‘From loneliness to alone-liness:’ Navigating social needs and solitude as parts of student life

Walking into Chancellor’s Professor Robert Coplan’s office, a person’s eyes may be immediately drawn to a collection of colourful turtle figurines and memorabilia spread across the corner of his desk. 

“When I talked to parents and teachers over the course of my career about shyness, we often used the metaphor of a young child being like a turtle coming out of its shell,” Coplan explained. “Over the years, I’ve started to collect turtles, and this collection of turtles on my desk is from all over the world.” 

Coplan, a developmental psychologist by training, researches the development of shyness and social anxiety in children and adolescents. Over the past several years, his work has focused on the costs and benefits of solitude. 

“We need the support of others, but how much exactly really differs across people,” he said.

In university, students face an environment that is both socially demanding and isolating. Here, being alone and social needs interconnect.

What is solitude?

When Sahar Shoaib moved to Ottawa from the United States in February 2017, she spent a lot of time alone. But she remembers it as solitude, not loneliness.

“Solitude, for me, is more of a choice, rather than being put into circumstances where you’re forced to be [alone], ” she explains.

By definition, solitude is “the quality or state of being alone or remote from society.” 

But in a technology-driven world, defining solitude can be difficult. People often feel connected online despite their physical distance from each other. Conversely, Coplan explains, one could live with others, but feel alone in their own room.

“Some people think about solitude more as that perceived separation or as this idea that there are no demands on you, socially,” Coplan said. “Another way people talk about solitude is being offstage. You’re free to be your authentic person.”

In 2021, Debora Beatriz Rabinovitch and Dr. Jade-Isis Lefebvre designed a workshop on loneliness for international students divided by pandemic shutdowns at Concordia University. The success of this event led them to create a workbook titled The Expressions of Being Alone. 

In the workbook, Rabinovitch and Lefebvre defined solitude as when someone has met their social needs and although they are alone, they feel connected to others.

This definition resembles how Shoaib felt. 

“I didn’t feel that I needed to immediately make new friends or see people,” she said. “I was okay with doing my thing, exploring the city, going to work and reading. For me that was very fulfilling.” 

Lefebvre, a part-time privately practicing psychologist, works at Concordia University Health and Wellness Services. At the university, she is a part of Zen Dens, a space where students can stop by and take a break to focus on their wellness with activities such as art projects or books. Zen Dens have clinicians and student support ambassadors available in addition to activities and workshops. 

This year, Zen Dens have facilitated several workshops using the Expressions of Being Alone to allow students to explore solitude and loneliness.

“We need to teach students how to be comfortable being alone,” Lefebvre said. “It gives us the opportunity to get to know ourselves, to make better decisions and to have clearer alignment to our values, goals and behaviours.”

Transitioning from solitude to loneliness

When Shoaib enrolled in the engineering program at Carleton University in September 2017, her perception of being alone changed. 

“I realized that I was not able to make friends and connect with people and that was very off-putting. I would say I was the loneliest I’ve been,” she recalled. 

The cognitive discrepancy model of loneliness defines loneliness as what happens when there’s a discrepancy between people’s social needs and the fulfillment of those needs. 

In the 2022 Student Academic Experience Survey conducted in the United Kingdom, 36 per cent of university students felt lonely at least once per week, 20 per cent felt lonely most of the time and three per cent felt lonely all of the time.

In Expressions of Being Alone, the authors narrowed down this finding even further, reporting that first-year, international and graduate students dealt with the most loneliness in university.

“What I’ve seen is, it’s people who experience big changes, who maybe feel different from the norm, or feel as if their experience may be less common, they might be prone to feeling loneliness,” Lefebvre said.

In a 2013 paper published in the Handbook of Solitude, edited by Coplan, psychology and neuroscience professor Steven Asher depicts the first year of university as a time when students have opportunities to interact with more people than they ever have before. 

Concurrently, it’s a time when distance and new situations test long-term friendships and connections from before university, leading to fluctuating levels of loneliness amongst students as the year progresses.

Loneliness: Its consequences and solutions

Research has shown that loneliness negatively affects well-being by increasing one’s likelihood of Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, cardiovascular disease and premature death in later life.

Samia Akhter-Khan is a PhD candidate at King’s College London who studies loneliness in older adults and works at The Centre for Global Mental Health.

In a 2021 paper, Akhter-Khan and her colleagues researched how loneliness changes as people age by observing data from the Framingham Heart Study (FHS). The FHS is a long-term study involving cohorts of regularly medically examined participants, allowing researchers to view the common patterns associated with various diseases. 

Akhter-Khan and her colleagues observed loneliness between two examinations that took place approximately four years apart. They classified three forms of loneliness: persistent, transient and incidental. 

Participants who felt lonely in the first study but not in the second experienced transient loneliness. Vice versa, those who felt lonely only in the second study experienced incidental loneliness. When participants felt lonely in both studies, they experienced persistent loneliness.

Akhter-Khan and her colleagues observed that persistent loneliness was associated with cognitive decline. Meanwhile, transient loneliness seemed to protect against Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, even more than no loneliness.

“One idea is that people who do feel lonely and do something about it usually change something in their environments, engage in activities or really take action,” Akhter-Khan said. “[They] have this kind of resilient mindset and get out of that state of loneliness, which is actually really healthy for one’s cognition.”

Persistent loneliness becomes more of a problem as one ages and finds themself living alone or having limitations, rendering them unable to meet their social needs regularly. 

A theoretical paper Akhter-Khan co-authored on loneliness in older adults discussed the Social Relationship Expectations Framework, which outlines six expectations older adults need to feel satisfied in their relationships. 

Four of the six expectations are universal: proximity, support, intimacy and fun. The other two, generativity and respect, are specific to older adults.

“Being aware of what kind of expectations one has, how realistic it is for them to be met and what we can do in order to meet those expectations, that’s definitely something that we can learn when we are younger,” Akhter-Khan said. 

“If somebody said ‘I feel very lonely and I don’t know why,’ it might be helpful to go through these six expectations and see which ones aren’t met.” 

One of the activities that Expressions of Being Alone suggests is to reflect on experiences of loneliness and solitude in the Third-Wave Cognitive model. 

Using the Third-Wave Cognitive model, a person can break down a situation into thoughts, emotions, body and behaviours. Then, they can observe how these elements interconnect.  

While doing so, they assume the role of the observer-self: a non-judgmental viewer who is only aware of what’s happening. The model allows people to step back from a situation and process it. 

“My thoughts won’t change, but the way that I perceive them and the way they affect me can shift my whole perspective on life,” Lefebvre said.

For Shoaib, it was a paid volunteer opportunity at Carleton that helped her find a new perspective on life, away from loneliness.

After being paired with a stranger while working at an engineering outreach event, the two began chatting and quickly realized they had common interests and were in the same program and classes.

Shoaib remembered thinking afterward, “I’m going to allow myself and open myself up more to these opportunities where I’m able to talk to people.” 

Is it okay to want solitude?

As Shoaib began making friends at university, she spent much of her time studying and hanging out with them. Often, she found herself going through long periods without solitude. 

“It set me up for a burnout, where I needed a good amount of time to myself to be able to come out of that,” Shoaib said.

When there’s a discrepancy between the amount of alone time one requires and the amount of alone time one receives, people can feel something called “aloneliness,” a term coined by Coplan’s team in 2019.

“If we are not getting enough time with others, then we feel lonely. This is associated with feeling stressed, angry, sad and other negative emotions,” he explained. “It turns out, not getting enough time alone is associated with the same kind of stuff.” 

Though Coplan’s research shows that those who experience the most aloneliness are people who enjoy solitude, anyone can feel alonely.

“It’s a little bit of a play on words, from loneliness to alone-liness,” Coplan said, adding he describes aloneliness as the mirror image of loneliness. 

Spending time alone by choice can increase the benefits of solitude, but it can also be challenging. Coplan said saying no to seeing friends can be difficult because spending time alone is often less socially acceptable.

“Hopefully having a word for [aloneliness] actually will help,” he said.

Since students spend a lot of time socializing, they might not know how much solitude they need to feel fulfilled, as that amount varies for every individual.

Coplan explained that in psychology this is called the Goldilocks principle—people require “just the right amount” of something. 

To find the right amount of solitude, Coplan suggested keeping a journal to track time spent alone. Then, it can be easier to understand how much time someone needs and what activities they enjoy doing on their own.

“There’s no specific activity that you have to do. It’s just an idea that you’re taking a break from interacting with others, and you are doing stuff that you are choosing to do,” he said.

It’s normal for humans to go through transitional periods in their lives where they’re worried about fulfilling their social needs. For students, graduation can be one of those changes. 

In spring 2022, Shoaib graduated from Carleton and soon felt like she’d lost a sense of community. Now, she’s able to reflect upon her experience in a positive light.

“I still had a community. I still had what I needed from friends. I just didn’t have that 24/7 as you do when you’re in school together,” she said. “When I realized that, I was able to understand: I’m not lonely. I am enjoying myself too.”

Editor’s note: A quote by Samia Akhter-Khan was changed to reflect a misstatement. The Charlatan regrets the error.    

---

Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.