THE ART OF DOING NOTHING
19 JULY 2022 (16 MIN READ)
In today’s modern age, in the space between stimulation, we have learned to consume more stimulation. What kind of twisted shit is this? To find evidence of this hyper-stimulated reality, look no further than any waiting room or line, where every single person is either scrolling through social media or voraciously consuming something on their phone. Thus, in the space away from doing, where humans can decompress and allow their minds to settle, we have decided to flood our minds with more stimulation, opting to live a life with no time for mental relaxation, but rather, constant overstimulation. Although some may point to the idea that we are so lucky to be able to be constantly entertained, I point right back at the increasing inability of the collective to sit with their own thoughts for an extended period of time. And if we cannot sit with our own thoughts, then we cannot sit with ourselves. And when we cannot sit with ourselves, we begin to dislike ourselves, creating a dangerous vehicle for self-hatred. So what once started as a hedonistic desire to be constantly entertained has resulted in self-hatred. How is there anything good about that? There isn’t. Only danger and hell exist in this land.
The prime challenge in life is to master our thoughts, which then dictates our quality of life. If we are constantly wrestling and shaming our thoughts, then our reality will match that painful situation. However, if we learn to coexist with our thoughts in a peaceful manner and feel in control of their trajectory, then we will be more likely to enjoy life. And how can we exactly begin to master our thoughts? Sitting down and paying attention to them. Once we refuse to sit down with our thoughts, and instead settle for constant distraction, we unconsciously accept that our thoughts own us, running away from them out of fear, rather than facing them. Living life constantly running away from our thoughts creates a massive problem: not being able to highlight our good thoughts from our bad ones, as well as not discovering the voice of our higher self. Our mind is similar to that of a board meeting and your awareness is the CEO. Just like a CEO can ignore the dumb ideas in the room to find the gem, we have to do the same with our minds, constantly. Once we learn to master this art, we can start living our lives in our highest expression, since we learn how to highlight our great ideas and follow our higher self through that lens. Without this ability of distinction, one will land themselves in a constant state of confusion, where they cannot trust any of their thoughts and stay lost because of that—in a land of anxiety-fueled self-hatred.
The only way to avoid this self-deprecating lifestyle and pervasive confusion is to embrace the art of doing nothing, where you become inspired to master your mind and capable of it as well.
But how exactly do we go about doing nothing? And how can we do it in a way in which we begin to master our minds?
THE PROBLEM WITH ATTACHMENT
Buddha himself could not have said it better, “The root of suffering is attachment.” And when do we not have any attachment: when we are intentionally doing absolutely fucking nothing. The reason why attachment creates suffering is a combination of creating expectations and needing something outside of yourself to bring you happiness. We all live life with attachments, whether it be our favorite tv show, our friends’ attention, or our chosen sports team. But what happens when we are at the mercy of them? When all of our happiness stems from the outcome of those attachments? Think of the man whose favorite show gets canceled, his friends stop seeing him, and his sports team loses in the playoffs. He’ll be miserable for a second, not be able to tolerate it, pick up a bottle of whiskey, and turn on some porn. As you can see, if we are not able to be with ourselves outside of our attachments, we will always be at the mercy of those things, even if those things leave us, because we will be quick to replace them. And being at the mercy of your attachments means you are signing up for a life of suffering, because our attachments can leave us at any second, creating a cycle of grief that we cannot tolerate so we keep looking for new attachments to numb it. Unless you desire to be a monk, I’m not going to argue that we can live life without any attachments, but what we can do is learn to temporarily live away from those attachments.
Through building the skill of doing nothing for a certain amount of time, where we observe the desire for external soothing mechanisms and learn to tolerate the cravings without caving in, we begin to fortify a deep knowing in ourselves that we will be fine if these attachments leave us. This understanding will allow you to not be at the mercy of your attachments, but develop more of a healthy relationship, where you can want the external thing and not necessarily need it. The want will create a little suffering in the attachment’s absence, but the need will sweep you off your feet, incapable of functioning without it. To offer some instruction on the doing nothingness when it comes to healing from unhealthy attachments, you can go about it two ways. One, if the absence from the attachments is causing a lot of anxiety, then you can sit down for about 15-20 minutes and exhale for twice as long as you inhale. This can look like inhaling for 5 seconds and exhaling for 10. What this will do is activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which puts you in a state of relaxation, easing the anxiety you previously sat down with. When the thoughts surrounding the attachments arise, such as texting back your new romantic interest, gently allow them to float away and keep coming back to your breath. Learn to observe the emotions that come with the thoughts with curiosity. This curiosity will create awareness inside you around how this emotion can drive your behavior. Again, the intention here is to do absolutely nothing but just breathe in that specific pattern and observe. The second way to go about this activity is a little more challenging: literally laying/sitting down and doing absolutely nothing. No specific breathing patterns or anything like that. You just have to plop your body down and sit with whatever feelings and thoughts arise for about 15-20 minutes, without any desire to change them. This helps in healing your attachments to a specific sort of emotion or thought pattern, learning to accept whatever your body and mind throw your way. The first method is more so for healing external attachments, the second for internal ones. But why is the second one so difficult and how can we master it?
THE REAL TOUGH SHIT
We often think that tough physical tasks are the hardest things to do, such as getting in a freezing cold ice bath or enduring a grueling workout. Yes, these things do have meaning to them and build resilience, but sitting down by yourself, while you actively do nothing is a whole different beast. And no, I don’t mean kicking your feet up while you watch The Real Housewives or scroll through TikTok. I mean sitting down with absolutely nothing but you and your mind. Back in the day, without the creation of television, smartphones, and social media, this would be an easy task for most. However, now with the dependence on stimulation for internal distraction, most cannot bear to sit with themselves for more than thirty seconds. Backing up this powerful claim, a psychological study gave people the option to sit quietly for about ten minutes or shock themselves with electricity.¹ Unsurprisingly, around ⅔ of people decided to go with the electric shock. Thus, to extrapolate the data, most people would rather torture themselves with real physical pain than sit alone with their thoughts for ten minutes. If this does not show you how hard it is for people to be with their thoughts and do nothing, then I do not know what will. The best part of this study is that it was conducted in 2014, before social media became the powerful vehicle of distraction and stimulation it is now, which suggests that the number of people who would endure a shock would be much higher in today’s day and age. But why is it so hard? And how can we overcome this difficulty?
The difficulty lies in our internal attachments to the sensation of happiness and positive thoughts, as well as a somatic distaste towards experiencing tranquility. We live in a culture obsessed with always feeling happy. And guess what happens when you only want to be happy? You will not accept any feelings that reveal otherwise, shaming them away and putting on a false smile. If you are always doing something, then you can play the persona of feeling happy, and you can choose to do things that bring you pleasure, which then gives you the “happiness” that you so badly crave. But what happens when we are forced to sit down and do nothing? We cannot fool ourselves anymore. We end up having to feel the negative emotions that we have repressed for so long. And guess what comes with those negative emotions? Negative thoughts. So, for those who never sit down and empty their minds, they never have to really face the severity of their negative emotions and thoughts, which is why it is so hard for them to engage in the art of doing nothing. However, true freedom exists on the other side of processing our darkness, in the form of feeling our negative emotions and allowing the thoughts that come with them to purge out of our head. And the only way we can do this is through doing fuck all, away from the distractions that feed the aversions to negative sensations and thoughts. If those feelings and thoughts are left simmering for too long, then they will explode at some point, leading to a potential downfall or mistreatment of someone you love, making it so important to let them be released. After becoming comfortable with sitting with the negative emotions and thoughts, not only will you allow that darkness to leak out of you and give room for light, but you will learn to not be so attached to the good feelings and positive thoughts, since you know you can overcome the opposite of them. So, sit your ass down, feel whatever sensations come up, as well as thoughts, and be with them, without the desire to change anything.
In terms of being somatically opposed to tranquility, if our engine that is the body is used to hyper-stimulation as its gasoline, then how can we expect it to function when we offer it peace? It cannot. The minute we are confronted with peace, it will demand stimulation in the form of craving thoughts and anxious sensations in our body. This can look like having an anxious need in our body to reach for our phones and scroll through social media when we try and sit down for a second to do nothing. The problem with this lifestyle, other than being attached to external stimuli for one’s “happiness,” is that when our nervous systems are in a constant state of stress, our physical and mental health will deteriorate. We can find ourselves more susceptible to catching colds or stomach issues, as well as eventually experiencing mental burnout, which can feel like a depressive episode. To not fall into this trap, try your best to ride out the waves of craving stimulation when you are doing nothing. It will be absolutely brutal at first, but over time, it will go away. However, when we really pay attention to the deep need we have for stimulation while doing nothing, it can help reveal how addicted we are to it. And when we accept this addiction, we become more inspired to not be at its mercy so much.
CREATING SPACE FOR COMPUTATION
Think back to a time where you were doing nothing and your brain reminded you about that important email you had to answer by the end of the day. Chances are, if you failed to have that time away from doing something, within that distraction, you would have forgotten about that email and been even more stressed once you realized it. When we refuse to take time away from distractions and simulation, we forget that our minds, once removed from externalities, have this beautiful ability of understanding our stressors and offering solutions, so we can move on and return to a state of peace. Because of this reality, whenever I meditate, I always bring a notepad with me, as every single time I am reminded of emails I need to send or ideas I need to write down that I had completely forgotten about. Even better than solving the trivial things in life, sometimes when I am dealing with a serious issue, such as a bad argument in my relationship, I force myself to do nothing, and out of thin air, the solution to the argument presents itself to me. We are fooled to believe that our conscious mind is doing all the work in our day-to-day lives, but in reality, it's mostly the subconscious mind. And we have to give that side of our mind a chance to speak to us, which is impossible if we are constantly distracted. When we take the time to do nothing, step away from stimulation, and slow down the conscious mind, that is when the subconscious can start coming through the surface and offer its wisdom, specifically in the form of letting us know what is causing us stress and what action we need to take to remove the stress. Put differently, if we do not take the time to decompress and do nothing, then we are adding unneeded stress to our life in the form of being unaware of what’s causing it and what we can do about it.
Another reason why your mind needs time away from stimulation to function properly is to inform you of your subjective ideas. Through always looking at social media when we have free time, we learn to consume what people are thinking, rather than taking time to understand what we think. And the problem with not thinking for yourself is both that you become easily manipulated and you can be polarized to a political extreme. In terms of the former, by only focusing on what people are saying you forget about what you have to say in the process. And when you are not familiar with your own discerning voice, you allow yourself to be at the mercy of the opinion of others. To truly develop independence, you must learn to listen to your discernment and follow it more than that of others. Once this discernment gets strong, you will better recognize the heaping amounts of bullshit on the internet and allow yourself to not be fooled by lies. Now, for the latter, by not taking a step back and thinking for yourself, you allow social media algorithms to push you into political extremes, where you are easily sold lies and learn to hate fellow humans. For example, on TikTok, if you tend to pay attention to videos about political issues, specifically the ones that stir the most emotions, which are usually the extreme ones, then over time you will start seeing how the videos become more and more extreme. And that’s because the algorithm knows it needs to stir more emotions in you to keep watching. And the more triggering a political video is, the more extreme it tends to be. Thus, if you never take a step back, use your discernment, and see what you truly think about the video, as well as how it's manipulating you, then you will end up at the egoistic, lonely hellhole that is a political extreme. And guess how you build the skill of discernment? Listening to your damn voice and recognizing its power, which you can only do by taking time away from all distraction and getting familiar with it.
LABELING THE TROUBLEMAKERS
Going back to the idea of our mind operating as a board room meeting, not only is it important to recognize our awareness as the CEO, choosing what voices serve us and those that do not, it is also crucial to become familiar with the negative voices and learn to identify them quickly. And what’s the best way to identify something? Giving it a name. I like to label the negative voice in my mind as “Sacul,” which is my name backwards, since it is the backwards version of my highest self. Similarly, when my anxious brain is coming up surrounding if somebody likes me or not, I see it as my younger self talking to me, whose trauma lies in needing others to love him, so I label the voice as my inner child. Some other voices are people who bullied me growing up, which ended up getting internalized in my mind, but I can now start hearing the thoughts in their voice, instead of mine. The more we can label these voices that bring us down, the better we get at disidentifying from them, making it easier to stick to the healthier path of gratitude, discernment, and presence. The reason why disidentifying from these thoughts is so powerful, is that it helps us understand that these thoughts do not have to serve a role in our life, and we gradually learn to realize they do not stem from our highest expression of self. All they are really is the consequence of the pain others have handed us on our life’s journey. If you want more evidence on the power of disidentifying from thoughts, then look no further than the popularity of religions such as Catholicism over the course of history. The reason why following this ideology is so enticing to many is the idea that our “dark” thoughts stem from dark spirits. Whether you believe in this way of spiritually analyzing our thoughts or not, by the everlasting popularity of following this sort of ideology, you should be able to see how appealing and effective it is to disidentify from the thoughts that hold us back. And how do you think we get good at this skill of disidentification? Doing absolutely nothing but paying attention to our mind and getting familiar with the voices that hold us back. If we are always doing something or under the mercy of constant stimulation, then we cannot learn to become familiar with these voices, which is incredibly dangerous for our mental well-being.
Although working on your thoughts themselves is important, through disidentifying from the ones that hold you back, you cannot neglect the somatic part of these thoughts. In other words, behind those dark thoughts exists a history of emotional pain that we are holding on to, which you should not forget about. By only focusing on our negative thoughts and forgetting about the pain underneath, we allow the pain to become unconscious. And when the pain becomes unconscious, it affects our perception of reality without us even realizing it. For instance, if somebody always represses their feeling of anger by just correcting the angry thoughts, the swallowed anger could then affect their perception of new people they meet or be taken out on a sudden argument with a loved one. We do not want to be at the mercy of our repressed emotions. It is much better to own them, feel them through, and return back to the clean slate we can observe reality through as objectively as possible. We can also use the art of doing nothing to really process and feel our emotions without distraction.
¹ Dunham, Will. “Would you rather sit and think or get shocked? You'd be surprised” Reuters (2014).
