Why We Struggle To Be Alone
So often in my therapy sessions, I hear my clients talk about doing just about everything and anything besides being alone. I live in NYC and that's an overstimulating environment, so I know we are not always being set up for stillness. But what it comes down to is most of us these days not only have an addiction to stress, busyness, and chaos - but it's so just hard to sit and be with ourselves and our thoughts alone. You may even have anxiety when you are alone.
If you are someone who:
Can’t sit still and feels wired or restlessness
Is afraid of sitting with your thoughts and feelings
Never is alone, always has someone to talk to or hang with
Never has down time, always packing yourself with plans and things to do
Always stressed and never feeling like life is calm
Feels you have to earn rest and doing “nothing” isn’t “productive”
Then this blog is for you!
Being alone with ourselves is often challenging, but it's a necessary thing to do. If we spend so much time doing and attending to other people and we avoid ourselves, it starts to add up and impact our trust in ourselves and how we see ourselves. It's like neglecting a loved one, they would feel it and be hurt by it eventually. Why doesn't that apply to you?
Here are some reasons it's hard to be alone:
You have a fear of abandonment and don't want others to leave you, so you spend all your time focusing on others
You are addicted to stress because you grew up in a chaotic environment so doing and being busy all the time gives you the cortisol and dopamine hit you need
You can't sit alone with your thoughts and feelings, it would mean facing yourself, your feelings, and your challenges and you want to avoid that and the discomfort it brings
You have low self-esteem and deep feelings of unworthiness, shame, or something else and don’t like sitting with yourself right now
You don't even know who you are outside of your accomplishments or relationships. You are unsure what you would even do if you were alone or what you value or like. You don't have many hobbies or interests that are yours and not involved with other people.
Your nervous system doesn’t currently allow you to relax or be still - you feel wired, restless, or on edge and experience racing thoughts and that feels uncomfortable
You have a negative judgement of yourself if you don't have plans - you make some sort of negative connotation with being alone and feel it means something negative about you if you’re not busy. Theres a story and a narrative here keeping you in the cycle.
If you are saying yes to the above, this absolutely can be changed. I do want to shed light on the fact that being alone and sitting in stillness is really key to improving the relationship with yourself AND with others.
It’s deeply important to get to know who you are, what you like, and spend time nurturing yourself and just enjoying your alone time. Relationships that lack any alone time, end up with enmeshed or codependent dynamics or just unhealthy patterns and tendencies.
It also further isolates you from yourself - you get more disconnected from your wants, your needs, and your feelings. So part of this work is not only uncovering the why, regulating your nervous system so that you can sit with the thoughts, and then getting comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Here are some tips to enjoy being alone:
Discuss the WHY in therapy - figure out why this pattern is happening for you and whats deep beneath the surface on why you cant be alone
Practice it in baby steps- spend 10 minutes on your own at first or have a daily practice walking by yourself, before you do the bigger picture stuff like spending a saturday night completely alone.
Develop mindfulness skills - present moment awareness or a guided meditation so you can learn to relax your nervous system and be with your thoughts and breath
Plan a weekly self care day where you can actually enjoy looking forward to something with yourself. For ex: spend a Friday night ordering your favorite food and binge watching a show or have a spa day where you use all the face masks and then sit and journal
Start to uncover what happens when you are alone and get in touch with your hobbies, interested, feelings, and needs. Recognize what is coming up for you when you are - and note it down in a journal or with your therapist. Think about what you could do if you had free time- is there something fun you’d like to take up? A new hobby? Is there somewhere you could travel to?
Put your phone away to limit the tempting to doom scroll on social media or call a friend. Alone time doesn’t mean facetime for 3 hours, see if you can really challenge yourself to not respond to others for a bit.
Finally, work on regulating your nervous system and widening your window of tolerance so that you can adapt to stressors but not seek them
Feeling like being alone isn’t productive
Sometimes I hear people say that resting and sitting with stillness feels impossible because of the above mentioned wired feeling, but also because sometimes there is a belief that its not “productive” and you feel you always have to be doing and achieving. This might indicate a perfectionism tendency where a lot of your worth or belief of valueness is in your achievements. Maybe you received attention or praise growing up for the accomplishments you earned. I always say, reframe the way you look at it. Because resting, recharging your tank, and being alone is actually productive because again it allows you to show up better in the world anyway. It’s the classic analogy of a battery percentage on your phone or a tank - you couldn’t operate at empty nor would you allow your phone to hit 0%. Part of the therapy process can help you unlock if you have these deep rooted beliefs about rest and also help you start regulating your nervous system.
Addiction to stress & drama
If the addiction to stress or busy-ness or drama stuck out to you - this is actually so common. Many of us don’t even realize that we are actually putting ourselves in this situation and creating so much stress. If you are an overbooker, over-extender, over-worker, or always have an issue or dilemma to fix - you may be looking to do this so you can avoid yourself. At the root of all this, is self-avoidance. Again it is hard to be alone with your thoughts, feelings, and problems so sometimes we just book so much to do so we don’t even have to deal with any of the reasoning you may be avoiding being with yourself. And as mentioned earlier, if you grew up in a chaotic or dysfunctional environment you don’t really know anything different. You may be hard wired to continue some of the cycles. So creating space for rest and stillness and alone time, is actually breaking a cycle! Just know it may be tougher.
Its okay if this feels impossible or just uncomfortable right now. Like everything else, this is a practice and it takes time to be at peace with this. Just like it takes time to regulate a dysregulated nervous system and learn to be with your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without crawling out of your skin. It takes time to develop the mindfulness skills to be with your breath. And as you work on this, you will one day feel proud that you can enjoy your alone time. And that will be the moment you feel you can show up as your best self in your relationships.
Reminders:
You don’t owe everyone a response urgently - next time you are creating quality time with yourself, put away your phone and don’t feed into anyones urgency
You are allowed to not take on everyone else’ s stuff, in fact it is good for you to put up a little separation
It’s okay to simply say no to a plan, guilt-free
And most importantly just because you “have the time” does NOT mean you have to say yes to someones request or plan. Being alone with yourself is just as important as any other commitment. Rest is needed and stillness is key.
If any of this speaks to you and you feel ready to work on it, I’d be honored to help you along the way! I am accepting new clients in NYC, NJ, MD, and DC. Email alyssakushnerlcsw@gmail.com or schedule a free 15 min phone call. Follow my instagram page for more learning, tools, and inspiration on these topics.
