Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
Everyone likes to spend time alone.
I bet all of you in this room can think about a time
when all you really wanted to do was stay home alone and watch a good movie.
I definitely can.
This joy we have from spending time alone is something that we all understand.
Yet, in our society nowadays,
it is something that is extremely stigmatized.
I'm sure you can all think about a time
when your friends showered you with reproving looks
when you told them that, no, you weren't going to this party tonight
because you just didn't feel like being social.
I definitely can.
Those looks, however, managed to make us feel so guilty
that, in the end, just a few hours later,
we find ourselves surrounded by them in a room filled with music and laughter.
I just want to emphasize here
that I do not mean to say that you'd be unhappy at that party.
You may be having the time of your life. Totally amazing for you.
What I do want to remind you, however,
is that, initially, going to this party wasn't your first choice.
You wanted to stay home alone and watch a really good movie.
So, why didn't you pursue what you wanted to do?
Because you were scared of the stigma surrounding spending time alone.
This stigma can be summarized in an extremely simple equation:
spending time alone equals having no friends, plus being antisocial,
and nobody wants to be recognized as a person without friends.
This idea we all associate with spending time alone
is so embedded in our society that we prefer conforming to the norms
rather than doing the thing we truly want to do.
What many people might not know, however,
is that spending time alone is actually very beneficial.
That's why I'm standing here in front of you today,
to prove to you that "me time" is worth fighting for.
The first thing we gain from spending time alone is creativity.
As Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at WUSTL, pointed out,
decades of research have shown
that brainstorming groups of people think of far fewer ideas
than that same number of people who work alone and later pull their ideas.
This may sound counter-intuitive
because you'd think you'd come up with more ideas
when surrounded by other people.
However, if you're on your own,
you will allow yourself the time to formulate your own opinion on stuff
and to also let your mind wander to places it probably wouldn't have gone to
if you had been surrounded by other people's opinions,
because other people's opinions would have necessarily influenced your own.
This increased creativity we gain from spending time alone
has also been proven in a study done in 2012.
In this experiment, 56 adults were immersed into nature for four days,
without any form of technology.
What they gained from this is that they became 50% better
at creative problem-solving.
So, if you allow yourself "me time," you'll become more creative.
Pretty appealing, no?
Another bonus point we get from spending time alone
is that it makes us work harder.
We always have a tendency to do less when we're surrounded by other people.
I mean, teachers, there's a reason why students love group work,
or at least part of them.
I don't know if you've noticed,
but when you say "group work," half of the class looks like this -
and the other half, like this.
You can probably guess who's going to end up doing all the work in the end.
This tendency we have to work less when surrounded by other people
has been termed "social loafing" by Max Ringelmann.
In the 1890s, this guy set up a study
in which he made an increasing amount of people pull on a rope.
In each of his experiments,
he measured the effort each person pulled on the rope.
What we can see on this graph is that the more people were in each group
the less force each individual person exerted.
So, if allow yourself "me time," you'll work harder.
And if this doesn't convince you enough,
just think about spending time alone and sleep.
And who doesn't love sleep?
Because, honestly, that's basicaly what it is.
When you sleep, you take the time to recharge before you start another day.
When you spend time alone, you take the time to recharge
from all your social interactions.
Alone time and sleep seem really similar to me.
So, to summarize,
spending time alone will make you more creative,
will make you work harder and can be regarded as sleep.
Those reasons seem all really good ones to stay in.
There however remains one tiny thing
that prevents us from spending the time alone that we need.
And I'm not talking about the stigma surrounding it.
I'm talking about this thing called FOMO, or "fear of missing out."
You've probably heard of it already.
You know, it's that feeling you get when you're invited to a party,
but all you really want to do is stay home alone.
Yet, you still go because, otherwise,
you're scared that you won't belong to the "cool group" anymore.
However, I hope that, after having listened to my [TEDx] talk,
you will understand that spending time alone is actually really beneficial.
So, stop feeling scared and guilty
if you don't want to be around other people.
You have all the reasons to. Thank you very much.
(Applause)