Do Nothing and Be Alone With Your Thoughts

An essay?

I’m going to do something different for me which is to compose directly in Substack¹ and then hit ‘Send to everyone now,’ which, for my Navel-gazing section, is no one. But that’s okay. When a topic is on my mind and it’s not so daunting as to require editing or research (ha! research…) I don’t see why this isn’t something I can and should do.

I have been trying to do nothing more often. And by nothing I don’t necessarily mean absolutely nothing, although meditating and sitting on the back deck watching the birds are great and I should do both more. It’s more “nothing” in the Seinfeld “show about nothing” sense. I really mean, to do one thing at a time.

As of not too long ago, I was almost constantly listening to podcasts—podcasts that I thoroughly enjoy and learn from—while I was doing dishes or shaving or brushing my teeth or on the toilet or making coffee or cooking or driving or doing laundry.

If there was a mundane task for me to do, there was a good chance that I was going to listen to a podcast, or an audio book, while doing it.

But what I noticed was a tendency to want to be distracted from what I was doing. To which you say, “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

Yeah, that was the point. Every task I mentioned, save cooking (and even cooking sometimes), is pretty boring. So I was listening to podcasts to either distract myself from the task or make myself feel that I was killing two birds with one stone and really Getting Things Done and Making The Most Of My Time.

Except I found, over time, that I was increasingly reaching for my phone to tap on the podcast app all the time, sometimes for a matter of seconds. I wasn’t even listening closely or intently or for an extended period of time.

Got two minutes to make a coffee? Alright, let’s start up the episode I was listening to an hour ago (also for two minutes) and listen to the next two minutes totally removed from the context of the greater whole.

I was neither focusing on the mundane task nor focusing on the podcast.

Lo and behold! I’m not the first person to discover that multitasking is terrible as is rapidly switching between tasks (task-switching).

Apparently Cal Newport has some books (Deep Work, Slow Productivity) more or less about this. I wouldn’t know; I haven’t read them. But he was on Sam Harris’ podcast and he seemed like a good guy so if you want to read more, go check them out.

I’m not trying to get too sciencey here as that’s not my strong suit, I haven’t done the research, and I don’t particularly care at the moment. I’m simply writing to my own experience.

What I can say is that I was becoming increasingly anxious to fill the time, to make the mundane tasks pass more quickly, and to make it feel as if the time I was spending on those tasks was not wasted. As a result, wasting my time was exactly what I was doing or, more accurately, I was spending all of my time with a consistent and much higher cognitive load than I otherwise would have. I was constantly multitasking.

It didn’t really matter that one task was mundane and the other interesting; my attention was split and I became attached to keeping myself distracted from the task at hand.

To get sciencey for a bit again, let’s discuss two of the main ‘modes’ or ‘networks’ of the brain: the Default Mode Network (DMN) and Task Positive Network (TPN). As the names suggest the Default Mode Network is the default mode of the brain when you are not focused on a task: it is active during brooding, ruminating, and daydreaming.² The TPN is active when you are focused on a single task and can lead to a flow state in which you are hyper-focused on the task, do not think about yourself or how you are doing at the task, and even lose a sense of time.³ It’s what we often call “being in the zone” and tends to be a common experience of elite athletes.

A great example of flow comes from my favorite documentary, Senna:⁴

“That day I suddenly realized that I was no longer driving conscious and I was in a different dimension for me. The circuit for me was a tunnel which I was just going, going, going, and I realized I was well beyond my conscious understanding.”

The interesting implication of the clip is that Senna crashed when, because, his flow state was broken.

I have had experiences of flow states when swimming, meditating, writing, reading, rolling in jiu-jitsu. It’s amazing and I blame a lot of distractions on my phone and the internet, but ultimately myself, for not experiencing it more often.

Am I going to seek out, or expect to enter, flow states while folding socks?

Maybe? But not really, although when practicing mindfulness, when really noticing and paying attention, one can find even the most mundane task interesting and really come to see it as if for the first time.

I mainly want to de-load my mind of the schizophrenic multitasking that has come to occupy my mind most of the day.

When I do this, when I don’t turn on a podcast or music or audio book while brushing my teeth for 60 seconds (okay, 30 seconds), my mind is not focused entirely on the mundane task but rather wanders in a pleasurable and relaxed fashion.

Unless it was already present, the negative rumination associated with the DMN does not tend to enter my mind, but rather I either remain entirely focused on the task or, sometimes, enjoyable daydreams and flights of imagination and creativity come and go. The free part of my mind, the majority not required for the task, is free to wander as it will. My conscious attention is not split between the socks and the podcast episode about longevity but rather focused only on the mundane task of folding socks while the rest just observes what comes into my mind.

Is this another form of split attention?

Perhaps. But I certainly find it much more relaxing and much less tiresome. I don’t expect to see any benefits other than in the immediate moment, although I suspect my attention, my ability to focus, will improve overall as well. And I’ll definitely listen to fewer podcasts but what I do listen to I will do so with intention.

So, maybe give doing nothing, or just one thing, a shot and see what happens.

And while you’re at it, go watch Senna.⁵ Don’t forget to turn off your phone while you’re watching.

1. I love that Substack’s own spellcheck flags Substack as an incorrect word, the recommended alternatives being “Sub stack,” “Subs tack,” and “Subtask.”

2. Tom Johnson at https://idratherbewriting.com/smartphones/dmn-and-tpn-brain.html

3. For more see: https://www.headspace.com/articles/flow-state

4. If you haven’t seen Senna, go watch it, even though it borders on hagiography.

5. Seriously, do it.