IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE ALONE AND HAPPY?

“All men’s misfortunes spring from their hatred of being alone.” – Jean de la Bruyere 

Is solitude good for your mental and emotional well-being and is it possible to be alone and happy? A while back, when my wife visited my daughter and our grandchild in Ireland,  I stayed and looked after our pets, I believe these points are still valid as when I wrote them then,

My benefits of solitude:

 1. You recuperate and recharge. All of us—even the hopeless extroverts among us—need time to recuperate and recharge. There’s nothing like spending time alone to make this happen. The peace, quiet, and mental solitude you experience when you’re by yourself are essential to recovering from the stresses of daily living. 

2. You can do what you want. As fun as it is to spend time with other people, it inevitably leads to compromise. You’re constantly modifying your ideas to accommodate other people’s desires and opinions. Being alone frees you up to do exactly what you want when you want. You can throw on whatever you feel like wearing, eat what you feel like eating and work on projects that are meaningful to you. 

3. You learn to trust yourself. Freedom is more than doing what you want; it’s the ability to trust your gut and to think clearly, without any pressure or outside influence. Being alone helps you form a clear understanding of who you are, what you know, and what’s right for you. It teaches you to trust yourself. When around others, even when you don’t realize it, you monitor people’s reactions in order to gauge the appropriateness of your own feelings and actions. When you’re alone, it’s all on you. You develop your own ideas and opinions, without having them watered down by what anyone else thinks. Once you learn to enjoy being alone, you’ll discover what you’re truly capable of, without the constraints of other people’s thinking.

 4. It increases your emotional intelligence.  TalentSmart tested more than a million people and found that 90% of top performers are high in EQ. Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence, and you can’t increase your EQ without it. Since self-awareness requires understanding your emotions and how you react to various people and situations, this necessitates careful self-reflection, and self-reflection happens best when you’re alone. 

5. It boosts your self-esteem. Enjoying your own company is a huge confidence booster. If you’re bored and restless when you’re by yourself, it’s easy to start thinking that you’re boring or that you need other people around you to enjoy yourself. Learning to enjoy time alone boosts your self-esteem by confirming that you are enough. 

6. You appreciate other people more. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder. Time alone lets you see people in a whole new light, and it helps you to develop a renewed sense of gratitude for who they are and what they do. 

7. You get more done. It’s said that “more hands make light work,” and while that might be true when it comes to raking leaves, it’s a completely different story with cognitive tasks. I found, that even the effectiveness of brainstorming is more myth than reality. Researchers from Texas A&M found that group brainstorming hinders productivity due to “cognitive fixation.” Cognitive fixation is the tendency for people working in groups to get stuck on other people’s ideas, reducing their ability to come up with anything new, and the bigger the group, the more fixated everyone becomes. Spending time alone not only eliminates distractions but also ensures that you don’t have trouble with “too many cooks, spoil the broth.”