Sometimes, We Benefit From Being Alone

It forces us to work on our relationship with ourselves

I have preached the virtues and benefits of community, of camaraderie, of relationships and family over and over again. I found my best friends in my cross country team in college, and my fiancee and other friends have pushed me and supported me to levels I never thought myself capable of. I like to think I helped push them to do the same.

And so, I often find solitude and social isolation to be incredibly painful and excruciating experiences. According to the CDC, social isolation is associated with a 50% increased risk of dementia and other serious medical conditions. It also significantly increases someone’s risk of premature death, and is associated with higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide.

Being a competitive runner is one example of something that has always been incredibly difficult to do alone. I always need training partners to motivate me and hold myself accountable. There are times when I just can’t handle running alone for easy runs that are three miles run.

It feels excruciating and having to sit with myself and my thoughts feels like a terrible idea. I can run eight miles with a friend in the same time I spend running five myself. Time also goes by a lot faster when I’m striking up engaging conversation with another runner versus listening to music or a podcast alone.

Of course, this might mean I just need some time off. But the inability to be alone sometimes spills into other areas of my life. As a law student, I often benefit from studying in groups and learning the material of the course from my peers.

Recently, however, I’ve made a concerted effort to be alone. During my week of spring break from work, all my running friends were on vacation. I had to run alone to put in a strong, 76-mile week of training, and I had to learn to be at peace with myself. I’m not saying doing everything alone is the answer, because it clearly has some health and mental health drawbacks.

But sometimes, we just have to handle things alone and benefit from being alone.

Being alone has its benefits

According to Kendra Cherry at VeryWellMind, being alone allows you to learn about yourself and work at your own pace. And research does point to some quality alone time being beneficial to people, especially introverts.

Cherry makes the important distinction between being alone and being lonely — being lonely means wanting social connections but not having that need fulfilled, whereas being alone means needing to take time for yourself.

Solitude can be beneficial to give yourself a break from social interactions and help you discover more about yourself.

One example of working at your own pace is all my runs alone. I start my runs slow — painfully slow. If it’s a run where I’m averaging a 6:40 mile pace or even 7 minute mile pace, I’ll often start the first mile at an 8:30 mile, a 9 minute mile, or slower. If I could run faster without feeling terribly in pain and uncomfortable, I would.

But I start really slow because it takes my body a long time to warm up. I’m forced to listen to my body and respond to how horribly it feels every time I start a run when I’m alone. Toward the end of the run, I can run at a much faster pace at the same effort, but I have to give the same effort throughout.

Contrast that to when I’m running with a friend, and I will match whatever pace they’re running to start. To be clear, I still feel not great starting out, and the people I run with also don’t feel great starting the run. But they might start the run at 7:30 pace, much faster than I’m necessarily comfortable with at the start. I push myself to follow whatever the other person is doing, but sometimes, I’ll even push the pace myself and be a bit competitive.

For my overall health and fitness, the former run is more beneficial than the latter because it builds mental toughness and because I’m more responsive to my body and how I’m feeling. It’s a lot more natural.

Even when studying, when studying with classmates or friends, I often have to follow along with what the group is doing. This obviously has its benefits. I realize ways I can contribute, but also concepts I thought I knew well but didn’t or different ways of thinking through problems. But when studying alone, I can work at my own pace and concentrate on my particular gaps in knowledge or application.

It helps you become more independent and see outside your social setting

According to Brent Crane at The Atlantic, being alone has often been stigmatized throughout human society. We think of it as something to be avoided, something to be ashamed of.

But one benefit that often goes unnoticed is how loneliness allows people to see how they’re shaped by their social contexts. They learn about ways their particular social setting can hold them back and get some distance by how they’re shaped by group dynamics rather than thinking or acting for themselves.

Sometimes I’m busy. Sometimes life puts me in an entirely new city or place. Sometimes I get ostracized from the group for doing something unpopular, that I felt like was the right thing to do.

But whenever I have some distance from a particular organization, social group, or family I’m a part of, I start to gain insights into how they molded me, for good and for bad. But I also realize elements of the groups I don’t necessarily mesh with or that I don’t want to take away. I start to be critical of ways these groups may function like cults and discourage people from thinking differently, acting outside group norms, or be unfairly critical of (often very good, very nice) people who are outside the group.

Of course, you don’t see this when you’re in the center of a group. I’m not saying any of the social groups or organizations I’ve been in are cults, but very few people who are actually in cults know they’re in cults, too. You don’t ask “why?” as much unless you’re on the outside looking in. I’m not saying people at the center of social groups and organizations never doubt or ask why either.

But can a pastor who doesn’t believe in God really say they don’t to their entire congregation without severe consequences? Can a lieutenant in the army publicly make statements criticizing the general?

The cliche of “be your own person” cannot happen unless you spend some time alone. Because I had distance from Chinese culture, for example, I was able to reject so many parts of it I find toxic and borderline evil.

That’s a story for another time — but we should never blindly accept things told to us as dogma and fact without scrutiny. We should question. We should find what we really believe and what we really think.

Lastly, being alone forces us to work on one of the most essential relationships in the world.

Our relationships with ourselves

Crane interviews a professor who says productive solitude requires deep internal work and exploration. And this isn’t comfortable for a lot of people. For a very long time, it wasn’t comfortable for me.

When you’re with people, you work on your relationships with those people.

But when it’s just you with your thoughts, you work on your relationship with yourself. You have to start to accept yourself, but it’s not as simple as that.

I think a lot of people are their own worst critics and would say things to themselves in their heads they would never say to another person.

We can’t spend all our time alone, but as we mature and build on that self-relationship, we “self-strengthen,” according to Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist at Medaille College.

“You have to have that capacity: the ability to know you’re gonna survive, that you’re gonna be okay if you’re not supported by this group,” Bowker says.

And I will say I struggle with this as much as the next person. When I left my cross country team in college, I struggled significantly with that self-strengthening and even lost a huge sense of my identity. I was even more in grief and devastated than when I lost a grandparent, and it sounds incredibly silly and trivial to an outside viewer and in hindsight, but it was a huge deal to me.

It was because I placed such a huge part of myself and my identity in that community. I didn’t know how to be sufficient. I didn’t know how to function by myself. And I don’t regret being as immersed and dependent on the group as I was, because my best friends and people I can rely on most were in that community.

So although being your own person, living your own life, and finding substantial benefits to being alone and handling things alone might be uniquely western values, there are benefits to it, just like there are benefits to being in community with others.

The reality is a lot of us need both — moments of solitude, and moments of connection.