HOW TO BE ALONE
29 SEPTEMBER 2022 (15 MIN READ)
Isn’t it interesting how the highest form of torture a human can go through is being in an empty room alone without distractions for an extended period of time? In the prison system, this is referred to as “solitary confinement,” and it is the harshest punishment one can be sentenced to. Maybe I should take that back. I forgot about sitting through an episode of The Kardashians. Although being in a room alone for months at a time is obviously extreme, most people can’t be alone without any distractions for twenty minutes without feeling tortured. Backing up this claim, one of my favorite psychological studies gave participants the option to sit down and do nothing for ten minutes or give themselves an electric shock.¹ About ⅔ of the participants chose to give themselves the electric shock. So, to extrapolate the data, the majority of people would rather inflict serious pain on themselves than sit alone with their thoughts for ten minutes. Or, maybe the majority of people are masochists in this society. Either way, cool study. Although this shocking reality can rightfully be observed as a reflection of anxiety plaguing the collective psyche, I more so see it as a lack of skill in our populace. And the skill lacking is the ability to be alone.
We are never taught how to be alone. Our parents teach us how to be presentable to the world so we can be accepted. Our education system prepares us to be knowledgeable enough to develop a personality that is worthy of making money in a capitalist system. In other words, humans at this point in time are only taught how to fit in. Fit into what, though? My sex education was pretty terrible. Even though these lessons taught to us are not useless, the extreme focus on fitting in makes us unable to understand how to be alone. And unknown to our parents and education system, being able to be alone is equally, if not more beneficial than knowing how to fit in, since it allows us to present a more authentic version of ourselves, be less needy and a lot more confident. Furthermore, it enables us to develop discernment, which is a necessary skill to be able to think for oneself in this world of lies.
One of my mentors would always tell me this notion when I complained about being alone:
“We come here alone and we leave here alone.”
Although the first couple of times he said it, I wanted to smack him in the face for being pompous, I finally realized that motherfucker was completely right. Because of this annoying truth, you might as well make sure that you can actually be alone. And that ability is dependent on how skilled you are at doing the thing.
Here is an attempt to show you how to develop and nurture that skill.
A TIME OF UNBALANCE
Anyone who is truly great at a skill will tell you that to get to where they are now, there were time periods of no balance, where they spent copious amounts of time only doing the skill. Consider Kobe Bryant’s routine, who woke up at 3am most days of the week to get in one more training session than everyone else. As Kobe’s routine displays, if you want to be truly great at something, you are going to need to have times in your life where you have no balance. He also might have been a serious workaholic. I’m sure his kids were happy. But what about good? How much of a sacrifice does good require? I consider myself a good basketball player, but not great, at least that’s what I tell myself. I was the starting shooting guard for my varsity basketball team and could have played at the Division 3 level of college. Even though that stature does not seem like much, for about three summers in a row, I played about 6 hours of basketball every day. As you can see, to be good at something still requires serious discipline and sacrifice. It may not be Kobe’s routine, but it’s still hard work.
In terms of how this translates to being alone, I went the Kobe route. In other words, I did not want to follow the same trajectory of my failed basketball career. For the past year, I moved to a new city without knowing a single person and chose to embrace the hermit lifestyle. I rarely, if ever, socialized with anyone and spent most of my time both working and figuring my shit out. Sounds like a fun life. Count me in! You may think that I’m just an introvert who has social anxiety. Wrong. Before this, I was as much of a social butterfly as anyone could be, but I could not deal with being alone. I always needed a girlfriend. I always needed a friend to do something with. I always needed someone to do drugs with. Put differently, I always needed a distraction from being alone with my thoughts. So, I embraced the mamba mentality, and spent as much time as I possibly could being alone with my thoughts. Due to this approach, at this moment, I truly believe I am approaching greatness at being alone, and that’s directly because I chose to have a time of severe unbalance where I focused on getting great at it. I don’t need anyone but myself to enjoy the present moment. Sure, at times I want to share an experience with a loved one, but I don’t need it. And that ability of not needing it makes you cherish the experience so much more. Jerking off still sucks. There are some things you just can’t replicate by yourself.
Regardless of whether or not you choose the good or great route, consistent action has to be taken to get good at being alone. Personally, I recommend going the Kobe route, and setting aside a portion of your life, whether it be a month or a year, where you are alone for the majority of the time, learning how to be with your thoughts and feelings, without anyone helping you escape them. Out of everything I have done when it comes to self-help, learning how to be alone is by far the most impactful one. It wasn’t meditation. Take that, self-help gurus! It has dramatically changed my love life for the better and my relationship to self. I would go as far to say it’s the most useful skill you can develop in this lifetime. If you are fine with settling for being good at spending time alone, then you should spend at least one day a week completely alone. That may sound extreme, but it’s what it will take to be good at it. And by good, all I mean is that you will eventually learn to enjoy your own company.
Now that we have covered the discipline needed to get good at the skill of being alone, what should we actually aim to be doing while we are alone? Let’s begin with the task of getting to know your thought patterns.
THOUGHT PATTERNS
As explained previously, the main reason people are afraid of being alone is because they are scared of facing off against their thoughts. I believe this fear exists for two main reasons. One, people have not realized that they are not their thoughts. And two, they have not traced their thought patterns back to an origin of pain; this pain drives the thought patterns unconsciously. In terms of the first reason, I’m about to tell you something crazy, but I promise it will change your life. If you believe you are your thoughts, then you must also believe that you are your poop. Did this dumbass just really say that? We can agree that the brain and intestines are both organs serving the human body. Our intestines take in the input of the calories we feed it and create an output of feces. Similarly, our brain takes in the input of external perceptions, such as the books we read or experiences we take part in, and creates an output in the form of thoughts. Put differently, we give our intestines food and they produce shit, and we give our brains stimulus and they produce thoughts. These outputs, shit and thoughts, are the functions of the organs. Using this logic, it does not make any sense to identify with our thoughts, only if you also identify with your shit. I don’t know about you, but when I take a perfect shit, it’s pretty hard to not feel proud of myself for making that.
When we start treating our thoughts as outputs that have nothing to do with us, but more so the information we consume, it becomes a whole lot easier to face them. For instance, if I have a thought late at night in my house about robbers coming into my house and shooting me, then I immediately not only see it as something outside of me, but also notice how it triggered because I was a dumb ass and watched a True Crime documentary on Netflix. Don’t Fuck with Cats was my shit. Worth it 100%. We cannot treat our negative thoughts as a failure on our end, but more so see it as a reflection of what stimulus we have been exposing ourselves to that is not serving us. And we can only get to this place if we spend time with our thoughts alone, developing the habit of detaching ourselves from them and investigating what source triggered them.
(The neuroscience author, Mo Gawdat, refers to his thoughts as Becky talking nonsense to him. I have found this strategy of treating our thoughts like an annoying coworker incredibly useful at times, especially when we find it hard to disidentify from them). But the name Becky? Kind of lame in my opinion.
Although a lot of the time our brain is just spewing out the garbage we feed it, sometimes the thoughts stem from a traumatic experience that we need to process. For example, if your father verbally berated you frequently and made you feel like a failure, then you will internalize that voice and start talking to yourself the same way. I believe, in this instance, this will continue until you stop feeling like a failure and develop radical confidence. However, the feeling like a failure will only release itself once you truly own and process the emotion itself. Believe it or not, the mental stories you tell yourself when the feeling you hate arises are actually there to help protect you and avoid the pain. If you stay in the head with your thoughts, guess what you avoid? The pain in the body. So, when you start confronting the pain, dropping the resistance, and processing the fear, the mental stories will start to wither away because you will not need the same level of protection as you did before. Unfortunately, you cannot discover where the pain lies without sitting down alone with your thoughts and tracing them back to a traumatic experience. And it sometimes takes weeks of sitting with the same thought pattern to finally discover where it comes from, but it’s always worth it in the end when you smell freedom. Sometimes you smell BO. It’s part of the journey…
Along with identifying our trauma through paying attention to our thoughts, we can also locate the holes in our heart as well.
FINDING THE HOLES IN YOUR HEART
In my eyes, holes in your heart arise because you cannot give yourself the love that you are constantly searching for in something else. Consider the pickup artist who spends his time swiping through dating apps and scavenging bars every night to find a lucky lady for the night. However, with each new sexual experience, the hole is only becoming more painful. That’s what she said! For some reason, no matter how many girls he can bring back home, he still feels the need to keep getting more to feel good about himself. If said man would spend time alone away from the apps and the bars, and truly feel the pain in his heart at the core of the issue, then he would figure out that he needs to hand himself the love he is constantly searching for elsewhere. But he cannot arrive at this place unless he sits with the trigger of needing sex and following the thought patterns that come with the trigger to tell him what happened in the first place. This much needed process could look like this:
The pickup artist, let’s call him Chad, gets a trigger to start swiping on Tinder to find a hot chick to score for the night. Fuckboys, I am sorry to have to expose you. My deepest condolences. Instead of going straight for his phone and rewarding the desire, Chad decided to sit down and breathe with the uncomfortable sensation, while observing the thoughts that came with it. In this moment of solitude, Chad started noticing stories in his mind about how he had to get a girl so he could feel good about himself. And about how if he did not, then he would be lame and a failure. He then started asking himself why he would be lame and a failure. He knows plenty of successful, virgin nerds who are chill and not failures. He sat with the sensation of feeling like a failure for not getting a girl and remembered himself feeling the same way in high school. All of his buddies were getting all the hot girls, while he was always left entertaining the girl that everyone ran away from. Every day he felt so envious of his friends and so ashamed of himself. He felt worthless and so lame for not being able to get the girls he desired, as well as imagined his friends thinking he was a dweeb. All he wanted to do was prove to them that he was like them, but he never was. He was now realizing how much it hurt to sit with that pain for so long and never truly face it. The pain was still unbearable for him to tolerate, so he immediately met with a girl on Tinder and later had sex with a different girl at the bar that night. Ah, good old Chad. But what could he have done in that moment to break the spell?
Chad was able to arrive at the level of awareness over why the hole in his heart was there in the first place. This is always the essential first step to healing and creating change. But once Chad arrived at the source of pain, it was too much for him to face. The level of actually facing the pain is where most people fail. It’s like when you finally got to the boss stage of Super Mario Bros and Bowser just kept being a motherfucker, so you threw your remote on the floor and called it a day. Unlike running away, the only way to transcend the wound is to sit with it intentionally. In that moment, Chad should have felt his younger self in the room and empathized with his feelings, without any shame. He should be ashamed of all that Axe body spray he was wearing back then. This room stinks! Because once you remove the shame and resistance towards an internal wound and lather it with compassion, you free it from its bondage. It no longer becomes so heavy and it invites you to truly sit with it. And the more you sit with the wound without needing to run away from it, the more it will stop running your life. In this instance, if Chad learned to sit with the trigger, instead of immediately running away and chasing tail, then he would stop needing to numb it with the addiction.
Of course, all of this self-discovery and healing can only happen when you are in a room by yourself, offering yourself the love you needed to hand yourself all this time. No! That does not mean getting out your vibrator. This vehicle for self-love leads us to the final section about becoming your own best friend.
BE YOUR OWN BESTIE
The words you have dreaded to hear from any sort of romantic interest are the words you need to be telling yourself right now, “Can we be besties?” Oh boy, those eighth-grade memories still sting. The phrase, “wherever you go, there you are” couldn’t be more true. No matter where you find yourself location-wise, or situation-wise, you are always there with yourself. The truth is, the world only serves as a mirror into our own consciousness. External situations trigger unconscious mechanisms in our psyche that give rise to thoughts that lead to perceptions that create our behavior. So, it’s not the happenings of the world that make us feel, think, or act, in a certain way, but rather our personal reaction to those occurrences. As you can see, there truly is no escape from ourselves no matter what we try to do. Ok, maybe besides taking a whopping dose of psilocybin. Since no escape exists, we might as well learn to love this prison we find ourselves in, and we can only do that by learning how to become our own best friend.
Again, as the pattern of this article may predict, you can only get good at being your own best friend if you spend time alone. We unconsciously always look for distractions to get away from our minds. If you look at most dinner tables at a restaurant, people are just staring at their smartphones, swiping away on social media. This unfortunate reality reveals how other people are not stimulating enough to distract ourselves from our minds, so we need to add a smartphone on top of that. Going even deeper, the people around them physically are not fixing the pain inside of them enough, so they go on social media to try and add to the love and approval they are desperately looking for, in the form of interacting with digital avatars. This habit occurs for the most part because we can only give out love to others and receive it to the degree we have loved ourselves. Since, as a collective, we cannot sit with ourselves away from distraction, we are greatly lacking the skill of self-love. No, that self-love does not mean cuddling yourself, while eating ice cream and watching Bridget Jones’s Diary. Put succinctly, self-love entails giving yourself constant compassion for the pain you are moving through on a daily basis. And we can never offer ourselves that compassion, if all we do is distract ourselves from the happenings of our mind.
We are currently treating ourselves as if our lifelong friend came to us with a personal crisis, while being quite emotional, and all we did was scroll on Instagram while they were talking and finding an excuse to go once they finally shut up. Alright, fine, we’ve all done that once or twice over the phone, don’t lie! In our solitude, we must listen to our thought patterns that stem from unresolved pain from hurtful situations and offer ourselves compassion. In its deepest essence, that is how we learn to become our own best friend. And once we have learned this skill, we can begin to love ourselves, which will allow us to genuinely appreciate the people around us much more, since they will no longer serve as an escape mechanism from our pain. Put differently, we can only sit with others lovingly and with grace to the degree in which we can do the same for ourselves.
¹ Dunham, Will. “Would you rather sit and think or get shocked? You'd be surprised.” Reuters (2014).
