![]() Feelings of burnout can mean we need more self-care. As our home, work and school lives converge into one ongoing neverending workday, that exhaustion is more prevalent than ever. We all know the feeling of being totally drained. Solitude helps us recharge our emotional batteries It can feel challenging to spend time alone, particularly in public, because it’s common to care more about what other people will think rather than focus on our own enjoyment.įrom eating alone in a busy restaurant to meditating in a park to taking up that table for two in Starbucks even though there’s only you, think of a thing that would bring you joy while you’re alone and just do it. It’s a cognitive bias (which is just a fancy way of saying a regular trick our brains play on us) where we drastically overestimate how much other people care or judge what we do. They’re most likely not thinking about you at all. Just like you, they’re far more interested in thinking about themselves. Why do we care so much about what others think of us? And not just your family and friends - even strangers and people in public who you’ll never see again. Think of all of the times in your life where you wanted to do something but then stopped yourself because you worried about how others would react. Not only because we’re not all used to it, but because we’re not always prepared for the awareness and self-focus that comes with it.ĭance like nobody’s watching… because they’re not If we remove stimulation and go to be with just ourselves, what happens if we don’t like what we find?Įmbracing the desire to be alone and actively planning for it can feel sort of radical. Maybe we don’t really want to focus on the feeling that we’ve been ignoring or pushing below the surface. For others, being alone with our own thoughts can be scary. Some of us will remember being sent to our rooms alone as children as a punishment and carry that negative association into adulthood. For some folks who live alone, the opposite could be true - they’re more alone than ever when they don’t want to be. If we live with our families or partners, many of us are less alone than we’ve ever been before. Even with vaccines and lifted lockdowns, the ways we work, go to school, and socialize have been deeply impacted. One of the long-lasting results of the COVID-19 pandemic is that our lifestyles and households have been compressed in ways we weren’t used to before. The key is to choose rather than just “be” Not all being alone is the same, and there are some simple strategies you can use to do it well. Either way, there are reasons, backed by research, why being alone is necessary for self-care, maintaining focus and increasing happiness. Like a lot of things, the “dose” won’t be the same for everyone and some folks will want alone time more than others. The truth is, it’s incredibly normal to want to be alone. So why does so much societal or internal pressure make it seem like we shouldn’t ever be alone, nevertheless want to be alone? Lots of us have a complicated relationship with the idea of “being alone.” Maybe because it just sounds so similar to “loneliness” and feelings of being solitary can bring up a lot of unpleasant memories of times we were by ourselves when we didn’t want to be.ĭon’t confuse alone time with loneliness.īeing alone and feeling the negative aspects of loneliness are two different things.
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