Regular doses of solitude are crucial for your brain

The current pandemic has us facing one of our biggest fears: staying alone, dealing with our own emotions and thoughts. However, this situation has also a great deal of advantages. While in self-isolation, we can use this time to improve ourselves by discovering new hobbies or just developing skills we have already gathered, cultivating our mind through reading. In fewer words, we finally have the time to learn how to deal with ourselves. And this is always a good thing.

As difficult as it may seem, self-isolation has its benefits. When spending your time alone, the key to handle this situation is to find a purpose in your suffering. In other words, focus on why your suffering is doing good to others as well as to yourself. Furthermore, the fact that you stick to a certain routine or that
everybody is doing the same thing provides you not only with a meaning, but also with a sense of belonging.

“Loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed but simply that one is alive.”

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.

Such acts of thoughtfulness may go from small and seemingly insignificant to as extravagant as buying matching jewelry. Keeping each other in mind to the point where you’re considering them in your regular purchases, you’re probably in a committed relationship.

It’s a big demonstration of trust if one or both of you have keys to the other’s house.

Those conversations are usually reserved for medical appointments and the occasional funny story.

If you can speak with your lover about intimate bodily functions, you’re probably more than casual friends; especially if you find that typically private and personal conversations become commonplace between the two of you.

In a committed relationship, however, it matters what the other person wants to do and where they see themselves in the future. So if you and your partner are making plans together, there’s a good likelihood that your relationship is in for the long haul.

The speed-reading habit is making us lose our deep attention and focus, gradually shunning denser, more complicated content. Instead of optimizing for speed, we need to optimize for comprehension, deep understanding, and retention of information.

Deep or slow reading, when the brain is attentive, absorbing, understanding and analyzing text expands our attention span and improves concentration and learning.

The brain develops stronger analytical skills and gets into critical thinking mode, forming new connections and even creates new ideas.

Deep focusing on a book is one of the best investments of your time.

Being alone is uncomfortable at times. But when it comes to creative work and thinking, it’s important to take a long-term view on those moments of discomfort. 

Being alone has a kind of a rebound effect. It’s like bitter medicine, creating more positive emotions and less self-reported depression down the line.

Bradberry and Kruse define leadership as a process of social influence which maximizes the efforts of others toward the achievement of a greater good. But even this definition is too narrow.

• Some leaders influence others not for the greater good: Adolf Hitler is an example of leading millions, but his leadership was wicked and barbaric. Following the wrong leader can lead to terrible consequences.
• Leadership “maximizes the efforts of others”: Leadership alone cannot achieve this goal, for individual efforts depend on many factors. People may feel like they live in the shadow of leaders and may find their expectations unfair.

However, leadership can work towards increasing the efforts of others.

Leadership is a process of social influence that works to increase the efforts of others in pursuit of a common goal.

What most do agree with is that good leaders don't wait for a title. They simply lead, and others naturally follow them.

It is an umbrella term we use to cover for all sorts of things most people would rather not name and have no idea how to fix.
Plenty of people like to be alone. But solitude and seclusion are different from loneliness. Loneliness is a state of profound distress.

Primates need to belong to an intimate social group in order to survive; this is especially true for humans.
Separation from your group (either finding yourself alone or finding yourself among a group of people who do not know and understand you) triggers a fight-or-flight response.