How often do you want to just do nothing? And by do nothing, usually, you mean, you want to just chill, watch a TV show or play a video game. You want to zone out from the world and simply have fun, without feeling the need to be productive.
Because here’s the thing – most of us want to be as productive as possible. We’re always saying how there’s not enough time in the day. When you ask someone how they are, the most common responses include some form of “I’m so busy!”
When we do take the time to just chill out and “do nothing”, i.e. do nothing productive, for any measure of time – we can very easily slip into guilt and stress. Or we can try to multitask, to find a balance between productive and chill. We can overwhelm ourselves when we do return to the world of never-ending to-do lists and wonder if binge watching Netflix was really worth scrambling to catch up on tasks afterwards.
We all need the downtime. We all need to have fun for no other reason than enjoyment. We all need to figure out our own balance and do what works best for us. Yet as easily as we can hit play on Netflix, we can just as easily get into the habit of truly doing nothing. Mediation is the holy grail of what it means to “do nothing”.
It requires no effort to sit and be still, to focus on breathing in and out, to let thoughts and emotions pass by without following them, to let the world completely fall away.
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