The Importance and Bliss of Doing Nothing
Carving out some time to sit in blissful silence may feel counterproductive, but it’s likely to make you happier, more focused, and even more imaginative.
Scaling the career ladder, fulfilling that new years resolution to exercise more, trying to keep on top of the washing up — can we just admit that we’re all exhausted? We need a break from the restless everyday. So maybe you binge watch a new Netflix crime documentary, go out for a meal and blow off some steam, or get some fresh air on a long hike. You’re momentarily refreshed, but soon, that daily stress creeps back in.
We’re all getting busier. We’re taking on more; multi-tasking through the work week, increasingly side-hustling at the weekend, and still muscling in the mundane tasks needed to survive. And the more we do the more we get used to doing and, eventually, the more we adapt to do even more.
So where did this desire to be non-stop come from? Somehow, as a human race, we’ve resigned ourselves to the belief that productivity is not just the way to lead a good life, but is the only good way to live. We’ve created a culture that equates busyness with status and success. What began as a way to encourage strong careers and rewarding promotions, has now seeped into the everyday. Sure, you’ve got a successful nine to five, but if the ‘5am that girl’ trend has shown us anything, we need to be making the most out of our out-of-work hours by journaling, hitting the gym and wolfing down avocado toast before most other people have even woken up.
Productivity has labelled the act of lounging about and relaxing, without following up on emails or listening to podcasts or reading long-form articles with hard-hitting core messages, as signals of wasted time. Time is a hot commodity. Why squander it doing nothing when you could be doing everything? It sort of makes sense, right? We can all agree on that. But unfortunately, buying into this, recognisably capitalist, ideal can eat away at your sense of self and ultimately destroy both your mental and physical health.
And that, in a nutshell, is The Productivity Myth. The term, coined by The Harvard Business Review back in 2010, explains the unavoidable fact that you will inevitably burn yourself out if you spend too much energy doing stuff without sufficient renewal. The investigation into productivity came after various studies consistently showed that employees who took longer vacations, performed better than those who took short or no holidays at all.
Explaining the seemingly contradictory phenomenon to Headspace, psychologist Marny Lishman said, “You feel good for being productive: it’s a dopamine release just like with any other addiction.” Research has shown that this release of dopamine can increase motivation to take on more in search of the next hit — and the cycle continues. Lishman further explains, “While this productivity addiction might be good for a while, it’s not good for you in the long run. If you’re doing too much of anything, it means you’re not balancing out the rest of your life, and you end up getting frazzled.”
As the argument forever goes, physical burn-out is a recognised impairment, mental burn-out, not so much. For professional athletes, overtraining is a recognised condition, we need to realise the mirroring condition experienced by not just creatives, creators, artists, and writers, who this conversation seems to centre around, but the entire population. Burn-out is a universal experience. Everyone knows the feeling; you’re overwhelmed by the smallest of tasks, you’re constantly exhausted, constantly thinking about everything you need to do and yet, you feel guilty that you’re not trying hard enough and worry your work will suffer if you take time off.
But consider this; one day you’ll look back and think “I wish I hadn’t worked so much” and “I wish that I had let myself be happier.” After all, these are two of the top five regrets people have confessed on their deathbeds.
It’s a stark realisation. But it is one that can lead to a much more fulfilling life. According to a study published last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, carving out time to spend totally distraction-free can not only make you happier, but can better your problem solving and make you think creatively. (If you’re still on the fence, the study also found that people who took time to just sit and do nothing actually enjoyed it much more than they initially predicted.)
Doing nothing opens up room in your brain for unconscious thought processes to take place. By slowing down, your brain can enter a resting state that will help regulate your emotions, maintain the ability to focus, and even trigger more imaginative thoughts and ideas.
In his book, Bored and Brilliant, author Manoush Zomorodi explained the science behind this phenomenon. He wrote, “When our minds wander, we activate something called The Default Mode Network [DMN], the mental place where we solve problems and generate our best ideas, and engage in what’s known as ‘autobiographical planning,’ which is how we make sense of our world and our lives and set future goals. The default mode is also involved in how we try to understand and empathise with other people, and make moral judgments.”
This isn’t some mystical plane of realisation that everyone is lining up to enter, we accidentally trigger it all the time. When you’re daydreaming at work, or your mind wanders mid-conversation, you’re tapping into your DMN. Here is where you can come up with all sorts of new ideas about yourself and the world. But, science has proved that we can only enter this state of mind when not focused on the outside world — in other words, when you’re doing nothing.
Aside from the occasional daydream that’s often swiftly ended by the ringing of a phone or shout from a boss, the concept of doing nothing is foreign to many of us. The bottom line is that doing nothing often feels like a waste of time, or it’s boring. Plus, being idle is difficult in the modern world. We’re unlimitedly connected to everything and everyone around us, with endless entertainment ready to distract us all day long. Really, it is easier to stay busy than to do nothing.
But doing nothing doesn’t need to be a big deal. You don’t need to carve out an hour everyday to sit and stare at a wall, or book some sort of monastery retreat to get you back to yourself. You just need to figure out what ‘doing nothing’ looks like to you.
You really can just sit and stare at nothing. Maybe listening to your favourite playlist or, if you want to go full meditative, whale sounds. Or doing ‘nothing’ can mean doing something that’s just for you and has no outwardly productive outcome. That could be painting, gardening, or going for a walk with no destination; anything you find that shuts your brain off for a bit.
We have to take care of ourselves, look after our minds and bodies by giving them a break. Just have faith that if you do nothing, just for a bit, the whole world won’t crumble around you. It’ll likely look a bit brighter.
