Something You Should Know - How Your Brain Reacts in a Disaster & Exploring Healthy Solitude - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: August 22, 2026

Most people think dogs see the world only in black and white—but that's simply not true. Dogs do see color, just not the same colors you do. Understanding how your dog actually experiences the world explains everything from why certain toys are easier to find to why some colors practically disappear. It's a fascinating glimpse into life through your dog's eyes. Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/200810/can-dogs-see-colors Disasters strike without warning, leaving people with only seconds to react. Yet those first few moments often determine who survives and who doesn't. Surprisingly, the biggest factor isn't always physical strength, experience, or even luck. It's how your brain responds under extreme stress. Amanda Ripley has spent years studying real-life disasters and the people who lived through them. She explains what happens inside your mind during an emergency, why so many people freeze or make dangerous decisions, and what you can do now to dramatically improve your chances when the unthinkable happens. Amanda is author of the book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why (https://amzn.to/4fGJakN). Many people think spending lots of time alone is a sign that something is wrong—that you're lonely, antisocial, or missing out on life. But research tells a very different story. Solitude, when chosen rather than forced, can improve creativity, emotional resilience, relationships, and even your overall well-being. Psychologist Netta Weinstein explains why healthy solitude is one of the most misunderstood tools for living a happier, healthier life—and how to know whether you're getting too much, too little, or just the right amount. She is author of the book Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone (https://amzn.to/3X1XkWf). Your phone goes almost everywhere you do—into your hands, your pocket, your car, the kitchen, even the bathroom. Along the way, it quietly picks up far more than texts and emails. The surprising part isn't that your phone is covered with germs—it's how easily those germs can wind up on you. Listen as I explain why your phone deserves more attention than you probably give it and the simple habit that can keep it from becoming a health hazard. Source: https://www.nm.org/healthbeat/healthy-tips/quick-dose-is-your-cell-phone-making-you-sick PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty, an $84 value, and AirDoctor’s 30-day money back guarantee WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less.  QUINCE: Elevate your everyday. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠https://Shopify.com/realm⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Then, what really happens in disasters and emergencies that people just don't know? The biggest lesson for me is that the most powerful ally you will have in any disaster is regular people. The people who do the vast majority of life-saving in every major disaster are regular people. It's your friends, your neighbors, your family, strangers on a bus. Also, I bet you have no idea how dirty your phone is. And solitude. There's a difference between solitude and loneliness that a lot of people don't understand. 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. When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board.

Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Something you should know. Fascinating Intel. the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, for the longest time, like forever, I've always thought dogs were colorblind.

I'd always heard that. But it turns out to be not true. It's a misconception. If by colorblind, you mean that a dog only sees shades of gray. The fact is, dogs do see color. but the colors they see are neither as rich or as many as the ones we see. In one study, scientists put several different dog breeds to the test and found that they were all able to distinguish blue and yellow,

but not red and green. So what does that red doggy toy look like to your dog? It probably looks dark brown, gray, or black. This is useful because, for example, if you play frisbee with your dog, you might want to get a blue frisbee, which your dog will see better against the green grass, which your dog sees more as yellow. And that is something you should know. I would bet that at some point in your life you've had to face a disaster or serious danger,

fire, flood, rain, hurricane, tornado, or maybe a smaller, more personal disaster, but to you still a disaster. And you've probably heard it said that you never know how somebody will respond in a disaster until it happens. But still, it's worth thinking about in advance and understanding generally what people tend to do in a disaster and who you should listen to and how to conduct yourself. Here to talk about all this is Amanda Ripley. She is a writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

and she is author of a book called The Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why? Hi, Amanda, welcome to something you should know. Hi, thanks for having me. So as you look at this topic of how people handle disasters, generally do people handle them well, not handle them well? What's your sense? Actually, we do something's much better than we expect and something's much worse than we expect. So that is why I got obsessed with this question is because what you find out is that your experience, you know, physically, psychologically and socially in a disaster is very different from what you expect in ways that are good and bad.

So you're a reporter who's covered disasters. I want to get a sense of like your sense of do how do people handle disasters. What do you see? What do people tell you the people who have been through them? And what have they learned? And just that kind of thing. I, for years, as a journalist, was covering a lot of disasters from 9-11 to Hurricane Katrina and other things. And, you know, we would do a lot of stories that you always see after every single disaster, right? You see stories about loss and grief and blame. And those are important stories.

But there was one kind of story that we didn't seem to do that no one did, which was, what was it actually? and what can we learn from the survivors? Like, what did it feel like to survive a disaster? Because every single survivor I met had things that they wished they had known, things that they want the rest of us to know. So yeah, it's very different from what we expect. Things like what? What is it that they experience that they want us to know?

And I guess it depends on the disaster, but in a sense, what is that? Well, that's the funny thing is it's actually very consistent across very different kinds of disaster. kinds of disasters, whether you're talking about a terrorist attack on a subway line or a tsunami or a wildfire. So some of the common but surprising patterns were people are startled by how slow they were to accept what was happening, how creatively their brain worked to normalize what was happening. They're also surprised by how polite and helpful strangers suddenly become. People become cooperative and generous, almost to a fault. So yeah, we feel safer in a group and there's and often are. Almost no one who gets out of a major disaster does it alone. And the reason this matters

is not just because, oh, now you won't be a surprise if and when you experience the disaster, but because we would want to plan totally differently, right, for a disaster. If we know what it will actually be like, like just to take a small example, people generally check with five different sources before they evacuate, before a hurricane, even after a mandatory evacuation order has been issued, right? And so those sources are family members, neighbors, friends, maybe a weather person on TV, you know. But because of that, you have to issue warnings to the public very differently, right? And you have to understand how people are actually going to act, not how you want them to act, right? And as an individual, you want to maybe prepare,

for emergencies a little differently, knowing that, you know, the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to go through a really profound period of disbelief. And you're going to want to push through that very quickly. I want to go back to what you said about one of the common experiences in a disaster is people don't believe this is happening to them. And I find that really fascinating. And I have a very small exam. It wasn't a disaster, but I think it triggers the same thing. I walked out of my office several weeks ago, and there was a giant bear in my kitchen. What? Oh my gosh. And this has happened. We've actually had a bear in the house before, but this was a giant bear, and he was in my kitchen, and I was maybe 10 feet from him. And what happens, and thinking back later, what happened, what happened.

What happens in my head when I see that is the most bizarre, like you try to make sense of it and it doesn't make sense. There shouldn't be a bear in my kitchen. And so you think, well, is that a dog? Is it a horse? And you wonder, why has this happened? How did he get in? But I think what that does is it stops you from acting because you're trying to figure it out. And it takes a long time.

I mean, it doesn't take a long time to take an hour, but it takes a good 10 seconds to go, what the hell is going on here? Yeah, right. And so your brain's trying to place this occurrence into its, like, library of previous experiences. Then what'd you do? Well, so I went through a series of things. So I went to my son's room and said, there's a bear in the house staying here. And he said, let's go in the garage.

And in the meantime, I saw the bear run. out of the kitchen and go back in my bedroom. He had come in through the door in my bedroom, the sliding door. And so I said, oh, okay, because I didn't know what to do. So I was taking anybody's suggestion. So we ran into the garage. And I thought, wait, I don't want to be in the garage. I don't want this bear ruining my house while I'm hiding in the garage.

And I also remember there are lots of encounters with bears where we live. And nobody ever really gets hurt. The bears are very docile. So they just want something to eat. They're not looking to kill people. So I went back into the house, and I went around and opened all the doors to the house in hopes that I could get him to go out. And he came back into the kitchen again, went to the pantry, grabbed a jar of sealed peanut butter,

sat down and opened it, unscrewed it, and then took the jar and went out by the pool, sat down and ate his peanut butter, and I went around and shut all the doors, and the police came and they saw he was outside, so they left. And the bear eventually climbed over the fence and went away. Wow. Amazing. This is a great example. I'm so glad you brought this up. So there are three phases that we all go through in every emergency.

And at the time, we never think it's a disaster, disaster. We always think it's just happening to us. And sometimes it is just happening to us, right? So the first phase, which you talked about, is denial. And it makes total sense, right? Like that's how we operate in the world is fitting everything that's happened. Everything that happens to us, we fit into what's happened before, right? And so that's how we can move through the world relatively efficiently.

So that makes total sense. Is your brain like, is it a dog? Is it you see you were trying to sort it out? Then you backed away and went into your son's room. That's phase two, which is deliberation. And so everybody gets very social, as I was saying earlier, right, in a disaster. It's like you immediately, if you're, let's say, in a. crowded mall and the smoke detector goes off. What do you do first? You look at other people to see

how they're reacting, right? And that's totally normal and usually smart. So you did a little consultation with your son, right? And you said to me, you know, you wanted, you didn't know what to do. You wanted someone to give you an option, right? And so he did and you went in the garage, right? So that at this point is the decisive moment. So the decisive moment is the third phase. And that very much depends on what's happened in the first two phases in denial and deliberation. Now, at this point, it sounds like you had calmed your nervous system enough that you were able to access your executive functioning thinking skills, which is impossible to do at first. And so at that point, you remembered, you know, actually probably don't want to be in the garage.

Also, bears don't usually attack people. Like you sort, you found other things in your library, your brain library, right, that were helpful to you. And then, you know, made a decision, which is to open all the doors and get out of the garage. So, yeah. And you made a lot of noise. Oh, okay, yes. Great. How did you do that?

I just started screaming and making a lot of noise banging things because I heard that's what you're supposed to do. I don't even know if it's true. But I couldn't just, you know, I had to do something. Something. You know, I had to do. Because there are plenty of stories of bears getting into houses. and if left alone, they destroy the house. I mean, they'll just tear it apart looking for food.

Anyway, it's interesting to me how, you know, people will react to the same disaster or emergency differently. Like, you know, we have earthquakes in California, had one not long ago. They don't bother me so much, but, you know, my wife and son, they don't like them. And not that I like them, but I don't freak out. And I know, like, if it gets to a certain point

where it seems too intense, you head for the doorway, and then it's over. But some people just like, they're very disturbed after an earthquake. Which is interesting, too. Like, what causes you to freak out about something might not cause me and vice versa. And so the technical term of art for this is dread. So each of us has a different dread equation, but we kind of know what the ingredients are. And those vary depending on your life experiences, your personality, your genetics, etc. but they're roughly dread is a function of uncontrollability perceived perceived uncontrollability right

unfamiliarity like how wild is this thing you just said earthquake you know what it is right so for you you it's not unfamiliar but also suffering like is it the kind of thing that's going to lead to a lot of suffering which is why we might be more scared of like cancer right than than a heart attack even though you're more likely to die of a heart attack in most cases so and the scale of destruction matters right so maybe, I don't know, but maybe for your son or your wife, the fact that an earthquake can, you know, destroy a city, if you don't know if that's going to happen, right, is part of the dread, right? It's different than a bear. And the unfairness is also a function in dread and the imaginability, like how, have you seen movies about it that are terrifying, that kind of thing.

So there is a kind of dread equation that not only implicates how we're going to feel, but how we're going to act, right? We're talking about disasters, how to prepare for them, and how to survive them. My guest is Amanda Ripley. She's author of a book called The Unthinkable Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why? Get your tickets now for the dog stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Go!

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People thought denim on denim was peak fashion. Inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when West Jetting welcomes you on board. Here's to West Jetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years.

So Amanda, do you know if somebody like has a real thing about earthquakes or hurricanes, are they likely to be very sensitive to a lot of other natural disasters or do we have these in particular disasters that bother us? Like a phobia. Yeah, I think it's pretty variable. I mean, there are some people who are just, you know, especially anxious about many different threats. And on average, not always, but on average, women tend to worry more about many of these threats. And so they're actually more likely to survive in many cases because they're less likely to take risks,

particularly in driving through flooded streets and things like that. But often it is extremely inconsistent. I know that's true with me. Like I bike all over Washington, D.C. where I live, which is, you know, objectively, very risky behavior. But I don't really like to drive. Like, that freaks me out. Do you know what I mean? So we're all kind of a weird, you know, kind of amalgam of our previous experiences and our fears. So quick example, after 9-11, right, many thousands of Americans decided

to drive instead of flying anywhere because driving felt safer, right? And the same thing happened in the pandemic, right? So in the months after 9-11, planes carried about 17% fewer passengers compared with normal and the number of miles driven increased nationwide, but an estimated 2,300 additional Americans died because they drove instead of flying in those months. So, you know, it's not really, we're not taking an objective actuarial view of the risk, of course. We're doing what feels safer, and that's understandable, but it's not always the safer thing. Is there a way to somehow, even though you don't know what the disaster might be, to prepare yourself for it? because I learned a long time ago and even had some training for this,

but in a disaster, in a difficult situation like a bear in your kitchen, panic is your worst enemy because you can't think you don't know what to do and you just focus on your panic. So is there a way to mitigate that somehow? To answer your question for most people, there's a lot you can do. One is to expect that disbelief, right, that we talked about, expect that. So, you know, the other day I was walking around in a crowded, very nice area of D.C. And it was like 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

And I heard a gunshot very close, maybe two blocks away. And I look around, first thing, right, look around what's everybody else doing. And there were hundreds of people just going about their day, groups of kids, groups of adults, people sip in their coffee, walking, you know, as if it hadn't happened. But because I know, I don't always get this right, but in this case, I know that there's going to be this default to normalcy. And in this neighborhood, there usually are not a lot of gunshots, right? So people aren't expecting it. It doesn't fit.

Maybe they haven't experienced it before. But I have, right? So I know, hey, this isn't right. So I'm looking all around. I'm scanning, you know, everywhere I can. I don't see any evidence that anyone has shot a gun. But I know in my gut that there's something not right. So I pivoted, walked a block, went into the subway, and took the train home because I knew it wasn't coming from the subway.

Now, is that the right thing to do? You only know it afterward. And in fact, it was the right thing to do. There was a shooting two blocks away. Car pulled up, shot another shot a driver. But like, no one reacted, which was wild because I've been in other situations, and maybe you have two, where people overreact, right? So just knowing that is super helpful. And the last thing I'll say about it is there is only one really easy way to calm yourself down so that you can think in an emergency.

And I'll use an example from a police officer. So Charles Humes was a police officer in Toledo, Ohio. And he was a rookie cop. And he was so embarrassed because every time he called in on the radio when something was going on, his voice would go up like several octaves. He was nervous. He was upset. He was frightened. And his words would suddenly become hard to follow, unintelligible, which is a big problem, right?

He got tunnel vision, which is another sure sign of a stress response. He couldn't make decisions, right? All normal fear responses, but not great for him. I'm embarrassing and also not good for the public. So as he put it to me, I was a threat to myself and others. So what did he do? Did he just quit the force? No.

Like, would it have been good if he got this training beforehand? Yes. But instead, he gave himself the training. which is he did the one thing we can do consciously to calm down our subconscious. So he used breathing tactics he had learned in martial arts. And he did such a cool thing. It was so clever. So every day for a month, he played a recording of a police siren for five or ten minutes.

And as the siren shrieked, he would breathe deeply, in for four, hold for four, out for four. And he was getting to a point where he could make that breathing response automatic. Every time he heard the siren, he would do the breathing. And after about a month, he sounded like a different person on the radio. So you can access this, but the only way to do it is to prepare for and rehearse for it in a realistic way in advance. One thing I think is really interesting is when there's trouble in a public place and you're with strangers, when there's trouble, potential disaster, whatever, people all of a sudden become very friendly with each other, very social, I guess because, well, you know, we're all in this together.

For good and for ill, because it depends totally on the wisdom and luck of the group, right? But what you do know is that if you do, if you do have your wits about you, and if maybe you've had you have some experience with this location or this threat, people will be very responsive to leadership, to like assertive leadership. So this is something that flight attendants are now trained on. I did some training with flight attendants to see what this is like. The whole thing with plane crashes, right, is they end up. on fire and on the ground. So most plane crashes are survivable, which is great news. But you got to get

off the plane really fast because the smoke becomes toxic really fast. And the smoke is the whole thing, as in all fires. It's all about smoke, right? So you got to get off that plane really fast. And for years and years, they would, when they investigate plane crashes, what they found is that people were either shutting down and not moving, even though the plane was on fire. And the firefighters will put the fire out and find a lot of passengers dead in their seats with their hands crossed across their laps, right? Or they would get up, but they would try to go for their overhead baggage, right, which becomes a big problem on an evacuation slide and other things, right? So what they've now learned is to train flight attendants to scream at you, to get off the

plane and do not, do not bring your backs, right? And it works. This is the great news, is that people are very responsive to assertive leadership in crises. So if no one's taking the helm and you know something, you can lead very effectively. Yeah. I remember, though, that like in 9-11, people were being told stay where you are in those buildings. And so they did. And they were following somebody's lead, and it turned out to be not great advice. I mean, they may not have made it anyway, but they had no chance by staying.

Right. So this is probably the biggest lesson for me that came up again and again and again is that the people in charge consistently underestimate the public and they don't level with the public. And they don't take advantage of the fact that the most powerful ally you will have in any disaster is regular people. The people who do the vast majority of life saving in every major disaster are regular people. It's your friends, your neighbors, your family, strangers on a bus. So the more you can prepare people for that, the better it's going to go, but it requires trust. But we know, like, to your point, that, you know, only half the people in the World Trade Center even knew how to get out of them. They didn't know where the stairwells were.

They'd never been in them. There was actually a law on the books in New York City that you couldn't make people go down the stairs in a fire drill, right? So they had no muscle memory for how to get there, except at Morgan Stanley, there was the head of security who thought very differently about this. And he trained everybody in that huge company to go down the stairs. And he would have regular surprise mandatory fire drills. And almost everyone got out of that office, not including him because he went back in to search for stragglers. Well, this is a lot of really good information that could be life-saving. I mean, people really need to know this stuff because, as I said in the very beginning,

and sooner or later, some emergency, some disaster is going to happen. And the more you're ready for it and the more you know what's about to happen, the better. I've been speaking with Amanda Ripley. She is a writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. and she is author of the book, The Unthinkable, Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why? And if you'd like to read it, there's a link to that book at Amazon and the show notes. Thanks for coming on today.

This was really, this was very helpful. Thank you, Amanda. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Solitude. Time alone. Some people cherish it. Others less so. But how much solitude is.

is too much. Solitude sometimes I think gets a bad rap because it gets lumped in with loneliness. So what is the relationship between solitude and loneliness? Are introverts more likely to like their solitude or not? What is healthy solitude? Well, I have just the person to address that. Netta Weinstein is an internationally recognized psychologist and director of the European Research Council's Solitude, a lone but resilient project. She is also professor of psychology at the University of Reading and an associate researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Netta is author of the book, Solitude, the science and power of being alone. Hi, Netta. Welcome to something you should know. Hi, thanks for having me on.

So I wanted to first ask you, I know people who seem to like their solitude and I know people who seem to not like their solitude. And the difference between those two people is that genetic? Is that learned? Is that because they're, and then there's all the people in between, but our desire to be alone or to avoid being alone comes from where? Yeah, I think it's a great question. When you kind of look at whether people are solitude lovers or suspicious or,

or even avoidant of kind of solitude time. You know, I think there are a lot of things that contribute to how we have and build our relationship with solitude, how we feel about it. And so, you know, one of the things that we kind of see is that there are some people who just generally feel more comfortable in solitude. And they've talked to us about, you know, I've always been this way. I came from a large family and I sought out my solitude even early on. So I think some of it is the way that we're wired.

and some of us might be wire in such a way that we want more of our time alone than others. But it's also a relationship that we can build and change and that changes for us at different times in our lives. So we can go out and kind of change the way that we relate to solitude. But also there are times in life where we just need solitude a lot less or more than we used to. If you're someone who likes their solitude, you're looking at. at differently than somebody who has a lot of friends and is very social. Like nobody ever says to that guy or that woman, they're too social. They have too many friends. They're too involved with other people. But people who like a lot of solitude are often looked at is, what's wrong with them?

Something's wrong that you want to spend so much time alone away from others. Yeah, absolutely. So there's this kind of stigma of solitude that 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 that there's something wrong with them or, you know, maybe they don't have something in their life. So, you know, why are you alone on a Friday night? Well, it has to be because kind of 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 is, you know, naturally social.

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, you know, 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. And there may be. Could there be? You know, when we look at preference for solitude, you know, when we ask people, how much do you prefer to be in solitude? So there's kind of a measure in psychology that we use for prefering to be in solitude. 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. So we see these correlations with sort of negative well-being indicators like lower well-being or more loneliness. 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, do you really enjoy solitude? There ask something like, would you prefer to be alone or prefer to be with other people? 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 there's 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. I'm sure that people who spend a lot of time alone

have been told, you know, you should have more friends, you should get out more, you should do more things with other people, and maybe they should. But can you also make the case? Is there benefits to, if you have a lot of friends, of maybe carving out more solitude? Or is everybody different

and it's whatever feels right to you. 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. But actually, the more we learn about solitude, the more really seems that everybody has their own relationship. And for some people, you know, 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 young adults in their late teens or early 20s, they tend to really like to spend most of their time in social interactions. And again, they're 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 interactions 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. 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, it means that actually, you know, 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? What are the benefits? Yeah, so, 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 like a lot of solitude feel any sense of shame about it? Because we hear things like, well, he's a loner. Well, we hear that about serial killers. Well, you know, when they ask the neighbors, well, he was kind of a loner, kind of a hermit. These are not positive things about people that spend a lot of time alone. Absolutely, yeah. So we, 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, you know, the person who's isolated and lonely. Or we might think about that kind of strange, you know, 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 own.

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. So we'll tend to think about solitude, a solitude lover as a loner, because we tend to think about solitude and loneliness in kind of the same space. 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. 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? Yeah. So, you know, it's a great question. It's a really complicated one, and when 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've found so far is that if you look at scales of introversion,

extroversion and introversion, 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, nobody can be social all the time. I mean, everybody needs a break. It's just some people seem to, you know, it's more of the default. Do you, you like normally like to be out and about, or do you normally like to be by yourself? And then you switch it up a little bit. 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.

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. 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. It's really the mindset of, is this time, time that I can use to relax, to have a sense of peace that I need to take care of myself in some way, to do something I love. Because we tend to ignore those, even brief periods of solitude when we have them as meaningful moments in our lives, rather than just the thing, the time that passes in between kind of two events in my day, we don't get as much out of that time as we could. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. But you're Right. I mean, but if you're spending time alone, it's not going to be as memorable as, you know, if you're doing something fun with other people. It just kind of by its nature isn't as memorable because you're just alone.

There is 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 I'm kind of excited. We call it a high arousal positive affect way. Solitude, though, gives us something else. 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, that we do. You know, it seems like solitude has a, like, bad PR, that somehow solitude gets mixed up with loneliness, even sadness to some extent, that it's not necessarily a good thing. Absolutely. I mean, I'm just, you know, when I hear you say that, it 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 look at terminology, a really kind of interesting way to think about it is to think about the language that we use and the words that we use. So the word solitude is a neutral word, right? We can have positive solitude. We can have lonely or empty solitude. We can be alone and feel anyway, really. We can have a difficult time with it or a great time with it.

But we'll tend to think about it as negative. 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. 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, you know, 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. We have less access to others, less access to intimacy with others, and quality social connection. 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 in the same way. And it's kind of a little bit the way I think about it is, you know, imagine we have the word, let's say, social interaction or conversation. let's say the word for conversation had been used in much the same way as the word aggression. So we'd be talking about conversation, but our association, our mind, where our mind goes,

is our mind will then go to aggression. We can only ever think about aggressive conversation. They go hand in hand. It's a little bit like that for solitude because inner history, and up until recently, when somebody was in solitude, that was another way of saying, I am lonely. I'm, you know, I'm 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. Well, it seems like what you're saying or what I took from what you're saying is that solitude is time alone that you want, that you seek out. It serves a purpose.

It refueles you or whatever it does for you, whereas loneliness is a lone time that doesn't feel good, that you don't usually want it. You don't like feeling alone. And you've explained well the difference between the two and the roles they play in our lives. I've been speaking with Netta Weinstein. She is an internationally recognized psychologist and author of the book, Solitude, The Science and Power of Being Alone. And if you'd like to read it, there's a link to Amazon.

on in the show notes. Thank you, Netta. Thank you for coming on today. Oh, that's great. Thanks so much for your time. Your cell phone is dirty. Really dirty. Your phone picks up germs everywhere it goes, and it goes everywhere. Work, home, coffee shop, car, to the store. In fact, cell phones carry 10 times more bacteria than most toilet seats. Cell phones collect the dirt, oil, and bacteria that people have on their skin. And the average person checks their phone so many times a day, and each time they do, they transfer these organisms from their finger to the phone surface.

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