I Don’t Want to Do It All Anymore!

I can recall how my teenage bedroom ceiling looked: I spent a lot of time staring at it; popping a CD (remember those?) into my stereo and listening beginning to end while lying on my bed. And doing nothing but that. For a long time, I would have called that boredom, but, looking back now, a few decades later, to feel that unhurried and unbothered, to be without worry or distraction or pressure, sounds more like bliss.

Maybe because it’s been a long while since I have felt any of those things. When I consider my current Instagram doom-scrolling, it isn’t usually about looking longingly at what others have (though, yes, that feeling does sometimes wash over me when squinting at all the impeccably designed homes and bottomless wardrobes), but about what they have done and achieved; about people’s output and the prescribed benchmarks of success being hit. Even more than the perfect mid-century sofa or The Row pants; that’s what tends to send me spiraling. Same goes for the magazine columns about how so-and-so successful person gets it all done, or the emails about the latest biohacking method that will ensure my maximum productivity, or the offhand questioning that I’ve come to expect living in New York for over twenty years about “what am I working on right now?”

In the US, says Sasha Hamdani, MD, a psychiatrist and ADHD clinical specialist (find her online @thepsychdoctormd), we place a high value on productivity, achievement and success. “There’s a cultural norm that suggests being busy and accomplishing multiple tasks is a sign of competence and worthiness, which can lead to a pressure to juggle numerous responsibilities simultaneously,” says Hamdani. That we live in an age defined by social media doesn’t help. “People are constantly exposed to curated images of other’s lives that often highlight their achievements which can create unrealistic expectations and a fear of falling behind, leading to a pressure to do more to keep up with the perceived societal standards,” she adds. Our sense of self often overlaps and is measured by our output. “For many of us, our value is deeply intertwined with how much we can produce and how quickly we can produce it,” adds Ashley Neese, a breathwork teacher, somatic practitioner, and author of the book Permission to Rest.

That value system that keeps us perpetually striving, says Neese, can also come at the expense of ourselves. To wit, with the rise of this constant need for productivity has come, in recent years, a dissection of it. Facets of girlboss culture (something that, with its infantilizing name did seem doomed) continue to come under scrutiny and the widespread hustle harder mentality, questioned. In 2019, the World Health Organization officially categorized burnout as a medical diagnosis. On a recent episode of The Ezra Klein podcast, guest hosted by Tressie McMillan Cottom, psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin, MD, admitted she experienced her own burnout; the extreme irony being that it came after the release of her book Real Self-Care: A Transformative Program for Redefining Wellness (Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included). As Lakshmin and others have pointed out, self-care, a term and now an industry which has risen in response to this productivity hamster wheel, is at its most eye-rolly when cast through a capitalist lens; when it’s something to be monetized. But it’s the act of simply giving yourself a break that can have a priceless effect. “Once we stop moralizing taking a step back as a character flaw, we can start reframing it as an essential tool for self-preservation,” says Hamdani.

And it’s not something that anyone should have to buy or score. As Tricia Hersey (creator of the brilliant Nap Ministry) writes in her 2022 book Rest is Resistance: “You are worthy of rest. We don’t have to earn rest. Rest is not a luxury, a privilege, or a bonus we must wait for once we are burned out. I hear so many repeat the myth of rest being a privilege and I understand this concept and still deeply disagree with it.” Neese’s new book, which stemmed from working with many women in her practice that were constantly in stress and survival mode, aims to help others learn how to prioritize rest, and also to see the value in it. “Resting isn’t about doing nothing, it’s about giving your brain, nervous system and body time to be in restorative states outside of sleep,” says Neese. “It gives us access to creativity and decision making that isn’t possible when we are exhausted or living in states of chronic stress.”

My five-year-old daughter recently complained, over a rainy weekend, that she was bored, so very bored. And I tried (OK, only somewhat successfully) to encourage her to lean into it. The benefits of boredom for our children have been well-documented; the over-scheduled and overstimulated kid doesn’t have time to just be, and the just being part is important. But it’s important for us too. The word bored is defined as: “being unhappy because you have nothing to do.” But what about embracing that sense of having nothing to do instead? Whether you call it rest or being boring or loafing around, whether it’s taking a destination-less walk or watering plants or letting the mind wander aimlessly or, like me, lying on your bed and staring at ceiling cracks while listening to the same Lemonheads album you did decades prior, doing much less than it all has its own value, too.