The Art of Doing Nothing

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a well-optimised life, and it doesn't respond to more optimisation.

We know because we tried. When the evenings stopped working we made them better: a podcast while cooking, an audiobook on the walk, stretching while something played in the background. Every hour improved. Every hour also full.

The thing nobody says about rest

Most of what we call relaxing is consumption. Watching, scrolling, listening, reading. Your body is still and your attention is working — which is why you can spend four hours on a sofa and stand up feeling like you've been at a station.

Genuine rest is boring, and boring has become almost impossible to access. There is always something in your pocket offering an alternative.

We have made it very difficult to be bored, and boredom turns out to have been doing something.

What changed for us

Twenty minutes in the evening with nothing on. No podcast, no background television, no phone in the room. Usually sitting by the window. Occasionally that's pleasant. Often it's restless for the first five minutes and then it isn't.

It is the single least impressive habit we have and the one visitors ask about most, because it sounds either enlightened or unbearable depending on who's asking. It's neither. It's just an unfilled twenty minutes.

Why it matters for the night

Because sleep is not something you do. It's something that happens when you stop doing.

An evening spent in continuous input asks your brain to switch from full engagement to nothing in the ten minutes after you put the phone down. It doesn't work, and then you lie there wondering why you're wide awake having been exhausted at nine.

The unfilled twenty minutes is a ramp. It doesn't make you sleepy — it removes the reason you weren't.

The uncomfortable part

The first week is genuinely unpleasant. Everything you've been out-running arrives — the conversation you avoided, the decision you postponed, the thing you're worried about. That's not a side effect of doing nothing. That is what the noise was for.

It's also why the ten minutes of writing things down works so well immediately afterwards. Give the thoughts somewhere to go and they stop arriving at midnight.

A note on “the art of”

The Italians have dolce far niente, the Dutch have niksen, and both have been packaged and sold back to us as another thing to be good at.

There's no technique. You sit down and you don't do anything. If you find yourself researching how to do it properly, that's the old habit wearing a new coat.