I think she confused some things here. When people talk about being alone, they are often still doing stuff that involves outside input. Watching TV, scrolling social media, reading, listening to music, the list goes on.

The benefits mentioned in the video come from being alone with our thoughts, without any external input. This is the piece she missed.

With smart phones able to quickly and easily fill every gap of time, people are rarely alone with their thoughts anymore, there is almost always an outside influence to occupy the mind. The culture largely encourages this, with people encouraging us left and right to put on a podcast while doing dishes or having the TV on just for some background noise.

Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism dives deep into this topic. Talking about the value of time to be alone with our thoughts like this, while pulling many examples from history of people who consciously practiced this to center them and improve the quality of their thoughts and decision making.