I’m a person who craves regular alone time. At home, I take quick walks. At work, I sometimes disappear into the office supply closet, which is always deserted. I find the orderly stacks of notebooks soothing.
When I can’t grab these moments, I tend to get twitchy. Robert Coplan, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, describes this as “aloneliness”: the negative feeling that crops up when people get less solitude than they need.
And, most of us do require a balance of solo and social time, said Thuy-vy Nguyen, a social psychologist who runs the Solitude Lab at Durham University in Britain and is an author of the book “Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone.” Her research has found that spending time alone has physical and emotional benefits, such as stress reduction and mood regulation, and can lead to increased creativity and productivity.
With that in mind, I asked experts how to recognize when you need more solitude, and how to incorporate it into your life.
Take your “solitude pulse.”
Solitude is different from loneliness, said Virginia Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology at Middlebury College. The latter is the feeling that we’re not connected to others as much as we would like, which produces emotional distress. On the other hand, intentionally seeking out some time to spend alone, she said, is “almost always experienced positively.”
There’s no standard amount of time that people should be alone, Dr. Thomas said, so she recommends checking in with yourself and tracking your moods. Do you find yourself feeling irritable or depleted, and could you benefit from stepping away for a bit?
Then, she said, ask yourself: What nourishes and rejuvenates me when I’m alone? “For some people, it can be a learning curve to figure that out,” she said. Maybe it’s swimming, disappearing into the garage to do woodworking or gardening, she said.
No matter what you choose, set your phone aside, Dr. Thomas said. Scrolling through the headlines or social media, she said, “is not technically ‘in solitude,’ as we would describe it psychologically.”
It’s not you, it’s me.
If you have a partner, make it clear that taking alone time is not about escaping your significant other, Dr. Coplan suggested. “You can say ‘This has literally nothing to do with you — I’m doing this because it’s going to make me a better person, and I’m going to be easier to be around,’” he said.
If you routinely yearn for time by yourself, but don’t say anything, your relationship might suffer. Research on “aloneliness” in couples found that anger builds when people don’t take the alone time they crave.
But if you know a person who is OK with silence, you can try what Dr. Nguyen’s book calls “companionate solitude,” where you do something alone together.
When Dr. Coplan was young, he would go fishing with his father on a quiet lake. “We would sit there for hours at a time and wouldn’t say a word to each other,” he recalled. “It was like I was alone, but he was there, and that was comforting.”
You don’t have to leave civilization.
You can find moments of solitude at home, Dr. Nguyen said. She gets up early, a half-hour before her family, to have coffee.
Now I do the same. In my backyard, the hummingbirds have made their spring return to my feeders. They have breakfast at dawn, so lately I’ve been taking my coffee outside to watch them.
If you don’t like being completely alone, you can also try “public solitude,” somewhere like a park or coffee shop, said Dr. Nguyen. I just found out that a library near me has a “silent book club,” in which members gather to chat about books for a bit. Then they retreat to different corners to read for an hour. That’s my kind of book club.
If you’re at work, Dr. Coplan suggests what he calls micro-moments of solitude, like taking a quick lunch break by yourself.
Everyone should do solitude in the way that works best for them, he added. I told him that I occasionally take a micro-moment to pop out to the drugstore to inspect various candies and nail polish colors. My teen thinks that’s weird.
“Well, I happen to love that,” Dr. Coplan said.
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