5 Necessary Life Lessons You Can Only Learn When You’re Alone
“And all I loved, I loved alone.” — Edgar Allen Poe
What feeling comes up for you when you read the word “alone”?
Maybe you feel an overwhelming sense of dread because it’s something you’d rather avoid. Perhaps the word fills your body with a sense of calm and longing. Or maybe the idea of being “alone” absolutely terrifies you.
I used to be the last person. I never wanted to be alone. I filled my days up with seeing my friends and being busy at work. Any downtime I had at home meant having to be with my feelings, which never ended well.
For everyone, being alone is inevitable. At some point in life, we’ll all have to be by ourselves. The fact that I tried running from it was even more of a reason to spend time alone. I had a lot of lessons I needed to learn that I was too scared to face.
If alone time fills you with a lot of uncomfortable emotions, I’d venture to guess you have some lessons about life and yourself to learn, too. Because not everyone views being by themselves as lonely, you can get to a point where you view it as solitude.
Whether you’re single, living by yourself, planning a solo trip, or are curious what tidbits of knowledge you could gain by spending more nights in, let’s talk about the lessons anyone can learn from being alone.
Knowing how to self-regulate is invaluable.
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I used to be a serial monogamist. I wasn’t interested in being single, and I’d quickly turn my partners into my sole source for feeling better about myself and anything I struggled with.
But I didn’t realize any of this until I took a year off dating and started spending a lot more time by myself.
When you’re alone, there’s no immediate warm body to help you feel better. You’re your only source of regulation. And in a world where a lot of people unknowingly become codependent or emotionally reliant on other people, learning to regulate your feelings on your own isn’t easy.
Now, this isn’t a challenge to learn how to bottle up your emotions. Self-regulation means that you’re able to make yourself feel better during stressful situations. You’ll find that part of that process is moving through your feelings.
The one person you’ll always be able to rely on is yourself. A support system is great, but understanding what you can do on your own to calm your anxieties and take care of your mental health is a tool you’ll use for the rest of your life.
We busy ourselves with a lot of crap that doesn’t matter.
If you don’t spend much time alone, what do you spend your time on? Where is your mind spent during the day? For many people, the answer is a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t really matter.
When you spend more time alone, you inevitably start doing more things you love. If it weren’t for that year I took off dating, I might’ve never re-discovered my love for reading fiction novels.
Once you spend more time doing things you enjoy, you resent doing the things you don’t. And if you’ve always kept yourself busy or are always the “yes” person for people, you’ll realize you waste a lot of time on things that don’t matter.
And I’m not talking about saying yes to yet another night out with your co-workers for someone’s birthday. This includes smaller things like scrolling mindlessly on social media or hanging out with a friend you don’t actually enjoy the company of.
This might feel like a harsh realization to make, but it’s crucial. Time happens to be the one resource you can’t get more of.
Your thoughts hold a lot of answers if you listen.
“What a blessing to be alone with your thoughts when so many are alone with their inability to think.” — Robert Breault
The best ideas I’ve ever had came when I was alone. They’ve come when I was driving; phone tossed in the passenger seat. All I could do was think and focus on the road ahead. They’ve also come while taking walks in my old Manhattan Beach neighborhood.
Being alone allowed me to hear the thoughts my busy life kept me from hearing.
Many of the answers people search for — like life’s next step or how they feel about a certain situation — are already within them. But they never find those answers because they’re distracted by people or social media, or both.
The best lesson you can learn while alone is that your mind and intuition are more powerful than you think. When you remove other people’s opinions and outside stimuli, you often know what’s best for you.
But you need silence to hear that answer.
You realize you’re complete, all by yourself.
Many people create an identity based on parts of life outside of themselves. As a result, they don’t feel complete when alone. One person might identify as what they do for a career or, in my instance, whoever their partner is at the time.
This creates an issue of the person feeling empty when they’re without that specific aspect of their life.
But if people aren’t complete on their own, they’d cease to exist after leaving their jobs or after a breakup. And I’m sure I don’t need to explain how that’s not the case. We continue to live, even when we’re alone.
Because we don’t need those external aspects to be who we are.
Being alone doesn’t necessarily mean you’re lonely.
“Being alone has a power that very few people can handle.” — Steven Aitchison
I’ve explained plenty of reasons why learning to enjoy being alone can drastically change your life. But if being alone terrifies you, I can reason with you for paragraphs and paragraphs, and nothing will change your mind.
Except, perhaps, for this one lesson.
If you spend your days slaving away at a job you despise, only to then spend your nights with friends you have nothing in common with, it makes sense you’d hate being by yourself. You have no joy in other parts of your life.
What joy could you possibly find when it’s just you?
But the truth is, you can be lonely even when surrounded by people. That feeling of loneliness doesn’t always extend from being by yourself. It comes from not feeling fulfilled or connected.
After spending some time alone in ways that you enjoy, you’ll begin to realize that not everyone who is alone is lonely. In fact, they might be pretty content because they’ve found solitude in their alone time.
You don’t need to be coupled up or surrounded by friends to be content with life. It’s actually a pretty unstable source to find all of your happiness and fulfillment. You’re a more reliable source.
Regardless of your long-term goals, being alone has a lot of value. There are plenty of lessons to learn when alone with your thoughts and navigating life by yourself.
It won’t be easy, and I don’t promise comfort of any sort, but the lessons you’ll encounter are ones not many people are brave enough to learn.
