When You Embrace Being Alone, These 10 Things Start To Happen

Aug 16, 2018 by apost team

Being alone is often viewed as a negative that infers you’re antisocial, unlikable, unwanted, or otherwise too flawed to have close friendships. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Yet, many people continue to over compensate to avoid such a negative perception by trying to fill every minute in the presence of others.

What they’re missing is that being comfortable with alone time is actually one of the number one signs that you’re confident and being the best self you can be. As you embrace alone time, you’ll see many benefits to your true sense of self.

Let’s explore some of the fantastic things that’ll happen as you embrace some solitude:

Emotions get cloudy amongst too many bodies and drowned out by the constant chatter of others. It’s impossible to really feel what you alone feel when you’re constantly having to cater to, consider, and put on kid gloves to pick up on, decipher, and respond to the thoughts and feelings of others.

Having alone time gives you an opportunity to cease all the background noise of other thoughts and feelings so that you can focus on your own and determine what makes you alone happy, sad, angry, and so forth. Knowing yourself this way will help you when it is time to consider others.

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It can be utterly exhausting to constantly account for how each and every one of your words and deeds might impact others, read others verbal and nonverbal cues, and just be engaging and present for actions and conversations that may not be of any relevance to you.

Yet, relationships of all niches require this connectivity and presence. Being alone gives you time to turn the connectivity to others off so that your mind gets a break from constantly being in motion.

How many times have you said or done one thing in the moment and then later thought about how you would’ve handled it much differently or taken a very different course? This is the type of clarity you get when you’re alone and can reflect. Daily life, surrounded by people, doesn’t give you a pause button to reflect on decisions, goals, and moves you want to make going forward.

It’s all about snap decisions, and sometimes these aren’t the best for you. Alone time hits the pause button on the outside world so that you can inwardly focus and self-reflect on the ideal courses to take.

Relationships don’t work unless both parties are happy, and the only person that can make you happy is yourself. If you don’t like who you are and what you’re doing, then you can’t expect others to like who you are and what you’re doing.

Being alone gives you the space to determine what aspects of life and decisions you’re making are designed with your own happiness in mind, not necessarily the happiness of others. This is true whether it’s a romantic, professional, friendship, or family relationship.

How often do you do things you’re not really interested in doing just to appease the other parties? How often do you have to make compromises in the where, what, when, who, why, and how you spend your time to suit the group, not you?

Being alone puts you in complete control. You don’t have to compromise. You can be completely selfish and do what you want for yourself.

Company can be entertaining, fun, or boring. In any case, the theme is the same - it’s distracting. These distractions eat away at your productivity. Instead of furthering your art talent on your one Saturday off that month, for example, you’re cheering a friend on as they run a marathon.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be supportive of friends. You just need to ensure that you aren’t packing every moment of your possible alone time with the lives of others and neglecting furthering your own productivity.

Again, there’s an inordinate amount of pressure to be a politically correct friend. Lapses require constant apologies for being yourself. It’s a constant state of being defensive and filtering words and deeds to suit others. Not only are your slowly blotting out who you are, you’re also chipping away at you’re self-esteem when you constantly feel like you have to apologize for just being yourself.

When you’re alone, the only person you can possibly offend is yourself. So, you can let down your guards and remove your filters to be as brutally honest with yourself as you want. The pressure and obligation is completely removed.

You’ve heard the sayings that you don’t know if you’ll miss something until it’s gone, distance makes the heart grow fonder, and you can’t appreciate the sun without experiencing the moon? Alone times gives you a greater yearning and appreciation for the meaningful relationships in your life.

You’ll also be better able to nurture those relationships by having a greater appreciation for and understanding of yourself.

With questions and uncertainties, asking for advice is always a prudent step. That said, often times we seek advice, approval, and validation for things we don’t really need input from others to know the answer already in our heart.

Alone time teaches you to foremost trust and prize the instincts and intuition that matters most - your own. Look for answers within yourself before you seek counsel with others.

As you utilize all the opportunities presented by being alone, you’ll find yourself naturally growing into a more confident and independent person. You won’t feel the anxiety of being alone, the dread of having to tell a hostess that you’re a party of one, or the sting of not having company 24/7 to entertain you and vice versa. You’ll know that these are the moments where you discover who you really are without the input, judgement, or dictatorship of others trying to mold an inauthentic version of who you really are and want to become.

In closing, none of the above is to encourage you to move to an island or become a hermit. It’s about ensuring that you set aside ample time in your schedule to further define the true inner you.

Have you experienced any of these or other benefits from being alone? We always love to read our reader’s thoughts, questions, and concerns in the comment section.