Do Nothing: Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

It’s true that we don’t enjoy boredom. That’s what makes it valuable, though, because when we feel bored, our brains are strongly motivated to find a meaningful occupation. Thoughts are not directed or controlled and are therefore free to travel in unexpected directions. “Once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to wander,” says the psychologist Sandi Mann, author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good, “you start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious.”

When our minds are allowed to relax and rest, they return to what’s called the “default network.” This is the part of the brain that sorts through all the new information we’ve received recently and tries to put it into context with what we already know. The default network is integral to learning, insight, and imagination. If our minds never come to rest, there is never an opportunity to wander into new directions.

Again, don’t mistake rest for inactivity. When the mind is at rest, it is still active. In fact, it uses only 5 percent less energy than it does when it’s focused on a task. Focus is required for di...

Now you begin to see, I hope, how dangerous is the idea that we must be engaged in productive work during all of our waking hours. It’s possible that too much work can separate us from our own humanity. When our minds are idle, we allow ourselves to reconnect with our creativity and reengage with reflective thought—two activities that are esssential to progress.

If we were provided with all that we needed in order to survive but were not required to work, we would be fine.

Leisure, however, does seem to be a requirement, as lack of it can make us ill. We’ve tipped the work-life balance in the wrong direction. At some point, we decided that working long hours was difficult, and difficulty was good for the soul, so the more you worked, the better a person you were. This is a perversion of natural human needs and abilities.

Why are we born free and end up enslaved? —NOAM CHOMSKY

Our history is very short, in other words. Compare our 300,000 years to crocodiles, who’ve been around for 200 million.

Some biologists believe our use of language is part of the reason we are able to engage in abstract reasoning. In other words, humans may be distinguished by our ability to use scientific thinking and ask “Why?”

Brain research shows we detect information and begin processing it less than fifty milliseconds after someone else begins to speak, and a vast amount of the information we relay to each other is sent and received subconsciously. Since text is a conscious communication tool, we can’t express what the voice can because we’re not even aware of what’s missing.

It’s confusing to me that we seek to be more efficient by avoiding conversation, since vocalization is so incredibly powerful to our species and, in almost every case, more efficient than text. I’d imagine that part of the reason we are wasting our time at work and putting in long, unnecessary hours is that we are neglecting to use our voices. In replacing phone calls with email and texts, we are not taking advantage of our own evolutionary inheritance.

However, voice-to-voice communication repeatedly outperforms text as more efficient and clear, so we are probably miscommunicating a lot by choosing the written word instead of the voice.

Research suggests it is our voice that humanizes us. A recent provocative study asked people to learn about others’ opinions using two forms: the written word and the spoken word. It turns out that when people read a differing opinion, whether it be online or in a newspaper, they are more likely to believe the other person disagrees because the other person is stupid and doesn’t understand the core concepts of the issue. When we hear someone explain the same opinion in their own voice, we’re more likely to think they disagree because they have different perspectives and experiences. On a subconscious level, we make assumptions about the other person’s humanity based on the method they are using to communicate. If we’re reading a blog online, we tend to think of the author as less human than ourselves. Hearing someone’s voice helps us recognize them as human and therefore treat them in a humane way.

It turns out, real human connection is powerful in a number of ways. For example, we know that negotiations that begin with a handshake are more likely to end successfully. Similarly, studies of brain activity show that face-to-face interaction is more likely to activate the part of the brain associated with mentalizing, or imagining the thoughts and emotions of another person. Mentalizing is the neural basis for empathy, and it’s an ability that scientists believe is fairly unique to humankind.

If you think you’re hearing someone speak to you, the part of your brain associated with empathy perks up, and you are more likely to feel compassionate toward that person.

Humans communicate best through the voice, so cutting back on emails and texts will help reduce stress.

another essential human quality, one that is common to every member of our species: a need to belong.

To our animal brains, social isolation equates to increased risk of death.

This drive to be a member of a group or tribe, however, goes beyond simple defense strategy or strength in numbers. We will sometimes make choices that benefit others, even at our own expense, and we share this tendency, the tendency to be generous, with our closest animal relatives. In one experiment, researchers taught monkeys to pull a chain in order to get food. Then they changed the setup so that when a monkey pulled the chain, the machine gave the animal some food but also delivered an electric shock to another monkey. Most of the monkeys stopped pulling the chain. Some starved themselves for several days rather than injure the monkey in the next cage. This instinct became stronger, the scientists found, when the monkeys had shared a cage at one point. If they didn’t know each other, they were a third less likely to forgo the food in order to protect the other. There was a natural inclination to protect their neighbors that became stronger as they grew closer. We share these protective tendencies with our simian cousins. Humans also naturally form groups and communities and then place the needs of that community above almost all others.

Lack of belonging and social isolation are quite devastating to the human mind and body. Research has shown that having a rich social life makes you less likely to get cancer or suffer a heart attack. People who belong to a community live longer, experience less stress, and are more likely to say their lives are meaningful.

Loneliness can lead to ill health and even death, and, as it turns out, the negative impacts of social isolation are tied back to our need to belong. That need is primal.

being part of a healthy marriage or partnership can help your body heal.

Social contact (provided it’s not hostile) can reduce pain and strengthen the immune system.

The surgeon and author Atul Gawande says, “Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic head injury.

The need to belong may have originated, many millions of years ago, as an efficient method to protect a species that was physically outmatched by many of its animal neighbors and by its human relatives like Neanderthals. Since then, this need has fundamentally changed our brains and our bodies so that we now can’t flourish without becoming a member of a healthy social group.

Seeking out isolation may be at the heart of our rising stress.

Empathy strengthens social bonds and helps to foster social inclusion, which makes it crucial in helping us fulfill our need to belong.

Empathy is crucial for the survival of our species, and so it is almost universally innate in humans. Babies as young as seven months old can form empathic bonds with others. One study monitored babies’ brains as the children watched other people touching. Seeing a person touch the back of another’s hand activated the same area in the child’s brain, as though the child had felt a touch on his or her own hand. We are born, it seems, with the ability to form unspoken bonds with other humans.

Remember that our empathy is not stirred by emails and text messages as strongly as it is by hearing another voice. That makes it all the more important that we begin to construct workplaces that involve in-person and over-the-phone interactions, and that help meet our need to belong, without impinging on the social groups people have outside the office.

If you’re thinking of early humans as primitive flower children who just did what they wanted all day, you may be surprised to discover that humans have a primal love for rules. We like structure and habits and routine. As the anthropologist Robin Fox says, “It’s the most basic feature of human nature. We’re the rule-making animal.”

scientists have discovered flutes made of ivory and bone that date back more than 42,000 years.

Play helps us develop socially, physically, and cognitively. It can also teach us how to handle unexpected events. Playing games teaches young children about social rules and establishes bonds within a community. It helps us create trust and manage stress. The ecologist Marc Bekoff, who worked with Jane Good-all, says that when we are playing, “we are most fully human.”

Remember, evolution simply cannot fully explain our behavior. One of the enduring mysteries is why we consistently choose to do things that hurt us and hurt our communities, not unknowingly like a dog eating chocolate with no understanding of the consequences, but with full knowledge, as when we smoke cigarettes. We do bad stuff, and we know it’s bad. I can’t explain why.

Loneliness and social isolation increase a person’s risk of death by 25 to 30 percent.

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. But work is not a fundamental need, while community is.

the moment, we are self-destructive. It’s essential that we remember what is most fundamental to our species and return to a lifestyle that meets our primal needs.

Research even shows that when we pick up tools, our brains treat them as extensions of our bodies. Grab a hammer and the mind behaves as though that hammer is part of your arm.

“I think a lot about how jobs used to be structured around smoke breaks or chats around the water cooler,” Jared Yates Sexton of Georgia Southern University said to me. “We’ve now structured our jobs around that phone.”

The irony for me is that we choose not to talk to people because we actually believe emails and texting are more efficient, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has written extensively about the benefits of slowing our thought processes in order to access not just our intuitive and automatic conclusions, but our more reflective reasoning capacities. The more we understand about the brain, the more we realize that a slower pace can be beneficial. For example, we’re often told to “take a deep breath” in order to calm down, but slowing your breathing doesn’t just relax your muscles—it can also have an effect on your brain. Coherent breathing is a method that trains people to slow respiration down to six breaths (or fewer) per minute. It turns out that slower breathing can improve your attention span, your decision making, and your cognitive function.

Let’s say you work for a shoe manufacturer. Is it possible that the same shipping receipt that reached you over the course of hours or days in 2001 will now cause a major catastrophe if it’s not received and responded to within minutes? Has our business truly become more urgent, or is it only expectations that have changed?

The problem is, blue light can cause damage to your eyes over the long term, and it can suppress the release of melatonin, the hormone that helps you fall asleep and stay asleep. When scientists at Harvard tested the effects of blue light versus green light, they found the blue suppressed melatonin production and disrupted circadian rhythms (which govern sleep and waking times) for about twice as long as green. The message here is that if you’re looking at your device within two to three hours before bedtime, you could be screwing up your sleep cycle. Millions of years of evolution have trained our bodies to react to the rise and fall of the sun, and adapting away from that will not be a rapid process.

Further, the phone is very stimulating, both cognitively and visually. Many apps are meant to engage your mind, and they’re quite good at it. An alert mind, though, is not a mind that’s ready to rest. On top of all this, your brain doesn’t really distinguish between posting on Facebook and working in the office. If you’re prone to using social media or answering texts and emails while you’re in bed, you’re telling your brain that the bed is a place for work, not rest.

The truth is, when smartphones are overused, they have a strong impact on the brain that’s mostly negative. Your mind treats all those notifications that come in as seriously as it treats a fire alarm or a knock on the door.

A little chime sounds, indicating that you’ve gotten a text message, and it activates the stress hormones in your head. Your body goes into fight-or-flight mode and your muscles may even contract, preparing you to run. Now imagine that process being repeated hundreds of times, perhaps thousands, over the course of a day, every time your phone vibrates or makes noise. The effect can be so strong that you may feel sore after your muscles spent the day contracting and releasing.

While we’re working on one thing, our prefrontal cortex (just behind the forehead, where executive decisions are made) brings both halves of the brain to bear on the task at hand. When we try to multitask (and that’s what is happening when we answer emails while working on a report), the brain splits the two sides into two separate teams. Our attention is almost literally divided. We forget things more easily and are three times more likely to make a mistake.

Access to the internet also makes us think we know more than we do. This one is important because it directly supports the idea that tech doesn’t always make us more efficient but instead creates an illusion of efficiency.

Studies show that online research doesn’t make us much more knowledgeable, but it significantly increases our confidence in our knowledge.

Steve Jobs famously did not allow his own kids to use iPads, saying that he and his wife limited the technology their kids used at home. One of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams, gave his kids actual books instead of tablets, and Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired, has said he severely limits screen time in his home because he is painfully aware of the damage tech can do. “I’ve seen it in myself,” he said. “I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”

Tech workers and software developers are partly responsible for the addictive nature of our devices, so it’s no wonder they’re concerned about the impact that tech has on their families. This should give us all pause when we consider how much we use smartphones and tablets. Would you eat a meal that the chef wouldn’t serve to his own family?