Kim Mills: For some people, the word “solitude” conjures up images of monks, hermits, wilderness retreats, and other extreme examples of spending time alone. But in reality, solitude is a common, maybe even an everyday experience. Some research has found that the average American adult spends up to one third of their waking hours alone. In recent years, psychologists have been exploring how these hours spent on our own affect us, including the potential benefits as well as the challenges of solitude. And they’re finding that being alone can offer us a needed opportunity for rest and reflection.
So what is the difference between loneliness and being alone? Do you have to be physically alone to experience solitude, or can you be alone in a crowd? How does alone time affect our emotions and stress levels? Why do some people seem to crave solitude more than others do? And how can we balance the need for solitude with fostering the social connections that are essential for mental health?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the relationship between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.
We have two guests today. First is Dr. Thuy-vy Nguyen, an associate professor of psychology and principal investigator of the Solitude Lab at the University of Durham in the U.K. She and her colleagues study how spending time alone affects people’s mood, stress levels, sense of loneliness, and more. She’s interested in exploring both the positive and negative aspects of spending time alone and how we can all have healthier relationships with solitude.
Next is Dr. Netta Weinstein, a professor of psychology at the University of Reading in the U.K. She’s also director of the European Research Council’s SOAR Project, which stands for Solitude: Alone but Resilient. Dr. Weinstein has a background in clinical and social psychology and studies the role that motivation plays in shaping behavior and wellbeing.
Dr. Nguyen, Dr. Weinstein, thank you for joining me.
Netta Weinstein, PhD: Thank you for having us on.
Thuy-vy Nguyen, PhD: Yeah, thank you for having us.
Mills: I should also mention that you both, along with a journalist and researcher Heather Hanson, are coauthors of a new book called Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone, published in April by Cambridge University Press. So let’s start by talking about the distinction between solitude and loneliness. How do you define solitude in the work that you do?
Weinstein: When we study solitude, we’re talking simply about the state of being physically alone, having nobody around and not interacting with anybody digitally or in person. So when—we tend to talk about solitude as simply the experience of being alone, the state of being alone.
Mills: Now, what about the distinction between solitude and loneliness? There’s been a lot of public discussion lately about loneliness in the U.S.—our surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, released a report last year calling out a loneliness epidemic among Americans. But you make the point in your book that solitude is not the same as loneliness. So how do they differ?
Nguyen: So after the definition that Netta has given us very much loneliness is more like related to our social experience. So that’s usually how—the best way for us to explain it to people is when we see that our social experience in reality doesn’t match with our expectation. So with that definition of loneliness, then it’s easy for people to distinguish between solitude, which is just a state of when you are not interacting with another person, and when you feel lonely, and that is when you feel like the social world doesn’t match with what you want it to be.
Weinstein: And I think just to add a little bit to that, I think one of the important things that we tend to forget is we can feel lonely when we’re in solitude, but we can also feel lonely when we’re with other people. So actually, if you think about the emotion of loneliness, negative emotion, it signals that we’re disconnected. It’s not something that’s unique to solitude, it’s something that can happen whether or not we’re with people.
Mills: So, Dr. Nguyen, you’ve done lab studies where you’ve looked at how spending even a brief period of time alone affects people’s emotions and state of mind. Can you talk about that research? What did you find?
Nguyen: Basically, when we put people into the lab, we decided on a short period so that we can study just the effect of solitude on people’s emotions. So I want to make it clear that the decision of just picking a very short period, either 15 to 30 minutes, is so that we can distinguish it from other phenomena that people have studied, things like isolation or loneliness. Usually researchers study those concepts in longer periods, from 4 hours for young people to 10 hours for an average adult.
So when I put people in the room for just 15 to 30 minutes, what we often observe is how we have different emotions, different types of emotion. And psychologists, we often think of emotion as two dimensions. One is either goes from negative emotion to positive emotion, which is generally what we tend to think of emotions. But there’s also another dimension is from the low in activation and high in activation or low in arousal or higher arousal.
So at the beginning of all these lab studies, we tend to just see that the emotions that are high in arousal drop after we spend those brief periods of solitude. And then sometimes we also see some of the low arousal type of emotion, so we’re talking about calm and relaxation, also goes up. And when I mentioned earlier about those strong high arousal emotions, we are talking about things like excitement, energization, things that you can imagine experiencing at a party or a concert, but it’s also including emotions like anger, anxiety as well. So when we think about the effect of solitude, previous research tends to focus more on the drop in those high energy, positive emotions. And we forget that solitude can also help us to calm down those strong negative emotions as well, so that is including our anxiety, stress, anger.
Mills: But can you feel strong emotions when you’re alone, when you’re in solitude?
Nguyen: That’s a possibility. And that’s why researchers on the topic of solitude, we tend to try to identify situations where those strong emotions can come up. And usually those are when people might have negative thoughts or ruminative thoughts that arise when they spend time alone. But the tricky part is I also find evidence in recent work that people tend to prefer solitude when they experience those strong negative emotions. So we don’t know if it is solitude that creates those emotions or people going into solitude when they experience those emotions with the purpose to kind of calm themselves down. So that is an empirical question we need to look at next.
Mills: I see you nodding, Dr. Weinstein, this all resonates with you?
Weinstein: Yeah, absolutely. I think just like social interactions, we’ll often think about having these great relationships, great conversations with other people, those conversations that leave us feeling excited and happy or angry or more relaxed. And in a way, solitude’s a little complicated in much the same way that relationships are. We can have strong feelings and solitude. It might help to bring us a sense of calm, but it doesn’t mean it always will. And what we bring into it is really important and certainly how we experience it, what we’re doing in those moments, how we’re thinking, how we’re dealing with our own emotions, all of those things are going to shape the solitude experience much in the same way that they shape our relationships with other people.
Mills: Are there some emotions that you would never feel in solitude? For example, I’ve read that when you’re by yourself, you can’t be embarrassed. Is that true?
Nguyen: I think in the literature it’s distinguished between also social emotions. So I don’t think that we have looked at it. But for example, even when I collect data, I try to think about also some emotions that if we give participants, it would not be possible for them to answer the question. Things like, for example, embarrassment. I think sometimes things like shame is also questionable, feeling ashamed, but I don’t discount that sometimes we might feel ashamed when we feel alone if we kind of recount those experiences.
Weinstein: And if I can just add, because I think it’s a fascinating question and it sort of speaks to what happens, just what our internal experiences when we’re in solitude. Because I think one of the things that we’re finding is that we do carry the experiences that we have into solitude, and even ones that we don’t often think of.
So one of the sort of surprising findings in some of the daily diary studies where we ask people kind of about How is your solitude today? What kind of experiences did you have? What kind of emotions did you have? And what we find is that even when we look at things like relatedness to other people or that sense of social connection, that we take that social connection into solitude so we can still be in solitude and feel connected to other people. And it speaks to, I think this is an area where we really need more evidence, but it sort of speaks to the possibility that a lot of those relationships and interactions we have—that we’re carrying those memories, we’re carrying the kind of symbolized people in our lives into our solitude space. And so we might reflect back to something we did that maybe felt shameful to us or was embarrassing and recall and kind of recreate that emotion in the solitude space even when there’s nobody there to sort of give us more of that feeling.
Mills: Many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of going out to dinner or to a movie by themselves, even if they might enjoy it. Why do you think that there’s some stigma around the idea of solitude, of being out in public alone?
Nguyen: So in the book, we kind of cover some of the historical context that might shape our schema or the norms that we usually carry about this experience called solitude. We talk about how historically we tend to see solitude talked about as more of a form of punishment. So in the past it might be people being in exile, being cast out from society, even the extreme case of solitary confinement. In more of the recent practice we see things like timeout that we use for children. With all that, I think we discuss in the book how that might shape our idea and perceptions around solitude. And that can make it a pretty fearful experience.
And we do see that even with qualitative interviews, people talking about how when they are alone in public, there’s the certain feeling of being judged. People might generalize the momentary solitude to who they are as a person. What does it mean when I don’t have someone to spend time with on this Friday night out in the city, in this restaurant? Does that mean I’m a loner? And then sometimes also I think not just the person, but also people around us, we talk about work in the book, how there’s women sometimes out in public space might experience gaze and judgment from other people. So yeah, so that’s something that I think it’s both the internalized sphere but also other people’s judgment as well.
Weinstein: And I think we see that as well in the language that we use for solitude. So I find that really fascinating that if we think about the word “solitude” and what it means and sort of reflects the way that our society treats and has treated solitude historically, but I think it also might shape the way that we think about solitude, that when you think about the word, it’s not a word that just means being alone. It’s a very simple concept, and yet it still needs explaining. And that’s because we tend to use the same word for solitude as we do for loneliness. We’ll talk about being solitary, and that can be an emotional experience of being isolated or being alone. And again, the loner is a person who prefers solitude. So there’s sort of something wrong in solitude as an idea in our head, the way we symbolize it. And in English, we have the benefit of having the word solitude and the word loneliness. So researchers like Thuy-vy and I can kind of study those two things separately and think about those two things as separate. But in a lot of languages around the world, there aren’t two words that mean solitude, the state of being alone and then mean loneliness. There’s one word that’s used interchangeably for both. So we don’t even have a language to speak to solitude as a neutral and even positive experience.
Nguyen: That’s definitely true. I could relate that to Vietnamese. We do not have a word for solitude. In fact, the word—every time I try to translate for my family, to understand, we struggle a lot because the word itself, it just doesn’t make sense to say that it’s a positive state.
Mills: That’s interesting. And I think a lot of people don’t see it in a positive light. I mean, I know there’s research, for example, where people are put in a situation where they are alone and then they say they would rather give themselves electric shocks than just be by themselves. Have you participated in research like that?
Nguyen: We heard of the study. It is a pretty interesting study, but I think the general message from that study is more about how a lot of us are uncomfortable with the idea of sitting alone with our thoughts. And I think the researcher decided to demonstrate that with a more sensational kind of measures, I think. But yeah, so solitude is something that best doing rather than thinking. And I thought that was very interesting. Just people are more comfortable having something to do when they are alone. And so the question is what is that something that we can recommend people to do?
Weinstein: And I think Thuy-vy’s really right on this, and just to kind highlight that, I think the evidence is showing that especially young people, if they can be with others, they’re quite happy to be with others. Doesn’t mean that that’s true for everybody all the time. There are times where solitude is needed, beneficial, appreciated, but there are quite a few times that it’s not, and for young people as well, what the research is highlighting is that if they’re going to be alone, they really do prefer to be doing something versus sitting alone with your thoughts—as a special form of solitude that isn’t always right for everybody all the time. We do find as people age throughout the adult lifespan, they get more comfortable both with solitude and with being alone with their thoughts. So a lot of the evidence based in younger people, we’re still learning about what that means for people throughout the adult lifespan and what it means for kids.
Mills: So these days, a lot of us will automatically just turn to our smartphones when we’re by ourselves. I mean, can you really experience solitude if you’re scrolling through social media? Or do you not get the benefits of solitude if you just take out your phone when you’re by yourself because you don’t want to be with your thoughts?
Nguyen: So I did conduct a set of studies to look at that, and it’s kind of interesting because so far the focus of my work is about the effect of solitude on emotion. So when we only look at that, it seems like picking up the phone, browsing through social media doesn’t really take away that effect that we call the deactivation effect, which I mentioned earlier about the drop in those strong high arousal emotions. So even when people are sitting there browsing on the phone, that effect still happens. But what we found was just it takes away this opportunity for self-reflection, and that has been shown. So I found that in the data that we collected, but also the researcher Virginia Thomas, she also found that in young people how that can interfere with self-reflection. And she discussed about how that can also interfere with this process of identity formation because self-reflection can be pretty crucial for that period of life when people are young and still discovering themselves.
Weinstein: Just to add to that though, that when we think about technology use, we’ll tend to kind of clump it up into one thing. But actually there are a lot of different ways to engage in social media. And so when we ask people to define solitude and research that I’ve done with Thuy-vy that we find that people will identify solitude, can be passively looking at other people’s posts and things like that, kind of exploring the social world in an informational way, what are other people up to? It doesn’t disrupt the sense of solitude. It might mean it’s a different flavor of solitude.
But actually actively interacting with others through social media is a different, now it takes people out of solitude. So we talk both about, I guess taking in social media information, but also actively engaging posting or talking to other people where it becomes much more a relational experience.
And again, these are different forms of solitude. And within all those experiences, I think this is one of the things that we’re still learning a lot about. But we could do those things in a way that is maybe a little more compulsive or we’re doing it out of habit, we can do it more mindfully. So my guess is that as we learn more about this topic, we’ll learn that there are different ways to have solitude moments that are maybe interspersed by social media engagement or technology engagement, and some are more or less harmful or disruptive to solitude than others.
Mills: What about reading or watching TV or even listening to a podcast? Is that a disruption to your solitude?
Nguyen: So that study I mentioned earlier, we did include a reading condition. Reading is actually very compatible with positive solitude actually, because to me, it’s very interesting how the difference between reading and flipping through the pages and just read whatever there is and able to basically reflect on the information. At least for me, engaging with things on social media is something a little more fast paced and information keeps coming in, but a lot of time depends on the algorithm. You might see information just being fed to you, but not in a coherent way as much as you would have in a book. So I think the type of media also has different ways to feed stimuli into you when you spend time alone. And if anything, I think of all of these things as more of different forms of stimulation. And there has been work that also shows that the fact that we pick up the phone sometimes to engage in social media or to even seek out information like what Netta mentioned, can be a way to regulate stress and boredom during that time. So yeah, I do think that this topic is very interesting.
Mills: One thing I found surprising in your research is that you found that introverts don’t necessarily benefit more from solitude than extroverts. How is our need for solitude related to introversion or extroversion or even other personality traits?
Nguyen: Well, it’s hard for me to think and answer a question about introversion because I very much still want to invest—I’m still invested in introversion and extroversion, even though we haven’t found evidence, because it’s just intuitively—that’s what we think about when we think about spending time alone, is that introverts tend to. So there’s data supporting that introverts spend more time alone than extroverts. So we are talking about the quantity of solitude and social interaction. And what we haven’t found—so one of the papers that Netta and I both published is we didn’t find a correlation between introversion/extroversion dimension with enjoyment of solitude or engaging with solitude for meaningful and enjoyable purposes. And then when I think about that work, it’s just kind of like, well, we don’t actually have a perfect measure of introversion. The current measures that are common in the field usually tend to treat extroversion as someone who’s talkative, energized, happy, and introverts are basically just when you reverse code. And that’s the opposite of extrovert.
So because of that, then we don’t know if when we find either no correlation or even sometime positive correlations between extroversion and enjoyment of solitude, is that just because there’s some shared variance between this idea of extroverts being a happy person and then because of that, then they can’t just find themselves happy in either solitude, social interaction or any experience that they engage in their life? So that to me is more of a methodological limitation. So because of that, we are not sure if we can speak inclusively about introversion, extroversion and enjoyment of solitude.
Weinstein: And just to add to that, because I think where quantitative studies can have you scratching your head, qualitative studies can help sometimes. And this is an example of that because when we’ve done interviews and asked people, so what do you think it is about you that makes you enjoy solitude? For those people who said they enjoy it, people will often say it’s because I’m an introvert. So people will self-identify as introverts and kind of identify that it’s that characteristic within them that makes them really like solitude. But when we think about how we tend to talk about solitude in the public, we’ll tend to say, okay, the definition of solitude is somebody who gets energy from being by themselves. So definitionally, I think our common understanding of what it means to be an introvert is somebody who likes to be alone. And so it makes a lot of sense that those are linked in our minds. And what Thuy-vy was saying was right on. Because if the way we measure it actually is measuring a lot of different characteristics about us that have very little to do with that, then each of those might affect our relationship with solitude in different ways.
Mills: Now, you mentioned earlier differences in enjoyment of solitude based on people’s age. What about other demographic differences? Do men enjoy solitude more than women or vice versa? Do we know?
Nguyen: Well, it is interesting because when we wrote the book, we talked about this, and then I think the three of us kind of really try to advocate solitude practice for women as well, so that you kind see that, a little bit of that advocacy in the book, mainly because we tend to get questions from people about men being independent, women being interdependent. So maybe men would enjoy time alone more talking about the idea of the man cave and the bachelor being in his apartment or flat. But then when we look at history and also descriptions, there’s women who, there’s hermits that are woman. I think there’s a word we use in the book, but I don’t remember what it is.
Mills: For female hermits.
Nguyen: Yeah.
Weinstein: Yeah. But the interesting thing when you think about gender and actually often when we talk about solitude is that it, it’s almost like you have to be a special kind of person to deserve solitude. So a lot of these stories, and I think that’s especially true for women historically, is that a woman who sort of is psychologically strong enough to handle solitude and not be corrupted or weakened by it in some way has to be spiritually already pretty transcendent. So it’s not for the everyday person, even in those instances where we have these amazing role models. And when you look at women historically who’ve really kind of talked about solitude being important to them, they’ve sort of lived on the edge of society. So it’s this kind of interesting thing I think with gender.
But I think also in terms of how we think about solitude, that we tend to think about this exceptional kind of transformative experience. It’s not accessible to many of us. And for me, that’s just always striking given how familiar it is to all of us, that then we have the split in the way we think about it and the way that we’re all experiencing it.
Just to speak to the question of how do our different backgrounds affect us? And Thuy-vy might also know more about this and where the literature’s out with it now. But from the studies that we’ve done and the evidence we reviewed when we were writing the book, the takeaway is really that there are no simple answers to solitude being, for example, for individualist cultures but not collectivist cultures. It seems to be recognized as potentially having these benefits globally. It’s also something that globally cultures might struggle with this. So there’s this kind of shared experience, and I think we’re only beginning to understand what that shared experience really is across the globe. And even for women where it’s not always very socially accepted to be alone, you hear stories of women even in the home taking a few minutes on their own, even when they’re meant to be sort of 24 hours on call for the kids and taking care of the family. So I think people have taken those at least brief moments to find solitude in everyday life, and that it doesn’t seem to be as far as we can tell so far culturally specific or bound to any specific time in our lives or subgroup.
Mills: Do people who were only children have more of a craving for solitude than those who grew up with siblings? Or do we not know?
Nguyen: I don’t think we know, I think really. But we do have some hypotheses around how development can shape people’s relationship with solitude. And then that’s specifically related to the work of Donald Winnicott when he talked about the capacity for being alone, being built throughout the person’s development, how if a child has more opportunities to engage with solitude. So he talks about how perhaps when the mom or primary caregiver is being away and doing some tasks next to the child, but the child gets the opportunity to explore the environment and just be alone in that space and feel safe, then that becomes a practice later on when the child grows up and also has a more healthy relationship with solitude. So we have seen literatures that talk about that, whether or not that has been tested. I think that would be something—I’m not aware that anyone has tracked longitudinally.
Weinstein: I think the closest we have is qualitative work. That’s really, even then it’s really early stages qualitative work where people do talk about their early experiences shaping their relationship with solitude, but they will talk both about having big families where then I needed to seek out the space for myself and also being the only child in the house and then having to learn to play by themselves. So it seems like our environment shapes our relationship in some way, but that we’re bringing something into how it does that it is kind of separate. There isn’t a sort of one kind of the right amount of siblings or household members or privacy to be a sort of person who appreciates solitude.
Nguyen: Oh, I want to kind of mention a story I read this week—actually by someone sharing on Twitter a thread about how her development has shaped her relationship with solitude. And she mentioned about the idea of how if you were someone who grows up with parents, whenever you do something wrong and you get put in time out, is not really a way for you to develop that healthy relationship with solitude. And I thought that was really insightful. I think that kind of ties to what we have talked about, about how these norms that we carry around, this idea of solitude, and how that can be shaped by our society, but also our development as well. Yeah. So I thought that’s just something interesting to share.
Mills: Well, talking about solitude as punishment, I mean that is one thing that we use in prisons, for example, where we will put people in solitary confinement for long periods of time, sometimes years and years. What is happening to the health of such people? What do we know about long term what happens to people who are in solitary? Does everybody react to it in the same way?
Weinstein: We both have a lot of things to say, I think, about solitary confinement, but kind of a few reactions to that. The first is when we talk about solitary confinement, we’re actually talking in a way about isolation, especially as you talk about these extended periods of time. And one of the fascinating things when you hear people talking about more extreme solitary confinement is they talk about it being a very relational experience. So we think about people being alone, but they’re put there by somebody who’s sort of saying, I have power over you, and because you’ve misbehaved or you’ve disobeyed me in some way, I’m not pleased with you. I’m going to punish you. So although it is solitude, it’s kind of a type of isolation where that relationship with the guard becomes really salient and important. It’s also often when people talk about difficult moments of solitary confinement or difficult periods, they’ll tend to talk about solitary confinement that is also devoid of exercise, fresh air, nature activities to keep the mind engaged, physical comfort, warmth.
So when we think about solitary confinement, we will tend to gravitate to really thinking about the solitude in it. But there’s so much more that happens when people are put in solitary confinement than that they’re separated from other people. And there’s been research done with prisoners who have had short periods of solitary confinement in prisons that essentially care about prisoner rights, where actually they feel that’s a positive break from an intense social experience. Sometimes one where I feel unsafe. So I’m not saying that we should put more people into solitary confinement, and I think I personally don’t have the expertise to say one way or another, but I think that as well it’s not inherently about having some solitude time. It’s about potentially having excessive forced and oppressive amounts of solitude time and having that be paired with a sort of the aggressive relational dynamic with the people who are in charge of the prisoner as well as the kind of day-to-day experiences of being deprived of comforts.
Nguyen: Yeah, I agree with Netta that the solitude in the context of solitary confinement is confounded by a lot of other factors around it. But when we, let’s say we take that solitude out and just study that in the lab. So there has been a group of researchers that did that, and I mentioned earlier about how when they study isolation, they quantify that as a 10 hours of being alone, not interacting with anyone. So the effect of that is they show that there’s a drop in our energy level. So of course there’s other outcomes like loneliness. There’s one interesting outcome that they measure is craving of social interaction. So that all makes sense. But the drop in energy level—I find that very interesting because if we’re talking about the effect that momentary solitude has is a drop in our strong emotion, then the extended period of that, that can have some implication for our energy.
And if we think of our self as an organism that we do need a balanced energy level, talk about homeostasis, then that can’t be good if a prolonged period and then our energy dropped down and the implication of that. So I think when we think about solitude and distinguish that from isolation, which is an extended period when we are cut off from social network and connection, I think that the length of time is a pretty determining factor there is that if it’s a short period you can talk about it as calm and relaxation, but in long periods that can’t be good. Just like anything, I think it’s all about balance.
Mills: Just to change gears a little bit, back in the late 90s, the early 2000s, there was a lot of discussion about this idea that was dubbed “bowling alone,” which eventually became a book, and Robert Putnam was the author. He noted how people were becoming less and less involved in face-to-face social interactions. Is there any scientific evidence that we’re becoming more solitary, and if so, is that a problem?
Weinstein: I don’t know of any evidence that would suggest that. I think the nature of our relationships is changing. Arguably this isn’t the first time that it’s changed. I don’t think humans have been holding their relationships steady for 2000 years and all of a sudden the last 20 years have happened and we’re fundamentally different. I think probably our relationships are always changing in the nature that we relate to others in our community, our families. So we’re seeing shifts in the way that we relate, but at least I haven’t seen any compelling evidence that we’re fundamentally becoming less sociable. I think our sense of connection to other people is extremely important. I don’t think anybody would argue with that. And it continues to be the case. So people will pursue opportunities for connecting with other people in the best ways that they know how.
Nguyen: The statistic that I’m aware of is just there’s an increase in single-person households, and usually that also tends to be mentioned in relation to the loneliness epidemic. But there’s one argument by a sociologist that I found really compelling, was that he was talking about how that could be a correlation, but that doesn’t mean it’s a causation because we might have the loneliness epidemic going on and we see more people—part of that we don’t know is just because we’ve become more aware of loneliness, aware of the issues around mental health, and we see more of that being reported. But in terms of the increase in single-adult households, he was talking about how in the past we kind of tended to have to rely on each other more for resources. And now there are, at least in developing societies, and we do see evidence of more single-adult households in developing societies just because there are social services, there are more resources in term of financial capability for people that allow people to live alone. So I think a lot of that, there’s other sociological factors that might explain that as well.
Mills: So what’s next for you both? What are you researching now?
Weinstein: When we think about kind of solitude, for me, it’s a place to build that relationship with yourself. And we’re just learning about that. And if you think about going out and having a conversation with somebody else, they could be really unkind to you or they could be really kind, supportive or unsupportive, listen to your feelings or not. I think we can do the same kinds of things with ourselves and that it’s that relationship in much the same way that you can be a good or bad friend, whether we’re good or bad friends to ourselves really could make a difference.
We’re exploring those aspects of solitude and also examining more about technology and what does it mean to pepper your solitude with social media time or have social media time intrude in solitude space? Can it have certain benefits and certain costs when the things that we’re seeing is when we go on social media, it helps satisfy our relatedness need is the way we talk about it. We feel sense of connection to other people that might help to explain why people are, when they’re in solitude or jumping out of it and dipping into easy social interactions that they can have from the comfort of their couch or wherever they happen to be, and sort of what that means in terms of both potential costs and benefits. And so I think those kinds of questions are really, really intriguing to understand how to optimize their solitude time and also what can make it difficult.
Nguyen: For me, I’m really fascinated about the idea of studying solitude and how that become just an essential part of our humanity, just because I think for a while we tended to think of ourselves as a social animal, and because of that intuitively we tend to think of when without other people, when we are alone, that is kind of like the opposite of that. So for a while, solitude doesn’t fit into the idea of us as being social animals. So I think next for me is just kind of to dig into that idea and challenge it a little more.
And just naturally, I tend to just gravitate toward experimental design, and we kind of try to, for example, right now I’m thinking about how, if solitude brings down our emotions, so in a stressful situation, what does that look like and what other factors that might play into that? Like you said earlier, there are situations where those strong emotions might come up again when we are alone, but what contributes to that? Is it something that going on in our thoughts, in the behaviors that we do when we are alone? So to me right now we’re trying to zoom in and kind of just see what can we learn more about solitude to explain why we spend time alone, if it is indeed that we are social animal.
Weinstein: I think just to add a big picture, intriguing thing about the topic is one of the things that solitude researchers are sort of highlighting is that a good day and maybe good life experiencing wellbeing that comes from having the very best of social relationships and the very best of solitude. So if we can take those two contexts for everyday life and sort of optimize them for ourselves, that’s where we can gain the most wellbeing. And some of that is how do they live in balance with one another? So we’re having the right kind of amounts for us. But also what do we do during that time? How do we take advantage of it? And for me, it’s just really intriguing because, so Thuy-vy and I are both social psychologists, I have a clinical background, so we’re very much tied into the social world, and we come from a field where the interest is in relationships, how are we with others? How are others with us? And so psychologists have worked a lot to learn about that part of our lives, but there’s this whole other world of solitude that actually we know so little about. There’s so little research in this area, so few solitude researchers compared to the relationships researchers that are out there. So I think it’s just an area where there are a lot of questions still, and we’re learning a lot all the time. And so yeah, it makes it a really kind of exciting, intriguing, and mysterious area of study.
Mills: Well, this has been really interesting. I want to thank you both for joining me, and I wish you great luck and success in your future research endeavors. Thank you.
Weinstein: Thank you.
Nguyen: Yeah.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get podcasts. And if you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for a future podcast, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.
Thuy-vy T. Nguyen, PhD, is an associate professor at Durham University, Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing fellow, and principal investigator of the Solitude Lab. She is a pioneer and expert in studying solitude and uses experimental paradigms to explore how solitude affects us emotionally.
Netta Weinstein, PhD, is a professor at the University of Reading and a psychologist with a background in clinical and social psychology. Her research focuses on both relationships and solitude, helping us understand how we can find everyday well-being.
