The Importance of Doing Nothing

By giving the brain ‘downtime’ we can improve mental health and allow ideas to incubate.

By Manfred Kets De Vries, INSEAD Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development & Organisational Change

“Learning without reflection is a waste, reflection without learning is dangerous” – Confucius

In today’s networked society we are at risk of becoming victims of information overload. Introspection and reflection have become lost arts as the temptation to ‘just finish this’ or ‘find out that’ is often too great to resist. But working harder is not necessarily working [amazon asin=B00005OMHN&template=*lrc ad (left)]smarter. In fact  slacking off and setting aside regular periods of ‘doing nothing’ may be the best thing we can do to induce states of mind that nurture our imagination and improve our mental health.

Busyness vs productive occupation

Our lives have become defined by busyness. Look around you at the train station, in cafes, out on the street, people are glued to their mobile handset or tablet.

I recently asked an executive I once coached how many emails she received a day. “Five hundred,” she told me. “But I don’t read any of them. If I did, I wouldn’t be doing my job.”

The challenge, she said wasn’t attaining information but “pushing it away so I don’t suffer from information overload. I need time to think.”

Helen, as I’ll call her, has an assistant who goes through all her emails and she spends a few hours every week discussing problematic[amazon asin=B00DSAULCG&template=*lrc ad (right)] ones with him. “I’m not paid to do that kind of work,” she explained “if I’m so busy doing what people expect me to do there will be no time left for what I ought to do.  You can’t do creative work at a cyber-pace.”

Helen has a point and I have learnt from experience that  many people would be better off if they did less and reflected more.

But doing nothing has never really been acceptable. We associate it with irresponsibility, wasting our life. Most of us feel guilty if we don’t have something to do. On the other hand we get a buzz when we feel really busy. Distraction-inducing behaviours like constantly checking email stimulate the brain to shoot dopamine into the bloodstream giving us a rush that can make stopping so much harder.

The danger is we may lose our connections, not just with one another but with ourselves. If we don’t allow ourselves periods of uninterrupted, freely associated thought then personal growth, insight and creativity are less likely to emerge.

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