Netta Weinstein

And our solitude time is the sort of

blank space in between those social interactions.

So I'm going out, what am I going to do until then?

Or I'm going to go to work, what am I going to do until then?

We don't tend to think about those moments when we're alone, whether we're kind of commuting or we're doing something else and we have a bit of solitude time as an opportunity in the same way that we think of social interactions.

And so I think for that reason, we often don't use those moments as an opportunity to gain from them what we could gain from them in the same way that we do our social interactions.

There is something to that actually, which is social interactions do tend to be more fun in a very specific way, which is they tend to be where we get our excitement, where we get our happiness.

So we see that social interactions in our social time, that's the stuff that makes us like really happy and kind of excited.

We call it high arousal, positive affect way.

Solitude gives us something else.

It gives us what we call low arousal positive affect, which is during our solitude time, when we take advantage of that time, we can feel calm, peaceful.

It can help us work through stress that we have.

So we might feel more relaxed and less stressed.

And so while social interactions might be fun in that exciting kind of way,

Solitude time can help us relax and have a sense of calm and peace.

And that emotion is one that we sometimes forget to value in our sort of high energy modern life.

But if we stop and really embrace that, it can help balance the more exciting, fun activities that we do.

You know, from a research perspective, I don't know.

I'll be really curious to find out.

We don't know nearly enough about this topic yet.