Solitude and brain health — choose a focused life in a noisy world

Cognitive 'canaries in the coalmine'? Studies of people born since 1995 — the first group to enter their teens with smartphones, tablets, and persistent connectivity, have found that teenagers were consuming media, including text messaging and social networks, for an average of nine hours a day. 

Studies have shown that if you suffer from solitude deprivation, the quality of your life suffers too

For two years of his presidency, the American president Abraham Lincoln lived in a rural cottage, three miles from the White House. It was there he drafted the Emancipation Proclamation. He also recorded scraps of ideas that he would sometimes store in the lining of his top hat as he wandered the grounds at night. Living in the cottage gave him the solitude he needed to organise his thoughts in a way that was impossible in the frenzied White House environment.

In a modern world that values connectivity above all else, solitude and loneliness are frequently bundled together and the value of being alone with your thoughts is lost. Cal Newport, in his book Digital Minimalism (2019) argues that everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude — and equally importantly, that anyone who avoids this state for an extended period, will suffer.

What do we mean by solitude?

Many people associate solitude with physical separation requiring time spent in a remote cabin, miles from anywhere. But solitude is more about what’s happening in the brain than the environment you inhabit. A place where the mind is free from other inputs.

You can enjoy solitude in a crowded café in a busy city. That solitude can be banished in the same setting if input from others invades that space.

In their book Lead Yourself First (2017), Kethledge and Erwin comment on the importance of solitude to Martin Luther King when he returned home from jail to a sleeping household. In that quiet moment he heard an inner voice saying to him ‘Stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth'. In the last four decades, the importance of intimate personal relationships has been portrayed as the most important source of human happiness. But this is not always the case. The need to spend time alone is common among actors, writers, and musicians — many who never had families or close personal ties — yet managed to lead remarkable lives. Famous introverts who enjoy their solitude include Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep.

Solitude can be essential for productivity as well as happiness. English historian, Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) said of solitude: 'Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius'.

The problem with constant noise in our lives really began with the arrival of the iPod in 2001. Before that there was noise, but it was confined to specific times — when we turned on the radio, answered the phone, watched the television. But with the iPod we could have noise all the time. Your iPod could form a backdrop to the entire day — only being taken out (sometimes) when you had to talk to someone else. Now suddenly, we had the ability to be continuously distracted from our own minds. With the arrival of the smartphones, came the ability to take ‘the quick glance’; and with it the ability to banish solitude from our lives.

Time spent looking at smartphone screens averages at several hours a day — that doesn’t include time spent listening to music, audiobooks, and podcasts. How often do you see families in a restaurant all staring at their screens rather than talking to each other? It is clear how effective people have become at banishing moments of solitude from their daily experience. All those moments when we had no choice but to listen to our inner thoughts: queuing in the supermarket, walking down the street, mowing the lawn — those moments of solitude, whether we wanted them or not, have vanished.

Why does this loss of solitude in our lives matter?

The idea of being alone is often looked upon as unappealing. Being alone means you have nobody to be friends with. Being alone means you are lonely as opposed to solitary. But avoiding solitude means missing out on the positive things that solitude brings: the ability to clarify difficult problems, to figure out how you really feel about something, to build moral courage and to strengthen relationships. In Digital Minimalism, Newport tells us that if you suffer from solitude deprivation, the quality of your life suffers too. Studies of people born since 1995 — the first group to enter their teens with smartphones, tablets, and persistent connectivity, have found that teenagers were consuming media, including text messaging and social networks, for an average of nine hours a day. Newport suggests that they are the cognitive canaries in the coalmine — if social deprivation causes problems, we should see them show up here first.

If we lose the ability to process and make sense of our emotions, or to reflect on what really matters in our lives, or even allow our brains to refrain from constant social connectivity, it is not surprising that patterns of ill health such as anxiety emerge

And that is exactly what has happened. Jean Twenge, one of the world’s foremost experts on generational differences in American youth, in an article in the Atlantic (2017) noted that young people born between 1995 and 2012, showed remarkable differences from the generation that preceded them. Rates of teen depression had skyrocketed with much of this seemingly due to a massive increase in anxiety disorders. Twenge noted that these shifts in mental health corresponded ‘exactly’ to the moment when American smartphone ownership became ubiquitous. The defining trait of the group she calls ‘iGen’ is that they grew up with mobile phones and social media. She suggests that they are paying a price for this distinction with their mental health.

Twenge did not set out to implicate the smartphone. "It seemed like too easy an explanation for the negative mental-health outcomes in teens", but it ended up the only explanation that fit the timing. There were other potential culprits, from stressful current events to increased academic pressure, that existed before the spike in anxiety that began around 2011. But the one factor that dramatically increased at the same time as teenage anxiety was the number of young people owning their own smartphones.

The plight of iGen provides a strong warning about the danger of solitude deprivation. When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminates time alone with their thoughts from their lives, it is not surprising that a decline in mental health would result. If we lose the ability to process and make sense of our emotions, or to reflect on what really matters in our lives, or even allow our brains to refrain from constant social connectivity, it is not surprising that patterns of ill health such as anxiety emerge.

All those moments when we had no choice but to listen to our inner thoughts: queuing in the supermarket, walking down the street, mowing the lawn — those moments of solitude, whether we wanted them or not, have vanished

I find that walking to work can allow those thoughts that are suppressed by the constant company (demands) of others or by my digital media, to begin to emerge and free-float of their own volition, allowing me to be more creative, solve problems that had previously been troubling and allow annoyances and perceived criticisms to evaporate. Time spent in bed too, free of social connectivity is vital. The ability to turn off the phone and close my eyes so that nothing, save for an act of God, will disturb me until morning is a recipe for a rested brain, and dreamless, untroubled sleep.

• Dr Catherine Conlon is senior medical officer in the Department of Public Health, St Finbarr’s Hospital, Cork. Her book, Modern Culture and Wellbeing was published by Veritas, in 2020.