Core exercise · 6 of 12
Niente
Yes / no, once a day
"The sweetness of doing nothing"
Between us, and don't tell the other exercises, but this is my favourite one! As the Italians say, dolce far niente: have you ever tasted the sweetness of doing nothing? You may be wondering how, and in what way, an exercise where you do "niente", "nothing", and just watch your surroundings, nature, the things in your home or simply the wall could help you. When your brain, which consumes things non-stop, does nothing, it drops into what's called the "default mode network", a kind of "default network mode". It's a mode in which it isn't focused on anything in particular, in which it can see the big picture and look at unfinished business from a wider perspective, think and come up with solutions without telling you, and regulate and calm itself. They also call this "The Shower Effect", because in the shower there is nothing you can do except shower. So your brain is working in the background! This exercise, I know it will sound odd, is the one that, compared with the others, raises my energy the most, heals me, and makes me hungry to bring my life to a better place.
"Could doing nothing be impossible?"
Right before this exercise I sometimes also do my body scan and chill exercises, so that my chances of sinking into a swamp of negative thoughts while doing nothing go down, and my chances of quietly synthesising vitamins like a plant making food in the sun, more positively, go up. Because doing nothing, yes, really is close to impossible. Especially in this age, when every food is full of processed sugar and synthetic chemicals, when energy drinks never leave people's hands and social media never leaves their eyes, to sit on a bench and watch the clouds drift by, the branches of a weeping willow swaying in the wind about to touch the surface of the lake, without looking at your phone, without listening to music, without talking to anyone... Could it be impossible? For someone with a clinical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or someone who eats the way I described above, yes, it could be. But if, after a few seconds, your mind starts to feel as peaceful as a clerk who has cleared every mess off his desk, filed every document away in the cabinets and is waiting serenely for the 5:30 train to take him home, then something is working.
Research
Research: Niente
The default mode network, mind-wandering, the shower effect, and how hard people find doing nothing.
These notes are a starting point for the author's own reading; nothing here is medical advice.
"Default mode network" is a real term from brain imaging: a set of regions that becomes more active when a person is not doing a task and quietens when attention is directed outward (Raichle and colleagues 2001). Whether letting the mind wander is good for you depends on what you measure. A large study that pinged people's phones through the day found that a wandering mind usually goes with a less happy moment (Killingsworth and Gilbert 2010); an experiment on creative problems found that an undemanding task, the laboratory version of a shower, improved the ideas people came back with (Baird and colleagues 2012), which is the "shower effect" the author describes. A review of the same network argues that rest is not idleness: the brain uses it for memory, for taking stock and for thinking about oneself and others (Immordino-Yang, Christodoulou and Singh 2012). The author's suspicion that doing nothing is nearly impossible has data behind it: in a series of studies many people disliked being left alone with their thoughts for 6 to 15 minutes, and a number chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than sit with nothing to do (Wilson and colleagues 2014).
References
- Raichle, M. E., and colleagues (2001). A default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Killingsworth, M. A., and Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science.
- Baird, B., and colleagues (2012). Inspired by distraction: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science.
- Immordino-Yang, M. H., Christodoulou, J. A., and Singh, V. (2012). Rest is not idleness: Implications of the brain's default mode for human development and education. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
- Wilson, T. D., and colleagues (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science.
Notes last touched October 16, 2026