Hey everyone, it's Dora here. I just want to let you know that we've launched a brand new

call and advice podcast called Dear Headspace. Each week the headspace teachers along with

some amazing new friends are answering your questions about relationships, work, life,

mindfulness, and just about everything else. It's so different from anything we've ever

created and we're so excited for you to hear it. Dear Headspace comes out every Tuesday

on the Headspace app and anywhere you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.

Headspace video.

Hi, I'm Malika Rao. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Thursday morning.

Today, I'm going to be talking about loneliness. I read this book by Haruki Murakami, what

I talk about when I talk about running, which is about his running practice. So he's

a very, very popular, commercially successful novelist and he's also a like obsessive

marathoner and he talks about how running marathons feels very instructive for him when it comes

to writing novels because both require like enormous amounts of persistence and endurance

and solitude. And I was really scared when I read that book because it just seemed like

such a sad life. It was like, what a quiet little field of one. In high school, I was really

active at school and I just was very socially active. But the kind of writing that I aspired

to do seemed to be done by people who were really comfortable being alone and that was terrifying

to me when I realized that because I just, again, I just felt so constitutionally not

built for that. And I think starting to like analyze my own emotional response to solitude

and to loneliness helped me to become more comfortable with it. It probably is very

akin to running marathon or deep sea diving or anything where you have to build up a tolerance

where everything in your body is telling you to stop because this is dangerous. But the

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