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Why being a loner may be good for your health
Improved creativity
- Being a loner boosts the creative space.
- Creativity has two key elements: originality and usefulness.
- Personality traits commonly associated with creativity are openness (or receptiveness), self-efficacy (confidence), and autonomy (independence).
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Being a Loner can be good
- Emerging research suggests there are upsides to being reclusive, all by ourselves, minding our own business – for both our work lives and our emotional well-being.
- Prolonged solitude or extreme social isolation is proven to be harmful, but a good amount of alone time has its advantages.
Types of Social Withdrawal
Social withdrawal is categorized into three types:
- Shyness caused by fear or anxiety
- Avoidance, caused by a dislike of socializing
- Unsociability, caused by a preference for being alone.
Inward Focus
- Since ancient times, people know the connection between isolation and mental focus. Cultures with traditions of old religions believe that solitude is important for enlightenment.
- A loner's brain goes in a state of active mental rest, due to the stillness of being alone. When we are with people, the brain can’t help but pay attention. That can be termed as a distraction.
- Daydreaming in the absence of such distractions activates the brain’s default-mode network. This network helps to consolidate memory and understand others’ emotions. Letting a mind wander helps with focus in the long term and strengthens your sense of both yourself and others.
- Periods of solitude actually help when it comes time to socialize, with the occasional absence of focus helping concentration in the long run.
The Loner: Useful Solitude
There is a difference between useful solitude and extreme isolation. If someone stops caring about people and cuts off all contact, this could point to pathological neglect of social relations, becoming dysfunctional - this is dangerous.
Being a creative loner while having interactions, is about striking the right balance, and any form of extreme behaviour is unhealthy.
Loner: The Conclusion
- It’s hard to be introspective, self-aware, and fully relaxed unless you have occasional solitude.
- Introverts tend to have fewer but stronger friendships – which has been linked to greater happiness.
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Being Alone Affects The Brain
Human beings form social circles averaging to 150 individuals; this is called the Dunbar’s Number.
A lack of people around us can actually make our brain shrink. The region known for formation of new memories, called the 'dentate gyrus', reduces in size if there is no human interaction. There is also a reduction in spatial processing (locating objects in a given space) and focus.
Solitude, Loneliness And Isolation
Positive solitude is a state of being alone without being lonely, in a contented manner.
Loneliness, on the other hand, is isolation with a hunger for social contact, something that distorts one’s perceptions, damaging the ability to interact in a normal way with others. It also lowers one’s self-esteem leading to a loneliness loop, characterized by social withdrawal and depression.
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Research has recently shown that people tend to feel unhappy whenever they focus on what brings them happiness in the long term.
However, if they chose to stay in the present moment, their happiness would not be in any way affected. Therefore, if you really want to feel happy, try focusing on the current happiness instead of thinking at a future one, because that can only bring worries and stress to your mind.
Tips to be happy
Being happy is, in big lines, a matter of choice. If you try to pay less attention to everybody else's life on social media and accept the unpleasant moments that life makes you face, you might as well discover that happiness is reachable, as long as you do not make a constant obsession out of it.
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Loneliness is a perception issue
Loneliness has more to do with our perceptions than how much company we have: it is just as possible to feel very lonely surrounded by people as it is to be content with little social contact.
Dealing with loneliness through creativity
One way people have always dealt with loneliness is through creativity. By metamorphosing their reality into art, lonely people throughout history have managed to interchange the sense of community relationships could foster with their creative outputs.
The artist Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is known for his paintings of American cityscapes inhabited by closed-off figures who seem to embody a vision of modern loneliness.
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