If you spend enough time with CEOs, writers, surgeons, athletes, and other professionals who guard a portion of their mornings the way others guard their salaries, you begin to notice a certain type of person. They don’t discuss it much. Before dawn, a stroll. After the school run, spend thirty minutes in a parked car. Between six and seven in the morning, the office door was locked. Nobody else in the room, no phones, no podcasts. This appeared to be eccentricity for years. Psychologists are now subtly arguing that it may be the most underappreciated wellness practice available.
You wouldn’t believe how recent the research is. For the past few years, Thuy-vy Nguyen at Durham University and Netta Weinstein at Reading have been attempting to distinguish between loneliness and solitude, two concepts that most of us mistakenly confuse. A state is the first. The second is an unpleasant emotion. Even when you’re alone, you can feel incredibly connected. It’s possible to feel lost at a dinner party. We may have been treating one like the other for a long time, and it has cost us.
In Nguyen’s laboratory experiments, measurable results were obtained in as little as fifteen to thirty minutes. The buzz, anxiety, and simmering annoyance from the morning meeting were all high-arousal emotions that subsided. Slowly, calm took its place. The deactivation effect is what she refers to it as. It’s not overly dramatic. Transcendence is not what it is. The nervous system is shifting into a lower gear. Even if they don’t have a term for it, anyone who has ever spent ten minutes in a car before entering a house already understands the sensation.
Who seems to use this the most purposefully is what’s interesting. People whose jobs require extended periods of focus or emotional control, such as founders, performers, clinicians, and elite athletes, exhibit this pattern. Not necessarily because they’re introverts. Even Nguyen was surprised by her own work’s inability to establish a clear connection between introversion and enjoying solitude. It appears that choosing the time alone is the more important characteristic. A 2023 diary study she ran with Weinstein and others found that hours alone reliably predicted lower stress and a greater sense of autonomy — but only when people had opted in. It felt lonely to be forced to be alone. Chosen solitude felt like oxygen.
There’s a cultural piece to this too, and it’s harder to shake than people admit. Eating alone at a restaurant still draws glances in most cities. A woman walking into a cinema by herself on a Friday night gets read in ways a man rarely does. Weinstein points out that many languages don’t even have separate words for solitude and loneliness — Vietnamese, she notes, doesn’t really distinguish them. It’s hard to value something when the vocabulary itself treats it as a deficit.
Then there’s the phone, which has completely changed the situation. Scrolling through a feed in a quiet room may preserve some of the calming effect, the research suggests, but it strips out the part that matters most for self-reflection. When you’re not with yourself, you’re alone. Strangely, reading a book doesn’t seem to accomplish this. Maybe it’s the speed or the lack of an algorithm that brings the next thing into view.
It’s difficult to ignore how hesitant the majority of us are to try any of this. When a free moment arises, the natural tendency is to occupy it with a call, a podcast, or a quick check of something. The high achievers that psychologists are currently researching appear to have made the tiny, obstinate choice to act in the opposite way. The science is still unable to determine whether that is the reason behind their output or just a correlation. Observing how they safeguard those hours, however, gives the impression that they have discovered something that the rest of us have been putting off.
