There was a weekend a few years ago when David was away visiting family and I had the apartment entirely to myself.
No plans. No obligations. Just silence, a pot of tea, and two full days stretching out in front of me.
I remember sitting cross-legged on my meditation cushion that first morning and feeling something unexpected: a low, creeping unease.
Not loneliness, exactly. More like a discomfort I couldn’t quite name. A restlessness. The urge to pick up my phone, text someone, find something to fill the quiet.
And I remember thinking: Why does being alone feel like something to fix?
That question has stayed with me. Because so many of us have been conditioned to treat solitude as a warning sign rather than a gift. We reach for noise, for distraction, for company the moment we find ourselves alone, as if aloneness itself were the problem.
But what if the discomfort isn’t evidence that something is wrong with you? What if it’s just evidence that you haven’t yet learned to be with yourself?
A psychologist put it plainly: “Solitude is only unbearable to people who haven’t yet made peace with their own company, and that peace is always available, even if it arrives late.”
That hit me. Not because it’s harsh, but because it’s hopeful. Peace with yourself is never out of reach. It’s just a practice most of us were never taught.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about solitude, and why learning to sit with yourself might be the most important thing you ever do.
Discomfort in solitude is normal, not diagnostic
The first thing to understand is that feeling uncomfortable alone doesn’t mean you’re broken, emotionally underdeveloped, or destined for loneliness.
Discomfort in solitude is almost universal, especially in a world that has been specifically designed to keep you stimulated.
Notifications. Podcasts. Streaming services. Social media. There is an entire economy built around ensuring you never have to sit quietly with your own thoughts.
So when you finally do find yourself alone, in real silence, the mind often panics. It doesn’t know what to do without input. That’s not a character flaw. That’s conditioning.
The Buddhist concept of dukkha describes a kind of background dissatisfaction that runs through ordinary experience, a subtle itch we keep trying to scratch with external things. Solitude strips away the scratching. And at first, all you feel is the itch.
But the itch doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means you’ve stopped distracting yourself from something that was already there.
That’s actually progress, even if it doesn’t feel like it yet.
What you’re actually afraid of in the silence
Most people don’t fear solitude itself. They fear what surfaces when the noise stops.
Unprocessed emotions. Uncomfortable truths. The questions they’ve been quietly avoiding for months or years.
Am I living the life I actually want?
Am I becoming the person I meant to become?
What am I carrying that I haven’t dealt with?
Solitude doesn’t create those questions. It just makes them harder to ignore.
This is why people who struggle with being alone often describe the experience as anxiety or restlessness, when what they’re actually describing is the discomfort of self-confrontation.
And here’s the thing: avoiding that confrontation doesn’t make the underlying material go away. It just delays it. Usually until a crisis forces the reckoning.
The people who develop a genuine ease with solitude are often those who have done the harder work of looking inward, not because it felt good, but because they stopped running from what they found there.
Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing
This distinction matters more than most people realize.
Loneliness is the pain of feeling disconnected. Solitude is the practice of being intentionally alone. One is a wound. The other is a choice, and in time, it can become a resource.
You can feel profoundly lonely in a room full of people. And you can feel deeply at peace when you’re entirely on your own.
The confusion between the two is part of why so many people rush to fill their alone time with company, even company that drains them. The fear of loneliness sends them into noise and social obligation, when what they actually needed was a different relationship with themselves.
Learning to distinguish between the two is one of the most useful things you can do. When you feel that discomfort in solitude, pause and ask:
- Is this actual longing for connection, for a specific person or a genuine sense of belonging?
- Or is this just discomfort with stillness?
- Am I reaching for distraction to avoid something I need to face?
- Would company right now nourish me, or just postpone something?
Not every pull toward people or noise is worth following. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is stay with the discomfort a little longer.
Solitude is a skill, and you can build it
Here’s what rarely gets said: being comfortable alone is something you develop. It’s not a personality trait you either have or don’t.
Some people learn it early. Many don’t. That’s fine. The timeline doesn’t matter much. What matters is whether you’re willing to practice.
Start small. Genuinely small.
Sit without your phone for ten minutes. Walk without headphones. Eat a meal without a screen in front of you. Not as a productivity hack, but as a genuine experiment in being present with yourself.
Notice what comes up. Resist the urge to immediately soothe it.
Over time, the window of tolerance expands. What once felt unbearable for five minutes becomes manageable for twenty. Then the discomfort starts to soften into something else: a kind of quiet companionship with yourself that you didn’t know was possible.
I started a daily morning practice years ago, waking at 5:30 before the city got loud, sitting with my journal and a candle, doing nothing in particular except being present. It took weeks before it felt anything other than awkward.
Now it’s the part of my day I protect most fiercely.
What becomes possible when you’re comfortable alone
This is the part people don’t talk about enough: what opens up on the other side of learning to be with yourself.
Decisions become clearer, because you’re no longer making them to escape discomfort or win approval. You start to know your own preferences, opinions, and desires more precisely, because you’ve spent time actually listening to yourself. Relationships improve, because you’re no longer using people as a buffer against your own inner life.
When you don’t need company to feel okay, you can choose it from a much freer place. You can be present with others without the low hum of anxiety that comes from depending on them to regulate you.
There’s also a creativity that tends to emerge in solitude. Ideas, insights, directions you couldn’t hear over the noise of constant connection. Many traditions, from the Japanese practice of ma (the wisdom of empty space) to the Quaker emphasis on silent reflection, have long recognized that something important surfaces in stillness.
You don’t have to belong to any tradition to access it. You just have to be willing to sit down and wait.
Final thoughts
Making peace with your own company isn’t a destination. It’s something you return to, again and again, across different seasons of life.
There will be stretches where solitude feels like sanctuary. There will be others where it presses on old wounds you thought you’d healed.
Both are part of the practice.
What matters is that you stop reading the discomfort as evidence that something is wrong with you, and start reading it as an invitation to go a little deeper.
The psychologist’s words still ring true to me: that peace is always available, even if it arrives late.
So if you haven’t found it yet, that’s not a verdict. It’s just where you are right now.
And that’s worth sitting with.
