People who prefer being alone may not be antisocial or depressed — they’ve discovered that the quality of their own company is higher than what most social interactions provide

by Lachlan Brown | May 5, 2026, 9:38 pm

There’s a quiet judgment reserved for people who spend a lot of time alone. It’s rarely spoken directly, but it’s embedded in the questions people ask. “Are you okay?” “Don’t you get lonely?” “You should really get out more.” The underlying assumption is always the same: if you prefer your own company to other people’s, something must be wrong. You’re either avoiding something, recovering from something, or missing out on something you can’t see.

But a growing body of research suggests that for many people who prefer solitude, the opposite is true. They’re not withdrawing from life. They’ve made a calculation, often unconsciously, that the quality of their internal experience when alone is consistently higher than what most social interactions provide. And rather than being a sign of dysfunction, that preference turns out to be associated with some of the most psychologically adaptive states the research can measure.

Solitude Is Not Loneliness

The first thing the research makes clear is that solitude and loneliness are fundamentally different constructs. A study on the narratives of solitude across the lifespan published in Frontiers in Psychology defines solitude as the state of being alone and not physically with another person, and distinguishes it from loneliness, the feeling of alienation from others, and isolation, the experience of choiceless and extended alone time. Loneliness can be experienced in a crowded room. Solitude is a state you choose. And the distinction between the two predicts almost everything about whether being alone feels restorative or destructive.

The same research found that self-determined solitude, time alone that is actively chosen rather than imposed, is associated with more positive emotions, particularly in adults and older adults. Most of the enjoyment people report in solitude comes in the form of low-arousal positive affect: relaxation, calm, a sense of ease. Not excitement. Not stimulation. Something quieter and, for many people, more sustainable.

What Solitude Actually Does to the Brain

Research by Nguyen, Ryan, and Deci, grounded in self-determination theory, found that solitude has a general deactivation effect on emotional experience. It reduces both high-arousal positive affect (excitement, enthusiasm) and high-arousal negative affect (anxiety, anger, stress). Solitude doesn’t make you happier in the way people typically imagine happiness. It makes you calmer. It turns the volume down on emotional reactivity across the board.

Critically, the researchers found that when people actively chose to be alone, solitude led to relaxation and reduced stress. Choice was the key variable. The same state that produces distress when imposed produces restoration when selected. For people who have developed a genuine preference for solitude, the choice element is inherent: they aren’t being forced into isolation. They’re opting into a state that their system has learned is regulating.

Solitude Seekers Are Not Antisocial

One of the most persistent misconceptions about people who prefer solitude is that they must be socially anxious, avoidant, or deficient in social skills. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology directly addressed this. The researchers note that individuals with a high preference for solitude seek solitude because they find time alone pleasant, not because they find social interactions unpleasant. Solitude seekers do not necessarily feel shy or socially anxious. Children with a high preference for solitude do not actively avoid others.

Interestingly, the study also found that people perceived those with a high preference for solitude as more competent than those with a low preference. The researchers speculate this may be because preference for solitude is associated with maturity and independence in lay beliefs. Choosing to spend time alone, particularly as an adult, signals a kind of self-sufficiency that people intuitively respect even as they find it slightly unsettling.

The Quality Threshold

Here’s the part that rarely gets discussed. People who prefer solitude haven’t rejected other people. They’ve developed a quality threshold for social interaction that most casual encounters don’t meet. They’ve experienced enough conversations that go nowhere, enough social events that drain more than they provide, enough pleasant-but-empty interactions to know what their time alone gives them in comparison: uninterrupted thought, genuine relaxation, the freedom to follow their own rhythm without the cognitive overhead of managing someone else’s expectations.

This doesn’t mean they don’t value deep connection. Many people who prefer solitude have a small number of close relationships they maintain with genuine care and attention. What they’ve eliminated is the middle layer: the acquaintance drinks, the obligatory gatherings, the networking events, the social maintenance that feels like work because it is work. They’ve made a trade, less social breadth for more internal depth, and for them the math works out clearly in favor of depth.

Recent research from the University of Michigan, published in Nature Communications, found that people who hold positive beliefs about being alone don’t just tolerate solitude. They actually feel more content after spending time alone in daily life. The study, which included data from nine countries across six continents, found that beliefs about solitude consistently shape whether people experience being alone as isolating or restorative. People who viewed solitude as a positive experience reported less loneliness and greater well-being after time alone, and the benefits were largest for people who spent the most time alone.

The researchers also found that contemporary media is ten times more likely to describe being alone as harmful than beneficial, and that exposure to such messaging causally impacts people’s beliefs about being alone. In other words, the cultural narrative that solitude is dangerous may be actively making people feel worse about a state that, for many, is genuinely nourishing.

What This Actually Looks Like

The person who prefers being alone isn’t the person sitting at home wishing the phone would ring. They’re the person who turned the phone off deliberately and felt a wave of relief. They aren’t lonely. They’ve just learned something that the research increasingly confirms: solitude, when chosen, is not the absence of connection. It’s a different kind of connection, one directed inward rather than outward, and for some people, it provides what social interaction often promises but rarely delivers: the opportunity to replenish, to process, to exist without performing.

That’s not antisocial. That’s not depressed. That’s a person who has discovered, through enough experience to know the difference, that their own company consistently meets a standard that most social settings don’t. And rather than pathologizing that, the research suggests we might be better off understanding it.

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown is an entrepreneur and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media, a digital publishing network reaching tens of millions of readers monthly. He holds a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies from Deakin University, though his real education came afterward: a warehouse job shifting TVs, a stretch of anxiety in his mid-twenties, and the slow discovery that studying the mind is not the same as learning how to live well. He started experimenting with Buddhist principles during breaks at the warehouse and eventually began writing about what he was learning. That writing became Hack Spirit, a widely read personal development site, and his book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism became a bestseller. His work breaks down complex ideas into frameworks people can apply immediately, whether they are navigating a career change, a difficult relationship, or the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. Lachlan splits his time between Singapore and Saigon. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, digital innovation, and the intersection of Eastern philosophy with modern life. His perspective comes from having built things from scratch, failed at some of them, and learned that clarity comes from practice, not theory.