The last couple of weeks have been particularly busy for me. I resigned, packed up an apartment, sold a car, moved to London, set up new bank accounts, found a new apartment, started to explore a new city and began looking for a new job.
Given all the change (read: stress) I rewarded myself with a scheduled day off. One day to sit in my new apartment, in my pyjamas, in the bare bones of my new life and enjoy doing absolutely nothing.
Three hours in, I was crawling up the walls. I found myself consumed in a half conscious state, skimming paragraphs of my book, checking Facebook, Instagram and What’s App. I wasn’t focused. I was restless. But it wasn’t boredom I was feeling. It was guilt. I felt guilty for not doing something more productive. I had a nagging feeling I should have been trawling job sites, or planning dinner, or exploring a new city, or anything other than warming the couch. Most of all I felt guilty that I wasn’t enjoying my self assigned time out.
Over the years there have been plenty of occasions where the stress of the week and long hours had me longing for a quiet moment, a chance to catch my breath for a moment out of the 24/7 cycle of connectedness. But somewhere along the way, between jobs and friends and family and social media and the internet, I had lost the art of doing absolutely nothing. Lack of downtime had left me out of practice.
And downtime is important. Ferris Jabr in a recent Scientific American article espouses the benefits of true downtime, “Even when we are relaxing or daydreaming, the brain does not really slow down or stop working … Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity.” Downtime should be embraced for mental health, for healthy relationships and for appreciation of what we can achieve when we are busy.
In a way, by failing to take full advantage of my downtime I was potentially preventing positive outcomes in my uptime.
A discussion with friends confirmed I was not alone. The most common complaint was connectedness. Checking up on other people’s uptime was not helping anyone achieve satisfying downtime. But why is it so difficult to switch off? There is no doubt that humans need interaction. Even the most hardened introvert needs a sense of place within a community. In many ways, social media allows us to share and interact with each other in new and interesting ways. And it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The issue lies in the habits formed and the way social media becomes a distraction not an interaction. Our lifestyles have bred a constant need to remain connected, to respond instantly, to share and comment and like. And it is these small actions that now fill the moments of quiet which used to present themselves in everyday living. Look around you on the way to work, in the coffee queue, in the waiting room, most people will be on their phones. Hell, some friends have confessed to getting online before even getting out of bed. In switching on, we have removed the smaller opportunities in life to switch off and snatch a little downtime. When it comes to larger slabs of time, where we want to relax, what hope do we have? Habit drives us to check in and check up on what everyone else is doing, losing an opportunity to hang out with ourselves.
‘I forgot my iphone’, a youtube clip viewed by over 41.5 million people since it was posted in August 2013, considers this constant connectedness. Ironically, many of the 41.5 million may have watched the clip on their phones but the point stands: sometimes we aren’t doing ourselves any favors by being online.
As for me, I am going to keep practicing downtime. And while I don’t plan on forgetting my iPhone any time soon, my hours of downtime are on the up – I would encourage you to do the same.