Become Comfortable Alone With Yourself, and Your Life Will Be Clear: Ep.3

In episode 3 of the Grateful Podcast with Jack Wagoner Jack goes into depth about the importance of becoming comfortable alone with yourself and your thoughts.

There were many studies mentioned in the episode today and the links will be available down below. I am going to release my notes for this podcast down below as well in which you will be able to see everything that I prepared for my episode as a way of holding me accountable and helping me get my true message across. 

There are so many instances where people just can't help but filling their time up but I am here to tell you that you should leave that time open in order to gain clarity and be happier, healthier, and be more GRATEFUL.

Do you know what ideas are actually yours?

Ok, welcome back to the Grateful podcast, as always I’m extremely grateful to be here recording, and working towards my dreams of making the world a happier, more grateful community. Today I’d like to start a tradition of starting each podcast with something I’m grateful for and this morning I am feeling really grateful for 

Today’s episode is going to be focusing on connecting to your inner dialogue, and genuinely understanding who you are. I believe that this is extremely important, actually I don’t know if I can explain in words how important I believe this is, especially with the amount of media and exterior input us humans receive daily. The quantity is insane. 

I was looking at this article by exploding topics, they track stats of just about anything with really accurate data, and saw that updated studies show that the average person in general spends 6 hours and 58 minutes per day staring at a screen. The average Gen Z kid, my generation, we spend an average of 9 HOURS on a screen per day. That is just crazy.

With all of this time preoccupied, doing something else, playing video games, scrolling on social media, how much time to we actually have to ourselves. I would like you to notice every time something stops during your day. Every slow moment, every time you are in a room with people you don’t know, or have a quick break. What do you do? If you are like most people you will pull out your phone. I do this too honestly pretty often, and it’s something I have really been trying to notice and work on. What these actions say to me is that I am not comfortable by myself, just with me, which is in my case not true so I should let myself be, without filling in all the gaps.

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats

I want to start off by talking about a 2014 study published in the science magazine where  Timothy Wilson, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville brought in hundreds of volunteers to a study where the volunteers would be given “think periods” ranging from 6 to 15 minutes. They were told to put away their belongings, most notably their cellphone, and were left alone with their thoughts for the time period assigned. Afterwards the participants had to rate the experience and over 50% said they did not enjoy it. The team of researchers took the experience a little further and added in a button in which the participant could shock themselves to get out of the experience. Beforehand every single participant said that they would have to be paid money in order to inflict a shock upon themselves, and yet 67% of men and 25% of women pushed that button. That is insane. People really cannot be alone with THEMSELVES for 15 minutes, that’s how uncomfortable they are with themselves. That’s how much they need exterior entertainment. Also, this was in 2014 and I don’t see any data saying that addiction to social media and other distractions has done any