Consider yourself lucky if you can balance being social and spending time by yourself. After all, your parents didn’t intentionally raise you to be a loner, learn to be alone, or take time for you.
If anything, you learned various social skills for your relationships. There may be days when you decide to not answer a text, respond to a phone call and snuggle with your dog on the couch to binge-watch Netflix.
Choosing to retreat gives your friends the impression that you are anti-social, which can bring pressures and difficulties.
In these moments, you learn to be alone.
However, it is harder to learn to be alone in the midst of people you’re supposed to interact with daily. In the mind’s of people, it is the norm for everyone to be socially active; seeking to reach out for various reasons.
When you learn to be alone and be happy about it, another layer of self-care and self-improvement evolves.
You open yourself to better understand new aspects of who you are, which in turn strengthens your relationships.
In reality, adulting comes with tons of responsibilities, constant break-up’s, friendship losses, and social misunderstandings–all of which can be draining.
You can begin to strategize how you will learn to be alone, be happy about it, and keep amazing relationships going without losing unnecessary energy.
Research shows that only 16% of the 82 million Gen Xers in the U.S. have no friends.[1] This doesn’t mean they are loners or uninterested in interacting. These individuals just enjoy time alone every once in a while.
To learn to be alone is a healthy choice. So, when you do find yourself without company at any time, you won’t view it as a terrible fate, but as moments worth spending time with yourself.
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Is It Healthy To Be Alone?
Spending quality time with yourself helps you enhance your psychological development, and experience.
On the flip side, excessively spending time alone can negatively impact your mental and physical health.
It would keep you at the mercy of your inner critics, lead to depression, painful loneliness, and can ultimately lead to the deterioration of your health.
Consequently, you have to strike a balance between the two extremes. That said, these are the health benefits of being alone.
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Spending Time Alone with Yourself Increases Productivity.
How quickly do you get a job done when you have family and friends chatting away around you?
Your goal may be to complete things around the house, run errands, finish a school assignment, or meet a deadline for work. Even a ping from your phone when a chat or mail comes in can make you lose concentration on a task.
The brain is naturally programmed to be more productive when there are little to no distractions. So, if you desire to be more productive, spend time alone.
It Fosters Better Relationships With Others.
Being an extrovert is amazing. However, sometimes being an introvert is good, too.
Research has it that introverts are more in touch with themselves, better express self-awareness and empathy. This makes it possible for them to understand individuals around them and better manage relationships.
What’s more, studies show that relationships thrive when the individuals involved can take a step back and keep a level of independence. When they do reunite, the spark is incredibly amazing and refreshing.
It Allows You To Revitalize Your Mind.
Being the life of occasions and mingling with friends can be fun, and can help with some aspects of brain activity.
However, what happens when your brain begins to lose creativity or, starts to yearn for some break away from the hype and action of your social life?
In such times, being alone would be healthy. Spending some time alone with yourself helps your mind to process previous activities, unwind, and recharge.
Additionally, when your brain is relaxed, a lot of things would begin to make sense and come together beautifully.
It Boosts Your Creativity.
The mind comes up with the best ideas when it is left alone in perfect solitude. It generates amazing plans, weighs the pros against the cons, and just creates beautiful creative stories.
So, when you feel the pressure to be creative, and you can’t deal with the noise of brainstorming, you can simply separate yourself from the crowd, and give your mind some time to think and come up with a great idea.
10 Ways to Learn to Be Alone and Happy
Here are some steps you can take to learn to be alone and be happy about it.
1. Be Your Primary Source of Validation
Having friends and family call and show you major attention sure feels great. However, what happens when they are caught up with other things and don’t have that much time to text or call?
In such times, getting disappointed about not being contacted won’t help you, and sure would tell that you are far from being your source of validation.
So, what you can do is to deliberately train yourself to get used to the absence of people.
Take some time off from the noise of social life, and indulge in your hobbies like reading, writing, or seeing some great movies on Netflix.
What’s more, you can try meditating or yoga. This would clear your mind, and keep you in tune with yourself.
2. Learn to Feel And Be Self-Aware
So, first off, you can take a person out of psychology, but you can’t take psychology out of a person. This means that the person that can reach into your emotions, and channel those emotions so you can be happy, alone and single, is you.
Learn to spend time with yourself, practice self-awareness, and keep in touch with your feelings. That way, you will truly be happy. Identify your goals, dreams, and setbacks. Know the things that make you tick, and do those things.
3. Spend Some Time with Nature
There’s nothing quite as soothing as bonding with nature. You can simply spend time in a garden, where you can watch the flowers bloom with your favorite book in hand.
Or you can listen to the chirping of the birds, lie under the skies, and watch the shapes of the clouds and the brightness of the stars, and fall in love with yourself all over again.
If you have some energy and stamina in you, and you are a lover of outdoor activities like hiking, then put on those hiking boots, grab your backpack, and head to the nearest mountain around you.
4. Work on Your Self-Improvement
Remember those amazing self-improvement things that you have on your bucket list, but have somehow managed to miss doing them?
Bring those goals into actualization. You can create some alone time and work on them.
Learn to play that musical equipment, author that book, strategize on how you will start that company, learn a new skill, or a new language.
Just improve yourself: 42 Practical Ways To Improve Yourself
5. Deliberately Ease into the Pleasure of Relaxation
The moment you go for a massage, treat yourself to a bubble bath with red wine in hand or stay home to watch Netflix with popcorn.
Then you will begin to love spending time by yourself. The cares of the world would be non-existent for that duration.
6. Take a Trip to a Dream Location Alone
You might ask yourself where the fun is in traveling alone. Be that as it may if you can get beyond the feeling of weirdness that accompanies taking a trip by yourself, just do it.
Just pack up your bags, and visit that location that you heard is a tourist attraction, or simply go for a weekend getaway in an amazing resort.
Then in no time, you will begin to feel the hang of being alone and happy.
7. Step Out to Town Alone
Perhaps you thought that to learn to be alone means camping at home and shutting the world out. However, that’s not the case.
You can indeed have beautiful time with yourself by going out to town to do activities like reading in a park, grabbing a coffee, and going to the seaside where you can feel the wind on your face, watch the sea waves come and go, and just gather your thoughts.
8. Stay Away from Your Phone
If you’re going to learn to be alone, then you might as well go all the way. This would mean staying away from your phone and the distractions that come with it.
When the phone is out of the way, you can do whatever you desire, such as snack away on whatever you crave for, or jam to your best music.
9. Feel Free to Be Weird
Okay, you might think that you’re an adult, so you just can’t go about being weird.
In truth, who cares? Being grown does not stop you from playing your favorite song at home and dancing to it in your underwear, or bingeing on your favorite ice-cream or meal.
Nothing stops you from doing crazy activities like sky diving, that will send some adrenaline shooting through your body.
And nothing stops you from participating in karaoke, even when you don’t have a voice worthy of applause. The main thing is to be weird and to own your weirdness.
10. Guiltlessly Make Mistakes, And Own Them
At this point in your life, you should understand that making mistakes is part of the cycle of life.
I’m not saying that you should go about being the king or queen of errors. Rather, you should not beat up yourself when you unknowingly make a wrong move or a wrong decision.
In essence, own your mistakes, learn from them, and move on feeling better, and stronger.
Final Thoughts
Finally, the one thing you should convince yourself of is that, it is normal for you to live your life the way you have chosen.
There is no need trying to convince anyone that what you are doing is in the right interest of you. There is no need working yourself up to prove to anyone that choosing to learn to be alone is right for you.
You have decided to be happy and have found the best way to be healthy.
Instead of getting heartaches from your relationships, you have decided to sideline yourself and you are doing just fine.
Laugh. Live. Be happy alone. You’ll soon discover that this is the greatest decision ever.
More About Being Alone and Happy
- What Your Fear of Being Alone Is Really About and How to Get over It
- 10 Things That Happen When You Start to Enjoy Being Alone
- How To Be Happy Alone and Enjoy Life
Featured photo credit: Andrew Neel via unsplash.com
