Research shows solitude is better for your health when it’s not too intense

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Hiking by yourself deep in a forest and similar episodes of intense solitude are not as likely to restore energy and enhance social connectedness as less complete forms of solitude, such as reading in a café or listening to Spotify while commuting, research by Oregon State University suggests.

The findings are important because of solitude’s role in building connectedness, a key factor in a person’s overall health picture. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, strong social ties are linked with a longer lifespan, better mental health and a lower risk of serious illness, including heart disease, stroke and dementia.

Morgan Quinn Ross, assistant professor of communication in the OSU College of Liberal Arts, and Scott Campbell of the Ohio State University surveyed nearly 900 adults in the United States and found that activities that provide less complete forms of solitude, like playing a game on your phone or going to a movie by yourself, offer some advantages over a solitary drive in the desert or writing in a secluded cabin.

“We learned that less complete solitude is more likely to restore energy and maintain a feeling of connection with others,” Ross said. “In a world where social interaction is almost always just a click away, we need to understand how to balance social interaction with different types of solitude.”

Ross and Campbell examined conditions under which an individual’s solitude might be “shaded” by people and/or technology; accessibility to others and engagement with media can shade the solitude experience by causing time alone to be more social in nature, they note. 

The researchers built a matrix of solitude that includes a base level – no interaction with people – and a total level, which refers to being inaccessible to others and not engaging with media. The matrix allowed them to investigate the tradeoff of solitude – i.e., does experiencing it more completely maximize restoration, while experiencing it less completely maximizes relatedness?

Ross notes that a commonly held theory, Communicate Bond Belong, posits that social interaction can build relatedness with others at the expense of social energy, and that solitude can restore social energy but at the cost of relatedness. Social energy describes a person’s capacity for social interaction and can be thought of as a battery that can be fully charged, partially charged or drained.

“Our study suggests that solitude is in fact not the flipside of social interaction,” Ross said. “Whereas more intense social interaction yields connection but depletes energy, more intense solitude depletes both energy and connection. Solitude does not seem to function simply as a way to regain energy used in social interaction.”

The scientists also learned that solitude was less detrimental to well-being for individuals who thought it helped them restore energy and maintain connection, regardless of how much energy their social interactions cost them. 

Interestingly, these findings typically hold for both extroverts and introverts, said Ross, who added that one suggestion based on the study that people might try is attempting to seek solitude only when constructively motivated to do so.

“If you have a positive attitude toward solitude – because you use it to restore energy and know that you will be able to connect with people later – then choosing solitude will probably make you feel better,” he said. “But if you choose solitude because of a negative attitude toward social interaction – because you don't want to talk to people – it will probably make you feel worse.”

The study was published in PLOS One.