by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
The Fear of Being Alone Means You Have a Fear of Yourself at Some Level
There are few fears as universal but as misunderstood as the fear of being alone:
It’s one of those quiet fears that hides behind constant busyness, endless scrolling, compulsive socialising, or even the desperate need for a relationship that isn’t really working.
At first glance, this fear seems to make sense because humans are social creatures and so we literally need connection.
The problem isn’t that we crave connection, however, but that we’ve forgotten what kind of connection we’re truly craving.
When you can look at it through this lens, you can start to see that the fear of being alone is rarely about the absence of people and is more about the presence of something within ourselves that we’ve been trying to avoid for a long time.
The perhaps brutal truth of the matter is that when we can’t bear to be alone, what we’re really saying to ourselves at some level is “I can’t bear to be with myself“.
That sounds harsh, but it’s actually an invitation and a call to face something REAL within yourself because every time you find yourself running away from solitude, what you’re really running away from is your own shadow self: the emotions, memories, and beliefs that were buried long ago and hidden behind the mask of ego because they were once too painful to face.
This is a tad ironic because all of those emotions you’re avoiding are the very gateway to peace, authenticity, and real connection.
The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once said: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” – and he was right:
Most of our modern anxiety, confusion, and exhaustion stem from our desperate attempts to avoid stillness because in stillness, we meet our truth.
This article will help you figure out a way to meet your own stillness so that you can turn loneliness into solitude and start to grow real.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
The Fear of Being Alone: What We’ll Cover in this Article
- The Fear of Being Alone Means You Have a Fear of Yourself at Some Level
- Loneliness Isn’t the Problem — It’s the Path
- Loneliness vs. Solitude
- Distraction vs. Real Action
- Running Away from the Unreal vs. Running Towards the Real
- Practical Steps: Turning The Fear of Being Alone and Loneliness into Solitude
- The Fear of Being Alone: Final Thoughts – Alone but Never Lonely
Loneliness Isn’t the Problem — It’s the Path
If you only take away one thing from this article, let it be this:
Loneliness isn’t your enemy; it’s the doorway to your realness and a sense of being whole again.
When you finally stop running away from yourself and allow yourself to feel the loneliness – instead of only thinking about it, analysing it, or dramatising it – then you discover that underneath the discomfort is something astonishingly peaceful.
This peace is your realness emerging and it was there all along, waiting for you to stop running.
The real danger, then, isn’t in being alone but in living a life so full of noise that you never hear your own pure signal calling you back home.
Loneliness vs. Solitude
To go deeper, we need to make some important distinctions – the first one being the difference between loneliness and solitude.
Loneliness is what happens when you spend time alone with your ego and so it’s full of noise, judgment, and meaning-making.
This is because the ego (your familiar way of identifying and the stories that support this) looks at the simple fact that you’re physically alone and turns it into a story:
- “Nobody cares about me”.
- “I must be unlovable”.
- “I’ve failed at life”.
- “I’m wasting my time”.
In loneliness, you don’t just experience the fact that you happen to be alone – you interpret it.
What this means is that you add meaning to it and that this meaning is usually soaked in unresolved shame, guilt, trauma or fear.
The ego loves this because it thrives on interpretations and drama because that allow it to keep its hold over you (because the ego is the opposite of reality). This is why it’s far easier for the mind to say “I’m broken” than it is to sit quietly and face the raw feeling underneath.
Solitude, on the other hand, is something completely different:
Solitude is what happens when you spend time alone with your realness and engage in the process of becoming even more real.
It’s not about isolation or self-pity but about integration and so, in solitude, you actively use your alone time to tap into the process of becoming whole.
This might mean sitting still in meditation, journalling honestly about your emotions, going for a long walk without headphones, or doing something creative just for the joy of it. On a deeper level, it might even mean finally facing those tears you’ve been holding back for years (which will finally release a lot of the tension that’s caused from holding onto the unreal version of yourself that these tears will start to clear away.
In short, the key difference is that solitude is intentional because you’re not judging the moment but using it to return to what’s real.
Loneliness feels like emptiness.
Solitude feels like expansion.
One drains you.
The other refills you.
Distraction vs. Real Action
Another pattern that feeds the fear of being alone is the addiction to distraction:
This is relevant because when we fear the emotions that rise in silence and ‘aloneness’, we attempt to fill every waking moment with stimulation.
This means that we keep ourselves constantly ‘busy’ but the busier we get – if the actions we take are unreal and disconnected from our purpose – the emptier we feel (which just makes everything worse in the long-term).
This kind of busy-ness isn’t real action; it’s avoidance and resistance disguised as productivity:
You might tick a hundred things off your to-do list, but none of them move you forward in any meaningful way and so you become a “human doing” instead of a human being.
There’s a world of difference between distraction and real action:
- Distraction is about avoiding pain and attempting to RUN AWAY from the truth about themselves, the world, and reality.
- Real action is about moving towards purpose and RUNNING TOWARDS the truth about themselves, the world, and reality.
Distraction says “Let’s scroll, binge, or overwork so we don’t have to feel anything” but Real action says “Let’s face the feeling, learn from it, and build something meaningful“.
The difference isn’t always visible on the outside and so it’s possible for two people to be doing the same task but for the energy behind it to be completely different. Like we said, this is because one person is running from themselves; the other is running towards the truth.
When your actions are aligned with your real values, even the mundane moments feel rich with meaning because actual meaning is a by-product of purpose.
When they’re not aligned, even the most glamorous distractions eventually leave you feeling hollow and that lonely feeling never goes anywhere.
Running Away from the Unreal vs. Running Towards the Real
Let’s go a little deeper into the deepest level of this pattern (which we mentioned a little above):
It’s not just that we’re running – instead, it comes down to what we’re running from and what we’re running towards.
When we fear being alone, we’re usually running away from something unreal – for example, a projection of shame, a painful memory, or a false belief/interpretation about what being alone ‘means’.
Here’s the paradox, though:
You can’t outrun what’s unreal (because it’s not real) – you can only dissolve it by facing it and learning to let go.
This means that the real shift you need to make if you want to overcome the fear of being alone is about turning your energy around from running away from the unreal to running towards the real.
Running towards the real means saying things like:
“I don’t want to escape my life anymore – I want to engage with it”.
“I don’t want to numb myself – I want to wake up fully”.
“I don’t want to chase false meaning – I want to live in alignment with the truth.”
This is the path of Realness:
It’s not glamorous and it’s not always comfortable but it’s the only path that leads anywhere worth going because if you wanna get results then you have to be connected to reality (because nothing else ‘works’).
Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to cultivate a deeper relationship with yourself and life and get into the flow.
Practical Steps: Turning The Fear of Being Alone and Loneliness into Solitude
Let’s get practical and explore how you can move from fear of being alone into a sense of genuine freedom and wholeness:
1. Cultivate Stillness
Start by learning to be still:
This doesn’t mean you have to sit cross-legged for an hour meditating (though you can if you like and it will definitely help). It means pausing throughout your day to feel what’s happening inside you at the level of your emotions and bodily sensations.
The first few times you do this, it might feel unbearable and that’s totally okay because what you’re feeling isn’t loneliness but the backlog of unprocessed emotion that’s been sitting beneath the surface for years waiting for your attention.
Stay with it and breathe through it.
You’re not being punished – you’re being purified and finally returning to reality instead of hiding behind mental and emotional blockages.
2. Drop the Story
Loneliness becomes toxic only when it’s interpreted through the ego’s lens and so the next time you feel lonely, resist the urge to add meaning.
This means that you don’t tell yourself stories about what it means and, instead, describe the feeling in simple, neutral language:
“There’s a heavy feeling in my chest”.
“I notice a sense of emptiness”.
“There’s an urge to distract myself”.
By naming the experience without judgment, you strip it of false meaning and reclaim your power to simply be with what’s real.
Even more importantly, you can make a CHOICE about what to do with these sensations instead of being driven by them on autopilot.
3. Feel Through, Don’t Think Through
You can’t think your way out of loneliness – in fact, too much thinking and identifying with those thoughts is what got you trapped there in the first place.
The only way out is through feeling which means that you let the emotion follow its natural wave of rise, crest, and fall.
When you allow emotions to follow this wave, then they will pass, and – on the other side – you’ll feel a little clearer, a little freer, and a little more real.
Feeling through is what turns the abstract concept of ‘healing’ into something tangible and it’s how loneliness transforms into strength and a foundation of acceptance.
4. Create a Real Vision
Once stillness becomes more familiar, use it as a foundation for creation.
You can start to do this by asking yourself:
- What kind of person am I becoming?
- What do I really value?
- What kind of contribution do I want to make in the world?
Write your answers down and let them evolve over time because vision gives your solitude a sense of direction and turns your alone time into a sacred space for self-alignment rather than self-criticism.
My free 7-day video course is designed to help you put a real vision for your life together: The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness & Life Purpose
5. Build Habits Around Your Vision
A vision is useless without embodiment and real action so break it down into daily habits (small, consistent actions that keep you grounded in what’s real).
Maybe that means journalling every morning; maybe it’s exercising, meditating, or dedicating time to creative work.
Whatever it is, the goal isn’t to fill your schedule but to fill your life with actions that are aligned with who you truly are and give you a solitude foundation on which to keep building.
This is how solitude becomes real power.
The Fear of Being Alone: Final Thoughts – Alone but Never Lonely
The fear of being alone dissolves when you realise that you were never truly as ‘alone’ as you felt and thought yourself to be in the first place:
We can say this because when you touch the deeper layers of your being beneath all the noise and the stories you discover that there’s a presence there that never leaves. You might call it consciousness, life, love, God, or Realness, but whatever you wanna call ‘it’, it’s always there – wating.
This is the same presence that animates everything and when you connect with it, the need to constantly seek validation or distraction fades away.
You stop running.
You stop performing.
You simply BE whatever it is that you are and that you’re becoming.
That’s when aloneness becomes something sacred and shifts into solitude over loneliness:
It’s no longer a punishment but a privilege because it’s a rare chance to come home to yourself, to reality, to what’s real.
In short, the fear of being alone is the fear of meeting yourself but – once you realise that what you meet in that silence is the doorway to peace, wholeness, and truth – you’ll never want to run from it again.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re ready to reconfigure your relationship with yourself and start living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.
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