You Don't Hate Being Alone – You Just Don't Know How

I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to my apartment.

A wave of panic would wash over me the moment I realized the weekend was coming and I had nothing to fill it with.

My mind would immediately start racing – What can I do? Where can I go?

I’d do double sessions at the gym just to stay out of the apartment longer. I’d put on Netflix and doom scroll on my phone at the same time because one screen wasn’t enough. I’d gorge on weed edibles just to drown the chatter.

I didn’t think of it as avoidance. I just thought I didn’t like being alone.

But what I was actually running from wasn’t the silence – it was everything I’d been bottling up that the silence would force me to hear.

Eventually the distractions stopped working. My body couldn’t keep up. I was cornering myself. That pattern followed me everywhere. Until my body finally made the decision for me.

I don’t know exactly when my foot broke, but it happened somewhere between Half Dome and the ten weeks I spent pretending it hadn’t.

Initially I fully switched over to biking because I couldn’t run. I spent eight to ten hours on the bike and still lifted heavy several days for weeks. By the end of my long rides I was in tears from the pain – not stopping, just crying and pedaling, begging for it to end but refusing to quit.

I told myself it was discipline. It wasn’t.

When my body finally gave out completely and I couldn’t do any of it anymore, I didn’t sit with it. I looked for the next thing to fill the space. Another screen. Another distraction. Anything to keep the silence from settling in.

Because the silence terrified me.

Not because I knew what was in it. I didn’t – and I wasn’t willing to find out.

I didn’t realize it then, but I wasn’t just refusing to stop training. I was refusing to stop running. Now, there was nowhere to run and I had no choice but turn inside.

The problem was never that I was by myself. The problem was I had never learned to be with myself.

“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” – Pascal

You’re Solving the Wrong Problem

Being alone is harmful. Research shows chronic loneliness has comparable effects to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

But here’s what nobody tells you: the loneliness you feel when you’re by yourself isn’t caused by solitude.

It’s caused by never having learned how to be with yourself.

There’s a difference between being alone and being with yourself.

You’ve spent your entire life running from that. So the moment you’re by yourself, the discomfort creeps in and you conclude you just aren’t built for solitude.

You’re wrong. You just never built the skill.

The Real Reason You Run

When I was forced to stop, I realized I wasn’t afraid of being by myself. I was afraid of what I’d find when the noise stopped. I was afraid there was nothing worthwhile inside me once the distractions were gone.

So I ran. I ran away from this feeling. I drowned myself with food, porn, and doomscrolling. But they’re just addictions – clever ways to distract yourself from the emptiness.

You just know you’re unhappy. That restlessness – the inability to sit still, the constant need to fill the silence – is one of the earliest signals that something is missing. It’s not a character flaw but a lack of meaning.

You try to change your behaviors, but you fail to see they don’t fix the root. Over time these issues continue to resurface. They get louder and louder, until you can’t ignore them anymore.

What you are running from is pointing directly to where you need to go to grow.

How Do You Know You Can’t Be Alone?

Most people don’t know. They don’t realize how over stimulated and distracted they are. Most people can’t sit still without their phones for more than 5 minutes.

Here’s a metric for you to gauge how well you can be with yourself. Find a quiet room with no distractions. How long can you sit in a room in silence? Seriously.

You’ll be surprised how reluctant you are to sit down and do nothing. When I first came across this idea, I brushed it off thinking I could do it.

What I found is I worked hard to come up with different reasons why I didn’t need to do it. I was afraid. It took me a long time to actually build up the courage to sit there doing nothing.

The first time I tried, I lasted 3 minutes before grabbing my phone. It was fucking miserable. My inner critic was yelling at me. It was so loud and mean.

The longer you can sit with yourself without feeling the need to run or have cravings pop up, the better your relationship is with yourself.

This is emotional maturity.

How Do You Learn to be Alone?

The only way out is to stop running and build the skill deliberately.

Step 1 – Create Awareness for Your Problems

You need to bring awareness to your current situation. In order to change yourself, you have to be aware there is something to change.

Get a pen and paper. List out what you do not like about yourself and the life you are living.

Don’t worry about getting all the details right, just get it out on paper. This is meant to get you into the right mindset.

Then write out your fears.

This is crucial because it is helping you connect the dots about how your fears are driving the life you don’t want. These fears are connected to why you can’t be by yourself.

If you really want to grow, I’d recommend taking these fears and turning them into a to-do list to conquer.

Step 2 – Develop a Meditation Practice

Meditation is how you will create peace from within. This doesn’t need to be a rigorous practice. You just need to start with a few minutes every day.

The key is to not miss a day and add time every day. Your goal should be to work up to 20 to 25 minutes. Do this for several weeks before going to step 3.

Technique:

• Do this first thing in the morning. That means before you look at your phone.

• Find somewhere quiet.

• Don’t worry about being in some weird pose. You just need to be comfortable. Sit like you are watching TV.

• Focus on your breath. This will help anchor you into the present moment.

• Add one minute per day until you reach 20 to 25 minutes.

Step 3 – Do Nothing

You are going to ramp up your practice to include an additional session where you legitimately do nothing.

This is the ultimate goal. The purpose of this step and the previous step is to build the foundational blocks for you to complete step 4 – that’s where the real magic is.

In the evening you are going to want to sit down with your eyes open and do nothing for 10 to 20 minutes. It’s much harder than you think.

What you’ll find is your Ego is going to lash out. Effectively what you are doing is dissolving the Ego – it feels threatened. It’s going to voice negative thoughts and you need to sit through this without reacting or casting judgement. In time, the chatter will die down.

Technique:

• Perform in the evenings in addition to morning meditation practice.

• Find a comfortable place to sit. No special pose needed.

• You are going to keep your eyes open and drop your gaze.

• You want to let your thoughts run wild without any action. You are acting as an observer to your thoughts.

• Do this for 1 to 2 weeks.

Step 4 – Become Super Human

This is where you drastically change your life.

After several weeks of effort, you will be ready to take this step. As a fair warning this is going to be incredibly hard, but I promise you it’s worth it. If you were to jump straight into step 4 it would be hell. You’d likely quit.

Your goal is to now meditate for 60 minutes every day for 60 days straight.

I’m on day 23. But I can already tell you that something is shifting. I’ve been exposed to deep seeded thoughts I didn’t even realize were driving my subconscious. It stung to hear initially, but the chatter has started to quiet down.

Naval Ravikant describes this process well. When you sit down to do nothing, thoughts start to bubble to the surface. Naval likens this to resolving unanswered emails going all the way back to your childhood.

“Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental ‘inbox zero.’ When you open your mental ‘email’ and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling. It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace.” – Naval

Technique:

• Do this first thing in the morning. Again, that means before you look at your phone.

• Find somewhere quiet, get comfortable, and sit up straight.

• No special pose is needed but try to be still the entire time.

• Close your eyes and do nothing. Don’t even try to focus on your breath.

• If thoughts come up let them. Don’t resist anything – just “be” for 60 minutes.

I haven’t hit inbox zero yet. But I’m far enough in to know this is something profound. I used to dread the silence. Now it’s where I find peace.

If you’ve never tried it, start tonight. Find a quiet room. Set a timer for five minutes. Sit down and do nothing.

Reply with how long you lasted. I read every one.