We joke a lot about people like Donald Trump “taking up real estate in someone else’s head.”

It’s funny because it’s true–we’ve all experienced someone else’s voice in our head. Maybe it’s our father, or our internet dad, or that girl from high school, but there’s someone, who has somehow sprung into being–fully formed–in our psychic headspace.

One of the truths about introverts is that we need alone time to recharge. But I’ve found that it’s not enough to be physically alone–you need to also mentally alone.

All those voices of other people, they need to shut up.

All those feelers you send out to people in your living space (even if they’re not in the same room), they need to shut down.

For me, at least, I need the psychic equivalent of a “no fly zone” in order to recharge. Superman’s fortress of solitude. Scott’s trek across antarctica. A faraday cage against psychic energy.

This can be difficult to achieve, especially when you live in a household with other people, or you live in a city, or you spend a lot of time on Twitter. It’s easy these days, with social media, to build up a reasonable facsimile of someone to carry with you always in your head.

You have to shake it off, and reconnect with your own soul.

That’s why walks in nature are so beneficial, and things like yoga, where everyone is too busy focusing within to really bother sending out much psychic energy.

I live alone, so it’s easy for me to get the physical space to be alone, but it can still be tough to escape other people’s thoughts.

I’ve written before about morning journalling, and it’s by far been the best thing I’ve done for my mental health lately. By giving myself space and time to write and think and breathe, before encountering anybody else’s psychic energy for the day, I feel like I start the day from a calmer place, and from a more coherent place.

In our modern world, steeped with mechanistic explanations of how things work, we focus less on “spirit” than we should. But spirit is an essential part of our beings, and deserves as much care as our bodies and our souls.