How to be alone: ‘I feel most alive when I'm with my own thoughts’

What’s the difference between solitude and loneliness? We may confuse the two because we’ve been trained since we were young to think about them as the same state. By sending children to their rooms as punishment, we teach them the idea that aloneness is a privation. “It should be a reward,” says Sara Maitland, author of How To Be Alone. “It should be: ‘You’ve been so good that now you can go to your room to be by yourself and do anything you like!’”

It’s true that social isolation is a risky business. “If you look at it epidemiologically, it’s a surprisingly powerful bad thing,” says Steve Cole, genomics researcher and professor of medicine at UCLA in California. His research found it to be a substantial risk factor influencing whether people get sick and die. “Everything seemed to eat up the body of a lonely person faster.”

But loneliness is simply being alone and not liking it, says Maitland. And while over 9 million adults in Britain say they are...

Source: How to be alone: ‘I feel most alive when I'm with my own thoughts’