Solo travel isn’t all fun and games. If your impression of what solo travel is like were to be judged based on travellers’ social media updates (including mine) then you would think the experience is a continuous adventure, full of good times and unadulterated by any of the hang ups and anxieties experienced back home. But this just isn’t true. Based on speaking to other solo backpackers and by stalking the travel subs on Reddit, I think it is common knowledge that rather than being a fun experience from start to finish, travelling alone is more like a rollercoaster of emotional highs and lows, achievements and mistakes, calm and turbulence, euphoria and despondency.

By travelling alone you do tend to meet more people than if you travelled with a friend or in a group. You could end up becoming good friends with someone, even just for the day, by striking up conversation in a hostel, during a tour, at a bus stop or in a restaurant. There is no doubt that travelling alone can entail forming many positive connections with people.

However, if meeting people from all over the world is part and parcel of solo travel, so is loneliness. There won’t always be someone there to turn to for a chat, for help or for reassurance. You might be in transit for a long time, in a region with few backpackers or locals who speak English, or you might just be sick to death of having the same predictable conversation with people in your hostel. Whether you are someone who naturally feels comfortable spending time on your own or not, it is an unavoidable part of travelling alone.

Even though I think of myself as an introvert (confirmed by the Myers Briggs personality test), I can’t spend day after day without some sort of social interaction. Some days I need to recharge the batteries as it were (which usually involves binging on YouTube and Reddit), but exploring a city by yourself or seeing something new and fascinating can become a dull and even irritating activity without having someone there to share the experience with. The irony of loneliness is that you can be surrounded by people but still feel completely isolated. You see crowds full of happy couples, families and groups of friends and you are there, sort of out of place, with this unyielding storm of negativity, frustration and anxiety welling up inside.

At the beginning of my trip, I remember that these feelings were quite strong at times – I remember walking around Budapest feeling slightly cut off from the kind of experience everyone else was having, and eating dinner alone in a busy restaurant in Berlin, feeling uncontrollably awkward. I kept saying to myself, Why does this have to be an uncomfortable experience? But no amount of reasoning got me out of those kinds of ruts.

In contrast, I now feel much more comfortable being alone, which isn’t to say I’ve become more introverted (probably the opposite in fact), and I think there are two reasons for this. For one, I think being alone is just something that I’ve grown accustomed to. It’s become a routine part of my lifestyle and so no longer feels unnatural. Secondly, I have understood that when being alone becomes a negative and draining experience, there are ways to deal with it.

The obvious solution to feeling lonely on the road is to strike up conversation with people. Sometimes it will feel forced, but there really is no other way to fulfil that social itch. After a few days of not speaking to anyone, bar the cashier at the supermarket, any conversation, however mundane, will seem like a saving grace. As the American entertainer observed, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet”, and I try to keep this sentiment in mind when I’m feeling a bout of loneliness.

A less obvious but arguably longer lasting solution is to develop a change of perspective, and I’ve found some words of wisdom to facilitate this attitudinal shift. A while back I read Tom Brown Jr’s book Grandfather, which details stories involving the inspirational ‘grandfather’, a possibly fictitious Native American known as Stalking Wolf, who supposedly trained Brown in tracking and wilderness survival. It is a fantastic book full of nuggets of wisdom, drawing on Native American teachings on man’s relationship to nature.

To take a quote from the book, the author says that “The chasm between being alone and loneliness is deep. The way you begin to be alone and at peace without being lonely is to know that you are with your best friend.” Brown continues to draw this distinction between aloneness and loneliness, the former being a form of solitude in which you are comfortable being your own company, and the latter involving an unmistakable sense of isolation in which you become your own worst enemy. Brown spent a considerable amount of time living in solitude in the wilderness – really living, using tracking and survival methods to meet all of his basic needs. In this way he learned to become his own best friend, to view himself as part of a community, which was nature as a whole and whose constituent members included the forest, plants, rivers, mountains and other wildlife.

This is the Native American perspective of man’s relationship to nature. As the well-known medicine man Black Elk puts it, “All of nature is in us, all of us in nature.” This view of the world also seems to hinge on their belief that every part of nature is endowed with the same spirit, but I think the sentiment of being part of a whole can still be retained without necessarily buying into the more superstitious beliefs. The important point is that whether you are alone or lonely depends on what you bring to the table. For example, the Native American critique of Western thinking is that it views nature as separate and untamed; something to be avoided and controlled. With this way of thinking, you could feel lonely in a forest, but if you adopt Brown’s mindset, the experience could be completely different.

Indeed, other philosophers recognise the benefits of solitude in nature, including the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. As Thoreau says in Walden, describing the two years he spent in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” He also remarked that he “…never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude”, and how “We need the tonic of nature.” I’ve always found that walking alone through the countryside, the mountains or the forest has a consistent restorative effect, washing away any loneliness I felt beforehand. “Go for a hike” might be some advice that I need to remember.

I also recently read a short book entitled Our Appointment with Life: Discourse on Living Happily in the Present Moment, written by the well-known Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. It is his commentary on the important Buddhist sutra (collection of aphorisms) known as The Sutra on Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone. When Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the better way to live alone, he does not mean retreating from society and becoming a recluse (as a monk called Thera does in the story described in the sutra); it means living unattached to the mental baggage you carry around with you. As he emphasises:

“Living alone’ here means living to have sovereignty of yourself, to have freedom, not to be dragged away by the past, not to be in fear of the future, not being pulled around by the circumstances of the present…There are many places in the sutras where the Buddha says that ‘being alone’ does not mean to be separated from other people.” In this way, you can be alone or lonely whilst being in a crowd, and which one ends up being the case depends how deeply you are living in the present moment. “Go meditate!” I think should also be some solid advice I need to remember, if I want to practice mindfulness. As is always the case, I will decide that I need to meditate, but then always end up putting it off, which I blame the Internet for…but mainly Reddit.

And if you can’t force yourself to talk to people, to go for a hike or to meditate, then make the most of being alone. Read a book, binge on Reddit, eat junk food, Skype family and friends back home, and so on.

If I can use Reddit deeply in the present moment, is that a better way to live alone? I hope so.