Hello
Hope your weekend turned out the way you intended it to. If not, no worries, let's chase the week ahead of us.
For years my headphones were a piece of my essential clothing. Keys, wallet, phone & headphones in, then I step out. Grocery run, podcast on. Walk to the station, audiobook running in parallel. Waiting in line no problem got my short form videos on scroll mode.
See I don't blame all the content out there, in fact it's very helpful. Anything I want to learn is two or three clicks away today, unlike any era in human history.
But sometimes it gets a bit too much too quickly. I stop and wonder after I've consumed it, wait, did I even need that info in the first place? A hack for fixing something while camping in the middle of the forest? Nah.. not happening anytime soon.
So here's what I started sitting with. How much of my day do I actually let myself be bored? As in zero external stimulation.
So I went looking for what actually happens when you do nothing. And it turns out doing nothing isn't nothing at all.
Our bestie brain has a second shift. It only clocks in when nothing is coming in.
That shift is the one that tidies up. It takes everything that happened to you today, decides what's worth keeping, and puts it somewhere you can find it later.
But it won't start while you're handing it new stuff. Podcast in, video in, audiobook in. So it just waits…
So boredom isn't your brain switching off. It's your brain finally getting a turn to process everything you've consumed so far.
Which means every time we fill the quiet, that shift never starts. The day never gets put away. And we've been doing that to ourselves for years without once noticing it.
Here's what gets me though. We've made filling the quiet the normal thing to do. Spot someone eating alone with no screen, no headphones, just sitting there eating, and some part of us goes 'hmm, what's going on with that guy'. Doing nothing became the weird one :/ Being permanently plugged in became the safe one :)
What are we actually doing to ourselves?
This week's hack
Do one errand this week, fully unplugged. Nothing in your ears, no devices in hand.
The first five minutes will be loud and a bit annoying. Stay with it. That's the part most of us escape.
Do it once. See if the second time feels any better.
Hit reply with the one activity you always pair with a screen or headphones 💌
With Love & Care,
Narman