You finally sit down and, three minutes later, a little voice reminds you of the laundry, the emails, the shopping, or that thing you could "get ahead of." Doing nothing has become so unusual that rest itself can feel like a waste of time.
The scene is familiar. An hour opens up and, instead of leaving it empty, we immediately look for ways to make the most of it. Tidying a cupboard, answering two messages, starting a load of laundry, listening to a "useful" podcast during the walk… Even moments meant to rest sometimes end with a list of objectives.
Carlos Caudet, a psychology professor at the European University of Valencia, defends a much simpler idea: simply stopping is an activity in itself. In other words, free time doesn't need to produce a result to have value .
A pause is not necessarily a space to be filled
Our go-to solution for a few minutes of downtime now often involves a pocket. We pull out our phone without even thinking about it. A message leads to a video, which leads to a post, then another. Twenty minutes have passed, but our minds haven't truly left the stream of stimuli.
Doing nothing, in the sense that Carlos Caudet refers to, is different. It can mean drinking a coffee without opening an app, staying on the sofa for five minutes, looking outside, or going for a walk without trying to turn the outing into a personal challenge.
And most importantly, there is no official minimum duration.
A break doesn't have to become an hour-long ritual with candles, soft music, and a phone locked away in another room. Ten minutes can remain ten minutes. The trap would almost be to transform the right to do nothing into a new skill to be mastered perfectly.
Rest doesn't have to be productive.
This idea also helps to distinguish between a deliberate break and procrastination. Postponing a task that worries you for three days while constantly thinking about it doesn't necessarily offer the same feeling as consciously deciding to leave half an hour without a plan.
In the first case, the task remains present in the background. In the second, we temporarily accept that there is nothing to accomplish.
Your brain isn't empty when your agenda is.
The expression "doing nothing" is actually quite misleading. As soon as we stop concentrating on a specific task, our thoughts don't stop. They simply wander elsewhere.
A memory surfaces, an idea resurfaces, we imagine the weekend or recall a morning conversation. Neuroscience has long studied these periods of mind-wandering. They are notably associated with the activity of a set of brain regions called the default mode network, which is more active when attention is no longer fully focused on an external task.
Research has also observed links between this mental wandering and creativity. This doesn't mean that simply staring at the ceiling will guarantee a brilliant idea within five minutes. But it does remind us of something rather reassuring: a moment without any visible task isn't necessarily a moment when nothing is happening .
We all know that idea that comes to us in the shower or during a walk when we had stopped thinking about it.
The problem begins when we try to use this observation to become productive again: "Very well, I'm going to do nothing to be more creative." We fall right back into the very mechanism we were trying to escape.
You also have the right to look at the clouds without any great idea coming out of it.
You don't have to earn the right to stop
Guilt related to rest is often accompanied by a condition: I will stop when I have finished.
Except that the list rarely ends.
There will always be a drawer to tidy, a message to reply to, or something that could be improved. Even the body can enter into this logic: one should have walked enough, completed one's workout, and taken care of oneself "properly" before considering that one deserves to settle down.
It is precisely this mechanism that can be left aside.
Your body doesn't have to earn its rest in exchange for performance. Nor does it need to wait to be different, more energetic, or more in line with some ideal version to be entitled to a quiet afternoon.
You might also enjoy busy days. Some people feel great when they're doing DIY projects, cooking, going out, or juggling multiple projects. The goal isn't to turn activity into a new problem.
It's simply a matter of regaining choice.
The next time a spare moment appears, try not to immediately find it a job. Let the coffee cool down a bit. Look out the window. Sit down for five more minutes.
The dishes will still be there afterwards. And those few minutes won't need to have been used for anything to have been well spent.
