Importance Of Alone Time
Is alone time important?
Alone time is important to everyone, regardless of your nature. Just like loving yourself, the lack of it is dangerous as too much of it.
Formerly, we discussed the ways of expressing self-love. We explicitly listed why you should spend quality time with yourself as an avenue to express love for one’s self.
What Is Alone Time?
Oxford Language defines quality time as “time in which one’s child, partner, or other loved person receives one’s undivided attention, in such a way as to strengthen the relationship”.
Studies have been conducted particularly to support the benefits of quality time in improving behavior, social, and all-around well-being.
Alone time is evidently important to develop good relationships with partners. Lovers should create quality time to spend with themselves because it creates room for bonding, communication, and other intimacies.
Parents should equally create quality time to spend with their children. It helps them understand and guide their child better, which is necessary for a child’s development.
Furthermore, families should spend quality time with each other. It strengthens their unity when they share honesty with each other.
Friends should spend quality time with each other. This helps the friendship thrive, and creates room for understanding and better communication.
There’s an all-around sense of belonging and home, love, and care when people spend quality time with each other. A deep feeling of support and healthier relationships.
Significantly, these positive benefits of spending time with others show why you should spend quality alone time with yourself as well. While making the rounds and spending quality time with everyone else, you should create time for yourself. This way you don’t get burnt out from giving everyone yourself.
Spending quality time with yourself as a form of self-care means dedicating your undivided attention to yourself to foster a better self-relationship.
Take note: spending time with yourself is a form of self-care. However, it doesn’t translate to being self-centered and ignoring other people who should matter to you.
Why does it matter?
Every day we make so many decisions and spend so much energy on many things.
We spend our time and energy with people from work, family, partners, and friends.
Spending time with other people is good. You get to understand them better, know them better, relate with them better, foster communication, etc.
When you don’t reciprocate these actions back to yourself, you might end up with emotions you don’t understand, suppressed emotions and feelings, confusion, and a bad relationship with yourself which will tumble into bad relationships with others, you’d be giving off the bad energy and passing your frustration around.
is alone time important?
There are so many benefits to paying attention to yourself and getting to know yourself, so many life-saving and life-changing benefits such as;
Reflection
There is a whole philosophy dedicated to self-reflection. Great philosophers like Socrates, were promoters of the ancient knowledge to “know thyself”.
In Old Egyptian religion, in order to ascend to the afterlife, a person would be judged by all their actions on earth in order to move on to the afterlife.
The Christian Bible supports reflection in 2nd Corinthians 13 vs 5 (ESV) “examine yourself to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves…”.
Reflection is not self-judgment. It’s not self-criticism. It is careful consideration of all your actions and decisions, the purpose behind them, and the honest emotions behind them.
It’s being accountable for your actions, making you responsible for your emotions. Reflection helps you become unbiased towards situations, process feelings with more clarity, and establish honesty with yourself.
You rid yourself of pride and bias because you’re trying to be honest, so solve a problem, settle your spirit, and bring peace to yourself. Take time to think about what you’re feeling, take time to rest, take time to heal, take time to recuperate, be 100% aware of yourself, and be accountable for yourself.
Read: how to talk to yourself
Better data and knowledge of yourself
Emotional neglect makes you out of touch with who you are. It is important to spend alone time to be conscious of your emotions. It grants you knowledge of self which can save you from staying in bad situations longer than you should.
Every conscious or unconscious decision we make is subconsciously based on the data we have on ourselves. What we know of how to deal with situations. What we know from our childhoods and upbringings. A child who grew up emotionally neglected will most likely neglect their own emotions as they grow, subconsciously.
It’s important from a young age to learn the value of quality time. This really helps you access more helpful data on managing your emotions. Spending quality and purposeful time with yourself gives you access to a better understanding of yourself.
When you pay close attention to your true feelings, and your true desires, the knowledge from self-reflection gives you a better handle on your situation.
You know your likes and dislikes, your strengths and your weaknesses, limits, and the more information you have, the more you can identify your strengths and weaknesses, navigate through overwhelming emotions, etc.
Create your own perspective of yourself:
When you spend time with yourself, You know yourself and you can turn yourself into being whatever it is that you feel like being.
You know who you are and no one can tell you otherwise. You’re not easily swayed by other people’s perceptions of yourself, because you know your strengths and weaknesses better. It’s very beautiful to have a sense of self and build your own identity.
It shows dedication and commitment to development. You have your life and should own it, you should mold yourself into the ideal version of yourself at your own phase. There’s no hurry, really.
You understand the virtues of love better.
Love is patience among other things. In your relations with significant others, yourself, and your family, you need the patience to love.
Furthermore, You need the patience to understand that humans including you, are flawed and prone to mistakes.
To judge less, understand more, and listen more, to yourself and to the people you love. Spending time with yourself helps you understand these virtues more, and how to actually give and reciprocate them.
I never understood what the concept of respect meant until I embarked on this journey of self-development. Now I understand that respect is; not doing things that cost your dignity, that is insulting, and not breaking your promise to hold yourself grounded and responsible.
Respect yourself by literally running away from situations that leave you in constant doubt. When your mind is bothered about something, that doesn’t feel right, don’t ignore it, listen to yourself.
Take time to address your concerns. You’re on a journey to becoming more responsible yourself, so be patient and respect yourself.
Read: what is Self gas-lighting
Focus and clarity:
Spending quality time with yourself gives you another view of the bigger picture. Resetting your focus, remembering your goals.
Asking yourself important questions helps you make important decisions. Are all your actions in line with the bigger picture? What is the bigger picture to be achieved with this thing I’m doing?
Are these actions or emotions in line with my goal? what value does it give to my life? Does this increase my value to myself and my immediate surrounding?
Am I heading downhill with these decisions? Asking and answering the right questions helps you stand and lock back at everything you’ve done so far. Sum up your actions and evaluate yourself. It’s time to structure and organize your thoughts: alone time isn’t rushed time.
It is the time when you intentionally structure and restructure. Build plans, rest, organize yourself, and prepare yourself and your mind. You’re able to decongest your thoughts and analyze everything you need to about your emotions, mental health, finances, life, etc.
Peace, a moment of honesty and reconciliation:
Quality time gives you access to peace, calmness, and holding the brakes. At this moment it’s just you and yourself.
What do you do? You breathe in and out, visualize all your stress coming out as each exhaled breath. Are you happy? Be honest with yourself.
Allow yourself to be vulnerable for all the strengths you’ve had to use. Allow yourself to be limp, and reconcile with yourself.
Digest your feelings better, are you mad at yourself because you broke your promise? Did you do something wrong? That’s okay take your time. Be honest about how you really feel. Reconcile with yourself before going to make amends, you can’t give from an empty cup, always remember that.
Give yourself what you want others to give to you. Reconcile your thoughts, actions, emotion, and yourself. Let yourself feel peace, and let go of stress and forehead strain.
Lastly, always be patient. Remember, “…patience is a virtue…”-Stormi Webster
Related