Being Alone: What Do Our Emotions Tell Us?
Many of my clients come to Mind Coach seeking a thinking partner to help them process their thoughts. They want to feel both calm and confident in their professional and personal lives. Recently, I’ve noticed that many of us get stuck when we find ourselves alone. In exploring the experience of being alone, we’ve encountered assortment of emotions that can give us clues about what might best serve us. Once we identify what we’re actually feeling, we can make conscious choices about how to move forward.
Three Stories, Three Struggles
I met with Michael one morning, frustration evident in his voice. He works remotely and lamented that he couldn’t get himself to do anything on his to-do list. “I just sit there,” he said, “avoiding everything and scrolling on my phone instead.” He labeled himself as lazy and he was profoundly bored. His work had lost its sparkle and his mind craved something more engaging.
I later met with Jason, whose voice carried a sad weight. An avid disc golfer and beloved member of his club, he had been sidelined for months, recovering from ankle surgery. “I feel so disconnected,” he shared. Jason was not only alone, but genuinely lonely, missing the companionship and community that had been central to his identity.
That week, I also met with Rob, a successful executive who’d been escaping to his property in the woods. ‘I should be working,” he kept saying. Yet as he described his time in nature — the quiet mornings, the space to think big thoughts, the freedom from constant interruptions — I could hear something else: he wasn’t lonely or bored. He was experiencing genuine solitude, and it was exactly what he needed.
Understanding the Spectrum: Boredom, Loneliness, and Solitude
When we’re alone, we can feel boredom, loneliness, or solitude. What’s the difference?
Boredom is the state of being bored, feeling weary because we’re unoccupied or lack interest in our current activity. Loneliness is sadness because we have no friends or company. Solitude is the state or situation of being alone.
All three — solitude, loneliness, and boredom — can be extremely uncomfortable. They all lack external stimuli and quick dopamine hits. They all require some sort of effort: overcoming the hurdle of discomfort of facing our own thoughts. We may experience fear of slipping into rumination and getting stuck in negative narratives and terrifying stories with catastrophic endings. We may be faced with wrestling challenging questions and weighty decisions.
The Hidden Power of Discomfort
Yet all of these states have advantages. Solitude leads to creativity and independent thought — it can be the catalyst for discovery. Loneliness can be a signal to seek connection, to make ourselves understood, and to forge relationships with mutual effort. Boredom can prompt us to seek new experiences, to learn, to build, and to invent. It drives innovation. While solitude can lead to loneliness and boredom, it can also recharge and provide a break from overstimulation.
I have a theory that the person who invented the wheel was bored with walking. They thought to themselves, ‘There’s got to be a better way to get from A to B. I’m sick of carrying this heavy load and walking on my two legs.” Maybe someone yelled at them for sitting down to tinker with a rock rather than continue walking with the group. Maybe they needed to be bored and alone to play with it and figure it out, to follow the spark of creativity and innovation. Maybe they needed that inner fire that said, “Seriously? We’re still doing this whole walking thing? I’m DONE!”
Trapped in the Attention Economy
Because we tend to avoid discomfort, it’s easier to seek quick dopamine hits, and we can easily become addicted to external stimulation, novelty, and validation. We now live in an attention economy. We find it easier to be entertained by our cell phones than to activate our own brains for cognitive demand.
And now we’re experiencing the AI revolution, which provides us with simulated companionship — an easy antidote. While AI companionship can be useful for those who are genuinely isolated, such as the elderly or those living in rural remote areas, it robs us of the opportunity for growth and true connection. It feels like fast food or candy, offering a sugar rush without any nutritional value.
AI companions leave us feeling validated, no matter what. Our own brains can create vicious cycles of distorted thinking leading to social withdrawal. We turn to AI, which means less honest feedback, which in turn deepens the delusions. Could we benefit from more curiosity, more challenge, and the kind of honest reflection that helps us see ourselves clearly? True human mental health professionals — coaches like myself — help us distinguish between fact and fiction through curious questions and genuine insights. True human friends offer us the gift of authentic perspective when we need it most.
Awakening Our Inner Rebel
How do we identify the feelings of discomfort? What is it telling us? We know what we need, but it’s easier to grab the phone — in the same way that we know an apple is better for us, yet even when we can see it in the fruit bowl, we still go for the Skittles! What to do? Luckily, we have a rebel inside our brains. How can we activate that rebel yell? When the surgeon general announced in the 1960s that smoking caused lung cancer, many adults were able to quit. Teenagers, who are natural rebels, continued to smoke cigarettes. It wasn’t until the surgeon general changed the marketing campaign to say “the tobacco industry is manipulating you so that you continue to spend your money on them and sacrifice your life to them” that the teens began to quit smoking. They resisted authority and wanted to think for themselves. No one was going to tell them how to spend their money or live their lives.
We can challenge social norms too. We can live with intentionality. Why would we give away our attention for free to Silicon Valley and Chinese billionaires? How do we choose to spend our precious resource instead? How do we choose to direct our focus?
The Science of Awe and Transcendence
A recent study from Peking University showed that people who experience awe tend to view solitude in a more positive light than those who don’t. Subjects were asked to imagine times they felt awe in the past, then reflect on how lonely they felt at that time. Those who experienced awe could feel alone, but not lonely. This led to a more positive view of solitude. The self-transcendent nature of awe negates the feeling of loneliness and gives rise to the freedom to contemplate universal spiritual questions.
As quoted in the report: “Awe typically arises when people encounter something physically or mentally vast, and feel a need to change their mental structure to accommodate the experience. Our experiences are self-transcendental, allowing people to transcend their current frames of reference and feel connected to a greater entity. As a self-transcendental emotion, awe may evoke feeling alone, but not lonely, breaking the misconception that solitude leads to loneliness. In the presence of a grand entity, people can free themselves from their daily triviality and might feel only themselves speaking to the grand entity, and therefore feel alone. However, this feeling alone doesn’t come with loneliness because self-transcendence provides a deep sense of connectedness, usually with an entity larger than people themselves, such as culture, humanity, or all of existence.”
Three Paths Forward
By the end of that week, each of these clients had made a breakthrough — not by fixing their “problem” with being alone, but by listening to what their emotions were telling them and making conscious choices.
Michael’s boredom was signaling that his brilliant mind needed a challenge. He decided to pursue his project using a different solution he’d been longing to play with — something no one else on his team used, yet his gut told him the whole department could benefit from it. “It feels like play,” he told me excitedly, “like tinkering with a new toy.” His boredom hadn’t been a weakness; it had been his creativity knocking, asking to come out and explore.
Jason’s loneliness was calling him back to connection, but not in the way he’d expected. He couldn’t play disc golf, but he could still be part of his community. He decided to have lunch with his friends, even though he couldn’t join them on the course. “I want to cheer them on,” he said. It turns out they’d missed him just as much — his presence had always been about more than just his golf game. His loneliness had guided him toward the connection he truly needed.
Rob’s solitude was actually serving him perfectly, but guilt was blocking him from receiving its gifts. As we talked, he came to a powerful realization: those weekends in the deep forest of ancient trees connected him to something far greater than himself. This sense of awe gave him the ability to zoom out and see the big picture, to strategize and envision a better future for his company. Without that transcendental solitude, he got sucked into the minutia of administration, which actually slowed down his progress. His guilt dissolved as he recognized solitude as a leadership tool, not a luxury.
Choosing Our Own Narrative
In the end, we get to decide how we experience being alone, and whether being alone is what we need most at that moment. If we’re feeling boredom, do we want to create and innovate? If we’re feeling lonely, do we want to seek real connection? And in seeking connection, do we want to reach out to others and experience a social connection through human relationships? Or do we want to remain alone and open ourselves up to awe so that we feel a transcendental connection?
There’s no right way to be alone. We can choose to narrate the story of that experience rather than allow another person, corporation, or algorithm to decide for us.
The key isn’t avoiding being alone — it’s learning to listen to what our emotions are telling us when we are alone. When do we need stimulation that leads to innovation and personal growth? When do we need true human connection — reciprocated honesty and respect, or simply a hug? When do we need space to connect with nature, to dream, to create?
What would change in our daily lives if we approached solitude with the same curiosity we’d bring to exploring an unknown territory? How might our relationship with being alone shift if we viewed our emotions as messengers rather than problems to solve?
The choice is ours.