This is especially true in times of personal turbulence, when the instinct is often for people to reach outside of themselves for support. “When people are experiencing crisis it’s not always just about you: It’s about how you are in society,” explains Jack Fong, a sociologist at California State Polytechnic University who has studied solitude. “When people take these moments to explore their solitude, not only will they be forced to confront who they are, they just might learn a little bit about how to out-maneuver some of the toxicity that surrounds them in a social setting.”

In other words, when people remove themselves from the social context of their lives, they are better able to see how they’re shaped by that context. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and writer who spent years alone, held a similar notion. “We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our bosom,” he writes in Thoughts in Solitude.

Much of this self-reconfiguring happens through what Fong calls “existentializing moments,” mental flickers of clarity which can occur during inward-focused solitude. Fong developed this idea from the late German-American sociologist Kurt Wolff’s “surrender and catch” theory of personal epiphany. “When you have these moments, don't fight it. Accept it for what it is. Let it emerge calmly and truthfully and don't resist it,” Fong says. “Your alone time should not be something that you're afraid of.”

Yet, at the same time, it is not only about being alone. “It’s a deeper internal process,” notes Matthew Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist at Medaille College who has researched solitude. Productive solitude requires internal exploration, a kind of labor which can be uncomfortable, even excruciating. “It might take a little bit of work before it turns into a pleasant experience. But once it does it becomes maybe the most important relationship anybody ever has, the relationship you have with yourself.”

Yet today, in our hyper-connected society, Bowker believes that solitude is “more devalued than it has been in a long time.” He points to a recent study at the University of Virginia in which several participants–a quarter of the women and two-thirds of the men–chose to subject themselves to electric shock rather than be alone with their thoughts. Bowker sees this heightened distaste for solitude playing out in pop culture as well. For example, vampires used to be portrayed in stories as secluded hermits, whereas now you’re more likely to see them on camera as sexy socialites, he notes.

And even though many great thinkers have championed the intellectual and spiritual benefits of solitude–Lao Tzu, Moses, Nietzsche, Emerson, Woolf (“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table”)– many modern humans seem hell-bent on avoiding it. “Every time we have a chance to go running we plug in our headphones. Every time we sit in the car we listen to NPR,” laments Bowker. “I mean, my students today tell me they can’t go to the bathroom without their phone on.”