Robert J. Coplan

One of them is that, you know, you need a two hour walk in the woods for it to reap any benefits.

And that's simply not true.

Although a two hour walk in the woods can be certainly wonderful for some people.

There's research that suggests that even 15 minutes a day is a reasonable amount of time for some people to spend alone and they see concrete benefits for doing that.

and for some people they might not even find that easy they might have to start even smaller and i like to say you need to you know just like you're training for a race right you don't run the whole marathon on the first time you have to kind of build up your solitude muscles build up your capacity for solitude and increase that time a little bit each day so you can plan it in and make it part of your regular routine but you were touching on sort of what you do when you're alone

And again, I think there's this myth that in order to gain benefits from solitude, you need to put out a yoga mat and fold your legs and meditate for two hours.

And again, meditation is great and has lots of benefits for our health and for our well-being.

But that's not the only thing that you can do when you're alone in order to get some of these solitary benefits.

It turns out if you're engaging in an activity that you personally find beneficial,

meaningful, enjoyable, engaging, it keeps your attention, it keeps your interest, then that is just as beneficial as perhaps even sitting and meditating for that time.

The key is to find an activity that's personally interesting for you and that works for you.

It's again, it's that same kind of personalization that I was talking about in terms of how much time you spend alone.

Also, what you do with your solitary time is very much a personalized choice.

And that's also OK.

I guess the one caveat I would say on that is maybe don't use your solitary time to FaceTime with friends.

Because then you're kind of, I would call that social washing your solitary time because you're using it still to communicate with other people.

And that's not really solitude.

And also maybe just don't scroll through social media because we know that doesn't make anybody happy under any circumstances.

Some people do very productive things when they're alone.

Solitude is a place where you can be directly focused and engaged and get lots of important tasks done.