Hidden Brain - How To Be Alone

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

We're always told to reach for that next ring, work that third job, go to that boisterous party after a long day at work. You only live once ... right? But psychologist Netta Weinstein says that when we constantly engage in achievement and distraction, we lose something essential about ourselves. This week, she makes a case for solitude, and examines what happens when we seek a quieter, more reflective interior life.If you like today's episode, check out our two-part series on mindfulness:Seeking Serenity: Part 1Seeking Serenity: Part 2

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantan. The English poet William Wordsworth once wrote that the world is too much with us. He penned those words in 1807, a time of growing industrialization in his country. William Wordsworth felt that people were becoming detached from nature and were too absorbed in, as he put it, getting and spending. His critique still rings true. We are surrounded today by more people connected to more devices and travel more often and widely.

From time to time, of course, we stop. We take a hike in the mountains or spend an afternoon reading a book. We are transformed by a lovely piece of music or sit by a window listening to the rain. These moments rejuvenate us. We tell ourselves, I should do this more often. And then we don't. That's because the world constantly tells us

that William Wordsworth was wrong, that getting and spending is the good life We should reach for that next ring work that third job Go to that boisterous party after a long day at work Work hard play hard. You only live once right? Movies and TV shows depict people who sit on the sidelines, who consciously step away from the crowds, as standoffish and strange. That figure sitting by a rain-spattered window?

She looks lonely. Today on the show, we explore the signs of what we lose when we constantly engage in getting and spending. And we'll examine the effects on our minds of a quieter, more reflective interior life. How to make friends with yourself again, this week on Hidden Brain. Researchers are people, and like all of us, they make assumptions. Sometimes those assumptions are right, but often they're wrong. That's where the data come in. If you track things carefully, you can start to see where your assumptions go wrong.

In early 2020, psychologist Neda Weinstein at the University of Reading in Britain made an assumption. She wanted to study the psychological impacts of the COVID pandemic as it swept across the globe. Her assumption was that social distancing would be an overwhelmingly negative experience for many people. We were worried and we anticipated that we'd see increases in loneliness,

that we'd see increases in anxiety and depression. And so our first project kind of jumping into this was to map people's anxiety, loneliness, depression across months of lockdown and try to predict who is sort of resilient to those kinds of costs of the lockdown experience. those kinds of costs of the lockdown experience. Now roughly one in three adults in the in in Britain live on their own live live by themselves. I'm assuming you you might have worried that these people might be especially hard hit they were already in some ways socially

isolated or you worried that they were suffering from loneliness and now you have this enforced loneliness where some of the social contact that they might have had by going out and making friends with the baker, that that would have fallen by the wayside as well. Absolutely. So, for those of us who lived with somebody else, we had different risks. So parents struggle because they were in close quarters

with their children all day long and balancing work and childcare might be difficult. Partners were challenged, you think, to I really like the person that I live with. But living alone adults, it was really about having nobody to access. And if you're stuck in the house

and there's nobody else there, it means long periods of solitude. So later in that first pandemic year of 2020, you and your colleagues published your first round of findings from the research project. What did you report, Neda? So one of the things we were looking for is we were looking for kind of evidence

that the motivation that we have for being alone can protect us from those kind of negative effects, you know, from loneliness or depression or anxiety. And we thought when you think about the reasons people were in lockdown, for some people they really understood the importance of lockdown. So we were looking for people who felt like, yeah, it's really important that I stay at home and I'm alone because I understand the importance for kind of public health, for my own health. I think it's a valuable thing to do. So we were looking for those sort of markers

of kind of positive motivation for solitude. And we were also looking for people who felt just really pressured and choiceless and being alone. You know, were there some people who just felt like I'm only doing this because I have no choice at all? And actually it feels very kind of controlled people who just felt like I'm only doing this because I have no choice at all and actually it feels very kind of controlled and coercive of the government to put me in this position. And what we expect is that those people who felt like they were being pressured or coerced, that

they would have more loneliness across time, more anxiety, and have more symptoms of depression. time, more anxiety, and have more symptoms of depression. And we didn't find strong evidence of those effects. We found very weak evidence. And the reason was actually what surprised us the most. The reason is that people didn't really increase in anxiety, depression, and loneliness the way that we had expected them to. anxiety, depression and loneliness the way that we had expected them to. Neta's starting point for the study was wrong. Her assumptions about how lockdowns would damage people's well-being were off base. What we saw is that across those early months, there wasn't really a lot of evidence that there was something that needed protecting.

People's mental health problems just didn't increase. And the kind of really surprising thing when I look back and you kind of look back and you have the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom of age here a few years later is I look back at that study and I think, well, we didn't actually measure anything positive at all. We only measured negative mental health indicators like depression and anxiety. We didn't measure the potential benefits people could have had being home alone during lockdowns. And we never asked the question, could it be that some people were doing more than okay? Some people were really, you know, finding some benefits in it. So following the release of those results, Neda, you published another study the following year. What were you looking to find in this study and what did you find? You know, I think we learned something. I learned something in that

initial study that was focused on anxiety, depression, loneliness, and none of the potential benefits of solitude. And so I ran a study that was meant to start to understand solitude across the lifespan. So we were looking at adolescents from age 13 to age 16, and we were comparing them to adults and older adults. adolescents from age 13 to age 16. And we were comparing them to adults and older adults. One of the things that we saw, and it's not the only time that we've seen this result,

is that older adults felt most peaceful and least lonely in their solitude time. And they were followed by adolescents. So actually it was middle-aged adults who struggled the most with solitude. But we also asked them to sort of openly reflect on what the costs and benefits of solitude were for them and what they potentially learned about themselves or about relationships from their time in solitude. And when you looked at those stories of solitude and what people really remembered, they often

talked a lot about solitude being a time when they could rely on themselves, solitude being a time when they were sort of free and independent, when they could be with themselves. There was one really lovely quote from one of our participants who wrote, I learned to listen to my own desires, needs, and wishes. In many countries around the world, we incline toward negative views about being by ourselves, regarding it as draining or depressing, a state to be avoided whenever possible. In the minds of many people, being alone equals being lonely. But what if that equation is wrong? When we come back, the science of solitude. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedant. Most of us have had experiences where we are on the outside looking in. We see other people having fun, enjoying each other's company. We feel our own isolation keenly. Psychologist Neda Weinstein got to experience this painfully when she was a small child. She grew up in Israel and had felt ensconced within a community. One year, when she was nine, her parents proposed a vacation to Disneyland.

The amusement park was fun, but the trip wasn't really about a vacation. The family was actually moving to the United States. We stayed in the LA and then San Diego area for the rest of my childhood. And so for me, that was a defining moment in kind of my young life. I went from having neighborhood friends and really a pretty independent lifestyle. We lived in a small town. I could go wherever I wanted.

I can meet with whoever I wanted to moving to this kind of big, strange city where people spoke a language that I didn't speak and the kids were really quite different. Hmm. So I'm wondering at the point at which this visit that you thought was primarily to Disneyland turned into a permanent move at what point did you realize oh my god we've actually moved from from Israel to this other country and what did that what did that feel like?

You know, it really hit home. I don't remember the exact moment when it sort of went from being a vacation to being the rest of my life. But it sort of hit home when I started school, and I started kind of public school in San Diego, and I didn't speak any English. In fact, I a little bit thought that everybody spoke in Hebrew inside their heads and then translated to whatever language they spoke out loud. So there was a lot of learning for me to do about the world clearly.

And we moved in, things were really very different in the US, not just the language barrier with friends, but the culture's very different. Kids behave very differently in San Diego than they do in Israel, and the kinds of activities that they do to connect. So my friends and I in Israel, we used to just kind of spend time together, hang out, sort of, you know,

loiter around our little village. And in the U.S., kids played a lot of ball sports and things that I hadn't been exposed to before. During the school day, recess became a time when Neda realized how lonely she was. I remember that pretty vividly even so many years later, that kind of sense of not quite fitting in or not really knowing how to behave, what the scripts are that I meant to follow. Probably didn't think about it in quite that way. And probably in some ways that was my first real sense of solitude in a kind of big way that I felt really alone

because there wasn't the opportunity to connect and there wasn't the language to connect either. I'm wondering if your teachers and parents sort of noticed that you were feeling isolated, feeling lonely. Did they do things to try and make you feel more connected? You know, at the time I think there was less awareness of maybe mental health or social connection. And I'm not really sure,

because again, I have the kind of a child's memory in this, but I do remember that I don't think anybody really picked up on it. So my parents were quite busy with a big transition and a big move and new careers. And so they were pretty occupied and the teachers in the school that I went to really were responsible for a lot of children.

It was very easy to fall through the cracks. And I don't remember them ever really picking up on this kind of, you know, little isolated girl that was there, who maybe was more likely to go off and play on her own. Netta's story might remind you of times when you were lonely yourself. And you've probably read news reports about the growing epidemic of loneliness in the United States and other countries. But as Neda became a researcher, she slowly became fascinated by the benefits of the time we spend alone. I asked her if that meant she didn't think loneliness was a serious problem.

Loneliness is absolutely a problem in many countries, and I'm definitely not going to go up and say, you know, we shouldn't be concerned about loneliness or we shouldn't invest in learning more about how to help reduce loneliness in the world. I think there's a lot of research that shows that there are mental health and physical health costs of loneliness. So, if you say that loneliness is a problem and it actually does have these serious problems for both our mental health and physical health, what is the distinction you're drawing between loneliness and solitude, which you say has many benefits? So I think this distinction is really important.

And you know, when we think about loneliness and solitude, we actually tend to conflate them a little bit in our minds. And we're a little bit wired to do so. And there are probably a number of reasons that we're wired to do so. And the first is that we're kind of social animals. A lot of what we learn comes from other people, of course. And so solitude has always been an uneasy thing for us

as social animals. And even the way that we talk about solitude, so our language for solitude is quite conflated with loneliness. Even up until recently when we said the word solitude, we still referred to it as a state of loneliness. When I am in solitude, it actually means I feel deeply lonely or isolated. And when we look at languages around the world now, many

of those languages don't have a separate word for solitude to the one that means loneliness. So as a solitude researcher, it's actually quite difficult to do solitude work because we don't have a way of communicating to our participants about what solitude is that is not loneliness as well. And of course when you call someone a loner in society that is not a compliment. Exactly and a loner is not somebody who feels lonely, a loner is somebody who spends time alone. And so we really think about them in the same space. And because we tend to do so, and we have done so kind of historically, and as part of our sort of culture and our traditions, and all around the world, it continues to be,

we don't have as much of an opportunity to consider solitude as a neutral thing, or even as a positive experience in our lives. When you think about loneliness as being distinct from solitude, how would you define it? If you were to come up with a definition that cleanly carves out loneliness from the concept of solitude, how would you cleave them apart, Netta? So if we think about loneliness, the definition of loneliness that psychologists use is the feeling that we are disconnected from others. It's the sense that we don't have the intimacy, the social connection, the love and caring in our lives that we desire or need. love and caring in our lives that we desire and need.

So loneliness by its definition is a deficit in something that is important to us. And it's a feeling that says, there's something, you know, warning, there is something wrong. And it's a negative emotion for that reason. Solitude on the other hand, is kind of much more vanilla, really. It's really the state of being alone. So the state of being alone really just means about whether there are people around me or whether I'm interacting with other people.

We can talk about sort of the specific nuances. But in all, it's really me being separated from other people. And it doesn't necessarily need to be a deficit. It can be neutral, it can feel lonely, but it can also be empowering and positive. There are certainly times when solitude can lead to loneliness. But because loneliness is a feeling and not a state,

you can also be lonely in a crowd. Netta has an illustrative example from her own life. Many years ago, she moved from her home in upstate New York to Germany. She was excited about a work opportunity in Hamburg and found a place to stay that was in a fun part of town. So there was a lot in it that was really wonderful. But I think the thing that made it quite hard

is that at least early on in that move, I went from once again having this close-knit community and this sense of familiarity. I really loved Rochester, and I really loved the people around me there, to being on my own and being a stranger in a new country and once again not speaking the language. So it felt very familiar and I moved from my house in Rochester and all my belongings

and it was just me and a couple of suitcases and I came in and there was very little in this apartment so it was really an empty space. Neta's mind filled with questions and self-doubt. Had she made the right move? As she sat in her apartment, she wondered, did it really make sense to leave behind a warm and loving community? When I was in Rochester, I'd go home to people who love me. And in Germany, I went home to this kind of, again, very barren apartment with nobody else in it. And it had this deep, but maybe sad for me, quiet.

And it was a little unsettling because it sort of represented a little bit this big move I'd made and was it the right move and what did it mean, and what would my future hold? And it had all these big ideas attached to it. Neta was reminded that she was a stranger in a strange land when she did the most ordinary of things,

like the time she bought a common household appliance. Moved from the U.S., and again again I had a house that was functioning and I moved to this apartment that had effectively nothing in it except for a couple of rooms and one of my goals was to get a washing machine because I thought you know if I can just have the devices that I need to sort of take care of myself How spectacular would that be? So I put myself to this task of getting a washing machine and I bought one online and I got it delivered to my doorstep. But it turned out when the washing machine came that it was in fact delivered to my doorstep. And so the nice delivery man came and he had this kind of cart to carry it and he dropped it off right in front of my apartment building.

And so the only problem with that was that my apartment was three floors up and I I kind of gave him a look and he spoke no English and I spoke no German and I sort of pointed up the stairs and said, help. And he kind of looked at me and sort of shrugged his shoulders. And, you know, he said something around this is where I'm meant to deliver it, I imagine. And he left with his trolley with the washing machine on the street in front of my apartment building. And so that was a moment that sort of reflected the kind of maybe the isolation, the helplessness around sort of this big move in this strange country where people do things very differently. Unlike the US, the apartment building that I lived in didn't have an elevator. And so the big challenge was how do I, with not a lot of upper body strength, get a washing

machine up three flights of stairs. For some time I had no answer to that question. Netta eventually figured out how to get the washing machine up to her apartment. But perhaps because lots of people have had experiences like the one she had in Germany, she finds that many of us have come to fear solitude because we believe it will lead to loneliness. Netta and her colleagues find people will go to great lengths to avoid silently spending time alone with their thoughts. In one set of studies, the researchers had people choose between solitude and being bored. We ran a series of studies that was led by my collaborator, Tuy Vinh Nguyen. And in those studies, we asked people to sit alone with their thoughts, or they could engage in a task.

And the task was to organize pencils. So we gave them about 1500 blue and red pencils. So we gave them about 1500 blue and red pencils that were all combined together in kind of one big box. We said, okay, your task now is to sort those pencils into the red pile and the blue pile. And they could either sit with their thoughts or they could sort pencils. We found that they could sort pencils, we found that they overwhelmingly selected to continue to sort pencils and sorted about 200 more each on average. So in other words, people prefer to do this excruciatingly boring task rather than sit by themselves alone with their thoughts. It seems so. So in some ways clearly there's a mystery here, Netta. People, you know People clearly hate being alone and they go to great lengths to distract themselves from feelings of being alone.

At the same time, when aloneness, if you will, is forced on them, as it was during the pandemic, many people reported not just negative feelings, but positive feelings as well. It is telling that around the world, so many millions of people have chosen not to go back into offices to continue to work from home and often to work by themselves. Many companies have gone to great lengths to induce employees to come back in the office, but lots of people have said no thanks. I understand that you might have a theory about what might be going on here that is rooted in some research that you did that took place before you started studying solitude. This was research on the subject of relationships.

Tell me about that work, Netta, and how you think it has bearing on the experience of being alone. For many years, my interest was in what makes for positive interactions, how do we bring our best selves forward to interactions, and how do other people help us be our best selves? And I was really interested in that question. And you know, one of the things that was really powerful in that was

that the best relationships, the best interactions are ones where we can bring our full selves forward, where people accept us, where we feel we can be heard, that we can express ourselves, where our behaviors and our actions are ones that we choose to do, they're ones we value and that interest us. So in a sense, me being fully myself with other people was sort of the pinnacle of social relationships. And other people could help me to do that or they could sort of stand in my way and be pressuring and demanding or judgmental instead of allowing me to fully express myself. So how did you apply this insight now in your new interest in the subject of solitude?

Did you draw a connection between these two things? I think solitude is just a really big gap in our knowledge of what wellbeing looks like. Because for me, that question of what makes for a great relationship or a great interaction, that was really about how do we have a sense of wellbeing and fulfillment in our lives? Where does that come from? And the question of whether I can be my own

really supportive friend became a really intriguing question of, do we really always need other people to be the ones who support and empower us, I guess, in a way to allow us to be authentic or be autonomous? Or actually, is that sort of a power that we have within us to do that for ourselves? I mean, I think what I'm hearing, Neda, is that as you talk about how we feel happy in our social relationships,

we feel like we are most ourselves when we feel heard, when we feel understood, when we feel we're not being judged. In some ways, when we bring that same model to how we spend time with ourselves, if we treat ourselves with the same kind of concern that we treat close friends, you're saying that that's more likely then

to lead to us feeling happy with ourselves when we are alone? Yeah, absolutely. And we're starting to see this in research findings. So one of the findings that have come across is that when we are compassionate with ourselves, that really helps us to get a sense of peace and well-being and solitude.

And so just like other people can be good friends to us, they can be supportive, understanding, empathic, forgiving, and kind. And then those are the kind of conversations and relationships where we feel like, wow, that person really gave me a sense of well-being. I'm really glad I had that conversation and I got a lot out of it. When we're kind to ourselves, accepting with ourselves and understanding,

it builds a stronger relationship with ourselves that makes for really positive solitude time. We think, I do wanna spend more time with that person, that person being me, and I'm happy to go back into solitude and have another conversation with myself. And in contrast, you know, if solitude is a place where, you know, dark thoughts are constantly bubbling up,

you're consumed with rumination, regret, self-blame, presumably that's not going to be a very happy state and it's not going to be a state you would be eager to go back into. Absolutely. And what researchers are finding is that when you look at everyday solitude that people experience, we call it kind of little s solitude, the solitude that we're all familiar with. When you look at everyday solitude, what people are seeing is that

especially for certain groups of people, everyday solitude isn't always a sort of positive contribution to their lives. So if you compare their moments in solitude to their moments where social interactions, solitude can sometimes come out as being more stressful and less positive than social interactions. But what researchers find is that a lot of that has to do with the kinds of thoughts that we have when we're in solitude. So when we tend to sort of ruminate and get lost in our thoughts in a destructive way, that can lead to solitude being quite difficult. And the sort of fascinating thing about solitude

is that it's kind of the same characteristics of solitude that make it wonderful, which also can make it really difficult, which is when we're alone, there's no one there to distract us. There aren't other people to tell us what we should be thinking about or to pull our attention away from ourselves. We don't have to kind of negotiate what we're doing. And so we create our own journey. We have a lot of space and time to do that. And we can really reflect on ourselves. And when we talk to people, we see some people love that

and some people really struggle with that emptiness and openness. Are there personality traits that predict that people will be happy when they are by themselves versus unhappy, Netta? We're still learning a lot about that, but what we're finding so far is that one of the kind of superpowers of positive solitude is a tendency to be really curious and interested, interested in ourselves, interested in the world around us, inquisitive, and bringing those aspects to our solitude time. We found in some research that people who have what we call an autonomous orientation, that is, they tend to take more of an interest in their emotions, they act

in a more what we call self congruent way. That is, when they act, it comes from their deep valuing of the actions that they're taking and their deep interest. So they kind of act in a way that's congruent with the self and they don't tend to follow sort of the kind of pressures and societal pressures as much, that those people find more value in solitude and seek it for the value that it has. One of the things that I think most people would assume is that the people most likely to want and seek solitude

are introverts, and the people least likely to want and seek solitude are introverts and the people least likely to want and seek solitude are going to be extroverts. Does the data bear out that intuition? You know it's really fascinating because I at this point I would say it's unclear. We have some studies that including studies that I've been involved in where we found no relationship at all with introversion. We do see some research. There's a study out of Taiwan conducted in 2020 where researchers were looking at undergraduate students and what they found is that those students who identified as having more

introversion tended to also have more capacity for solitude. So they enjoyed it more, they were able to reflect more when they were in it. So we're finding different evidence, but fairly weak evidence on the whole, much more so than we might anticipate that introversion sort of drives the desire for solitude. We're also finding extroverts can enjoy solitude just as much. Neta and other researchers find that solitude can calm people down and reduce stress levels. One study examined the effects of solitude on creativity. What the researchers did was they put participants in a room and they asked them to write poetry. All the participants wrote a poem in silence.

And then they took some of their participants and randomly assigned them to write another poem once again in silence. And they took the rest of the participants and they assigned them to write their second poem with interruptions of noise. And what they did was they piped into the lab noise blasts that were 85 decibels, which is just kind of at the upper edge of what's okay for human hearing. And so some participants who were writing their poems with these noise blasts and what researchers found was, you know, when they compared the two conditions,

the participants who could write their poetry in quiet wrote more creative original poems than those who had disruptions by noise. And in some ways, I guess this makes sense to every office worker in the world who tells her boss, stop interrupting me, I can't get any work done if I have to keep answering emails from you. This makes sense to every office worker in the world who tells her boss, stop interrupting me. I can't get any work done if I have to keep answering emails from you.

Absolutely. So when we're around other people, we can have a breadth of ideas exposed to us. So we think broadly, we get new ideas, we can bounce off of each other. And that has a benefit to certain forms of creativity. But what we see in solitude is that people's minds can wonder and we talked earlier about that being potentially difficult, but it's also a place where creativity happens. When our mind is allowed to wonder, we can dig deep into, you know, our ideas and learn more about them, develop them, and we can think more originally about the the kinds

of contributions that we want to make. We can create artistic works, musical works, and we hear a lot of stories of solitude being a wonderful space for those forms of creativity. Solitude can give people a chance to understand themselves, but it also seems to help people understand their place in the world. Neda remembers a time after she first graduated from high school when she spent days, like William Wordsworth, hiking in the British countryside. Those were the first real deep moments of solitude and exploring in solitude that I had. And it was a really powerful moment in my life because those days of hiking were days of exploring opportunities.

And those opportunities came in the form of paths that were open to me. They're these beautiful walkways and walking paths all across the UK that allow you to kind of explore and get a little bit lost. And there were days when it was just me and fields of green and hedges and sheep and nobody else around. That was the first time that I felt a peak experience, which is an experience described in psychology, that is a moment usually brief, where we feel this sense of sort of oneness with the world, and we feel a sense of joy and awe. And so there are these really powerful, positive moments.

And for me, those were moments that came from really being with nature, with the sheep, with the grass, with the hedges, and nobody else around. Solitude can offer us positive feelings of being autonomous, authentic, and competent. It can provide us a portal to some of the most intense and meaningful experiences of our lives. But being alone well is a skill, one that many of us have not yet fully developed. When we come back, how to get the most out of solitude? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedant.

Counselors and confidants tell us how to improve our relationships with other people. Not many teach us to become better friends with ourselves. Neda Weinstein is a psychologist at the University of Reading in England. Along with Heather Hansen and Thuy Nguyen, she is co-author of the book, Solitude, the Science and Power of Being Alone. Neda, you say that the first step to becoming better friends with ourselves is to understand the stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be alone. In 2020, researchers published an interesting study where they provided people different

interpretations of being alone. Tell me what they did and what they found. Researchers conducted a really fascinating experiment where they asked people to be alone, but before they did that, they put them in a number of conditions. And one of those conditions was called the loneliness debiasing condition. And in that condition, researchers just kind of highlighted, you know, it's okay and normal to feel lonely. We all feel lonely sometimes. There's nothing kind of scary or unnatural about it. And what researchers found is when they then asked participants to spend 10 minutes alone, on the whole, participants didn't particularly like this activity. They had a drop in their

positive affect. But participants who were in the loneliness,-debiasing condition didn't show this drop the way the participants in the other conditions did. So it sort of protected them from solitude being difficult for them during that period. Hmm. I mean, in some ways what it suggests is that our expectations and perhaps even our socially constructed expectations about solitude shape whether we get something out of it or we are hurt by it. Absolutely. So it could be the loneliness has a self-fulfilling prophecy where we

expect that if we're going to be alone, there's something wrong with us. We're going to be lonely. It means that we're failures. And it's those kinds of expectations and ideas we have about solitude, the kind of solitude stigma that sets us up for having a difficult time when we then are alone. Many of us find that when we spend time with ourselves, Netta, we get caught in unpleasant and unproductive patterns of thinking.

Of course, psychologists call this rumination. What can we do when we're alone and we realize that we're slipping into one of these mental ruts? Because presumably it's one of the reasons many of us find solitude or being alone to be in aversive state. Yes, absolutely. So even those of us who are solitude lovers might have times and moments where we actually feel that solitude is quite difficult. Maybe we've made a terrible mistake at work and we're ruminating and regretting it, or

maybe we have something else difficult going on and we're tending to really focus in on that and we seem to be unable to get out of those feelings. The first step to really reshaping our relationship with ourselves the way that we're thinking and then our solitude time is to have awareness of it and take an interest in it. Research on emotion regulation and what we're finding out of the solitude research both sort of point to being able to step back and be curious about our emotions, be interested in our feelings and what's going on for us, and kind hear this and think, gosh, well, that doesn't sound like something I can do. But it's something that the more we practice, the better we can get at. So we start small and start to practice that way of kind of thinking about ourselves.

And over time, we sort of build that as a strength. Netta says that just as we plan outings with friends, We can think about solitude crafting as a way of intentionally approaching our solitude. And we've been doing a series of studies where we try to facilitate solitude crafting, but it's something that we can all do at home. What do I wanna get out of my solitude time? We sometimes find that solitude is more positive when people have a plan for it. Some people even have traditions that they've talked about where they might light candles

or they might play certain music and they create a setup for themselves. The means at that time is then as rewarding and self-fulfilling as it can be. We've talked a bit about the idea of being out in nature as being one of the engines of solitude. Can you explain what it is that being alone with ourselves outdoors, why that's so special? Sure, you know nature and solitude sort of go hand in hand in a beautiful way. being alone with ourselves outdoors, why that's so special? Sure. Nature and salt sort of go hand in hand in a beautiful way.

They're kind of like strawberries and whipped cream. They just really work together. When we're alone in nature, there are a couple of benefits. The first one is nature connection, that sense of me being connected to the world around me and being connected to the birds and the animals and the plants around me, that that in itself can be fulfilling in much the same way that social connection is. When we're in nature, we also have what researchers call soft fascination, which is

our attention is receiving what's happening around us in a mindful way. We think about what is currently happening in terms of the leaves rustling, the birds chirping and we're also thinking very much about our actions. What our next step is going to be if we're going on a hike, for example, how we'll sort of cross that boulder. So we tend to be very focused in the space around us and the present moment. And nature helps us really focus to the present moment.

And it also really satisfies our senses in a wonderful way. I'm wondering whether the search for solitude can negatively affect our relationships with other people. At some level, Netta, you know, if you're saying you want to be by yourself, doesn't that mean that you're saying you don't want to be with other people? Have you had experiences like this where you're seeking solitude but other people interpret what you're saying as you don't want to be with them? Yes, absolutely. So I think, you know,

because we see solitude in a negative light, and many other people around us will tend to see solitude in a negative light, it's hard for people to really think about any individual kind of seeking solitude because of the value in solitude. And so it's very easy for people to interpret needing solitude as wanting to get away from the other person. And often when we talk about solitude as wanting to get away from the other person. And often when we talk about solitude, we talk about it as the thing you do when you're not interacting with other people. So we think, well, we could be having a social interaction

or we can choose to be alone. And if we're choosing to be alone, it means we don't want to be with other people. And so, you know, it's very easy for people to assume that if you want to step away, if you want to have a bit of your alone time, that it's really a reflection of how you feel about them in the moment, that it means you don't want to be with them. And we see the people around us interpret that as meaning, well, you don't want to be with me.

So what do you do in a situation like that? How do you communicate that in some ways it's, if you will, not about you, it's about me? So, you know, I think the important thing is for us researchers and, you know, for people is to de-stigmatize solitude in a way. So if you wanna be alone and you're worried about hurting

somebody's feelings, one way to frame it is to say, I really haven't had a lot of great me time lately and that's something that I would really look forward to. And so conveying what the value of solitude is for you is part of making other people aware that, you know, solitude isn't about not wanting to be with others, but it's actually about how important it is for you to have that alone time. And I also like to say that when we talk to people about needing our solitude time, that it's important to highlight to them that I'm really looking forward later on to continuing this conversation with you, or I'm really looking forward to going out to coffee with you.

Let's find a different day to do it. Netta has also learned it's important to help others who crave solitude to not feel like there is something wrong with them. One of those other people was her own 10 year old daughter. She is creative and imaginative and she really loves her solitude time. And I've kind of always had a sense of this, also because she's very vocal about it. So she will say, I need my solitude time, and then she will go seek it. And so it's a little difficult to ignore that need that she has.

But when I was writing this book, we had just moved to a new house in a new neighborhood. And what I saw was the neighborhood kids came to visit and they would come. And when they came to the door, she would run to the door and she would politely decline that she didn't want to go out with them. She wanted to be in her new room, in her new space, doing her crafting and being creative. And you know, I was a little bit worried as a parent. I thought, gosh, well, I'd love Maya to have friends in the neighborhood. Will they stop coming around? What does this mean? Is there something wrong with her? And I was just chatting with my co-author, Heather Hansen, about the book at the time. And

I kind of mentioned this to her because a child had come to the door and she said, you know, you're writing a book about how solitude can actually be a positive experience. And yet you're quite worried about your daughter here. And I realized that my gut reaction was to worry me that there's something wrong with my daughter because she wants to be alone. And so that was a real, for me, a big kind of eye-opening moment. And I thought as a parent,

maybe my job is to help support her in that rather than worry that there's something wrong with her for wanting to be in solitude. I understand that you recently celebrated a birthday. Tell me how you chose to spend this special day, Neda. So I decided to craft my own solitude and I thought, what is the ideal birthday for me? And I decided to spend my birthday in solitude having a long walk and just being with my thoughts.

And so I put myself on a mission to go on a long walk and I went on a long walk by the beach. And I had the sea around me and the waves making sounds. I had a cup of coffee in my hand and coffee is kind of my, that's my great reward. So my sense of taste was quite happy and you know I just gave myself the opportunity to think not about research questions or not about what I have to do for work or for home, but just about whatever came to my mind. That was my ideal, ideal birthday, birthday present to myself. Neda Weinstein is a psychologist at the University of Reading in England. Along with Heather Hansen and Thuy Nguyen, she's co-author of the book

Solitude, the Science and Power of Being Alone. Neda, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Quirell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Burns, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Tom Waring. Tom works in creative partnerships at Patreon.

A few weeks ago, we expanded our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus, to make it available for Android users and others on Patreon. Tom was our reliable guide in that process, walking us through every aspect of the expansion. He answered every question we had with speed and good humor. Thank you, Tom. If you'd like to try Hidden Brain Plus on Patreon,

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