Last Wednesday night, I delivered my first TEDx talk at Walden Pond. The talk is about the importance of making time to do nothing—to go without input—to give your brain time to metabolize all the thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are rolling around in there.
The premise is that you need to make regular one-hour blocks where you go inputless: no podcasts, no music, no conversations, no reading, no screens. And then, to give your body something to do that’s easy on your mind so you have enough to pay attention to so you can quiet the nasty narrator but still enough mental bandwidth to reflect and metabolize your thoughtload.
I’ve been talking about this idea of using inputless activity to boost your thoughtload metabolism with a bunch of audiences lately. And here’s the #1 most frequent question: How can I deal with the guilt of taking time for myself? How can I justify an hour of doing nothing?
It’s Not Nothing
The first thing I would say is that you’re not doing nothing when you give yourself an hour of inputless activity. You’re metabolizing your thoughtload, which consists of three things:
- You’re extracting what’s nourishing from all you’ve ingested: giving your brain the space to consolidate allows you to find the connections, patterns, and insights among all the information, facts, and figures that have gone in. It also gives you the space to experience and process some of the nourishing emotions you might have been racing through, like pride, accomplishment, or connection.
- You’re figuring out what you can discard as waste: what information is superfluous? What’s noise? What can you disregard? What about wasteful feelings? Are you feeling jealous of someone, or embarrassed about something you did that is silly to be embarrassed about?
- You’re processing anything that could be toxic. You’re spotting your faulty assumptions and destructive narratives so you have an opportunity to question and reframe them before they take you down. Those toxic components of your thoughtload might be ideas—like thinking someone else is going to fix a problem rather than taking agency. They can also be emotional toxic baggage, such as imposter phenomenon, perfectionism, or conflict aversion.
Dedicating time to inputless activity is not the same as doing nothing; it’s making space to metabolize what’s in your thoughtload.
And It’s Worth It
The second thing I say when people feel guilty making space for inputless activity is that they should ask others what they think. Which version of you do your colleagues deserve? Which version of you do your direct reports want to look up to? Which version of you does your family want to sit with at the dinner table?
I bet if you asked them, their answers would be clear. They don’t want the high thoughtload, distant, reactive, depleted version of you. They want the version of you that has invested the time to lighten the load.
Ask Yourself
- When was the last time I went a full hour without any input? What is fueling the compulsion to be shoving more in all the time?
- Where could I insert three one-hour blocks over the course of the week for inputless activity (walking the dog, mowing the lawn, folding the laundry, making the commute)?
- What has been stuck in the back of my brain pantry for a while? What ideas, insights, emotions, and narratives need to be processed for me to feel more energized, learn and grow, and start to repair things that have been broken?
- How can I make a habit of one-hour blocks of inputless activity so I can boost my thoughtload metabolism?
I understand that in a culture that celebrates hustle, but not flow, doing nothing for an hour can feel self-indulgent and wasteful. I promise you that it’s not. Boosting your thoughtload metabolism will help you be more present, more creative, and much less overwhelmed.
So rather than feeling guilty that you’re letting down your colleagues or being selfish with your family if you make the time to go inputless, what if you reminded yourself of the person they want and deserve to be with?
With you in the deep end,
Liane