How I Learned To LOVE Being Alone

So you feel lonely. Like you have no real friends on this planet. You see all of your classmates posting stories on social media, going out, seeing girls, going to parties together.

Whilst you’re sat at home on a Saturday night scrolling YouTube.

It just feels unfair. “Why does this happen to me?” The loneliness can be crushing at times.

But when you start “self-improvement”, this journey towards self-mastery, it is inevitable. These people are just on different paths to you. You’re just not compatible anymore.

By definition, friendships form around similarities. Whilst I was going to the gym, working on my mental health, optimising my sleep, trying to do all these productive things - my “friends” were fucking around playing video games. The overlap of interests was pretty small!

So it becomes difficult, almost impossible, to actually maintain a friendship.

This is a necessary part of your self-development journey. As you start improving yourself and cutting out the bad habits, you are going to start realising that the only reason you were “friends” with some of these guys is because you both did instant gratification bs together (or because you were forced to spend 5 days a week together at school!). And when you start cutting out the instant gratification, soon you’ll find yourself losing friends.

That’s OK.

But this realisation doesn’t really make the loneliness any more bearable. It is still crushing, and you start to wonder if maybe you should start playing video games, go to parties, watch Netflix again, just so you actually have something to bond over with other people. That’s only natural – we as humans love social connection. It’s in our DNA.

But this is where the problem comes in.

You hate being alone. You feel like you can’t live without friends. And so you never make the progress in your life that you truly want to make.

You have to learn to love being alone.

Once you learn to just love being by yourself, alone with your mind and your thoughts, is when you can find real inner peace (and ironically, once you become happy by yourself, that is when you start attracting other people into your life).

 So, how do you do it?

First you have to work on your mind.

The reason you hate being by yourself is because when you are left alone with your mind, it starts hurling anxious, negative, self-deprecating thoughts at you. So to try and escape this chaos, you distract yourself by talking to other people. Going on social media. Playing video games.

But what if instead of just distracting ourselves from the negativity, we turn it into positivity?

Mindfulness meditation is probably something you have heard about 1,000,000 times already. But it is truly a powerful practice that trains your mind to stay in the present moment, instead of letting itself be overrun and hijacked by negative thoughts.

Gratitude journaling is another powerful habit that I implement every morning (and something you’ve also probably heard about lmao – don’t worry, we’ll get onto the other stuff soon). Every morning, I write down 3 different things in my life which I am grateful for, and this literally trains your mind to be more positive.

You go through your day-to-day life, and instead of thinking about how shit your life is because you’re lonely, you naturally just start to focus on all the things in your life you should be grateful for. You start being happy with what you already have.

Nature is another big one. We as humans love being out in nature – we have evolved to. So every day, just try to make some time to spend in nature – whether you are going for a walk, or literally just reading in your back garden.

Using Your Time In Solitude

Now something big that I learned from reading the book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is that the big problem with being alone isn’t necessarily the fact that there are no other people around. The times when you feel the most down bad is when you are on their own – and there is nothing to do.

This is why people tend to try and distract themselves. Social media, video games, all these things – because when there is nothing to do, that is when the negative thoughts have free reign over your mind.

So the most effective way to actually learn to love being alone, is to work on a meaningful project. To enter “Flow”. The fact that you are alone almost has no effect when you can see yourself making real progress towards a goal.

The biggest thing that helped me learn to love being alone, through a difficult period of my life when I felt so crushingly lonely, is this. Building my YouTube channel, working on my email newsletter, my brand. Learning and improving my life so I can share the solutions with you.

That’s all for this one boys.

Hope this helps whoever needs it,

Yvan