Robert J. Coplan

You know, solitude is often thought of as an empty place, right?

A place where there's nothing to do and all that's there is rumination and loneliness and anxiety.

But solitude can be a full place.

It could be a place that you can fill with what you choose to put there.

Yeah, that's one of the issues that we've actually explored over the last two years because, I mean, historically we've been, and for good reason,

really concerned about people who feel like they're getting too much solitude, right?

So that's what loneliness is.

It's the feeling that you are not getting enough social connection.

You're not getting enough social interaction.

It's a discrepancy between your social life that you would like and this, you know, your perception of your actual social life.

And when that's not living up to your social needs, so you feel lonely.

And it's often equated to the feeling that you're getting too much solitude.

And that's really important to study.

Over the last few years we've also studied their sort of new idea that maybe it's also possible to feel like you're not getting enough solitude.

And so this is kind of like the mirror image of loneliness and because that word didn't exist in the English language to even define that term, we made one up.

We call it a loneliness and that's the feeling that we are not getting enough time alone.

It's a discrepancy between the quality and the quantity of the solitary time that we would like to have and what we are actually experiencing.

That's a fair response.

But if you don't know that it's a thing, if you don't know that it's possible to feel more stressed or more anxious or more sad or more angry because you're not getting enough solitude, if you don't know that that's even a possibility, that it can impact you like that, it can be difficult to actually understand why you're feeling stressed.

And when we've interviewed people, that's a common thing that they said.