Finding Solace in Solitude: It’s Not Just About Introversion

Long before the coronavirus struck and sent hordes of people into lockdown — many of them totally on their own — Professor Thuy-vy T. Nguyen of the University of Durham in the UK and her colleagues around the world were in pursuit of an understanding of the experience of solitude. By now, they have probably conducted more than a dozen studies, providing insights never more valuable than they are now, and upending some of our most intuitively compelling beliefs about who really rules the domain of being alone.

I wrote about Nguyen’s earlier work on solitude here at Living Single. I learned about this new research from her chapter, “The possibilities of aloneness and solitude,” co-authored with Netta Weinstein and Richard M. Ryan, that is in press in the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Solitude. (The first edition is here.)

The Personalities of People Who Enjoy Solitude: Not Introversion, but Autonomy and Authenticity

It is not often that a set of findings completely transforms the way a particular psychological experience is understood, but Nguyen’s research did just that. Solitude has long been considered the special domain of introverts. In the popular imagination, they are the ones who embrace their time alone. We already had hints that other factors mattered more, but for the most part, we were not dissuaded.

Insecure attachment has also been posited as an important characteristic of people who want to be alone, but for psychologically unhealthy reasons. Insecure people are anxious around others or they try to avoid personal relationships.

The Nguyen team, though, pointed to something else entirely — the autonomous and authentic personality.

People who are autonomous and authentic describe themselves in these three ways, as measured by the Index of Autonomous Functioning:

1. They experience authorship of their own actions. Sample item: “My actions are congruent with who I really am.”
2. They are curious about themselves. Sample item: “I am interested in why I act the way I do.”
3. They are not susceptible to being controlled by other people. Example of an item they disagree with: “I do a lot of things to avoid feeling ashamed.”

In four studies in which participants kept daily diaries of what they were doing, whether they were alone or with others, and how they were feeling, the authors found that the personality trait of autonomy and authenticity mattered most. The people who scored higher on their scale were:

• More likely to enjoy their time alone
• More likely to get more of their needs satisfied when they were alone
• Less likely to experience intrusive, unsettling thoughts

Any links between introversion and spending more time alone, or enjoying time spent alone, were weak. So were the same correlations with anxious attachment. People with avoidant attachment styles did want to spend more time alone, but they did not enjoy their solitude.

Two Ways of Experiencing Solitude

From their own research, as well as their review of other people’s findings, Nguyen and her colleagues learned what distinguishes happy solitude from unhappy solitude.

Happy solitude

People who like being alone experience solitude in these ways:

• They value their time alone.
• They get more out of their solitude.
• They feel more relaxed and less stressed when alone.
• They become more aware of their thoughts and emotions.
• They are not undone by their own thoughts and emotions, even when they are negative ones such as anxiety or fear; instead, they are curious about those reactions.
• They are not all that tempted to do something just to distract themselves; sitting with their own thoughts is fine.
• They don’t worry about what other people think they should be doing.

These are the people most likely to thrive while living alone under quarantine. Sure, they may be wishing they could get out and resume their pre-coronavirus lives, but they will not feel as distressed as the people who really don’t like being alone.

Unhappy solitude

Some people are uncomfortable and unhappy when they spend time alone:

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• They find it boring.
• They don’t know what to do.
• With no one else around, they aren’t even motivated to engage in activities they might ordinarily find meaningful.
• They feel lonely.
• They descend into rumination, obsessing about what an awful person they are or how terribly other people have treated them.
• They do mindless things like scrolling endlessly through Facebook or Twitter, not because they are truly interested in anything they find there, but because any distraction at all is better than sitting with their own thoughts.
• They do the things that other people expect or want them to do, even though no one else is around.

These people are probably having a very hard time staying home alone in the time of the coronavirus. As the lockdown stretches on, they may feel even worse.

Alone-time Activities of the Authentically and Inauthentically Engaged

Authenticity — the experience of being true to yourself — matters. When you feel like your actions are consistent with who you really are, your psychological experiences are likely to be healthy and fulfilling. The opposite is true when you are doing things just to avoid getting criticized by others, or when you are trying to get yourself to embrace certain points of view so other people will like you.

Nguyen and her colleagues found that people typically experience authenticity more often when they are alone than when they are interacting with other people. They are also more likely to experience authenticity than inauthenticity when they are alone.

In one of their daily diary studies, they found that during alone time, people were engaging in different kinds of activities when they were feeling authentic than when they were feeling fake.

Authentic engagement

People who were alone more often experienced that positive feeling of authenticity when they were:

• Doing something they were good at
• Doing something they really wanted to do
• Doing something they were passionate about
• Doing something that was an expression of their values
• Taking a break from tending to others to take care of themselves

Inauthentic engagement

People who were alone were more likely to experience that miserable feeling of being inauthentic when:

• They were doing something they didn’t value
• They were doing something only because they had to, such as finishing a boring assignment
• They were worrying about what their spouse or friends would think about what they were doing
• They weren’t making any progress on whatever they were working on
• They were experiencing doubts about themselves
• They were obsessing about things they screwed up in the past

Nudging People Toward a More Positive Experience of Solitude

People who insist that they hate being alone can be exasperating to those who don’t feel the same way. It can be tempting to tell them that they just “have to” spend their time alone in the particular ways that you think are best.

That would be a mistake.

Nguyen and her colleagues demonstrated the power of a light touch in one of their experiments in which participants spent time in a room all by themselves. Half of them were told that different people have very different experiences when they are alone, and there is no right or wrong way to feel. They were encouraged to see how solitude feels to them. The other half got the more controlling instructions that insisted that they “must” spend the time alone in a specified way.

The participants who got told what they “had to” do had a lousy experience. Sitting alone in the room, they felt sad and lonely.

Not so for the other participants. They experienced their solitude in positive ways. In fact, when they were offered an opportunity to do something boring instead of just sitting there, about a quarter of them declined. They were fine sitting with their thoughts.

Note that the instructions did not specify that they should try to enjoy their solitude. The participants were not told to do or experience anything in particular. Instead, they were encouraged to just see how solitude felt to them, and they were reassured that there was no right or wrong way to feel. That’s a way of nudging people toward autonomy and choice and authenticity. And it made all the difference.