Spending 15 minutes a day alone helps you feel calm

SPENDING just 15 minutes alone a day makes people feel more calm and peaceful, a study has found.

Being alone, particularly by choice, has been found to reduce people’s anger, stress and anxiety.

The downside is loneliness, which can also set in after 15 minutes, but researchers found thinking positive thoughts could help to overturn this feeling.

The results of the study, led by the University of Rochester in the US, are based on four separate experiments with up to almost 350 people asked to spend time alone.

In one test, participants spent 15 minutes alone and 15 minutes in conversation, before their emotional states in both scenarios were compared.

Spending time alone appeared to reduce positive active emotional states such as excitement, but those who did so were also less likely to report feeling negative emotions such as stress. Other experiments, which examined different scenarios such as reading a book by yourself, reported similar findings.

The study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, concludes that alone time can reduce positive and negative ‘high-arousal’ states like excitement and anger, but also increase positive ‘low-arousal’ states, such as peacefulness and relaxation.

The authors, led by Thuy-vy Nguyen, conclude: ‘The set of studies suggested that people can use solitude, or other variations on being alone, to regulate their affective states – becoming quiet after excitement, calm after an angry episode or centred and peaceful when desired. And solitude also leaves people more relaxed, depending of course on the situation.’

Solitude tends to be viewed as ‘slow’ and ‘unexciting’, while loneliness is now said to be worse for our health than smoking.

However the latest study suggests some well-chosen time alone can actually help achieve some much-needed inner peace.