Popular media has made loneliness look bad, but is it really? Author and psychologist Ethan Kross explains his study of loneliness, finding that it is actually our response to loneliness – rather than the act of being alone itself – that has negative effects. If we reframe loneliness as an opportunity instead of a threat, it can have surprising benefits for our creativity, well-being, and relationships with ourselves.

ETHAN KROSS: There's been an increasing amount of attention over the past several years about the negative consequences of loneliness, of feeling like you are isolated and disconnected from other people around you. But there are many situations in which being alone can actually be good for us. We often hear that being alone is bad for us. This messaging is getting us to believe that being alone is bad for us. So if we find ourselves in this state, we might think, uh oh, this isn't good. Which could in turn have cascading negative effects For our health and well-being.

We've done research on this and found that the media is approximately ten times more likely to describe experiences of being alone as negative as compared to positive. Now, why does that matter? It matters because if you expose people to descriptions of being alone as good for you versus bad for you, that has direct implications for how people think about being alone.

When we do research where we track people over time and we look at how much time they spend alone, what we see is that if you're the kind of person who thinks being alone is good for you, you actually feel good when you spend time alone. But if you're the kind of person who thinks being alone is bad for you, then you feel more lonely when you spend time alone. What I love about that finding is it gives us the opportunity to potentially intervene.

Because we can shift people's beliefs about being alone. And what the research suggests is that if we can get people to embrace these experiences of being on their own as more positive for them, they will, in fact, have that effect. Rather than thinking about that experience as reflecting something wrong about me or the circumstances, we can reframe that situation as an opportunity to be creative, to be alone with our thoughts in a pleasant way.

What I'd love to see more in the media and public health campaigns, however, is a recognition that being alone doesn't necessarily need to lead to that state, to that experience of loneliness. I'd like to see some of the benefits of being alone celebrated. The more we talk about these things, the more gets on our minds and the more it penetrates into the culture more broadly.