The benefits of solitude: the unpleasant emotion that can help us know what makes us happy

Have you ever had a hard day and gotten home, and there was no one to share your day and your worries with? Or had to stay home on a Saturday night because you had no plans, but when you opened a social media account, you found everyone having a good time partying? In these situations, you may have felt a sense of emptiness , surrounded by so much silence . That feeling is a sign of loneliness . Despite being an unpleasant emotion, loneliness is useful and serves an important function: it responds to our basic, human need to feel connected to others and helps us reflect on our relationships and ourselves in order to understand what we need to feel fulfilled and complete .

It might seem like loneliness only appears when we lack company, but, as Amaral's song says, we can "be alone in the middle of a crowd." It arises when we feel distant or disconnected from others, or even from ourselves, and it attempts to offer us the space to understand what we need.

Perhaps we don't consider the relationships we've established to be genuine enough and need to make changes to them, or perhaps our relationship skills are acting as a barrier to achieving the depth we desire with those close to us because we are, for example, too reserved and find it difficult to open up to others.

Loneliness allows us to reflect on it, as if it were an alarm that tells us something is not right in our relationships, so that little by little, we can find a solution .

Despite the discomfort it causes us, if we learn to read loneliness well, we will realize that it will help us value what is truly important to us and what we need in our lives.

In some ways, it helps us establish our priorities and improve our relationship with ourselves. To properly manage this emotion, it's essential to understand loneliness as a growth tool that allows us to explore our passions and connect with our essence .

It's normal for us to be afraid of feeling lonely, because as we said, it's not a pleasant emotion. However, it's important to train ourselves to accept it, trying not to judge it so we can learn to draw on the lessons it can teach us.