Don’t confuse solitude with loneliness. Privacy and seclusion can relieve the pressures of life and help your sense of wellbeing.

To prove the point, researchers asked 178 people to keep a daily diary over three-weeks, tracking the number of hours they spent alone — that is, without face-to-face contact with other people, speaking with them on the phone, or using social media or email.

At the end of the trial, the volunteers were asked three questions:

• how pressured they felt to behave in a certain way,
• how free they felt themselves to be,
• how much they felt in control of what happened during their day.

The more time the volunteers spent alone, the more positive their answers and the lower their stress levels on any given day.

The researchers had set out to find if there was a ‘tipping point’ — a certain number of hours alone per day that might harm wellbeing. At he end of each day, the volunteers were asked how strongly they agreed with the sentence ‘today I feel stressed.’ Contrary to expectations, their stress levels were generally lower the longer they spent alone, although some volunteers ranked their loneliness as higher and rated their day as less good when they spent more time alone.

Individual wellbeing seems to depend on whether being with other people is normally enjoyable or even rewarding. But it can also be a bit of a drag, even stressful, so a certain amount of solitude may indeed help personal wellbeing.

However, whether people choose to be alone is important. The researchers asked the volunteers how much they agreed with statements about enjoying or valuing solitude, and whether or not they thought it important. When people chose to be alone, the amount of solitude no longer affected their enjoyment, and feelings of loneliness were much reduced.

Volunteers who normally spent a lot of time alone did not experience the same levels of loneliness and reduced satisfaction. So, the findings contradict the commonly held view that people who are alone more frequently are more frequently lonely.

Solitude is not always easy — different people cope with being alone in different ways.

Remember — we’re talking about solitude, and peace and quiet — not loneliness. It is true that the volunteers generally felt more lonely on the days spent alone than was usual, but this was not the case for people who regularly spent a larger amount of time alone. So we can conclude that solitude only feels unpleasant if you’re alone when you don’t want to be.

Many people can happily spend hours on their own without any negative effect on their wellbeing. For the record, I’m one of them. I look forward to periods of peace and quiet.

One reason is that I am totally in control of my own time and space for as long as I want. I find solitude relaxing because it gives me time to think. I’m probably one of the few people who actually enjoyed lockdown! No deadlines to meet, no one breathing down my neck, just peace and quiet, and a chance to catch up on my personal stuff!

You could try this experiment with yourself to see how you feel about shutting the world out for a day, or even a couple of days.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports