6 Ways Being Home Alone Can Be Psychologically Enriching

What is it like to spend time alone in a home (or bedroom) of your own? Will you feel isolated, depressed, and lonely, or will you instead find the experience psychologically rewarding?

In a new review paper, “Solitude in context: A systematic review of how social norms and physical environment shape perceptions of solitary experiences,” Thuy-vy Nguyen of Durham University and Ellen Taylor-Bower of Cambridge University offer answers from 157 scholarly articles they reviewed.

From their wide-ranging review, I will focus on the conditions they describe that contribute to a positive experience of being home alone. I will also discuss other factors that may matter that have not yet been studied systematically.

Home Alone: 6 Ways It Can Be Psychologically Enriching

1. When Having Your Own Place Is an Accomplishment. For young adults, getting to live alone for the first time, when that is what they want, can feel like a triumph. It can be a mark of maturity and of independence, of having finally arrived as an adult. Having a place of one’s own can feel like a success to adults of all ages who had previously longed for a place but couldn’t afford it.

For people with physical or psychological challenges and those who worry that such challenges may be on the horizon (e.g., when growing older), every day they can successfully live alone is a day they get to maintain their independence.

For children and adolescents, having a room of their own can feel like an accomplishment. If they have control over their space and who gets to enter it, that can be experienced as a sign of being trusted by their parents.

2. When You’ve Made Your Space Your Own. People who love having a place of their own often personalize those places. Their spaces become reflections of who they really are. They become attached to those places. Children and adolescents can be great at making their rooms their own.

3. When You Experience Your Place as Your Sanctuary. The Single at Heart, who love being single, are more likely to live alone than those who are not Single at Heart. They are especially likely to describe their home as their sanctuary. Even during Covid lockdowns, when so many other people started experiencing their homes as prisons, many of the Single at Heart still experienced their homes as their sanctuaries.

When you are alone in a space that feels like a sanctuary, you can rest and relax, engage in creative pursuits, or practice spirituality. In a place where you feel comfortable and safe, you can learn and grow.

4. When You Use Your Space to Live Authentically. In the privacy of a home of your own or a room of your own, you are free to do what you want without social pressures or judgments. You can be who you really are or try to figure out who you really are and what you really want.

Being home alone can be psychologically enriching when staying home honors your true self. That can happen, for example, when you are feeling pressured to attend some social event that you have no interest in attending, and you give yourself permission to savor your solitude instead.

5. When a Place of Your Own Is a Place Where You Connect With Other People. Alone in your home or in your room, you can connect with other people. Using social media, video games, and augmented reality, as well as texting, emailing, calling, and video chatting can all be ways of maintaining social ties while you are home alone.

Nguyen and Taylor-Bower found in their review that some of these options, such as social media, are especially helpful to people who don’t like being alone; they are in a better mood when they can connect virtually with other people. People also experience positive emotions and feelings of companionship when they play video games online with other people.

There is another way in which spending time alone can be good for our relationships with other people. Some people need to have a sufficient amount of time to themselves in order to be their best selves when they are with other people.

6. When You Know You Can Leave. Being home alone is a psychologically enriching experience when you have chosen your solitude for positive reasons, for all that it offers, and not just because you are anxious or you have been marginalized or ostracized. Choosing to be alone for positive reasons can also mean that you are free to leave. If you get tired of being alone, if your virtual connections just aren’t as satisfying as you’d like them to be, you can walk out the door and go be with the people whose company you enjoy.