The Joy of Nothing: Practicing Niksen
Adapted from my reading of The Happiness Hack, Audible edition, March 2021.
If I offered you a way to boost your happiness, creativity, and wellbeing, easily and quickly, doing something anyone can do, would you give it a try?
“Of course,” you say eagerly. “Tell me and I’ll do it!”
I’d tell you about Niksen. And if you’re like most people out there, you’d ignore every word.
Over the years I’ve gotten funny looks as I’ve described this practice my experience with it. Comments like, “How could THAT make me more creative?” or “What about all of the important stuff I need to get done?” or “I’m too busy to waste time like that” are common responses.
I get it. Really, I do. We’ve been so conditioned to think that the path to a good life, to success, even to simply being happy comes from the OPPOSITE of what Niksen suggests. Resistance to Niksen is so deeply ingrained into our culture, one that worships productivity, craves an incessant “More! More! More!,” and associates busy-ness with status and importance.
Our role models embody that MORE. More hustle. More hours spent working. More competition. More titles, possessions, and upvotes.
And often, more sacrifice of life balance, healthy patterns, even relationships in pursuit of what they’ve, and we’ve, been told success is supposed to look like.
We’ve all gotten the message that if we only work harder, do more, stay later, or prioritize better, then maybe we would keep pace with the others around us who seemed, somehow, to …work harder, do more, stay later, and prioritize better than we perceive ourselves to.
So we buy into the frenzy, sometimes feeling a sense of imposter syndrome — like we’re fakers or slackers compared to others around us. What’s more, we unintentionally cherry-pick the most idealized attributes of the most idealized people around us, and compare ourselves to THAT, wondering why we come up short.
And in response? We double down on the “more,” and on the stress, frustration, and confusion it often points us to. Our brains, wired for survival and encoded by the messages we’ve gotten over the years, point us increasingly at the path we’re on, and the path we see around us, to direct the thoughts and actions that shape our life.
So of course people reject Niksen.
Yet — I’ll tell you about it anyway. Especially since the people I know who did adopt the practice, even periodically, ALL reported how it shifted things for the better. One, a product designer who felt he’d peaked creatively, actually chuckled as he described the flow of new ideas Niksen brought his way.
Another, a highly regarded professor of economics, quietly shared that her bouts of anxiety had all but disappeared.
And a hard-working parent with two appropriately boisterous young kids, proudly reported how seldom she’d lost her temper since she’d started the practice. It worked so well that — contrary to the more common messages she’d heard, and tried to enact, as a parent — introduced her kids to the concept. After a few whiney test-drives, she shared, they started doing it on their own — and their own temper tantrums started to wane.
In my own experience — yes, I follow this practice — I’ve found Niksen to reliably unlock writer’s block, help me navigate new ideas, and put things like stressful work days into a gentler perspective.
And if it’s that helpful for us I wonder if it will also be useful to you.
Ready to hear what Niksen is?
OK, if you’re sure: here goes.
It’s doing NOTHING.
That’s right. Doing. Nothing.
It’s spacing out. Chilling. Vegging. Idling away, as in — air quotes here — WASTING — a bit of time. Niksen is the practice of staring off into space and watching clouds go by, of walking slowly through the neighborhood with nowhere to go and nothing to do, of laying in bed for a little while simply enjoying the feeling of waking up. Or, as my friend Peter says, of steering at your shoes and wondering where the various scuffs came from.
Notice what’s coming up as you hear this. Maybe you feel a sense of disdain. Of resistance, or dismissal — after all, how could throwing time away so carelessly possibly be a good idea? What about the to-do list? Or that work ethic? About all the time and work we’ve put into getting where we are based on anything — BUT Niksen?
Here’s the part where I shrug and say, “See. I told you you wouldn’t like the idea.”
But let’s dig deeper. Some of our most admired achievers associate their success with making time to do nothing. Warren Buffett, Brené Brown, LinkedIn’s Jeff Wiener, and environmental activist Roz Savage are a few of many who have cultivated “do nothing” practices. Now, they may not call it “Niksen” — for them, it’s a thinking practice, or time for reflection and integration. There’s a catch, though: it’s only Niksen when you take the mental break without an outcome in mind. You don’t do it to “DO” anything. You do it to do…nothing. And the brain takes it from there.
Researchers Sandi Mann and Rebekah Cadman astonished the British Psychological Society with when they presented surprising research associating increases in awareness, creativity, and problem solving with prolonged periods of …doing nothing.
Their reports showed that subjects given boring, repetitive tasks…pointless things they simply had to do to fill time, like push paper clips from one side of a table to another…showed a marked rise in creativity on the other side of the veg-out. “Daydreaming,” Mann said, “Literally made them more innovative, better at problem solving, and more likely to have creative ideas.”
Penn State’s Karen Gasper and Brianna Middlewood mirrored these results, showing that a group that spent time, well, wasting time was significantly better at finding solutions, even to complex problems, after they’d taken some time to …simply do NOTHING.
Their work also showed that doing mundane tasks — things like chopping vegetables, organizing that sock drawer, or raking leaves, or whittling away the hours at a favorite hobby — exactly the tasks we tell ourselves we’re too busy for! — could produce similar results. As long as the activities were familiar and routine — and as long as we let ourselves space out into them.
Those creative, integrative, and positive solution outcomes correlated to the discovery of a surprising activity brains switched on when their owners were busy…spacing out.
Several years back, neuroscientists noted unusual patterns firing in the brains of research subjects who were taking breaks between psychological experiments.
These strange flurries of activity were a thing nobody talked about for quite some time. I like to believe that it was an awkward little secret neuroscience kept to itself: that the brain actually ignited an astonishing amount of activity when we actually shut it off and…stopped thinking.
Over time, as researchers started comparing notes about this strange activity, they spoke about the “default mode” brains presented during downtime. Watching the routes the activity traversed, they began speaking of the activated areas as the Default Mode Network, or DMN.
If Niksen mode is like other rest, space-out, or do-nothing experiences, it invites the brain to activate the DMN, creating a surprising flurry of chemical and electrical exchanges across the brain. These exchanges connect parts of the brain that generally tend to do their memory, motor, or information processing things without checking in with each other. When the DMN is active, currents flit across the cortex, connecting long-term memory centers with places that process new information. They integrate language, emotion, and movement centers, and generally spark a synaptic dance party as chemicals and electricity activate across the brain.
The party is more than cortex-deep. The most recent DMN studies reveal that the action continues deep in the brain, presumably creating or tuning connections that update our very ways of thinking.
Yet — that can’t happen when we’re…THINKING. Or when we’re busy. The network only activates when we turn the thinking off. Do THAT and the DMN seems to tiptoe in, like a mischievous child hiding a clue to the next step in a treasure hunt.
Yet doing nothing — fully, comfortably doing NOTHING — invites the benefits of DMN integration and the welcome reminder that our always-on busy-ness comes at a cost — and that it feels different to be a human BEING than our usual, societally approved human DOINGS.
Maybe you hear all this and think, “Oh yeah — like that time I was zoning out on the beach on that vacation, and I had that aha moment.” Or “when I was sitting on my porch waiting for my friend to come by and I suddenly remembered an insight I’d totally forgotten.”
We all remember those moments. They’re like we found little treasures that had put out for us, there all along yet… waiting to be noticed.
But those moments of magic only happen when we’ve made room for them — and we certainly DON’T make room when we use our unstructured moments to check our email, update our social media, plan our next binge-watch, or scroll through our texts to see what we might have missed.
Or when we trade downtime for screen time, exchanging a deep brain recharge for the dopamine-optimized, increasingly habitual allure of online doing or viewing.
Watching, browsing, gaming — these may seem like relaxation in the moment. Yet from a brain perspective — and thus from a cognitive, creative, or mood perspective — they are much more like the linear processes we exercise when working or sifting through social media than they are like a proper brain recharge.
In a world where we’re increasingly pointed toward busy-ness — even beyond the world of business — I invite you to explore the power of …nothing. With Niksen. Getting to inbox zero, scrolling through news or social media, making plans, checking off goals, planning the next thing we need to do: “Save those for later,” Niksen invites. Slow down. Forget what happens next. Give yourself a little bit of time to do…no, forget “do.” A little bit of time to simply…BE.
And to enjoy it, knowing your brain will turn on the DMN lights and get a happiness-inviting, creativity-boosting, and fresh-thinking dance party started.
Find more brain-aware tips to living mindfully on The Happiness Hack, Audible edition, and on my website, ellenleanse.com.
