In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard ran a series of studies where people had to do exactly one thing: sit alone in a plain room with their own thoughts for six to fifteen minutes. No phone, no book, no window worth looking out of. It went badly. Many participants chose to press a button and give themselves an electric shock rather than just sit there. A shock, mind you, that they'd earlier said they would pay money to avoid. And it wasn't a Gen Z thing; participants ranged in age from 18 to 77.
So if the idea of a free evening with nobody to spend it on makes you a little queasy, you're in extremely well-documented company. But here's the part the shock study doesn't tell you: solitude isn't a fixed trait you either have or lack. Researchers who study it keep landing on the same conclusion, which is that the quality of your alone-time matters far more than the quantity. And quality is something you can change. Here are seven ways to do that.
1. decide you're choosing it
The single biggest factor in whether alone-time restores you or wrecks you is whether it feels chosen. A 2022 study by Tse, Lay and Nakamura tracked people's daily solitary activities and found that unchosen solitude carries what they call a "double vulnerability": you lose social connection and autonomy at the same time, and well-being drops with them. The same empty Sunday can feel like abandonment or like relief, depending on whether it happened to you or you picked it. So pick it, out loud if you have to: "I'm taking tonight for myself." It sounds like a trick, and it mostly isn't.
2. give the alone-time a job
Researchers draw a line between simply preferring to be alone and what they call self-determined motivation for solitude: wanting time alone to find enjoyment and gain something meaningful from it, rather than just avoiding people. That distinction turns out to matter a lot for how the time feels. "I'm going to be alone tonight" is a void. "I'm going to cook that thing, finish that chapter, walk until my head clears" is a plan. The job doesn't have to be productive in any way a boss would recognize; it just has to be yours.
3. start with fifteen minutes
You don't need a silent retreat. In a set of studies by Nguyen, Ryan and Deci, just fifteen minutes of solitude produced what they called a deactivation effect: high-arousal emotions like anxiety dialed down, and calm dialed up. A 2024 review found the effect kicks in fast, with even ten minutes of solitude increasing relaxation in the lab, and brief pockets of alone-time in daily life helping people come down from strong negative feelings. Fifteen minutes is a bus ride, the gap between meetings. You have it.
4. don't reach for your phone
Here's the uncomfortable one. Lying in bed "alone" while scrolling through four hundred other people's lives is not solitude; it's a crowded room you happen to be holding. Sherry Turkle has argued, and psychologist Virginia Thomas agrees, that being alone with your phone doesn't meet the criteria for psychological solitude, because real solitude is inner-directed: your attention has to actually turn toward you. That inward turn is where the payoff lives, since Thomas points out that one of solitude's biggest benefits is the chance to recharge after a draining day. Scrolling skips the recharge and keeps the isolation, which is the worst of both.
5. take it outside
If sitting in your apartment with your thoughts still feels like too much, don't sit in your apartment. Walk. Research summarized by the American Psychological Association links time in nature to improved attention, lower stress, better mood, and reduced risk of psychiatric disorders. Nature also gives your attention somewhere gentle to rest, which makes the whole being-alone-with-yourself thing dramatically less claustrophobic. A park counts; so does a tree-lined block.
6. give the thoughts somewhere to land
Go back to the shock study for a second. I don't think those people were afraid of silence; they were afraid of what fills it, because a thought with nowhere to go doesn't leave, it loops. The argument you should've won, the text you shouldn't have sent, on repeat at increasing volume. The fix isn't to think harder, it's to get the loop out of your head. Some people journal on paper; some of us find blank pages hard and talking easy, which is why we built Joice — you say the loop out loud on a walk, it asks a gentle question back, and the thought stops circling because it finally landed somewhere. However you do it, solitude gets much easier when your head isn't the only container you own.
7. treat it as a skill, not a trait
It's tempting to file this whole subject under "introvert stuff" and decide it's not for you. The research says otherwise. Weinstein and colleagues found that what predicts healthy, enjoyable solitude isn't introversion but autonomous functioning, a general capacity to act from your own interests and values, which people can develop. In other words, enjoying your own company is less like eye color and more like cooking. You start bad and get better. Nobody's born good at it, whatever their Instagram suggests.
The strange thing about learning to be alone is that it doesn't make you want people less. It just changes what you bring back to them: you show up because you chose to, not because your own apartment scared you out the door.
Start small this week. Fifteen minutes, phone in another room, one thing you actually want to do. If a loop starts, say it out loud. See who you find in there.