Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

Mentalizing is the neural basis for empathy, and it’s an ability that scientists believe is fairly unique to humankind. In a carefully controlled experiment, researchers found this effect when people believed they were listening to a live speaker instead of to a recording: The part of their brain associated with imagining the thoughts and needs of others was engaged.

These are the essential qualities of a human being: social skills and language, a need to belong that fosters empathy, rule-making, music, and play. We excel at these things, and we need them in order to be healthy.

Instead of investing our time in group activities like clubs or other hobby-focused groups, we are pouring our time into our jobs and into never-ending individual self-improvement schemes.

This is what makes the issue of productivity versus idleness so very urgent.

In a short span of about two hundred years, we have stepped far away from human nature and tried to push ourselves further toward digital existence and isolation.

Noam Chomsky once said that “humans may well be a nonviable organism.” He was talking about our propensity to destroy the planet; I think his words also apply to our propensity to destroy ourselves.

Turns out, the more interaction you have with your phone, the “noisier” your brain is. The noise I’m referring to here is called “neuronal variability.” It’s a term that describes a certain kind of extraneous, possibly distracting, electrical activity inside our skulls. It’s static interfering with our brain’s radio signals.

The urge to have the most current information is primal. As the clinical psychologist Anita Sanz wrote on Quora, there is a region in the brain that’s responsible for warning us when we’re not getting all the information we need or are being excluded from our community. “That specialized part of the brain,” she writes, “is a part of the limbic system, the amygdala, whose job it is to detect whether something could be a threat to our survival. Not having vital information or getting the impression that one is not a part of the ‘in’ group is enough for many individuals’ amygdalas to engage the stress or activation response or the ‘fight or flight’ response.”

A person who can leave their cell phone at home is not an important person, right? Kids see their parents answering emails at the dinner table and make assumptions about the relative importance of the meal versus the email.

IT WAS SELF-INTEREST THAT led me to this field of study. I had reached a stage of my life where I could not continue doing what I was doing. I was anxious and irritable and perpetually exhausted. That’s not what I wanted my life to look like, and a vastly increased income had made it all worse, not better. I was doing what I was told would make my life better: finding strategies to streamline my chores, using productivity journals, following a guaranteed exercise regime, and working very, very hard. I became more successful in my career, but that success was not accompanied by less stress and increased well-being. Instead, the more success I had, the more anxious I became.

“Resilient systems,” writes Roger Martin in the Harvard Business Review, “are typically characterized by the very features—diversity and redundancy, or slack—that efficiency seeks to destroy.”

Research shows that when you are highly aware of time passing, it even makes you less compassionate toward others. What’s more, it can interfere with your ability to make rational decisions. Because of that, feeling pressed for time can lead you to make bad choices about how to use your time.

An understanding of how our hours are spent is known as “time perception.” People who have little time perception spend more time watching TV or lingering on social media sites, and they often report feeling overwhelmed.

You’ll notice I said “make someone believe they have free time.” That describes a feeling, not necessarily a tangible reality. No one in the experiment actually found more free time; participants just felt they had more. And that feeling can come from keeping track of your hours, without changing a thing!

We work long hours in order to make more money, not realizing that once we’ve met our fundamental needs, it is leisure time that increases happiness, not necessarily extra cash.

I printed my schedules and hung copies in my office. After following them for a few weeks, I was surprised to discover that I had plenty of time to do everything I wanted to do, with hours to spare. It was a powerful moment for me. When I truly understood that my work was not out of control or unmanageable, a tangible wave of relief swept through my body. I had enough time!

“So many of them are looking to write the perfect essay,” he says, “they spend more time with anxiety than they do producing.”

Therapists will tell you that you cannot both strive to be perfect and enjoy good mental health. They are mutually exclusive.

That should be the new measure in most things: Is it good? Forget how it looks in photographs and ask yourself if you like it. Does it work? Instead of worrying about whether you stayed at the office longer than anyone else, focus on what tasks you accomplished and how well you completed them. Don’t look at your friends’ vacation photos and juxtapose them with your own. Instead, ask whether they enjoyed their time off.

“Don’t work a long day, go home, and turtle on your couch with a frozen dinner. Solid research shows forcing yourself to get out and go to the bar with friends, have dinner, see a movie, meet people and socialize, reduces your stress and makes you more efficient. Have a hobby.” The guide also suggested that they leave the building for lunch and take a break every half hour or so.

It’s time to work the hours you’re required to work, and no more. Stop choosing to stay at your desk.

If your goal is less stress and more happiness, years of scientific research have proven that rather than trading your time for money, it’s best to trade your money for time.

Buying time leads to much higher levels of life satisfaction, whereas feeling short on time leads to poor sleep patterns, anxiety, and less happiness, and is even linked to obesity, because people who feel they’re too busy are less likely to exercise or eat well.

Surprisingly, there are some downsides to having more money in this instance, because wealthier people are more likely to spend their free time doing things that are ultimately stressful, like shopping and commuting. Because they don’t get a chance to rest their mind, they are also more likely to feel they are pressed for time. The report states that “simply leading people to feel that their time is economically valuable induces them to feel that they do not have enough of it.” When time is money and the amount of money goes up, we are more likely to think we can’t afford to waste time.

I know it’s irritating, when you are strapped for cash, to hear someone say that money can’t buy happiness. And yet, above a certain income level, you are quite literally trading your health and happiness for a modest rise in pay (working excessive hours generally results in a pay raise of 6 to 10 percent). Once you reach ...

If your goal is to be happy, then working excessive hours may be taking you further from your objective of financial stability. What’s more, if your goal is to be more productive, then your harried schedule is literally counterproductive.

More and more, it’s clear that the ideal schedule is short bursts of very focused work, followed by regular breaks.

Test this for yourself, like I did. Simply note the time when you start working, focus on one task at a time, and stop working when you become distracted or restless. Note that time down and keep track of your hours for a couple weeks.

Trying to do several things at once instead of taking advantage of the brain’s natural inclination to pulse between focus and rest is a waste of fertile brainpower. The structure of my work life consisted of hours spent at a computer or in meetings, switching from one task to another until it was time to stop. That structure was not designed for my human brain, and it had to be dismantled.

There are two kinds of rest: leisure and time off, or spare time. Spare time is not true rest. As Sebastian de Grazia explains in his 1962 book, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, what we call “spare time” is the minutes and hours we find in between the work we do. It’s inextricably tied to work and is meant to recharge our batteries so we can get back to work feeling refreshed. Leisure, on the other hand, is separate from work. It should be unpolluted by work, meaning that you don’t check your emails or answer work calls during this time, nor do you worry about how your activity might impact your work life. The purpose of leisure is not to make you better at your job, but to let you enjoy the life you work so hard to achieve.

When you’re not directing your brain to do a specific task, your mind activates the default network. The default mode network, or DMN, becomes active when we allow our minds to wander.

“One key component of an effective break is psychological detachment,” they wrote in Psychology Today, “which refers to mentally disengaging from work thoughts. By shifting our focus, detachment helps us to directly reduce work demands that are causing fatigue and to naturally recover.”

When you’re not at work, you can actually enjoy not just time off but true leisure. You can be completely detached from concerns about work, and you should strive to make a complete separation. I realize it feels necessary to answer emails and texts promptly, but that habit is incredibly hard on your body and mind.

The result? During one of my untouchable days, I wrote 4,000 words before my brain overheated. Then I baked some scones and took my dog for an hour-long walk, and still had time to watch some Netflix before reading a book and falling asleep at a reasonable hour. I slept well, too.

I know it’s scary to lift your foot off the gas pedal, but trust me that you’ll enjoy the ride much more.

Stop becoming and just be for a moment.

People generally expect to hate talking with people in person and on the phone, but enjoy it when they’re forced to do it.

As the behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley has said, few people wave, but almost everyone waves back.

“However well-informed and sophisticated an expert is, his advice and predictions should be pooled with those of others to get the most out of him,” James Surowiecki says in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. “The more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.”

I’m telling you to do this because years of research proves that doing nice things for other people, even small things, is incredibly good for you.

“Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism.”

Wandering, or even getting lost, are old-fashioned activities.

Sakichi Toyota’s “Five Whys.” Keep asking yourself why until you ultimately arrive at your fundamental objective.

Leisure becomes stressful when you subconsciously believe you are wasting money by not being productive. However, if one of your end goals is to be happy, then pursuing a bigger income is not necessarily going to get you where you want to go. Allow yourself to consider other options.

The key is to create an environment in which the brain is most likely to access its creativity.

The self-made-man fairy tale is part of a shaming culture.

But in the end, this isn’t really about me. It wasn’t my choices, ultimately, that overloaded my schedule. It was the hard-work culture that made me believe I was lazy if I stopped working for even short periods of time. So the solution cannot come from my choices but from a collective choice to change the paradigm.