Do Nothing: Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.

When asked, most parents say they just want their kids to be happy. And yet research reveals that what most parents actually want is high GPAs, because they think success in school will make their kids happy.

We can and must stop treating ourselves like machines that can be driven and pumped and amped and hacked.

The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.

The anthropologist Ian Hodder of Stanford says these people probably didn’t think of their chores as work, and instead saw them “as just part of their daily activities, along with cooking, rituals and feasts that were such an important part of their lives.”

Now the average American works 140 hours more per year than the average British citizen and 300 hours more than the average worker in France.

Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably.

“Work now fulfills some of the needs for socialization that before only time with family and friends would satisfy.” As our personal lives have become lonelier and more isolated, lots of people would rather stay at work, where they at least have some social contact.

Economists began to realize that John Maynard Keynes may have been wrong when he posited that people work only to buy what they need. Instead, people may continue buying in order to experience, again and again, that flush of pleasure that accompanies the acquisition of something new.

What’s more, we’ve lost sight of the fact that productivity is a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself.

But the main reason we try to multitask is because we believe it’s more efficient and ultimately increases our productivity.

In terms of productivity, the child is the product and the parent sometimes goes overboard in trying to make that product the best one on the market.

The end result, though, is that women struggle with a heavy weight of expectation and it’s less acceptable for them to take breaks or engage in hobbies that might relieve that pressure.

So it’s no surprise to me that women have come up with coping strategies both at work and at home, trying desperately to meet the outsize expectations placed on them.

So, my advice to women is this: Be kinder to yourself. Working longer hours is not likely to bring you significant bumps in pay, but it will take a toll on your well-being.

Missing a deadline, for example, doesn’t usually take the same toll as the death of a loved one.

We now live in a culture in which we are not happy being and only satisfied when we’re doing.

Idleness is really time in which one is not actively pursuing a profitable goal.

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.

Language is essential and important because humans survive not alone but in groups.

The voice is an underappreciated and incredible instrument. It supplies us with data that we can get in no other way. Our ears evolved in ways that specifically help us listen better to other human voices, while our throats, mouths, and lips changed over time so that we could better speak. We evolved to talk to other humans and to hear them.

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.

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

“Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic head injury.”

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

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

Most people touch their phones about 2,600 times between waking and sleeping and spend about five hours browsing on them every day. Consider that when you’re feeling pressed for time.

Turns out, the more interaction you have with your phone, the “noisier” your brain is.

Having hundreds of “friends” on Facebook or followers on Twitter is not the same as having true friendships with real people.

The former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris writes often and eloquently about the ways tech “hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities.”

But none of this—the addictive apps and the fear of missing out—would be quite as successful were it not for the existing emphasis on productivity and efficiency that started dominating lives in the nineteenth century.

It’s a common mistake to evaluate ourselves and our lives by comparison instead of through objective measures.

The more TV you watch, it turns out, the more likely you are to overestimate how much other people make and how many things they own.

Researchers discovered that many people imagine their peers hang out with friends on a regular basis. They think their friends are going to parties and generally being quite social, while they spend most nights at home. The actual data, though, suggest our peers are not as social as we believe they are.

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.

If your goal is to be happy, then working excessive hours may be taking you further from your objective of financial stability.

Proving your worth by logging an arbitrary number of hours is more than silly—it’s a practice that is killing productivity and, more seriously, endangering your health. Get up and get out.

“One key component of an effective break is psychological detachment,”

“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.”

“I am sitting on an Acela [train] next to someone who is sitting with her hands on her lap, quietly looking out the window. No computer out. No tablet out. No phone out. Just peacefully looking out at the world as we pass it by. Like a psychopath would.” My answer to Stu: “I am sometimes that psychopath.”

Stop becoming and just be for a moment.

Work is necessary and can be fulfilling when you feel a sense of purpose in what you do, but it is not the justification for your existence. Remember that we are not biologically and evolutionarily “born to work.”

It turns out, we are most likely to be unkind when we over-think things and get wrapped up in our own thoughts, our own issues.

Before you invest a lot of hours in pursuing that new position, make sure it’s worth it.

Articulate your end goals and then choose smaller, specific goals that you are reasonably sure will bring you closer to the bigger objective. Check in frequently to make sure your habits truly are helping you make progress.

Realize that everything you do is likely just a means to a larger goal.

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.

We are precocious animals. Humans have always worked to achieve more than their parents and grandparents; that impulse has served us well.