Why I did nothing for hours — and you should too

One of the big downsides of the busy, highly connected world we live in is how hard it is to turn it off. To keep up with the demand, our brains are always busy — keeping track of appointments, meetings, chores, goals, gossip and the state of the world. We are overburdened. Burnt out. We have trouble slowing down our brains enough to sleep. There are always too many things to do, to keep track of — it’s never ending. Every second counts. Slowing down is unthinkable.

And yet, sometimes we get more done by slowing down. We produce better work when we take breaks. More is not always better.

One place this has become painfully apparent to me is in my business. Rather, the business I’m working on in a confused, meandering progression. One of the most important parts in my business to me is the creativity. I love writing. I love creating, and yet my relationship with creativity is strained at best.

I have always been a creative person. And yet, sitting down and telling myself “okay, it’s creating time” often yields me nothing more than frustration. It feels unnatural to force creativity.

Of course, you can self-discipline yourself into progress. Setting a time, sitting down and putting pen to paper (or, uh, fingers to keyboard) can get you there. That works for me when writing school papers. I hear that’s how you get a book finished. Self-discipline is often necessary for the commitment part, but that wasn’t where I struggled.

Where I struggled was the creativity. The ideas. How to get them, how to pick one, how to put it into form. You can brute force this through self-discipline, too. But that method had something missing for me. it felt more like chasing down an idea like a hungry cheetah than just letting it come to you.

Basically, I wanted to do less mental work for the same — or better — results, especially because feeling this way was blocking me from moving forward with having a blog, which I’ve wanted to pursue for a while.

After reflecting on this for some time, I came up with a solution: a notebook, and a whole lot of quiet.

The notebook part basically came by the realization that the kind of writing I associated with my computer was tedious, rushed and obligatory — how I felt about writing school papers and cover letters. Whereas writing in my journal was already something I did every day. It was good, it flowed, it was comforting. That, by itself, has already been a turning point. Though, I admit as I write the first draft, my wrist is getting sore and sooner or later, I may have to switch to dictation.

Nevertheless, handwriting feels flowy, while typing feels like slogging through mud. It opens up my brain because it is used to this. This is a channel by which feelings and creativity flow. It is safe and enjoyable.

The other part came about after I heard someone mention silent retreats in a podcast. I wondered what would happen if I did something similar.

You see, there’s been a phenomenon in my life where I never really knew what “recharged” me. So called “self-care” days usually involved video games, Netflix and scrolling mindlessly on social media. I thought I was giving my brain a break, but really, I was just stuffing it full of “junk food” input. Instead of actually letting my overworked system rest, I was filling it up with unnecessary stimulus because I thought distraction from work or school or my issues would make me feel better. It didn’t.

Lately, I even wondered if reading was really “downtime” if I was just stuffing my brain with more information than it could process. So, I decided to try an experiment. One Saturday morning, I decided to try to do essentially nothing. No phone, no computer, no reading or music, no doing tasks. I even tried to avoid conversation. I still allowed myself to eat, to do movement like going for walks and to meditate and journal. The point was to remove as much incoming information as possible to my brain, in order to see what came out.

What I found at first was restlessness. I kept reaching for my phone every five minutes, even though I left it in another room. I was fidgety for a while. I circled the kitchen for a few minutes like a vulture, eating snacks until I realized I was using this as a distraction, too. Sullenly, I moved out to the deck to remove the temptation. I wasn’t so sure about this experiment.

But after some time, sitting outside with a blanket and a cup of tea to guard against the morning chill, I found calm. And then I found creativity.

Do you remember being young, before technology became so constant? We would play and create and just be. I don’t miss those days, but I do think my younger self holds a lesson: when we stop taking stuff in, we start to produce. We synthesize what we already know. We think more deeply. We create. We use our imaginations. In our regular lives, we are sponges, taking in new information all the time. Our thinking is practically done for us.

How regularly do you actually take time to think about something before moving on? Often, we just keep on consuming.

I noticed this issue with books. I love reading. I love learning through books. When I started on a new self-improvement kick, I ordered several books and blew through them. That excited me, gave me motivation and each had one or two things that really resonated with me. But I tore through them so quickly that I didn’t really stop to think about how I would implement the knowledge. The immediate excitement of taking in new information outweighed the longer-term benefit of actually implementing it. I felt productive without being productive. I knew all sorts of strategies and tricks, but knowing doesn’t create success. Doing does.

Keeping it to knowing, to the theoretical, keeping it in my mind instead of creating action with it was self-sabotage. I kept taking in and nothing came out of it.

Until I let myself experience quiet.

I did this for a full six hours, because I had the luxury of that time, but you don’t need to do it for so long. I highly recommend trying to do nothing (except journal, if you’re into that) for 30 minutes to an hour and to see what comes out of it. It’s like half-assed meditation and I am a big fan of it. Being outside makes it even better. It’s a lovely way to recharge and check in with yourself. Grumpiness is to be expected, just ride it out. Happy recharging!