Me, myself and I

CATHERINE WOULFE - SUNDAY MAGAZINE

Catherine Woulfe looks at why psychologists are telling us to spend  more time alone.

MORE than 300,000 New Zealanders live all by themselves. That's one in five. All those people! Alone! Miserable, probably. Getting drunk and weepy, and singing along to power ballads, for sure.

But science is starting to chip away at the idea that alone equals lonely. Research is showing that the benefits of time spent alone can be profound – it boosts creativity, mood, empathy and memory, and decreases stress.

Meanwhile, How to be Alone, a long and corny poem by Canadian Tanya Davis, has exceeded three million hits on YouTube. “If you are at first lonely, be patient,” it begins, before launching into how to go solo (smell books at the library, take yourself to dinner, turn off your phone, sit on park benches). She paints solitude as a sort of delicious floatiness.

“Society is afraid of alone though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements… But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it…”

Dr Susan Hayes, a clinical psychologist working in Auckland, is certain solitude is about to have its time in the sun.

“There’s a very strong human need for just space, to recharge. I think our culture is very judgmental about aloneness and I’m not sure where that came from. I mean, we are social animals and we do need social interaction… We do need and crave a sense of belonging and connection to others, but we also need and crave space to ourselves, just to think. And I think a lot of us get peopled-out without realising it.”

Consider the busy executive, says Hayes, “getting calls all the time and having dinner with people in the evenings and coming home and sitting on Facebook, and all your weekends are spent catching up with people. There’s just not enough downtime to recover.”

These people often turn up in Hayes’ office wound up like springs, she says, anxious and exhausted, overstimulated, not sleeping, “just go-go-go-go-go. They’re bombarded with other people.”

But why is the absence of others so crucial in undoing this?

Hayes explains that even when we do ‘unwindy’ things like curling up with a book and a Milo, if there’s another person around, our brains betray us. “A lot of your focus is actually on what they’re saying, what they’re wanting. You’re watching their body language, you’re concentrating on non-verbal cues. Even if you don’t realise it, you’re tuned into them and what they’re doing, which takes your attention away from what’s happening inside you.”

Watching people on TV can have the same effect, she warns, “but I still would say it’s better than spending time with people, all the time. Think of it almost on a continuum.”

Hayes is yet to see any data linking too much social interaction with physical or mental health problems (although there’s masses about how dangerous solitude’s doppelgänger, loneliness,
can be), but she’s certain it’s not far off. In the meantime, she urges clients to give alone a chance.

Many find the idea of being by themselves threatening, and ask her, “Well, what would I do?” She tells them that solitude doesn’t have to mean meditation or navel-gazing; as a transition, she recommends TV, reading, listening to music or
going for a wander sans cellphone.

“It’s a difficult thing to sell. People don’t quite understand it at first. They don’t believe that there could be benefits from just having less noise in their life and not being with other people all the time. And generally, my advice is to try it, just get used to it. Persevere for enough time just to get used to it.”

Selina McEntee worked all this out for herself as a toddler when, as her mother once told her, she could be plonked on the floor with a pile of toys and left to play for hours. McEntee was an only child raised by her dad, a quiet, older man. He died when she was 16 and she went into a bustling foster family of two parents and three kids.

”The constant noise, you know, it just never really stopped. I felt swamped, and that’s something that still often happens when there’s a lot of people, a lot of talking, a lot of activity.”

For this interview, McEntee invited me to her home in West Auckland, because she doesn’t like phones. She screens her calls, sometimes even ignoring friends (“If it’s important, they’ll leave a message”). She’s a single mum and blogger
(at prettycleverblog.blogspot.com, on things sartorial and cosmetic). Her ex has the kids every second week and her boyfriend is overseas for about three months each year. Most days, McEntee is alone from 9am until 3pm, when the kids pop
in on their way home from school. And she loves it that way.

“I'd go days without seeing people and be quite happy,” she says. “I don’t know if I have a maximum… I don’t think I’ve ever reached it.”

She’s not quite in the ‘hell is other people’ camp – she does have friends – but hell is definitely holidays during which she’s obliged to stay with other people. When McEntee does spend too much time with others, she comes home exhausted. It feels, she says, a bit like having aching legs after a run; she wonders whether maybe her socialising “muscle” isn’t used to the strain.

“It’s claustrophobic. It’s noisy, even if it’s not loud. It’s like this barrage of senses.”

McEntee says her need for solitude has impacted on her friendships, as she’ll often prefer to stay home rather than visit friends (although she forces herself to socialise when she notices she’s particularly averse to it). But she says those who know her know she’s happy. She views her ability to be alone as a good thing, “because it gives me independence”.

“Probably 90 percent of people, if you say, ‘What does “alone” emote for you?’, it will be a negative word for them. It says ‘lonely’. I think the two words are automatically put together but, to me, alone isn’t lonely at all. In fact, loneliness is not a state I’ve ever felt.”

What does ‘alone’ mean to her, then?

“It means just being in my own head, you know? And inside my head is a really cool place… and it, oh gosh – it’s so hard to describe. I have complete control over it. I don’t have control over other people, they act in unpredictable ways.”

McEntee says she’s unable to function creatively – say, write a blog post – when there are people around. “It’s too much stimulus. I always say to people, ‘I’m not a multitasker.’ I can’t have sound coming in or people trying to distract me. I’ve
got to be one thing at a time and focused on that thing solely.”

Historically, she’s in fine company. Mozart, Einstein, Picasso, Carl Sandburg, Isaac Newton, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, Beatrix Potter… show me a genius and I’ll show you a loner, or at least someone who retreated into their own little world when they were working.

Hayes says there is research showing that creativity is reduced by brainstorming in a group. “It’s almost like the thing where if you close your eyes your hearing improves. It’s like if you shut down everything else then the creative energies come through more strongly. You’ll find most artistic people far prefer to work in isolation.

“There’s partly the side of it where all [other people’s] demands on you are exhausting,” she says. “But also just the self-awareness side of it, that you actually get a stronger connection with yourself.”

In turn, creativity feeds into happiness.

Hayes: “There’s a concept in psychology called ‘flow’, or ‘absorption’, where you’re so caught up in what you’re doing you lose track of time; you don’t really even hear people talking to you. That’s incredibly healthy. The more time you spend doing things in which you get lost, the healthier psychologically you tend to be.”

A more base benefit of solitude is that it can remove you from negative social behaviours like smoking or drinking, says Hayes. But she and the other psychologists I talked to were careful to emphasise that for certain people – such as those who have social anxieties or depression – solitude can be damaging.

Dr Kris Garstang, a clinical psychologist based  in Nelson, points out that there are ways to think yourself into solitude rather than loneliness.

“If you’re thinking, ‘Nobody cares about me, that’s why I’m on my own,’ then you’ll feel lonely. Or, ‘Gosh, I haven’t seen anyone. Maybe I haven’t got any friends.’ But if you think, ‘Oh thank God, some time to myself at last’ – which is what I think – then you’re unlikely to feel lonely. You might  feel excited.”

- Sunday Magazine