Laziness Does Not Exist

by Devon Price

finding time to sit still, be nonproductive, and become attuned with one’s emotions can be therapeutic and improve a person’s physical and mental health.

James Pennebaker began to study how expressing painful emotions in writing could be healing.

sample of trauma survivors and chronic illness sufferers and instructing them to sit down for twenty minutes each day and write about how they were feeling.

Find a time and place where you won’t be disturbed. Write continuously for at least twenty minutes. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. Write only for yourself. Write about something extremely personal and important for you. Deal only with events or situations you can handle now.

writing about feelings in this way helped a person to ruminate less on the things that bothered them and improved their coping skills.

Pennebaker’s landmark book Writing to Heal: A Guided Journal for Recovering from Trauma & Emotional Upheaval

Why does expressive writing work so well? Because it forces us to confront painful feelings that we usually downplay.

Patriarchy and the Laziness Lie worked together for decades to make me suspicious of soft, feminine-seeming things such as crying or talking about emotions—even when my own repression started to eat me alive.

popular “self-care” methods have gotten an unfair reputation

seen as frivolous, ...

lighting some candles, getting a massage—these are seen as lazy, wasteful extrav...

many of us come to realize that these gentle, healing activities are absolutely wonderful, and we need to fight back against the cultural brainwashing that tells us to avoid them.

I finally gave “feeling my feelings” a try.

Every single second of it sucked. I hated it. It was painful,

I felt utterly pathetic.

After a couple of weeks

sleep. I started communicating my feelings

as soon as they...

I also started noticing patterns

certain obligations,

always came up in my writing as a sou...

Once I noticed this pattern, I found it a lot...

the more they meditate, the more they’re able to calm their nerves and identify what matters most to them in life.

Meditation is the most important place to start because it’s not intended to solve any problems.

it’s explicitly about abandoning goals for a little while, letting go of stress, and restoring energy and well-being in the process.

when we savor our free time and work to move at a slower, lazier, more intuitive pace, we begin to repair the damage that years of overwork has done.

far too many offices in America—almost perfectly designed to create traumatized, exhausted people.

The typical workday is structured around the expectation that a person should be able to sit down and churn out results for eight hours or more, despite overwhelming evidence that this is unrealistic.

Though many of us feel guilty for not being productive enough, the truth is that most of us are doing far more work than is healthy.

While at least 134 other countries have placed legal limits on how many hours a person is permitted to work,15 in the US there is no legal maximum, so the length of the workweek can continue climbing up and up.16

In some organizations, working overtime isn’t even viewed as an extra push of effort; instead, it’s considered a weekly obligation.

it now takes the average worker just eleven hours to complete what would have been forty hours’ worth of work back in 1950.17 Yet despite how much more people are working, and how much more output they’re generating, wages have declined over the years instead of going up.18

The harder it gets to make a conventional, nine-to-five living, the more people have to fill their weekends, evenings, and other spare moments with moneymaking side hustles

Human beings are not robots; we can’t keep churning out consistent results for hours and hours. In fact, we can’t maintain consistent output for more than a couple of hours per day.

we were not made to work for a full eight hours per day, despite that being considered the reasonable, “humane” workday length

More hours of work doesn’t equal greater productivity.

quality work requires time for rest.

Henry Ford famously found that when he cut his employees’ hours from forty-eight per week to forty, productivity actually increased.

when we work more than forty hours per week? We get very stressed-out, but we don’t get a whole lot more done.

these standards were developed during the Industrial Revolution, when people were doing repetitive, manual-labor work. Are these numbers even still relevant today,

most people’s jobs are complex and mentally taxing?

Industrial-organizational ps...

found that the eight-hour workday is, in fact, unreali...

Researchers consistently find that in office jobs, people are capable of being productive for only about three hours per day, on average.

When we talk about idle time as being a “waste,” it implies that people are capable of working nonstop for a full eight hours, if only they had more willpower.

The employee laziness that so many managers fret about patently does not exist.

Our Attention Is Limited

the average student cannot pay attention for more than an hour or so without a break.

students typically keep their attention fixed on a video for only about six minutes.

Workers have trouble staying on task for more than twenty minutes at a time, and the more distractions (such as e-mail, ambient noise, and instant messages) they have to deal with, the shorter their attention span