What You Do and Don't Dream About & What Happens to You When You're Alone

This episode explores the intriguing nature of dreams and their implications, focusing on why certain dreams are common and why some dreams, like those about mathematics, are exceptionally rare.

1. Dreams are influenced by the activity of various brain regions; logic-related areas are subdued, while emotional and imaginative regions are enhanced during sleep.
2. Common themes like falling or being chased are universal across cultures and time, suggesting inherent psychological processes.
3. The episode challenges the notion that dreams are just trivial; instead, they can offer meaningful insights into our emotional and mental states.
4. Dreams about complex subjects like math are rare, which reflects the specific neural activities during the dreaming phase.
5. The discussion emphasizes the importance of reflecting on the emotional content of dreams rather than their bizarre narratives.

1: The Nature of Dreams

An overview of what dreams are and why they occur, focusing on the brain's activity patterns during sleep. Dr. Jandial discusses how dreams might serve more profound functions than previously understood. Rahul Jandial: "When you look at general brain activation patterns... some interesting conclusions can be made."

2: The Rarity of Math in Dreams

This chapter explains why dreams involving mathematics are uncommon, linking it to the decreased activity in the brain's logic centers during sleep. Rahul Jandial: "Math tends to be only a few percent."

3: Emotional and Visual Dream Content

Explores how the brain's heightened emotional and visual activities influence the content of dreams, making them feel real and significant. Rahul Jandial: "The emotional dreams can be an insight into what's going on in your waking life."

1. Reflect on Dreams: Consider keeping a dream journal to explore the emotions and images that appear in your dreams, as they can offer insights into personal challenges and emotional states.
2. Understand Common Dream Themes: Recognize that common themes like being chased or falling have psychological significance and reflect universal human concerns.
3. Pay Attention to Emotional Intensity in Dreams: Focus on the emotions within dreams to gain insights into your emotional wellbeing.
4. Explore Creative Ideas: Use the clarity and creativity that might emerge just after waking from vivid dreams to solve problems or generate ideas.
5. Consider the Impact of Dreams on Waking Life: Reflect on how dreams might be influencing your mood and perspectives during the day.

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Almost no one dreams about math. Almost everyone dreams about falling or being chased. These are just some of the fascinating things I discuss about dreams with Dr. Rahul Jandial. He is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who has been studying why people dream and what happens in the brain when dreams occur. If you have wondered about your dreams and how they affect you, you need to hear this conversation. Dr. Jandial is the author of several books, his latest is called, This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life (https://amzn.to/3KmOE5N).

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• Rahul Jandial

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• "This is Why You Dream" by Rahul Jandial

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Mike Carruthers
Today on something you should know why being rich, especially when you're young, can bring trouble. Then what you do and don't dream about why some dreams are very common and almost no one dreams about math. When you look at patterns of dreaming, some dreams cluster in families like nightmares. Some dreams are common. Despite changes in culture and society, like falling and being chased and then math, dreams are very rarely reported.

Also, what makes organic seafood organic and should you buy it and spending time alone? A lot of people like it, but they worry about other people who like it. There aren't any hard and fast rules for spending too much time or too little time alone. But we do tend to have these expectations that others who really prefer to be alone must not be liking it very much, must be having a hard time, or there's something wrong with them. All this today on something you should know.

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Hi. Welcome to something you should know. Assuming this isn't the case for you? Have you ever wondered or wished for for the fact that you had been born into a very wealthy family, or had won the lottery a while ago? Or maybe inherited a bunch of money early on so that your life was fairly easy for most of the ride?

I imagine a lot of people wish that or think that. But interesting research shows that when wealth and success come too easy or too early, like when people win the lottery or receive a big inheritance, trouble often follows. Researcher doctor Steven Burglas says human beings are wired to face challenges. It's how we have survived all these years. So when life becomes easy and carefree, it's really rather boring for many people.

So we create our own obstacles. This is why you often hear that lottery winners or the children of celebrities or children of wealthy parents get into all sorts of trouble with drugs and money or with the law. Humans need challenge. If life doesn't serve it up, people make up their own challenges. And often they're the kind of challenges that cannot be overcome.

And that is something you should know.

We all sleep at night to allow our brain and body to rest. But what if that isn't really true? What if we sleep at night to allow our brains to dream? After all, we are dreaming much of the night, which would indicate our brain is working, not really resting. So why do we dream?

Does dreaming perform some important function? Do we require sleep so that our brain can dream? Are the dreams we have really significant? Or are they just weird little stories that don't mean much? Here to discuss this is doctor Rahul Jadial.

He is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist who performs and teaches brain surgery in underserved hospitals in Central and South America, Southeast Asia and eastern Europe. He is the author of several books. His latest is called this is why you dream what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. Hey, doctor, welcome to something you should know. Thank you for including me.

Rahul Jandial
My pleasure. So, what does science really know about dreams and why we have them? And what I mean is that we've all heard that dreams are so important that they can be helpful, that they're trying to tell you something. You can even maybe solve problems in your dreams. And my experience, and I suspect the experience of a lot of people is that my dreams don't make a lot of sense much of the time.

Mike Carruthers
They're hard to remember. They seem inconsequential most of the time. So how important can they be? And how much stock can we put in our dreams? I think that's an important point.

Rahul Jandial
And the way I think about it is let's not ask the dreaming brain and the dreaming mind to do what we wouldn't ask the waking brain and waking mind to do. We don't always have clever thoughts. We don't hold on to much of what we do during the day. And the product of the waking brain is not always consequential. So, yes, many dreams are irrelevant, they're static.

Some dreams are universal nightmares and erotic dreams. So that has to be understood that that doesn't seem like an accidental process. Some dreams cluster in families like nightmares, so they're inherited in some ways, like our disposition to risk or mental health. Some dreams are common despite changes in culture and society, like falling and being chased and have been reported for centuries. Those things can't be accidental when they're happening over centuries across cultures.

And then some dreams. The pattern when you look at, not your dream or my dream, but thousands of dreams, math is very rare. What happens with the dreaming brain is our executive network, which is a collection of structures that includes something that's really, that functions for logic, and math is dampened. It kind of makes sense that math dreams are very rarely reported. When you look at the dreaming brain and you see that imagination network, which is a different collection of structures, and the limbic system, which is a different collection of structures for emotion, those are liberated, if you will, they're accentuated.

Their activity is higher in the dreaming brain. Then that kind of makes sense, that when we do have dreams and we do remember them, that they're filled with anxiety or they have nightmares or erotic dreams. So not every dream, not your dream, not my dream. But when you look at general brain activation patterns through machines, through electricity measurements, and you look at general description of dreams over the ages, I think some interesting conclusions can be made. Well, that's really interesting that people don't dream about math.

Mike Carruthers
Do even mathematicians dream about math? They must. They have to. That's a great question. Of course, some of your listeners are going to write in, no, I dream of math.

Rahul Jandial
I'm not saying it's not an impossible thing, but when you look at thousands and thousands of dreams, the percentage of nightmares is above 90%. It's essentially universal. I don't have to explain to somebody other than my children when they were kids that, oh, it's only a nightmare. And when you look at the large patterns of dreaming falling, chasing teeth, falling out, they're common, 30% to 70%. But math tends to be only a few percent.

Mike Carruthers
So there is this sense this belief that when you're asleep, you're at rest, you're resting, you're sound asleep, you couldn't be more resting. And yet I wonder if, while you're dreaming, how does the body react to those dreams? Does the body see or does the body experience your dream the same way your body experiences real life? When you're falling in your dream that feels real to your emotional systems, those neurons are activated, releasing the electricity we can measure from the surface of the scalp. And they're using glucose that comes into your blood.

Rahul Jandial
It's burning hot. When we sleep, the contents of our skull are throbbing with electricity. They're mopping up glucose coming in through the blood. So if you run in your dreams at the brain level, the experiences we have while we dream are real if they just don't activate the body through the spinal cord and actually make you run. In most cases, is it true that.

Mike Carruthers
Because it's been my experience that when you're dreaming that your body is somehow disabled, that you can't really move very well? Great question. Again, there are patterns and insights here. So during the periods where most vivid dreams happen, the body tends to be chemically paralyzed. During the periods where vivid dreams don't happen, in certain stages, you can get reflexive behavior, like sleepwalking.

Rahul Jandial
Then on the third scenario, in some cases of dream dysfunction in patients with Parkinson's, they can actually act out their dream. So it's not a universal thing. But in general, our bodies are chemically locked down, temporarily paralyzed while we dream. So I think it's been common advice for a long time that you should pay attention to your dreams. Write them down and take a look at what you dreamed about, because it may be telling you something.

Mike Carruthers
What is it I'm supposed to pay attention to? Because if I have a dream, most of my dreams are nonsensical. If there's a person who turns into a golf ball and then becomes a turtle and is drinking orange juice in my driveway, what about that am I supposed to be?

What about that am I supposed to pay attention to? And what in the world could it be trying to tell me without trying. To remember the specific content of your dream? What I'm finding that people reporting, and in my life also, is that you really want to chase the central emotion and the central image. The central emotion because the emotional systems, the limbic system, is liberated in your brain and the central image because dreams are very hyper visual.

Rahul Jandial
So going back to your original point, some dream thoughts and experiences, they're just junk. Understandably as in our waking life. But when they're emotional, when they're highly visual, when you wake up, I think trying to remember the feeling and the visual, the central image is, is the goal rather than the meticulous details of the dream. In trying to remember the meticulous details of the dream, I think the dream memory slips away a little bit further. But these are some of my ideas.

These are obviously things that are hard to prove. What's the benefit of journaling, keeping track of remembering, thinking about your dreams. What's the point? The point, I think, is to have access to thoughts, experiences and emotions created by the dreaming brain, which, let's call them dreams. That it's your brain.

It's on a 24 hours cycle. Two thirds awake, roughly one third asleep and dreaming. The liberated and hyper emotional hypervisual brain and its product might offer you insights into your life that a therapist can't. Or in connection with a therapist, they might offer you insights that you haven't recognized in your waking life. I think that's one thing.

Mike Carruthers
Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. But so often the dreams make no sense. If there's an elephant sitting in my living room, what insights am I getting from that? Well, that's a good question. So I would say if you look at dreams, I would put them in five categories.

Rahul Jandial
So if you have. So that one I would put into the static or junk dream. That one is one to ignore because it doesn't have a strong central emotion and it doesn't have a strong central image. But let's unpack that a little bit. But I think dreams fall into five categories roughly as a way of thinking about them.

In the morning, if you show up naked on a podium or your alarm goes off in your dream because you have an exam, you know what that is? That's waking anxiety feeding dream anxiety. Right. That's sort of clear. If you're at end of life and you have, you're at the end of your cancer journey.

Some of my patients, you have these end of life dreams. They're sort of expansive. There's often reconciliation. Not always, but that fits that. Your waking life is having such dramatic events that your dream life is clearly linked.

That doesn't require interpretation or journaling. Pregnancy dreams are like that as well. Number three, they're universal dreams. Nightmares in kids, erotic dreams and prepubescents. I mean, those, I think, have a different concept.

The elephant sitting on a purple rug, as you mentioned. You know, I think that's those are dreams. If they're not tied to a heavy emotion, then those aren't necessarily ones that are revelatory or have the capacity to be revelatory. The last type of dream is the one that has more of an emotion. So it's not just static, more of an emotion, more of a central image.

If you write that down, if you reflect upon that during the day, I think there can be insights. The emotional dreams can be an insight into what's going on in your waking life. And those are the ones, I think, to write down, to reflect upon, and to bring up with therapist or your. Partner, because they could do what they could tell you what one, they could. Tell you how your coping processes are evolving.

That if you're working through your dream, if your dream stories are evolving to be specifically difficult divorces, as they have more engagement with their partners and they're doing better in their dreams and there's less conflict, those people tended to have a better resolution of divorces. So it's a correlation, it's not a direct cause. But those are the insights that I think some dreams can provide in how you're coping with difficult situations during your life. Number two, new onset nightmares. So usually adults don't have nightmares.

An occasional nightmare is fine, but the start of nightmares, the progression of nightmares, I think it can be seen as a vital sign to sort of what's going on in your waking life. It can reflect what people are going through. Take that example deeper. Parkinson's disease. Its initial warning flares are actually changes in dreaming patterns.

So we're just now starting to see that a hyper that dreams, not always, not every time, can offer insights for you about how you're coping with daytime stress. Number two, in certain brain diseases, they can actually be the thing that goes wrong first. It's the warning flare, and people can look this up. It's called REM behavior disorder in Parkinson's. So I think those are two specific examples where dreams are something interesting to reflect upon.

Number three, for people who are creative, they find this sleep exit stage can offer creative ideas. Not necessarily all of them are great, but for me, I find a lot of my thinking about surgical approaches or creative ideas for writing. It tends to pop up in the morning as I'm coming to. And most of my ideas come from that time. Most of them are bad, but when they're good ideas, they come from that time.

Mike Carruthers
We're talking about why you dream what you dream and what they might mean. And my guest is Doctor Rahul Jandial. He is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist and author of the book this is why you dream what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. Hey, a shout out to Claritin for supporting this episode and providing us with samples. You see, I am what you call a seasonal allergy sufferer.

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See ebaymotors.com dot so doctor, how much do we typically dream in a night? Hard to say. People were thinking they were only during certain stages. But in sleep laboratories, they're waking people up. And dreams happen at the top speed.

Rahul Jandial
At the max, we could be dreaming up to a third of our lives, because that's how much time we spend sleeping approximately, but as far as how much. And that, I think, is highly variable. But I just want people to walk away with the thought that when you wake up, your brain was not resting at night. If there were stickers with little wires on the surface of your scalp, the electricity would look like an earthquake. So something vibrant is happening as you sleep.

And when you wake up and you think, ah, what happened the last six to seven, 8 hours? You may remember little, but the brain was going through something I think is akin to high intensity training. And yet when I wake up in the morning, you know, that's when I do some of my better thinking, is, you know, when the day first, the work day first starts. And I've always attributed that to the fact that my brain's been resting, that my, you know. Yeah, that my brain has been resting overnight and is refreshed.

Mike Carruthers
And now I can kind of reboot and start again. The measurements reveal that your brain is not like on a computer on hibernation mode, where the screen goes dark and you wake up and it's like clicking a key on your laptop, and then the computer springs up. The clarity and their focus of the waking brain that returns to you in the morning has to be somehow linked to the process of what was happening the next last six, seven, 8 hours before. Interestingly, more vivid dreams happen closer to when you wake up. So maybe the, maybe the night of good sleep, that's 8 hours versus 5 hours, is because your brain has had the window to have more vibrant dreams in the morning on that 6th, 7th and 8th hour, the last REM stage.

Rahul Jandial
But yes, the refreshed mind, the clarity that we have after a good night's sleep isn't because we were lying down. Our thigh muscles and liver, they don't need sleep the way we think of it. I've transplanted livers from one person to another, and kidneys. We don't reconnect the nerves. I don't think sleep is really for bodily tissue.

Sleep is for the brain. The brain makes us sleep, and when it makes us sleep, the brain is active dreaming. So to me, that suggests that dreaming is a fundamental need of this collection of 100 billion neurons within our skull, the human brain. I think brains in general need to have the dreaming process to function best during waking life. So this idea of lucid dreaming, which, as I understand it, is you're in the dream and you know you're dreaming.

Mike Carruthers
And every time that's ever happened to me, I wake up. I can't stay in the dream. But is that a good definition of lucid dreaming, that you're in the dream and you know you're dreaming? It's a perfect definition. So we continue to return to the foundation of understanding.

Rahul Jandial
I want to leave the listeners and readers with is you have waking brain, and you have dreaming brain. When you go from waking brain to dreaming brain, that's called sleep entry. When you go from sleeping dreaming brain to waking brain, that's called sleep exit in the middle of it. While you're sleeping and dreaming, usually you don't know you're in the dream until the dream is done. You wake up in the morning and go, ah, that was only a dream.

It's in the rear view. Lucid dreaming is being in the middle of sleep dreaming and saying, hey, I have a little bit of, I realize I'm in a dream and you haven't woken up. You're actually still asleep and dreaming. Can you do it? I tried the techniques, and I realized, I think I've been doing it in the morning when I wake up, when I was on call and the pager would go off and I would sleep and fall asleep, and there was that.

It's sort of awaking and returning and floating in a hybrid state. I have only done it once. The concept that we aren't just fully awake or fully asleep, I think, is powerful. I wanted to ask about nightmares because, well, I had one not too long ago. And first of all, how common are they?

Mike Carruthers
I think what you said is that they happen more in children, less in adults. And what is the definition of a nightmare? It seems like you have to. It's up to you to define what a nightmare is. The definition of nightmares requires that you are, you wake up and you have a searing memory of what happens.

Rahul Jandial
A bad dream is a bad dream, but a nightmare wakes you up. The patterns, you know, the patterns of reports when you look at them, are interesting, nearly universal. At age 4567, nightmares arrive for all children, whether they've seen scary monsters or not. They talk about monsters. And when they first arrive, we have to tell our children.

My sons are in university now, all three of them, but when they were younger, hey, it was, hey, this is just a dream. And so before nightmares, kids may not know the difference between waking thoughts and dreaming thoughts. So that's interesting. That'll never be proven, but that's an interesting pattern to look at. And then they sort of universally fade in children.

Around 6789, maybe 1% have them, and they rarely tend to have nightmare disorder, which is like the memory of the nightmare ruins the next day. And so that's a very interesting pattern. And then for most of life, nightmares are uncommon, a few percentage. And then they return as a warning sign for Parkinson's and other diseases. And then they return when people are having very stressful events.

And then they obviously return in PTSD, whereas that's a flashback, that's a replay of something bad that happened. But nightmares in adults are very different than nightmares in kids. I think nightmares in kids are sort of cultivating and training the mind, much like erotic dreams do and much like adolescence does. Like there are these three phases of children's mind development. Nightmares arriving and serving some purpose.

Erotic dreams arriving before the erotic act, and then adolescence arriving. And it doesn't change the substance of the flesh, but it definitely changes the mind. And then in adults, I think they're a potential vital sign or warning flare for stressors during the day, especially if they're more frequent, they're persisting. I think that can be something to pay attention to that maybe the events of your waking life, you're not coping with them. Well, you mentioned that there are dreams, and I've had them, I'm sure everybody's had them, where they taint the next day somehow.

Mike Carruthers
They weren't nightmares necessarily, but they were very. I guess they were very powerful that something happened where you kind of can't shake it for a day. And then, at least for me, a day later, I have completely shake. I've never had one linger more than a day. But for that day, it kind of haunts you.

Rahul Jandial
That's powerful. I love your words. Powerful dreams that haunt us, I think speak to the original five general clusters of dream types that I talked about with you. The elephant on the purple rug. No emotion.

That's not one that you want to reflect upon. But a hyper emotional dream, hyper visual dream that lingers with you the next day is a bit of a solar flare from an imaginative and emotional dreaming brain. And it's one to consider. What is it? Why you had it?

Could it be connected to something? And to me, it's proof that what's happening in the middle of the night while you think you're resting and your brain is calm and cool, it's quite the opposite. It's doing something remarkable. And dreams are the little solar flares that we have the opportunity to reflect upon. And I don't think they should be neglected, especially the haunting, powerful ones.

Mike Carruthers
Well, I've heard and participated in several discussions and interviews about dreams, and never one quite like this. So this is very insightful. Doctor Rahul Jandial has been my guest. He is a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist and he is author of a book called this is why you dream what your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life. And there's a link to his book in the show notes.

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Mike Carruthers
There is a scale that we all fall on. At one end of the scale are the people who like to spend a lot of time alone. At the other end of the scale are people who prefer the company of others much of the time. And we all fall in there somewhere on that scale, for the people who prefer time alone, who enjoy their solitude, there's a bit of a stigma, like there's something wrong. Humans are social.

People need people. Solitude, well, that's kind of been bundled up with loneliness, that people who spend a lot of time alone are lonely. And while that might be the case, it is not necessarily so. Solitude gets a bad rap. And yet there are some things about solitude many of us don't really understand.

Here to discuss it is Netta Weinstein. She is a psychologist and director of the European Research Council's Solitude alone but resilience project. She's also professor of psychology at the University of Reading, and she's an associate researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. She's author of a book called the science and power of being alone. Hi, Netta.

Welcome to something you should know. Hi. Thanks for having me on. So I'd like to start this conversation by talking about this connection between solitude and loneliness, because I think they are connected. People use them interchangeably, I think, sometimes, and I'm somebody that enjoys his time alone.

I don't spend all my time alone, but when I'm alone, I don't feel lonely because I have connections in my life. And it just seems that solitude has a bad reputation. When I hear you say that, I just can't help but think about how, how true that is, really. You know, when we look at this, the way we talk about solitude in society and the worries we have about solitude, time, I think it does have a bad reputation. And when we've talked about it in the past, in the English language, we have used the word solitude in the same way as we do loneliness, so interchangeably with loneliness.

Netta Weinstein
So our language set us up to think about solitude and loneliness in the same way. And we know loneliness is a very difficult feeling. It's a feeling that all of us can kind of think back, gosh, when I felt lonely, like that was not a great experience. That's not an experience that I want to have again. And if I'm lonely, there's something that's not right in my life.

And loneliness definitionally means there are not enough social connections in the way that we need. So we feel that we are less connected than we want to be. So loneliness inherently is something that's not right about our lives. But when solitude and loneliness are used interchangeably, we're set up to think about them, you know, in the same way. And it's because in our history and up until recently, when somebody was in solitude, that was another way of saying, I am lonely, I am feeling isolated, I'm feeling disconnected.

And even when we look at languages around the world today, what we see is that many languages don't have a word for solitude that doesn't also mean loneliness. So the way we talk about solitude and in society in explicit ways, but even in these subtle ways, where we have these associations that we're not even fully aware of, we tend to conflate the state of being alone with the emotion of loneliness, of being actively disconnected from other people. And that's an unnecessary conflation because we can feel really connected to people in our lives even when we're away from them. I think for many of us that stigma is a default. I mean, it's not that you want to think of someone you see eating alone or seemingly never goes out of the house or whatever.

Mike Carruthers
You almost can't help but think they must be lonely. We're likely to think of people who prefer to be alone or who like to spend a lot of time on their own, as if there's something wrong with them, or maybe they don't have something in their life. So why are you alone on a Friday night? Well, it has to be because nobody wants to spend time with you or you don't have anywhere else to go. And this kind of stigma that we have about solitude, it really is because we're set up to think of ourselves and others as naturally social.

Netta Weinstein
We're out there to live and function in society. It's how we contribute to societies by being with other people. It's where we learn how to be kind of functional members of society. We learn that from other people. So a lot of the way that we develop and the way that we learn how to think in a way that benefits society, that all comes from our social interactions, and we're set up to think.

If somebody wants to be away from all that, gosh, they might be a little bit different. Maybe they think a little bit differently. And, yeah, maybe there's something wrong with them. Is there? I mean, is that normal to want to spend a lot of time alone?

Mike Carruthers
Is that depriving you of something if you do? Researchers have historically found that actually people who prefer to be in solitude are showing some of the kind of mental health concerns that we might have where they're dysfunctional. But at the same time, a lot of the way that we've measured preference for solitude in psychology has kind of set it directly against preferring to be with other people. So participants are not asked to really enjoy solitude. They're asked something like, would you prefer to be alone or prefer to be with other people?

Netta Weinstein
And by creating this kind of forced choice, what we're really measuring are not people who prefer to be alone or like to be alone, but people who actually dislike being with others. So what we're learning more and more in really recent research that is sort of thought more deeply about this is theres a lot of value that we can find in solitude. And you can kind of love to be alone, but you can love to be alone and enjoy the company of others as well. When you look at the data on people who spend time alone and people who dont like it as much, are you able to come up with some kind of, I dont know, formula equation? Like there is a case to be made that you're spending too much time alone, or you're not spending enough time alone?

Mike Carruthers
Or is there a balance anywhere? Or is everybody different? Yeah. Oh, I wish I could prescribe more or less solitude time. And I think it would be nice if we had a kind of ideal equation that we could follow or a set of guidelines.

Netta Weinstein
But actually, the more we learn about solitude, the more it really seems that everybody has their own relationship. And for some people, their relationship with solitude is such that just a little bit of it in a day is the right amount for them and they are actually wanting a lot of their social time. And actually, we tend to find this in young adults. So late teens or early twenties, they tend to really like to spend most of their time in social interactions. And again, there are going to be individual differences that will be true for some people more than others.

But on the whole, that age range is a time in our lives when we learn about ourselves from our social interactions. So people go out and they spend time with their friends, and they're developing their independent identity that isn't kind of their parents and their home identity. So social attractions play a really important role. And on the other hand, what we're seeing is parents, when they have babies and small children, start to value solitude a lot more than they have before. And that's because they're spending a lot more of their time caring for somebody else in a very intensive social interaction.

And so I think each of us can think about the function that solitude is playing. And for some people, that's going to mean that they want a lot more solitude. Time in their lives and for other people means that actually maybe what they have is about right, or maybe they could use even less time alone and finding really quality social interactions is the key to well being. And so what is the value? What's the prize of getting your solitude time just right?

Mike Carruthers
What are the benefits? You know, if we think about the kind of ideal day that has the right balance of social and solitude time, where we have quality moments in both, we're only now beginning to learn about what that means for us. What we're seeing so far is that, you know, on those days, those are days where people feel calmer, where they might have more of what we term autonomy, which means they can be themselves, have a sense that they can do the things that interest them and that they value, and they have a sense of choice around their activities. And potentially that kind of balance can lead to a sense of satisfaction in our days and in our lives. But the science of solitude is so young still, and we're learning so much more about what the implications are of having not enough solitude time or how we can find that balance and what the potential benefits of having that balance could be.

Do you find that people who spend a lot of time alone, who like a lot of solitude, feel any sense of shame about it? Because, you know, people have this image of someone who's spending a lot of time alone. They're a loner. You know, often when, you know, some serial killer does something, they ask the neighbors, well, you know, he kind of kept to himself. He was a loner.

I mean, these are not positive traits, that being alone a lot of the time has a negative connotation. It's definitely interesting how we're sort of wired to see these images. And often when we close our eyes and we think about somebody alone, we'll tend to think about the person who's isolated and lonely. Or we might think about that kind of strange, strange person who lives on their own, never sees anybody, or that kid in the playground who's sitting under a tree reading rather than playing with their friends. We tend to think about solitude in this negative way, and we're kind of wired to have these types of images because the way that we talk about solitude, both historically and currently, is very conflated with this idea of loneliness.

Netta Weinstein
And what we find in research is not a lot of evidence that people who spend more time alone, at least in kind of more general populations, that they are loners. So there isn't this kind of accumulation of I'm more lonely on the whole because I've spent multiple weeks alone. There aren't any hard and fast rules for spending too much time or too little time alone. But we do tend to have these expectations that others who really prefer to be alone or spend a lot of time alone must not be liking it very much, must be having a hard time, or there's something wrong with them. When you see somebody like that, or when you know that there's a neighbor who never seems to go out, never seems to have people over, you don't think, whoopi, for them, you think, well, something's wrong.

Mike Carruthers
Maybe we should go over and do something, because it's a problem that needs to be solved. Yes, absolutely. So can we have a positive image of solitude? What does that look like? So we'll tend to think about positive solitude.

Netta Weinstein
We'll tend to think about somebody like the Buddha or spiritual leaders. Spiritual leaders around the world are kind of images of solitude that can be positive. When we see our role models of who's allowed to love solitude, it tends to be the kind of big shot CEO, the kind of Silicon Valley exec who goes out on long retreats. It tends to be philosophers or thinkers, great minds. And so it's reserved for special pockets of society.

The rest of us, there's something a little off when we like it. But I think it's important to point out, as good as solitude can be in your life, that one of the symptoms of solitude is being alone. And one of the symptoms of loneliness is being alone. And there are people who are alone who are not enjoying their solitude. They are, in fact, desperately lonely.

There definitely are. And again, solitude isn't for everybody. And at all times. What we find, though, is when we talk to people about their experiences of solitude, and we talked to them quite openly. Some of our research had to do with understanding people's stories of solitude, good and bad.

We had people from around the world in ages 18 to 80 who we talked to. We often found that all of us have moments of solitude that were positive, that are everyday solitude, periods that are nice, rewarding, sometimes special, and we call those little s solitude versus this big Buddha like s solitude. And those little s moments are something that many of us can relate to when we stop and we think back to our own solitude time. So it doesn't mean that solitude is always good, or that we'll always love to be alone, or that in a day where we might have 12 hours alone at around hour four, maybe we start to think, maybe I should go out somewhere. It can be difficult at times, there's no question about it.

But many of us can relate to those moments of solitude that were really special for us or that leave positive memories that play an important positive role in our lives. What's the connection? Because it seems like there would be one between people who are introverts and people who like their solitude. Are they one in the same? You know, it's a great question.

It's a really complicated one that we researchers haven't quite worked out for a number of reasons, including how we measure introversion tends to be a little complicated. But one of the things that we found so far is that, you know, if you look at scales of introversion and introversion, extraversion, that extroverts kind of surprisingly, also seem to benefit from solitude. It really can be for everyone. So introverts and extroverts both prefer to have some time alone and benefit from that time alone. We do find when we ask people, hey, what makes you love solitude?

We did studies like that as well, that people will self identify. It's because I'm an introvert, I really gain energy from that time I have alone. So when people identify themselves as introverts, they see that that's one of the reasons that they really like to be alone. But at the same time, when we survey people, we're finding that extroverts also enjoy their alone time. Well, another image problem I think solitude has is that alone time is, I think, perceived by many as a downtime, that you're not doing something.

Mike Carruthers
You know, if you're spending a lot of downtime, well, it's downtime from what I mean, if you're never really out there being social. But solitude isn't necessarily downtime. Absolutely. And I think that point that, you know, we don't need social interactions or even want them all the time is a really important one. And I think we tend to forget that a little bit.

Netta Weinstein
We tend to think about our social interactions as the key moments in our lives, the things that we're doing. And our solitude time is the sort of blank space in between those social interactions. So, you know, I'm going out, what am I going to do until then? Or I'm going to go to work, what am I going to do until then? We don't tend to think about those moments when we're alone, whether we're kind of commuting or we're doing something else.

And we have a bit of solitude time as an opportunity in the same way that we think of social interactions. And so I think for that reason, we often don't use those moments as an opportunity to gain from them what we could gain from them, in the same way that we do our social interactions. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But you're right. But if you're spending time alone, it's not going to be as memorable as if you're doing something fun with other people.

Mike Carruthers
It just kind of, by its nature, isn't as memorable because you're just alone. There's something to that, actually, which is social interactions do tend to be more fun in a very specific way, which is they tend to be where we get our excitement, where we get our happiness. So we see that social interactions in our social time, that's the stuff that makes us really happy and kind of excited. We call it high arousal positive affect way. Solitude gives us something else.

Netta Weinstein
It gives us what we call low arousal positive affect, which is during our solitude time, when we take advantage of that time, we can feel calm, peaceful. It can help us work through stress that we have, so we might feel more relaxed and less stressed. And so while social interactions might be fun in that exciting kind of way, solitude time can help us relax and have a sense of calm and peace. And that emotion is one that we sometimes forget to value in our sort of high energy modern life. But if we stop and really embrace that, it can help balance the more exciting, fun activities that we do.

Mike Carruthers
You know what I wonder is when most people have it right and they have the right balance of social time and solitude, when they're having those solitude times, those alone times, do they see it as a break from the social? Is it something to do in between my social activities? Is the solitude something I do or something I don't do? You know, from a research perspective? I don't know.

Netta Weinstein
I'll be really curious to find out. We don't know nearly enough about this topic yet, but what we do see is when solitude is seen as an opportunity in the same way that we see our social interactions, that it can give us many rewards. And feeling peaceful is one of them. Being really creative and reflective in a positive way can be another one. And even having a sense of joy and a nature connection when we go out and we connect with nature or connection to our animals or connection to ourselves in a way that when we're with others, we'll tend to focus to them instead, we can focus to other relationships we have in our lives.

Mike Carruthers
Well, I think it's really important to understand the difference between solitude and loneliness and the benefits of solitude, the right amount of solitude, which I don't think a lot of people understand. So this is really great. I've been speaking with Netta Weinstein she is a psychologist and director of the European Research Council's Solitude alone but resilience project. She's author of a book called the science and power of being alone, and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate you being here.

Thanks, Netta. Thanks. It's been a pleasure.

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