Your Brain on Idle


Idleness is the Devil's workshop, or so the saying goes. Blame it on our Puritan origins if you like, but Americans take fewer vacation days than nearly anyone else. And worldwide, when it comes to how much paid time off a company must give its employees, the United States comes in dead last, at zero days. Uncle Sam, it seems, got the Puritan memo: downtime is laziness.

That's a problem, says Heather Rogers in her Experience Life article, "The Upside of Downtime."

Rogers cites Victoria Sweet, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Sweet's new book, God's Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine, tells the story of her medical residency, where she was under enormous pressure to perform, and where, in response to that pressure, she began to take frequent smoke breaks.

This could've been disastrous for her health, except for one detail: Sweet didn't smoke.

Instead, she used these little chunks of free time simply to decompress, gather her thoughts, and contemplate the patients she'd just seen.

What Sweet probably didn't realize then was that unstructured free time activates the brain's "default mode network." This is when the insula, the switch that toggles between active focus and daydreaming, flips over into daydream mode, producing a mental state neuroscientists sometimes call incubation.

Incubation is the byproduct of idleness, and it's associated with driving more oxygen and blood to the brain. This in turn produces clearer thinking, less fatigue, and more resiliency—all pretty important for a medical resident working 16-hour days. Incubation is at the heart of freeform subconscious associations, commonly known as creativity. This is believed to be the birthplace of those aha moments.

Mark Twain already understood this concept over a hundred years ago when he said, "I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry, you've only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time—quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on." (It should be noted that Twain's version of the non-smoking break actually involved chain-smoking cigars, but this was long before people began to raise concerns about big tobacco.)

Taking five-minute breaks throughout your day stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing heart rate, creating better digestion, and producing overall better moods.

Still, with all that said, a joint study between psychologists from the University of Virginia and Harvard found that 83% of subjects spent zero time "thinking or relaxing", but 95% of the same group reported regularly pursuing some kind of leisure activity.

We are not comfortable with the idea of idle time. We prefer to to be doing something, even when relaxing is the goal. Checking e-mail, perusing Facebook, watching TV, or even listening to music does not jumpstart that incubation state. True idle time involves a quiet coming together of just you and your thoughts.

So maybe idleness is not the Devil's workshop after all. Maybe it's more akin to exploring the heavens of the subconscious brain, and getting in a little healthy R&R at the same time.

Based on current research, it makes perfect sense to let your thought tank fill up from time to time. It will, however, probably require reframing some of your thinking. For instance, consider the merits of Sweet's non-smoking break. Then, perhaps, consider turning off this glowing screen, and indulging in a long cool draw off a couple of random thoughts.


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more