem with that study is it gets misinterpreted.
People use it as evidence for “Well, we’re social creatures. We’re bad at this we shouldn’t be doing it,” etc. I think that you two would agree that’s not the way to interpret this study but what your work is showing is that actually if you decide to forgo the shocking there’s a benefit from that, especially if you’re having a bad day. What’s the origins of deciding to do this work and this study, specifically?
I remember the work during my phd when we started doing that. It was at the same time when that paper came out, so we ran the experiment and then we found the paper and like oh they did the same thing well they did their study 6 and 12 minutes and we did it for 15 minutes mainly because I think 10 is too little. I want to push it a little bit so we have a little variation in people’s response. The idea is just to see what happens, I think that’s the very enjoyable aspect of doing research
We originally just want to find out what happens and actually, the way we measure emotions in psychology also tend to focus more on the high arousal type of emotion. I don’t know, Robert, if you would agree is that the PANAS, what we usually use to study emotion, they have a lot of the strong, more arousal emotion. I remember still that day in the lab when I present my findings and my advisor said, “Can you go back and check your coding because why is it that both positive and negative goes down?” It should they tend to assume that negative would go up, positive go down if we usually think of solitude as more of a negative experience.
However, then we see that and then that’s when I start thinking that maybe it’s more of arousal thing and we follow up with another study where we include also the low arousal type. Yeah, so that’s just how it started. To me, that’s very important to reframe my way of thinking about solitude in the context of stress like what you mentioned when you have a bad day. Most of those probably some people don’t usually have bad days, I do.
You’re a professor. Of course you have bad days.
Yeah, but some professions have more bad days than others.
I actually had a chat with Wilson who was the psychologist who ran that famous study back in 2014. He told me that when they were preparing to do that specific experiment, there was a bet going on in the lab in terms of how much the college students who they were asking to sit alone for fifteen minutes just alone with their thoughts, how much they would enjoy it. He was certain that they would love it. He thought it would be a nice break for them, it would be like a respite from their busy classroom schedule and he was shocked, to use the pun term there, that they disliked it as much as they did.
You’re right that it’s been so misunderstood because it’s not really a study about solitude per se, it’s a study about doing nothing for fifteen minutes and sitting alone and being forced to do so. You’ve taken away the choice, you’ve taken away the choice of activity, you’ve taken away their technology, so it could also just be a study of college students hate being without their phone for fifteen minutes or however long it is. I think one of the primary takeaways from that study is people would rather do something than nothing.
He’s replicated that now this cross-cultural research in a whole bunch of other countries followed up where they basically replicated that component of the study. That’s a good takeaway, people enjoy doing something more than sitting alone with their thoughts. Also, it turns out it’s not that hard to alter people’s experience of sitting alone with your thoughts for fifteen minutes. There’s some subsequent research that suggests that if you adjust the mindset, which Thuy-vy has really brought to the forefront as a critical component to think about here.
If we just give participants simple instructions like, “Think happy thoughts,” “Think positive thoughts while you’re there,” they’ll have a more positive experience in those fifteen minutes. If we have them read a short paragraph where we describe how solitude might be good for them, it improves their experience. A lot of it has to do with the mindset like if you go into fifteen minutes, thinking like you’re being punished like it’s a time out and you’re an unruly toddler, you’re not going to have a positive experience. If you think of it as an opportunity, as a gift, as a chance to have a break, then you’re more likely to have a positive experience.
Delving Into The Two Sides Of Solitude
Yeah, it’s a study of intuition more than anything else, I think. I want to get to where you got started with this, Robert, so the playground watching thing. What was it that clicked for you, thinking that, seeing the two sides of this?
This is a story I tell a lot. When I started the beginning of my career, I was primarily interested in shyness and social anxiety in quite young children. We did spend quite a bit of time just sitting around in kindergarten classrooms and at recess and we did observations over lunchtime breaks. The primary goal was to watch these shy kids who tended to do things. The thing about shy kids is they want to play but they’re scared to.
It’s like they have this internal tug of war going on inside them where it’s an approach-avoidance conflict, “I want to get closer so I can play this cool-looking group but also that makes me feel nervous and self-conscious and so I’m going to just stay where I am. Behaviorally, what that often looks like is they hover on the edge of a social interaction or they watch without joining in. We spent a lot of time watching these shy kids. The quickest way if you’re scanning the playground to find the shy kid is to look for the kids who are off by themselves.
While we were doing that, and that was our primary focus, we almost, by mistake, identified this other group of kids who were also by themselves but they seemed like quite okay to be by themselves. They were building something with blocks, reading a book, playing with Lego, drawing pictures. We would watch them and someone would come over and say, “Do you want to come play?” more often than not, they’d say, “Sure,” and they’d go and they’d play and then when they were done playing, they would go back and continue whatever they were doing.
They seemed quite content in their solitude. This is the distinction I was making earlier choosing to be alone because you’re avoiding a stressful social situation that’s what the shy kids were doing versus approaching a solitary experience because you’re doing something that you’re enjoying and find engaging. It was such a great microcosm for what’s going on with people and their attitudes and relationships with solitude that here you go, just watch the kindergarten kid and you’re really seeing a pretty good representation of that.
Of course, you had other kids who would just never want to be by themselves and they would flitter around from one to another and as soon as they were by themselves you could watch them scanning and immediately seeking another group that they could go and join and you got the sense they maybe weren’t so were quite uncomfortable with being by themselves. Again, everything I learned about life I learned in kindergarten was a great book from a number of years ago and you can learn a lot just from watching the kindergarten kids and that’s what got me started.
One of the things that we want to do as researchers is we want to find main effects. We want to look at often how everybody’s the same. It’s just an easier paper to write. It’s just easier data to look at and model and so on. What’s coming up here is there’s a lot of individual differences. One thing that I wanted to ask you, Robert, talking about children, you mentioned timeouts. You think about it like you can imagine a timeout on one hand being a useful thing with regard to Thuy-vy’s finding.
You have a kid who’s having a temper tantrum, they need it’s good for them to be alone, they get to they can downregulate their emotions etc., but also, timeouts are punishments. I remember having to stand in the corner. By the way, that was a much more preferable punishment than some of the punishments that we had in my generation, which also aren’t healthy, but I remember like I would be lucky if I was in the corner that had wallpaper. I just remember fixating on the wallpaper, counting things, looking at things, whatever. Anything I could do to just try to entertain myself in a sense. This can be a nefarious message to send children in a sense, no?
That’s some of the contemporary complaints, I guess, with the whole timeout methodology, that whole punishment technique. People have tried to adapt it to be because the idea being is if you’re separating the child from their support group from their parent, from their attachment figure, from their siblings, that’s not necessarily the “punishment” that you want to try to implement. Some people suggest that this is something that with my kids when they would get a little bit out of hand and needed to calm down. We would just have them sit on the top of the stairs so that they could still see us and they weren’t shunned from the family or facing the wall or something like that but they would catch their breath.
That’s the one of the great superpowers of solitude. It lets them take the edge off of their strong emotions. It gives a little chance for reset and the timeout is not the is not the end of the intervention, it’s the beginning. It’s take the edge off of the negative emotions and then you’re in a position where you can sit down and have a conversation and talk through whatever it was that was going on.
I don’t want to get us too far off topic but you’ve touched on parenting and solitude and kids and at some point, if there’s an opportunity I want to make a case for parents to let their kids play alone and make sure they have some solitary playtime. I don’t want to veer us off too far into the into the garden but I’ll just put that out there for something we might want to talk about.
Yeah, we’re going to finish. Just so to heads up for the reader and for the two of you, I’m going to ask to finish with some advice and so maybe we’ll work that in some parenting advice this there. Thuy-vy, reflecting on what we’re talking about, I’m curious what your thoughts are.
How Moments Of Solitude Can Help Children Growing Up
Robert, just curious. Before I started my PhD, I used to work with kids and I’m curious, when you observed those kids during the early day of your research, did that raise concerns? Those kids that just want to play alone, did that raise concern from the parents or from the teachers? I remember specifically the elementary that I was looking at. Usually, they would get referred in and I’m like, “What’s wrong with them? They just want to play by themselves.” I’m curious what’s your experience have observing the reaction from teachers and parents.
Yeah, it’s so interesting because there’s been, I think, a change on both fronts. There was a time where teachers were not so worried about shy kids. They tend to not to notice them and we did a lot of work to try to and others of course to raise awareness around the idea that we should be paying attention to these shy kids. They deserve our attention they deserve and sometimes need a little bit of a helping hand in order to get them integrated. At the same time, the opposite message was but sometimes, there’s these other kids who are quite happy to play alone, as long as they are getting a at least a minimum amount of peer interaction.
In my graduate student days, I was raised in a peer relationships lab where we spent years trying to get the world to understand this is a long time ago that friends matter and that peers are important and that we need to have social interaction with friends. It’s amazing that something of course we all take for granted now. That’s always been the worry or the potential worry and the argument used by people against the kids who are enjoying spending time alone in kindergarten is, “Wait, they’re missing out, they need to interact with their peers.”
Of course they do, but it doesn’t have to be all the time. Again, that gets back to that balance issue and that’s what we found. There is certainly evidence from our observational studies and others that like a medium amount of time spent alone, not the most and not the least is optimal which gets back to that balance idea but again, it’s slightly different for everybody. I think over time, we’ve seen the right shift. Now teachers are now telling us quite robustly that shyness is a potential problem. They’re going to keep an eye on these shy kids they’re going to try to help them and assist them and there’s a whole bunch of appropriate and positive ways that we can do that.
Also, that it’s okay for some kids to spend some time playing alone as long as you just you want to monitor and keep an eye on that it’s not an all-the-time thing because you do want to make sure that they get the opportunity for hanging out with their friends because the peer group provides so many unique and really important opportunities for growth and learning and happiness in kids. We don’t want to deprive them of those opportunities.
I don’t know if this more of the Millennials parenting office practice but it’s called quiet time. It’s actually like inviting your child to go into the room and set up the room and activities. I did a study with mothers and they actually also need time so they sometimes want their kids to go off and have quiet time so they can have time for themselves.
When you were talking about earlier the idea of timeout and it’s amazing how just the change of word can really reframe so that this is the time for you to enjoy those activities. A lot of my people in my friends group actually do that. The parents find out that it’s actually benefit them just as much as it benefits the kids, I think.
This reminds me. I saw a funny headline and it was like, “Gen Z is raw dogging boredom.” I don’t know if you saw this, which I just thought, like, “Gen Z has discovered meditation. Gen Z has discovered what it means to put your phone down, etc.,” but I do think we’re going to talk about technology in a bit, this world where I think we can teach some skills around solitude. This quiet time, I think, is a very useful moniker for a skill that people can develop the kids can develop and use through their life.
It’s a capacity for solitude. That’s the term that Winnicott and others used to use. That you have that that’s a skill that you can build up in your in your kids from an early age. That’s what we’re aiming to do. There’s so many different developmental theories, from attachment theory. Solitude can be a great an important place for kids differentially so at different ages and they need to be given the time and space to spend that time.
I think one of the findings I found when I was working on my book was parents often lament the teen who goes off into their room and close and locks the door and worries about that but that seems to be part of a developmental process that’s important for them to learn to be alone, to regulate their emotions at very tumultuous time. It can be a time of a lot of conflict and so on.
It’s a time of such pressures and social pressures and academic pressures and also teenagers are trying to figure out who they are and who their true self is and how authentic they can be. Solitude is a place where they can develop that self and they can work on their self-system and figure out who they are. Again, sometimes, parents should keep an eye. That’s the where we have to find the balance there because it’s a solitude in in adolescence also can be a two-sided coin.
It becomes a place that is particularly important for identity development and for having a break from social pressures and things like that and so you want to allow that to happen. It becomes more okay to spend time alone, more normative, but at the same time, for some teach teenagers, it’s also a very sad and lonely and anxious place.
We can’t just say, “Let your teens go and close the door and tune out.” I know parents, of course. Still need to be vigilant and monitor and try to engage and talk which comes with its own challenges with kids at that age. I’m a little worried of giving too plain of a message there because it is a bit of a double-edged sword there and you do have to keep an eye.
Recently in our data, we see a correlation between having negative emotion and then that’s when people want to be alone, like prefer to be alone, but then actually, that correlation is stronger for young people. I do think that we do see now with young people wanting to have time for themselves and actually, it’s come from a healthy place, to regulate those emotion. When I try to probe a little more of some qualitative data, they would say that when I have a bad day or I have some negative experience, I’m not ready to go out there to interact with my friends.
They actually mention a lot of times, friends can make it worse because if I talk about my problem, they can make it worse so I would just rather be by myself. I do think that we need to also think about the risk into it because they can go online, it can be a space for them to engage in materials that maybe parents need to just to keep an eye on the kids.
I think one of the things that you think about children and adolescence is they’re inexperienced. What happens is that as you live life, your repertoire of coping mechanisms, emotional and social, can expand. You get to find out what works for you. What you two are identifying is that quiet time, let’s just call it quiet time for a moment, seems to work universally in a sense, especially if you develop it as a skill.
Differences Between Extroversion And Introversion
The Gen Zers who are raw-dogging boredom, which I think is just hilarious idea are onto something that seems like a main effect, in a sense. I want to ask one other question about individual differences. It’s about extraversion/introversion. There’s a lot of lay theory and belief around these ideas. Maybe if you could do a a brief lesson about extraversion/introversion and how it relates to the findings in in solitude.
Before that, I think we need to start with a caveat that in psychology, we also don’t really have good measures for extraversion and introversion that is fair for the introvert. I think there’s a book that Susan Cain put out a few years ago talking just about how it’s societies and the lay theories around extraversion and introversion is unfair to the introvert.
We celebrate extroverts.
Yeah and then introverts are just a bunch of really sad, gloomy people, which we know is not true because I’m an introvert. Yeah, so because of that, at least in data, in my work but I think there are other works, there’s a researcher, Virginia Thomas, who also found that actually there’s a positive correlation between extraversion and enjoyment for solitude. We do not know if that might just be an artifact of the fact that the measure itself tend to portray extroverts as happy people so they are just happy regardless.
I think Jan Selenski, he’s the one that look at introversion/extraversion and do see evidence that introverts tend to spend more time alone and they also tend to prefer being alone more often, but so far, whether they prefer or spend more time alone speak less to whether or not they actually enjoy that time alone. I think it’s important to because I do think that extroverts can also enjoy solitude as well.
I know Robert is going to jump in here but my joke is now at this age 55, I say that I’m an extrovert by day and introvert by night.
I’m going to steal that.
I like to go mix it up out in the world and do all these things and then like 7:00 hits and it’s like, “Leave me alone.”
You’re called an omnivert.
I have so much to say about this if you’ll give me a moment for a little bit of a rant. First of all, the lay definition of extroversion/introversion and what psychologists study is quite disconnected and I think most people focus particularly in the general public on the sociability component of introversion/extraversion. Introverts like spending time alone and spend time alone and extroverts want to be around people and that’s fine and that’s one component of introversion/extraversion, which is actually a really broad trait. It includes things like risk-taking and impulsivity and how we express emotions.
It covers a wide range of things but I think even the bigger issue is that I just heard each of you say, “I’m an introvert,” or, “I’m an extrovert,” but there’s no real criteria for that. There’s no cutoff. It’s a personality trait, it varies. People are high or low on the scale. D the huge majority of people have characteristics of both. What are you even going to call an introvert, the top 10% of the population, the top 15%? Someone who’s in the 51st percentile, “I’m an introvert.” of course, they differ on all kinds of other characteristics, how emotional stable versus neurotic they are.
How agreeable they are? All the other big personality traits vary and so you can have introverts who have all these different combinations of these other traits and introversion is not their defining characteristic. I think we need to get past that. It’s a good story and it makes for good memes and all of that stuff. There is this idea you might probably remember from the beginning of the pandemic that this was like introverted heaven. “I’m in lockdown. This is my Wednesday as a for my life as an introvert. I’m so happy that it’s like this.”
There was all these ideas that introverts were going to thrive during the pandemic and it was going to be the wonderful opportunity for them. The rest of the world to finally see what their ideal situation is. In fact, what ended up happening is when the data’s now just starting to come out is that in fact, extroverts did better during the pandemic from an emotional and well-being standpoint. Maybe because they had used a wider variety of coping strategies and are generally express more positive emotions and they were able to adapt to the situation better than introverts.
It’s a complete myth that was completely debunked in terms of that experience and so I think we really need to try to change the dialogue around introversion and extraversion that it’s not just about being one or the other most people have characteristics of both. We need to be a little bit more flexible and accepting of how there’s lots of different kinds of introverts and lots of different kinds of extroverts and stop trying to stick everybody in the same square peg, round hole scenario.
Making Good Use Of Your Times Of Solitude
I totally buy it. There are these things that are out there, the five stages of grief, total BS, these things that are out there in the world that people believe it. Maybe helps them make sense of the world, it helps them get along, but it’s not a necessarily useful concept for them to focus. We’re going to start to trend into advice here in a moment, but one thing that seems to be the case is we talked about choice.
You’re choosing time alone, choosing solitude, but then there’s a choice within the choice, which is what do you do with that time? It might be nothing, it might be having a dance party, it might be scrolling on TikTok. Not all of the choices within that choice are created equal. I’m curious both of you, how do you think about that?
I think the research is behind the advice still. I think we’re just starting to learn about the different types of solitary activities and how they might implicate in terms of experiences of solitude. I’ll make more of a general statement with a caveat that research is still pending to a certain degree but I would say my best guess here is that as long as you are engaging in an activity that you are personally finding meaningful, enjoyable, gets back to Thuy-vy’s discussion of intrinsic motivations. If you are intrinsically motivated to do something while you’re alone, it maybe doesn’t matter so much what the actual activity is.
You could knit, you could go for a walk, you could listen to music. If that activity is personally meaningful and enjoyable and engaging for you, you’re going to get some benefit out of doing that in solitude. You choose, but then of course, certain activities are probably less adaptive than others, so nobody should be scrolling social media and doom scrolling and etc. That’s bad for you no matter you’re whether you’re alone or with other people.
I guess the last thing I’ll say about that is I call it, “Don’t social wash your solitude on technology.” If you’re spending all of your “alone” time texting with someone, facetiming with someone, interacting with someone virtually, I understand people might do that because they don’t like spending time alone, they’re bored, they don’t want to let their mind ruminate or they’re lonely, in which case they should be reaching out and connecting with others. That’s good. If you’re feeling lonely, make some social connection even if it’s a text or whatever if you’re not able to go out and be with someone.
That’s good. Do what you need to do. Everybody should take some non-social engaged solitude too. Just don’t spend if you’re spending all of your alone time engaged socially virtually with someone else, then you’re missing out on some of the good stuff. Again, some of this is more general advice versus research-backed advice and I’ll certainly acknowledge that but if you’re asking me for my advice, those would be a couple of big ones.
Thuy-vy, do you agree? We should basically throw our phone in the ocean at some point.
Not necessarily. It’s good to have that somewhere. Maybe you want to read a book on your phone.
I’m of the generation that was raised on starting to discover all this phones. I hesitate to say to just throw the phone away because descriptively, there is some research that have shown that we reach for the phone because we want to cope with boredom and whatever low mood at that time. I have done that as well, but I do agree that at some point, I look at the phone and I’m like, “What am I even watching?” I don’t process this stuff actually because the algorithms, so it’s also depends on the social media actually, like the algorithm um.
I do think that if scrolling is something you need to resort to, make sure you do that and back to the message that Robert said, engaging with it meaningfully. Some materials definitely are more personally meaningful to you than others. In terms of activities, it’s also interesting that it’s not an area that psychology focuses on, but we also categorize activities in term of utilities activities and recreational activities, like leisure activities.
I wouldn’t say that this is an advice but just some descriptive data out there is that we tend to just use solitude for more utilities. I think that that can sometimes be missed opportunities because we tend to just do things like go grocery shopping, things that more practical. In fact, it’s interesting that even when we eat alone, we tend to resort more to food that are more practical rather than go for an elaborate meal.
In that sense, people tend to think that maybe time alone is not the time that you go out and do leisure or recreational activities, especially the one that are commonly enjoyed with other people like dining alone or going to the movie theater. I used to do that when I was a poor grad student because in the afternoon is when the ticket is the cheapest. I’ll just go alone by myself and then just watch a movie and I think that’s completely fine.
I think that’s also need a little bit of reframing to think about the activities we do. There are activities, yes, that are more fun to do with other people. I think there’s a paper that came out that people do generally enjoy doing things with other people, but that doesn’t stop them from trying out some activities by themselves.
I’m being hyperbolic when I say throw your phone in the ocean, but I work with undergrads and grad students and you can see the cost of these phones. These are amazing inventions but they are also a distraction, a place where you can start to feel very bad about yourself, rage bait, all this stuff, inauthentic view of the world, and so on and so forth. We know these things.
On the other hand to Robert’s point my music is on there, my show are on there, books can be on there, my connections to the outside world especially when you’re traveling that you can just text someone, pick up the phone and have a conversation that you couldn’t have 30 years ago, even though you’re on the other side of the planet. They’re wonderful devices in some ways and then also really awful in others.
I think probably what I hear you both saying is how are you feeling? How are you doing? If the answer’s, “Great,” then keep on doing what you’re doing. If the answer is, “I’m anxious, I’m unhappy, I’m depressed,” then there needs to be some change with regard to those activities, whether they’re with other people or alone. This notion of doing things alone in public, I know there’s research I’ve been writing about, people intuitions are wrong, they think they’re not going to have as good a time as they actually do.
There’s the great benefit of, Thuy-vy, you get to choose the movie. You don’t have a compromise movie when you go alone. You get to walk through the museum at the pace that you want. You get to linger, you get to flaneur, which is the word that I like to use. You can’t flâneur with another person. You get to improvise your afternoon, your day, your experience in a way that works best for you in that you don’t have to compromise.
I’ve also been writing about what I call the solo economy. With the rise of singles. One thing that we haven’t said yet, but is true, is that single people spend more time alone than partnered people. Just mathematically, that typically is the case. For my Solo audience, some of them are not partnered because they enjoy their alone time so much, or they have, my New Way audience, have non-traditional relationships which might create more alone time. For example, they may live apart from their spouse or they may have a different bedroom and so on.
What I’m starting to wonder is when we reach some equilibrium between partnered and non-partnered people in a world that’s built for partnered people, that’s built for two, that we’ll start to recognize that we have a lot of non-partnered people, how will institutions change? We’re seeing this in Asia more so than in in the West. You have solo karaoke, for example. I was in Tokyo and I went and did karaoke alone because I was curious.
I was like, “Okay, is this solo karaoke thing a bad thing, a good thing, a neutral thing?” I got it. What I realized was there’s two benefits to solo karaoke as I saw it. First of all is if you’re a really terrible singer as I am, solo karaoke is great. You can just have a good time and you don’t have to be embarrassed, you don’t have to be shy. I played the same song three times in a row, which no one in a group karaoke would ever let me do.
That brings me to the second benefit, which is like if you’re really into karaoke, you want to practice. You get to actually work some reps, in a sense. No one thinks that going to the gym alone is weird in that in that sense. You get reps. This is a very long lead up to my question. This is a big question that you may not have an answer about.
How Society, Institutions, And The Media Adapt To The Solo Lifestyle
As the world starts to see that we have lots more single people and as a consequence, lots more people doing things alone, most notably living alone, but then also shopping alone and then going to the movies alone and so on. I know you’re psychologists, now I’m asking you to be business school professors and economists, do you see institutions starting to adapt and change? That’s where I’m starting to puzzle over how will they adapt and change, when will they adapt and change to serve this new community and to facilitate something that that can be quite good.
I actually had a conversation with, you probably know Donna Ward, the founder of Single Equality. It’s the idea of when we think of all these policies, we tend to a lot of time think about what we can do to make people happier. There’s different way to think about happiness and well-being. The data came out because we working on a project on the cost burdens on single people.
The data actually that we got shown more that the people with kids are the one that feel more stressed about their finance, but do we want to base evidence based on that, who is more stressed to form policy? The other way of thinking about policy is how we can build the capacity so everyone can live life in the way that they want even if they want to be married or they want to be coupled or they want to just live life being single.
What we see nowadays usually at least the policy is not catching up yet. We haven’t built enough capacity for single people to actually pursue that. Most of the time, we require more of single people to have to rely on themselves to adjust their lifestyle so that they can adapt to this economy. It’s more expensive to eat, to cook for yourself. A phone plan is one of the thing that we usually disadvantage single people.
I do think that in term of institutional policy in that sense hasn’t caught up. When it comes to solo economy, yes, Asia is actually a little quite ahead in term of that. There’s a lot of places where you go. Even restaurants change the way that they set up things so that people can go in and eat alone. Also, the convenience of delivery and DoorDash and all that. I talked to someone in hospitality, they also now cater certain packages for solo travelers. I think that’s very cool. In a sense, I think the economy itself is actually catching up. I think in term of government policies, I don’t know. We’re still not there yet.
I like to say that single solo living is luxury living. We’re not at a place yet. Part of the reason that we have seen this growth of solos is because economic opportunities, educational opportunities, growth, more generally GDP. People can afford it now in a way that you couldn’t have in the past. I think you’re absolutely right.
I think that the government’s going to be the last thing to change. I think businesses are first because they’re more nimble and they’re more motivated. You can think about religious institutions. You can think about other types of institutions, educational institutions, etc. Robert, I’m curious if you have an opinion about this.
As you said, businesses will be the first because they’re going to just respond to market demand and with changing demographics and an increased number of people now in North America living alone or not marrying or whatever definition you want to use of how broad you want to make the solo tent, I think that’s already happening.
I agree with you, the government will be last. The other institutions are going to follow because it’s an economic choice. If you are ignoring a larger and increasing economic proportion of your society, then the businesses who don’t do that are not going to survive and so it’ll be very Darwinian in terms of how that works. I still think there’s a really important role in the media and in the popular press and for shows like this to continue to raise awareness and change attitudes because the attitudes lag behind.
There’s still a stigma associated with eating alone in a restaurant, with going alone to a movie. It’s getting better, but the societal views are still lagging. That people who live alone or who aren’t married are talked about. There’s all these words with negative connotations that are used to describe people who like spending time alone, a loner, a hermit, or a spinster, cat lady or whatever it is. There’s a social butterfly but there’s not like a happy solo caterpillar.
It sounds silly but this is what people are exposed to every day and it shapes their views and it shapes their attitudes and you need to normalize asking for solitary time. If a family member, a close friend, a romantic partner, whatever your situation is, it needs to be more okay to say, “I love you, you’re great, but let me spend a little bit of time alone and in fact the research says I’ll come back even better. We’ll have a better interaction afterwards.”
Indeed, yeah. I’m glad you brought up the media because I think there are already case studies with regard to business and the media in terms of shaping people’s attitudes and behavior. The LGBTQ+ community is one. Businesses recognize that this was a group of people who were being ignored, weren’t being represented in advertisements, weren’t having services and events and experiences built for them.
Also, you have like television shows, that now start showing gay couples in a positive light, rather than a negative light, and then music follows, and so on. The single thing is a little bit of a stickier wicket when it comes to media because it’s like it’s hard to have a rom-com, like there’s not a solo version of a rom-com.
It’s actually not a category of movie that gets made. I’m working on it, but we don’t have it yet. The love songs, the like I love myself. The Divinyls in the ‘80s, you two might be old enough to know that song, but it was I Touch Myself or something like that, the Divinyls. I have like a solo playlist on Spotify, but it’s not the constant amount of music that is built around coupledom and so on.
Think about when are you most likely to hear about solitude in the media. It’s when it’s at its most extreme form. Here’s this person who we found living in a cabin who hasn’t interacted with somebody in fifteen years. Here’s this person who did this solo hiking trek across these mountains and spent six months without talking to anyone. Those depictions of solitude, here’s this artist who went two years without talking to anyone as part of the artistic experience. It’s not normalized. Its more frequent within the distribution, what everybody else does. It only gets attention when it’s at its extreme and that also colors things.
One of the things when I started this show, I think there was only one other podcast that took a positive view of single living. Now there’s lots. There’s lots more, but because podcasts are democratized, they actually come bottom up. There’s no one in a suit that has to approve my show. There’s no gatekeepers and so you’re seeing trickles in this way.
Has The Solo Lifestyle Gone Too Far?
I want to do three more things here. First of all, both of you have books on this topic. Thank you for writing them. One is The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World, that’s yours, Robert. Thuy-vy, yours is Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone. I’m going to tee this up.
I’m going to take my most contrarian stance and that is, are we celebrating solitude too much? Are we giving people permission to withdraw from the messiness of life and to the challenges but reward of relationships? My readers, who are who are building unconventional lives without a default partner, are they making a mistake? Have we gone too far?
I would say not enough.
All right. Doubling down. Way to go.
I think that the message that we have, have been delivered very well. Actually, more likely to equate solitude, and I don’t know Robert if you agree, with more independence. Somehow, solitude becomes an idea that I don’t need other people and I don’t think that that’s actually what celebrating solitude is about.
To celebrate solitude, I would think that it’s actually for anyone that want to just have that time to regulate or just to do something that they enjoy. One thing that I like about Robert’s book at the beginning is that got it out of the way the idea that yes, loneliness is really bad and there are risk that are involved that might be associated with solitude.
To celebrate solitude, I don’t think it should be about that means we don’t need other people. In fact, research would show that we enjoy solitude best when we know that in the background, we have a strong and high quality social network. Even with solo living or single people, I think it’s a misconceptions that they don’t have a social life. Not having like a partner or a relationship, you have access to many other relationships in your life.
There’s also research on strong tie and weak ties. We can have neighbors, we can have family members, friends and solo and single people and I think Bella is one of the champions that she talks a lot about how single people can have a very enriched social life. I don’t think that we selling it way too hard. In any way, we just have to make sure it doesn’t go too much in the direction of social avoidance and independence. It’s more about anyone can enjoy this or take a little time for yourself.
That was such a great answer. I love that response, Thuy-vy. Thank you. I literally cannot possibly say it better than that. I’ll completely agree. I think it’s a mistake to put too much emphasis on any one thing regardless. If we think of our social experiences like our diet, everybody needs to eat different things. A one food diet is not going to make you the most healthy.
If you eat a steak every day and that’s all that you eat all the time or if you eat even fruits or vegetables, if you eat only those things all the time, it’s not probably so good for you and you’re not going to be so happy. The key to wellbeing is a smorgasbord. A little bit of this and some of that and go back and forth and time alone and time with others and time that’s intimate and time that’s just saying hi to the barista when you buy your coffee.
All of these things, the tapestry of those range of social experiences and solitary experiences that you can orchestrate and set up in a way that you choose what you eat, if you can. That’s always the stickler. We talk about, “You should have a choice between how much time you spend alone and how much time you spend with others,” but of course and as Thuy-vy knows from her own research, there are times in our lives when we get very limited choice.
A parent of a new child, a young child who doesn’t have friends and is forced to spend time alone, someone who’s retired and who’s living in a little apartment by themselves and can’t get outside because they have mobility issues. There are times when we have less choice. That makes us more stressed. That’s less choice on the social side and on the solitary side.
It’s not always possible to implement that best balance and to make those choices, but if you’re asking for should we still advocate for it? Yes. Everybody needs to be with others, we need social connection, but even if it’s not an evolutionary life or death decision, I think solitude is still a need for our well-being and happiness. If we are fortunate enough to be able to choose to do that, then we should absolutely continue to do that.
Maybe in some ways, the people who think they need it the least that we can push the most. People who don’t think they need any solitude are missing out on stuff and also the people who think they only need solitude are also missing out on stuff and we have to push them too. Everybody probably needs a little nudge in one direction or the other to find that balance. Most of us either probably need to spend a little bit more time alone or a little bit more time with others to really optimize our well-being.
As someone who does alone real well, I actually had a very interesting insight. I was in Asia, as I mentioned. I was in Japan, among other places, and I actually found the time difference to be rather isolating. What it made me realize is how often I just pick up the phone and call someone during the day. I’m on a commute, I go through my rolodex, I call this person, I call this person.
It’s like I’m on a walk, I call someone. When you’re 12, 14 hours ahead, behind, whatever, you can’t call people because they’re asleep. There’s never a good time. I’m an introvert at the end of the day. I don’t want to talk on the phone while someone’s starting the day. I’m starting the day someone’s ending their day.
Advice On Doing Solitude Better
Even I, who does this really well and am really connected can see the points of friction to your point. Robert, your response, too, is very well said. I want to finish with advice. You talked about nudges. If someone wants to assess their life and wants to do solitude better, let’s say, where would you encourage them to start? What advice would you have for them?
I guess a couple of pieces of advice there. One would be to start small. Take some micro moments of solitude and like anything else, you’ve got to build up your muscles for it. You have to build up your capacity. If you’re going to run a marathon you don’t go and do it all in the first day, you walk around the block first and then you walk a little further. Start off even if it’s just a few minutes here and there and experiment with different things that you’re going to do in that solitude and how it makes you feel and track that for a while.
Build it up to a point where it reaches maybe fifteen minutes a day or maybe more. Some people are going to need more. Make it a part of your schedule to do that. Don’t be intimidated. Not everybody needs to take a two-hour walk in the woods to get benefits from solitude and don’t let the marathon stop you from going for a walk.
Give it a try and don’t feel too pressured to do solitude in any one way. Meditation is great, but not everybody is going to enjoy meditation to the same degree, find something that works for you, build it up a little bit slowly over time and then try to make it a part of your schedule because I think again, under times when people are stressed and there’s not enough hours in the day, it’s hard even to think about adding a fifteen-minute new activity.
There’s a real return on investment here. I think the research is starting to catch up with that idea which is that positively chosen good quality time alone can make the rest of your day better. It could improve your mood, it could make you more focused, it could make you enjoy your subsequent social interactions. There is a real potential for a concrete return on investment for a little bit of me time. That would be my lump of advice around that.
I’ve been looking into a lot in term of the physical locations of when you spend time alone and it’s not to say that I would advise and prescribe people on where to be alone, but I think there are certain space that are more ideal. For example, nature is one of the few place the place that really good compatible with solitude.
Also, when it comes to indoor space, there’s actually a group of researcher in China that went in Hong Kong and assessed the space of where people like to go to spend time alone in public. They found that people organically just go and find a space away from the more heavy foot traffic areas. I would agree because I spend time in New York City and I definitely don’t want to go to place where there’s a lot of people around.
They also like to find space that have a less chance of interruption. That’s also something that we found in research with mothers. It’s so hard to find time alone when you have a crying child. Even when you say to your partner, “Take care of the child, I’m going to go have some time for myself,” they find it hard to just have the crying child outside because that means their solitude is interrupted.
I do think that there’s something to be thought about, those kinds of space that we create for ourselves so we can have that time. I also look into the history of that a little bit and back in the day, solitude is such a luxury. Solitude space is such a luxury. Not everyone can have a study room that you can resort to. Nowadays, we can actually have more accessible ways to create that space.
I think spend a little time to think like what is the space where you can find that positive solitude moments for yourself? That would be another thing. I really definitely completely agree about the micro dosing on solitude advice. I do remember when I studied this subject and my mom know that I study solitude and she call me and said, “Today, I tried just block everything out and be alone for the whole day and it was terrible.” I’m like, “Why did you start off that way? You should just take a little bit at a time.”
Just reflecting on our conversation, I’ll add a little bit. I think one thing is to know that what works for someone else may not work for you. This is about creating something customized, bespoke for yourself, and I think that this idea of starting small is really the way to go and then being willing to experiment and pay attention and iterate how do you feel, how does it go? Recognize that it may take a little time to adapt.
While I was in Japan, I found these onsens, so these are like mineral baths, so natural hot springs. Japan’s volcanic, so they’re all over the place and there’s even like inns and hotels around them. There’s also public baths. I was like, “I realized how much I just like sitting in hot mineral water doing nothing. I don’t want to be in the water on my phone. That seems wrong and weird. I don’t want to be just sitting alone, but in the hot water alone, so good.
Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
Luckily, I paid attention to how I felt in and after that thing and now, it’s something that I can build into my repertoire. Obviously, the advice I would give, of course, people should pick up your books and read more about this and as they devise their own bespoke, customized life of semi-solitude. Do you have any announcements, anything that the world should know about what you’re doing, where you’re headed? What’s happening? How people can connect with you further?
I think the best way is just our lab website because we do have a Solitude Lab website. We create a YouTube series. Regionally, we thought maybe this a good way to reach the younger generation because I do have a lot of young people coming in and they actually raise the concern exactly about devices, actually, and it’s just amazing how young people now taught start reflecting on all these things that he on media about the effects of devices on well-being.
They said, “What should I do?” We created the YouTube series called Solitude Explain to just give information about emotions. It’s going to be about the relationship between physical space and solitude. It turned out, we actually also reach a lot of older people coming in and then just listening and I guess they appreciate the short form format. That’s something that our lab has invested time into, to create those short communication to help people understand solitude more.
I think we’re reaching a phone as smoking moment. There was a time where people smoked. It was very bad for them but they didn’t know it was bad for them, and then they figured out it’s bad for them and I think we’re having that same thing with the phones at the moment. I think it’s wonderful that you’re offering a resource that people can tap into where it’s backed by science but also then practically delivered.
The Gen-Z is trading in phone for the brick phone now is what I heard.
I’ve got a chance to see some of those videos that you’re describing and I will put in a great plug for them they’re wonderful and I really hope people will seek them out and watch those. In terms of what we’re up to in my lab these days, our book just came out in November 2025, so there’s still some book publicity going on.
I guess readers can keep an eye open for the softcover edition that’s coming out in a few months, so I’ll put in a little plug for that. In terms of the stuff that we’re working on in my lab right now, I’ve gone a little bit back to my developmental roots and we have a big study that we’ve just started working where we’re looking at changes in how kids experience and respond to solitude at different ages.
We’re hoping to do a real lifespan check in there, starting with kids quite young in elementary school all the way up through adolescence and into young adults and beyond. We’re looking at some of the different factors that we need to pay attention to how kids are spending their time alone, what the implication is, what they’re doing.
How that impacts upon their wellbeing and just trying to add some more data to our model about how solitude can play different roles at different ages. How it has different costs and benefits and different functions for kids of different ages. I imagine at some point, I’ll turn that into a book for parents so that we can translate some of that stuff into that. That’s the longer term goal but we still have a lot of work to do before that.
Wonderful. Good luck with that. It’s an ambitious project and an important one.
Thank you.
As we wrap up, I just want to say thank you to the two of you for doing this important research. It’s really refreshing to see that there’s not just one voice out there trying to counter the zeitgeist of this. I think obviously this will be well received from our community. A lot of amens and fist pumping and hallelujahs from the audience. Really appreciate your time and I’m going to sign off and be alone for a little while.
Sounds good. Thank you, Peter.
Thank you.
Cheers.
Important Links
- The Joy of Solitude: How to Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World
- Robert Coplan
- Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone
- Thuy-vy Nguyen
- Solitude Lab on YouTube
About Dr. Thuy-vy Nguyen
Dr. Thuy-vy Nguyen is the Principal Investigator of the Solitude Lab, where she studies how spending time alone shapes emotional and cognitive experiences and how people use solitude to regulate themselves in everyday life.
Her work combines experiments, daily life data, and physiological measures. She is the recipient of an ESRC grant for a project on solitude as an opportunity for rest in everyday life, conducted at Durham University. She is the founder of the Charles Darwin Centre for Human Studies and works to make psychological science more open and accessible beyond Western academia.
About Robert Coplan
Robert Coplan is a psychologist, researcher, teacher, and author who has been studying solitude for more than thirty years. He is a Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
Over the course of his career, he has extensively explored the costs and benefits of spending time alone among children, adolescents, and adults. He has authored several academic books and recently published his first popular press book, The Joy of Solitude: How To Reconnect with Yourself in an Overconnected World.