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Are you capable of it? Truly doing nothing for a day? I recently found out that I’m actually pretty bad at it. My boyfriend and I went on a five-day, poolside vacation. I thought I would love it. Doing nothing but reading books and drinking pina coladas by a pool, with a view of the desert mountains and a golf course in the background? What’s not to love, right? Nothing. No—nothing—that’s the thing I didn’t love. The nothingness of it all. I didn’t realize how much my mental stability (or at least what I perceived as mental stability) relied on my remaining super busy, all of the time.
I am a very busy person, and for that reason, I thought that taking a total break from everything would feel like dessert for my brain. But, at first, it really didn’t. It was terrifying. I did one day by the pool, and then I got anxious. I tried to find things to do in the small, sleepy town. I almost had a panic attack. I opened my laptop and worked for a couple of hours…until my partner found me and shut that down. “We are on vacation,” he reminded me. “The whole point is to shut your brain off,” he insisted.
He was right. But it was weird. We did have a few more days there, though, so I leaned into it, and once I got past the panic part of it—our brains really don’t want to let go of control—I discovered a few interesting things happened. Since then, I’ve tried to make a point to do nothing once a month, for a whole day. It may seem unproductive—I mean, it is literally the opposite of productive—but it actually helps me be more productive the rest of the month. Here are amazing things that happen when you do nothing for a day.
You notice your neighbors
We all run around, really just treating your neighborhoods and homes like mere shelter that we take during breaks from our “Real lives.” We don’t meet our neighbors much anymore, do we? Even though we should. If anything, we see them as…the house that plays their music too loud, the neighbors who park badly, or the neighbors whose dog barks too much. We turn them into these limited characters in our heads. But if you take a day to do nothing, you’ll notice more about your neighbors. For example, I discovered my neighbor who parks badly actually does so because she has a daughter in a wheelchair who needs extra space in the driveway to get out.
And everyone in your life
We can get so caught up in thinking about our immediate experiences and the little boxes we live in, that we forget to think about the people in our lives. I mean really think about them. For example, I know that my mom is taking care of my grandpa daily, but I didn’t really think about what that meant for her—how much she worries, or how hard it is for her and my stepdad to take a vacation. There are these facts we know about our friends and family, but we rarely take the time to empathize and truly consider their personal experiences.
