Alone Time: An Extrovert’s Cheat Code to Life

“What’s your deal?”

“Don’t you get bored?”

“You poor thing. You must be so lonely.”

“I hate being alone with my thoughts.”

These are among the top responses I get when I tell people that I value my alone time. Especially if they know that I’m an extroverted social butterfly, they are even more perplexed. To them, “alone time” equates to boredom, inactivity, and oftentimes, loneliness. I know this because I used to feel the same way. I used to disdain alone time.

I’ve had a number of isolating experiences, such as my upbringing (story for another time), relocating to South America alone, and being a leader in a country I’d just moved to. Most recently, I’m living alone in the COVID19 pandemic. All of these chapters of my life forced me into being alone, which was often an emotional rollercoaster. I even became depressed during certain periods, because I didn’t like myself, so alone time was pure torture.

Over several years, my stance has done a complete 180. I absolutely love alone time, so much so that I schedule it into every day, for a minimum of 30 minutes and up to several hours. It is almost always non-negotiable, and if I miss it, I make up for it the following days. 

I guard my alone time because it has become the cheat code to my life.

How did I make this switch?

The most common misconception about spending time alone is that it equates to loneliness or boredom. This is only true if you allow it to be true. Loneliness and boredom come from a lacking mindset. With this mindset, you miss your friends when alone, or you need to be engaged in some activity, because you are not fully happy or complete without it. 

In order to be good at being alone and reap all its benefits, you must think of time spent alone as solitude. Experiencing solitude comes from an abundance mindset. With this perspective, you see time alone as time with yourself, so you are never really alone. You have an opportunity to get to know yourself better, to go deep into a creative project, and maybe even produce something of value. You fill in the gaps of who you are — becoming your best version — in your time spent in solitude.

How do you become your best version through solitude?

To list a few ways:

• It makes you better in all relationships
• It propels you towards your goals faster
• It teaches you how to generate your own happiness

Ironically, much of the time you spend alone benefits you in the time during which you’re not alone.

The better you are at being alone, the better you are at being with others, in professional and personal settings.

The most successful people self-evaluate. Benjamin Franklin was iconic in this regard. He was constantly refining his virtues for how to behave and treat others. As sociable and charismatic as he was, he couldn’t have achieved such levels of influence if he didn’t spend just as much – if not more – time alone than with others. Below are a few of his 13 virtues on which he intently focused, one-by-one.

• Silence: speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.
• Sincerity: use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and if you speak, speak accordingly.
• Justice: wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

Notice that these virtues apply to relationships. He was trying to improve himself in different social settings with these virtues. Franklin took the time in between encounters to reflect on what went well and what he could improve on to make others like him more, to make people feel better, and to increase his social influence. He would journal every day to indicate where he succeeded and where he failed in these virtues, and compounded over time, he became one of the most influential people in American history.

Do you self-evaluate? If so, can you do it when you’re hanging out with other people? It’s exhausting – and a little neurotic – to hold a conversation with someone if you’re simultaneously measuring everything you’re saying and trying to read how it’s affecting the other person. Nobody in their right mind acts like this. That’s why we must reflect on these conversations afterwards in preparations for the next one – while we are alone.

I’m an impulsive and emotional person. This demeanor, when untended, hurts the people around me. I started self-evaluating years ago, and I still work on these traits consciously all the time. I’ve seen vast improvements over the years due to this practice, and the people closest to me can attest to this. But those “vast improvements” occur at small increments over time, so you must be patient with yourself. Self-evaluation and self-improvement are lifelong practices. 

Here is my complete guide to self-evaluation, free for you to steal.

Achieving goals faster through alone time

How can you hit a target if you don’t know where it is? If you’re shooting towards your goals blindly, there’s about a one-in-a-million chance that you’ll hit your desired target. Contrarily, if you spend the time to aim towards the goals that you specifically set out for, your chances of hitting them will be much higher.

“Most people live in a world that other people have created for them. Be the designer of your world, and not merely a consumer of it.”

James Clear, Atomic Habits

It’s easy to get stuck in the trap of complacency, especially when you are comfortable. This has happened to me many times. After I’d been living in Chile for eight months, I started to consider my exit plan as I didn’t want to be in Chile for much longer. I was there for work leading a team and had no clear successor at the time. In a conversation with my manager at the eight-month mark, I arbitrarily threw out one year as the amount of additional time I thought it’d take me to build the next wave of leadership, so that I could leave.

Later, though, in my alone time, I felt that one year was far too long. I preferred to leave Chile in six months’ time. So I spent the evening of October 15th alone with a pen and piece of paper. Starting with the goal of promoting a new leader within six months, I then reverse-engineered by asking myself questions like, “What has to happen for so-and-so to be a self-sufficient leader by April 15th?” That night I built a plan, and then followed it every day for the next six months, and we hit the goal perfectly. 

Over a year later, this leader is not only succeeding, but excelling, and building more leaders behind him. If I hadn’t taken the time that evening, I would have been aimlessly wandering towards a loose goal that I hadn’t thought critically about. Maybe I would’ve hit it, but without the intention behind it, I may not have been as effective in instilling leadership principles so deeply that they’ve outlasted my tenure at the company.

Speaking strictly logistically, you need to spend time alone to consider what your targets are. I hit my target largely because I took the time alone to set it in the first place. Then I reflected regularly (also, while alone) to review how we were pacing towards our goals, and calibrated where necessary.

These activities are simple to carry out, but most people don’t do them, and they wonder why they aren’t achieving their goals. A little alone time goes a long way. To insert this simple practice into your life, you will have drastic realizations about where you are going, where you want to go, and the opportunities that you can create to get there.

It’s important to note that, while much alone time may be spent reading and listening to audiobooks/podcasts, not all alone time can be spent consuming content. This isn’t genuine alone time. Simply put, you can’t hear your own inner voice when it’s drowned out by the voices of others. Don’t hide from your thoughts and feelings with other people’s voices while you’re alone.

Generating your own happiness

Perhaps the most undervalued reason to spend a lot of time alone is to build your relationship with yourself. We’ve become such an outward-looking society that we often neglect ourselves. Not only must we look inward, but also sit with our emotions, process our past trauma, and genuinely get to know ourselves.

It’s kind of weird to think we spend the most time in our lives with ourselves and yet many of us don’t actually know ourselves like we know others. Imagine that you spend your entire life with another person (and I mean your entire life, including all things you do in the bathroom) and you don’t really know them. You know surface-level things like the foods they eat and the music they listen to, but you don’t know how they cope with stress, why they hold the religious/spiritual beliefs that they do (or don’t), or the traits they got from their parents that they do and don’t like about themselves.

This is you with yourself, if you don’t spend time alone.

The more time I spent away from my family while living in Chile, the more I came to understand my past trauma and how I developed certain behaviors. This space allowed me to determine which traits I wanted to keep and which ones I wanted to grow out of. I also came to learn how I cope with anxiety, which is what turned it, my lifelong nemesis, into a companion.

When you’re truly happy with yourself, other people can see it. I’m not talking about arrogance (yes, others can see that, too), but rather, authentic self-love. Many people might find this to be cliché or cheesy, but frankly, those people have some inner self-loathing that they need to work through. I had it too. Anybody who has a genuinely healthy relationship with themselves, flaws and all, does not want to tear anyone else down. Rather, I’d argue, they want to help build others up. This is why self-love is a key characteristic of strong leaders. Leaders are not just people with rank over others, but they are people who you want to follow.

People with self-love generate their own happiness. This is because self-love is one of the only things that nobody can ever take from you. If you lost every material item that you owned, you could even smile at the loss, because you’d trained for it.

That’s much of what spending time alone is. It’s training you for loss. You, I, and everyone else will lose many things and people we love in our lifetimes. Because these losses are inevitable, I suggest you make time for yourself now, so that you can get some practice in.

It’s not just preparing you for loss, though, as outlined earlier. In the song “it’s not u it’s me,” 6lack said “Self-love ain’t selfish.” I believe this is true. Self-love is fostered in your time spent alone, and self-love shows itself in all of your relationships, accomplishments, and losses.

All that said, how is it that you learn to love spending time alone?

Know that it might be painful at first. If you haven’t practiced solitude much, you may feel anxious, uncomfortable, or restless the first several times. Remember: this is a practice. You will get better at it the more you do it. And the secret to being good at it is to lean into the discomfort. This is how you harness the magic of solitude. The discomfort is a signal. Whether it is remembering something you said that was unintentionally hurtful, recalling a way that someone else hurt you, or realizing that you’re dissatisfied with where you’re at in life, all of these are important pains to sit with.

It was through recalling the way he offended and hurt others that Ben Franklin developed his 13 virtues and set out to embody them daily. It was through sitting with my anxiety that I learned how to make it a friend rather than foe. It was through feeling discontented with my arbitrary year-long exit plan that I created an ambitious 6-month plan that we accomplished and blew ourselves away with our results. The only way out of your pain is through it. And if you feel that you’ve hit a low point as you unravel things deep within yourself, get excited. The lower you fall, the higher you bounce back. That’s right, I said it. Rock bottom is a launching pad, if you choose to spend time alone, intentionally.

So what’s stopping you?

The first obstacle to overcome is the mental framework I shared earlier. Stop equating alone time to loneliness and rather, see it as an opportunity. Consider your solitude as time spent with yourself, rather than empty time in between everything else. It’s like Jack Butcher’s design principle about blank space on a website. It is not empty, but rather, it frames what’s within it.

The second barrier is a tough one. We live in a hyperconnected world. The Internet is on and available to you 24/7/365. You can hold a conversation or fill your head with any noise imaginable at any moment of the day. For that reason you must create barriers. Sometimes willpower isn’t enough to stop you.

You can’t just dabble in alone time (i.e. taking 2 minutes to look at a tree between a day full of tweeting and absorbing content). You must go deep into alone time regularly. So whether that means locking your phone in a drawer and turning off the computer, deleting apps and blocking websites, or literally chucking your devices out the window, build in tactics to help you. You don’t need to be hyper-disciplined, you just need to plan well. Schedule your alone time in advance, and figure out what you need to sacrifice in order to make it happen.

The third barrier, which should be less of an issue at the time I write this due to the pandemic, is social pressure. Because most people don’t value their alone time, it makes it even more challenging for you to preserve your own. You get invited to do fun things and to go places with people you like! How could you ever turn that down for time spent alone? 

It’s a balance. We all need social time – everyone to varying degrees – but it can’t be all the time. The more you practice being alone, the better you’ll be able to gauge when you need to say no to a social event or not. Oftentimes you don’t even have to choose between an event and solitude. You just need to keep yourself in check and balance the two throughout the weeks and months.

Personally, I notice that when I’ve missed a few days of alone time and/or journaling, I am more irritable, impulsive, and reactive. Due to this, it’d behoove me and the people around me if I would take some time alone to journal and process whatever happened over the last few days. If I can do this before the social event, great! If this need is at odds with the scheduling of the event, I might RSVP no. There’s no hard and fast rule – you have to figure it out for yourself.

If you have a family, this is certainly more challenging. I’ve found that the best way to achieve the alone time you need when you live with family is to communicate your needs compassionately (this also works with people you don’t live with who don’t understand why you RSVP’d no to the event). And guess what? The best way to communicate your needs compassionately is to prepare while alone. Spend time alone and consider the feelings of your family and friends. How might they feel when I tell them I need some time alone? How can I assure them that this is nothing against them? How can I communicate that this is actually beneficial to them and I’m keeping their best interest in mind? Try it — you’ll be surprised at the effectiveness.

Are you starting to see the benefit of alone time?

Going from a depressive, self-loathing adolescent to an authentically fulfilled young adult was not a simple or easy process. I’ve had to face some inner demons. I tore myself apart piece by piece, only to build a stronger and healthier version of me over several iterations.

And I’m never done. Self-improvement is a lifelong process. So this is my parting advice for you: Fall in love with the process. Get comfortable with the discomfort. Just because you have a bad day, week, month, or even year, it doesn’t mean you can’t become the person you want to be. All you need to do is try again tomorrow.

Nobody is ever satisfied with where they are in life. Even the people you admire most, who appear to have everything that you want and more. Don’t focus on them during your time spent in solitude. Your time alone is for you to create the best version of yourself, piece by piece, day by day.

CALL TO ACTION:

• Review my self-evaluation guide and download my templates.
  • Use them as a guide! Make them your own so that they fit for you.
• Schedule at least 30 minutes of alone time into your day – not for consuming content, but for one of the following:
  • Journaling
  • Walking (without podcasts/audios etc)
  • Sitting and thinking (no TV)

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

Big thanks to Brandon Zhang, Andrew Yu, Robbie Crabtree, Christina Luo, Michael Koutsoubis and Yannick Hallas for the feedback and contributions to this piece.