Resting and the Art of Doing Nothing

I never expected that chronic fatigue would commandeer over a year and a half of my life; prior to the languid house-bound months, I had always been wildly energetic. As the illness lingered I grew bitter. More than bitter. I was terrified that after tasting joy and vitality, I would spend seventy years locked in a body that I could not control. A body that could not create the long list of accomplishments I had previously used to define my worth.

Some days I only had the strength to lie in bed and stare blankly at the ceiling as I faded in and out of sleep. When I recovered from these episodes, my lazy eyes and tired mind couldn’t cope with the fast-paced stimulation so many of us find normal. Never before had it occurred to me that the speed with which a typical movie cuts through clips and camera angles could be too fast. Too stimulating. Too overwhelming. Apps, websites, books, and conversations were equally unapproachable, but lying in bed made me miserable.

So I sat outside and watched plants. Sometimes I watched chickens or the burbling water in the garden creek. Other times I watched the fish swirling around in the pond. These creatures did not accomplish momentous feats, yet the daily repetition of small pleasures seemed to fill them with genuine joy. It made me happy to watch them, and once I adjusted to the peaceful meditation, I derived more pleasure and rest from watching a motionless plant for ninety-minutes than I did from a feature film.

Though it is common for people to assume that circumstances dictate what is felt, whether one is happy, devastated, bitter, or content, this is not the case [3, p 77]. In the way that one cancer patient can be anxious and another calm, it is not the circumstance but where the attention is focused that makes the difference. Our brains are wired to filter out what we do not pay attention to, so if we focus on what is sad and upsetting, happy circumstances will seem infrequent and sadness will define our perspective. Conversely, focusing on positive events and perspectives cultivates a mind that is not shaken by unhappy circumstances and delights in the positive. Somehow, mindlessly watching pea-brained chickens chase down beetles helped me to focus what little bandwidth I had on positive emotions.

We need recreational activities that are genuinely restful and guide us to positive thinking.

Rest Is Essential – From Work and Fast-Paced Play

In this modern era, we spend a great deal of our lives engaging in a large number of little somethings. Yet it is uncertain if all these little somethings ever accumulate to much of anything at all. Many work days become filled with a lot of visible (but perhaps unnecessary) tasks as the big picture grows more obscured [3, p 64] As the business world divides work into ever smaller, dissociated pieces, the craftsman is traded for the assembly line and the big picture is replaced by a small cog [2, Ch 7]. Without the perspective and motivation that comes from seeing the final result and understanding the impact of one’s work, the process becomes drudgery. Work is something to be suffered through to provide the means for play. Often dissatisfied workers seek to balance the day’s pain with an evening of pleasure. The determined pursuit of pleasure sets the stage for addiction formation, thus we see the trend that those who are strongly dissatisfied with their work bear the propensity to “play harder” and with more addictive substances and experiences than their counterparts. Essentially, not every recreational activity is beneficial or restful, and the degree to which we find satisfaction and purpose in our work heavily influences the choices we make with our free time.

We were designed to crave both meaningful work and meaningful rest. Diminished satisfaction in (or neglect of) one area inevitably leads to an imbalance in the other, thus the partnership of rest and work must be enriched in tandem. Rest allows us to recuperate and approach tomorrow’s work with vigor and tenacity, but rest does more than boost productivity as work starts up again. The unconscious mind is capable of solving problems all by itself [3, p 145]. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) suggests that challenges involving strict rules, such as math, require the conscious mind. However, abstract problems that involve large amounts of information and utilize vague rules are better suited to the unconscious mind.

This is just as well, since our ineptitude concerning multitasking means that the conscious mind can only truly concentrate on one task at a time [1, p 46]. Deep work, however, is cognitively taxing and can only be done for a small portion of the day. Practiced deep workers may reach as many as four hours per day, but after reaching the brain’s limit there are diminishing returns. Our bodies need rest, and not just during sleep.

Our environment, however, is not particularly conducive to deep, regenerative rest. We are now in an era of continual entertainment. It seems as though our resting hours are ceaselessly occupied by smartphones, televisions, and computers. Repeatedly engaging in an addictive, dopamine-rewarded behavior such as smartphone scrolling leads to neuroadaptation. A neuroadapted brain experiences less pleasure for a shorter period of time for the same experience than it did during the original. Additionally, as the brain attempts to return to homeostasis, neuroadaptation increases both the intensity and duration of the pain resulting from the experience; withdrawals, cravings, hangovers and more increase in intensity. Therefore, the pursuit of pleasure for the sole sake of indulgence and avoiding pain leads to the inability to experience pleasure at all [2, Ch 3]. If our rest time is occupied by dopamine-fueled, addictive activities, pleasure and rest slowly erode into cravings that provide no rest when satiated.

Fast paced recreations such as action-film watching and instagram scrolling have been thoroughly normalized. These activities really can be fun and even restful, but I believe we also ought to be capable of sitting quietly without podcasts, screens, or even books. Initially, it seemed unpleasant and wasteful to sit silently for lengthy stretches of time, simply to meditate on how light falls on grass, or how feathers are knit together on a well-groomed bird. Yet when this is all I could do, the practice slowly became precious to me. There is something quite deep, quite vulnerable — something illuminating and artful in finding beautiful ways to do nothing at all.

References

[1] Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits an Easy & proven way to build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. New York, NY: Avery, an imprint of the Penguin Random House LLC.

[2] Lembke, A. (2022). Dopamine Nation. London, UK: Headline. [Audible Audiobook] Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com.

[3] Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. New York: Grand Central Publishing.