6 Personal Health
F
or over three decades, researchers have stigmatized solitude. They observed that solitude can cause a high level of suffering and loneliness, particularly among teenagers. That people perceive loners as “weird,” and the majority might rarely accept them.
By Anuradha Varanasi
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“Loneliness is when there is a mismatch between the desired level and the actual level of social connections. As opposed to solitude, that is defined as the state of being alone.
Several studies suggested that being alone inevitably causes loneliness. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, social isolation or loneliness is linked to serious health conditions. But in 1999, school psychologist Beverly Terrel-Deutsch suggested that loneliness and solitude are two different concepts. Rather than solitude, it is loneliness that damages health. Those who feel lonely do not always lack social relationships. That same year, other scholars who studied teenagers like Terrel-Deutsch suggested that socially-isolated teenagers do not feel lonely but could enjoy being alone and capitalize on it once they realize the benefits. In the early 1990s, other researchers in the positive psychology tradition insisted that the capacity to enjoy solitude is important for happiness and stress management. Psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed in 1970 that appreciating solitude was “one of the defining characteristics of self-actualized individuals.”
