Most people enjoyed spending time alone during the pandemic, research suggests.
The study of more than 2,000 teenagers and adults in the summer of last year found that most people drew benefits from solitude in the early days of the crisis. All age groups experienced positive as well as negative impacts of being alone but researchers found that descriptions of solitude included more positive effects than negative. On average, wellbeing scores when participants were alone were 5 out of 7 across all ages, including adolescents aged 13-16.
Some participants talked about worsening mood or wellbeing but most described their experiences of solitude in terms of feeling competent and autonomous. Forty-three per cent mentioned that solitude involved activities and experiences of feeling competent, such as time spent developing skills. Autonomy — self-connection and reliance on self — was a key feature particularly for adults, who mentioned it twice as often as teenage participants.
Working-age adults recorded the most negative experiences with more participants mentioning disrupted wellbeing (35.6 per cent v 29.4 per cent in adolescents and 23.7 per cent in older adults) and negative mood (44 per cent v 27.8 per cent in adolescents and 24.5 per cent in older adults). Experiences of alienation, or the cost of not interacting with friends, were twice as frequent among adolescents (about one in seven, or 14.8 per cent) as when compared with adults (7 per cent) with older adults mentioning it most infrequently (2.3 per cent).
Dr Netta Weinstein, associate professor of psychology at the University of Reading and lead author of the paper, which is published in Frontiers in Psychology today, said: “The conventional wisdom is that adolescents on the whole found that the pandemic was a negative experience, but we see in our study how components of solitude can be positive.”
