You spent the entire week asking for a break. Then, it finally arrives: class ends early, an appointment is canceled, or you have fifteen spare minutes before leaving the house. There is nothing urgent to deal with, no important message to answer, and no task that truly needs to be done in advance. Even so, almost immediately, you find something to do.
You open social media, choose a song, read a few pages of a book, or decide to set aside your clothes for the next day. Before you know it, that break has already become another item on your to-do list, and the pause has stopped being a pause.
It is a small contradiction, but a very easy one to recognize: we long for free time, yet when it arrives, we do not really know what to do with it. Or rather, we know exactly what to do: anything.
The problem is not the activities themselves. Listening to music, reading, or even organizing a drawer are perfectly valid choices. The question is different: are we choosing what to do because we want to, or because we cannot stand the idea of an empty moment?
In a routine divided between college, work, social life, self-care, and plans for the future, every moment seems to need a purpose. If we are not producing, we are consuming. If we are not studying, we are trying to rest the right way. If we have nothing to do, we find something.
After all, when was the last time you spent a few minutes without any kind of stimulation and without trying to turn that time into something useful?
But What If Doing Nothing Is Not as Bad as We Imagine?
Part of the difficulty may lie in our expectations. Spending time alone with our own thoughts seems boring before it even happens. We imagine the silence, the discomfort, and the minutes passing slowly. That is why, at the slightest sign of boredom, we look for something to keep us occupied.
But a study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that spending time alone with our thoughts may be less unpleasant than we imagine. In the study, participants predicted how much they would enjoy spending some time simply sitting with their own thoughts, without a phone, anything to read, or any other activity. Then, they actually went through the experience, for periods ranging from three to 20 minutes.
Across the six experiments, which involved 259 people, participants enjoyed the experience more than they had predicted. The experience was not considered extremely pleasurable, but it proved to be more enjoyable than they expected.
Still, the findings raise a question: what if we avoid these moments less because of what they really are and more because of what we imagine they will be?
For Davi Camargo, a clinical and sports psychologist specializing in behavior analysis, part of the difficulty comes from the way a pause brings us face to face with thoughts, concerns, and feelings that we tend to push into the background during a busy routine:
“Doing nothing puts you in touch with your thoughts and worries, and that can be uncomfortable. The difficulty is not in finding something else to do, but in dealing with what is present at that moment”.
If we never allow ourselves to experience that emptiness, we will never know what it would actually feel like. Filling every break can therefore become a way of avoiding that encounter.
Not necessarily because we consciously choose to run away from something, but because we have become used to having an immediate response to every sign of boredom. When silence appears, we already know where to look for noise.
What Do We Do With Every Empty Moment?
Just look at the small breaks in an ordinary day: the bus ride, the minutes before class starts, lunchtime, or that final hour before going to sleep. In practice, almost none of them remain empty.
The routine of Maria Fernanda Manccini Fernandes, 21, an Accounting student and back-office intern, illustrates how this need to stay busy can show up in everyday life. She considers her daily routine relatively calm compared with that of other people her age.
What stands out, however, is not her schedule, but what happens between one commitment and the next. She reads a book or checks her phone over breakfast. The journey to work may also be filled with reading. At lunch, she alternates between her book and conversations with coworkers. After her internship and, later, after showering and having dinner, she usually spends her time on her phone.
There is nothing wrong with these choices. Reading, walking, talking, and keeping up with content are activities that can be good for us. The point is that nearly every break is given some kind of purpose.
“The moments when I do nothing are rare. I am always filling my time with something,” Maria Fernanda summarizes.
In her case, the phone stands out as the quickest and most accessible way to fill empty spaces. She acknowledges that there are many moments when she could simply do nothing, but believes that having her phone within reach has made that possibility harder to embrace. In those moments, the phone seems to provide rest, although she does not always feel truly rested afterward.
This is where technology enters the conversation, not as the only thing to blame, but as one of the most readily available responses to boredom. In just a few seconds, we can switch between videos, songs, conversations, or topics until we find something that holds our attention.
But this constant switching does not necessarily make boredom go away. Sometimes, it simply takes on a different form. A 2024 study, also published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, examined what is known as digital switching, the habit of repeatedly switching between videos or skipping parts of content in search of something more interesting.
Across seven experiments involving 1,223 participants, people believed that switching videos would help reduce boredom. In some tests, the opposite happened: switching increased boredom and reduced satisfaction, attention, and the sense that the experience was meaningful.
The results were less conclusive for online articles and for groups that were not made up exclusively of university students. This means the study should not be interpreted as a condemnation of smartphones. Rather, it points to something more specific: turning to a new stimulus whenever boredom arises does not necessarily make the feeling disappear.
Davi does not consider technology a villain either. Opening a social media app or watching a video when you are bored is not necessarily a problem. The difficulty arises when this becomes the only possible path, and we keep reaching for immediate stimulation until the behavior becomes a cycle.
It would also be simplistic to limit the discussion to screens. The impulse to fill our time appears when we put on a series, open a book, organize our room, or look for something to do over the weekend. All of these activities can be good and enjoyable. What matters is recognizing whether we choose them because we genuinely want to or simply because we cannot stand the idea of a moment when nothing is happening.
When Resting Feels Like Wasting Time
This discomfort appears even when resting is a choice. Someone can spend Saturday watching a series or a movie they enjoy and still end the day thinking that they could have gone to a park, tidied their room, or taken care of a pending task.
Looking at it objectively, that person rested, enjoyed the moment, and did something that made them feel good. Even so, they may still feel as though they could have made better use of their time.
It is strange to realize that even rest has to compete with other possibilities. Enjoying the day is not enough. It always seems necessary to prove that it was worthwhile.
The quotation marks that often accompany the expression “I did nothing” say a lot. Watching a series is not, literally, doing nothing. But within the logic of productivity, free time that produces no concrete results can be interpreted as time wasted.
What is most curious is that nothing was necessarily bothering that person during the moment itself. The discomfort appeared afterward; their choices were measured against an invisible ideal of what a weekend well spent should look like.
Maria Fernanda experiences something similar, although in a different way:
“On weekends when I have nothing planned and spend the entire day on my phone, I end up feeling like I wasted the day and feeling guilty for not doing anything useful”.
In her case, the frustration is also connected to how she experienced the moment. Spending hours on her phone does not always produce the sense of rest she expected. Even so, at the end of the day, she is not only assessing the activity she chose, but also whether her time resulted in something considered useful.
Davi explains that this criterion is learned. We often associate our value with what we produce, especially in a culture where we constantly follow other people’s routines and achievements:
“If recognition comes mainly from achievements and results, the simple act of resting begins to feel like a lack of effort”.
This comparison may be especially intense among young people who are entering the job market and want to demonstrate their value. When they follow the journeys of people who already have established careers, they may develop the impression that they are falling behind and the persistent feeling that they have not done enough.
Not everyone experiences this pressure in the same way. Even so, when productivity becomes the main measure of value, any moment without a visible result can feel like a waste.
Perhaps that is why saying “I did nothing today” sounds almost like a confession, while saying “I had a productive day” feels like a reason to be proud. At some point in our lives, rest became something that needs to be earned.
Even leisure has acquired goals: finishing a series, reading a certain number of books, visiting different places, documenting an outing, or making the most of every opportunity.
For university students, this conflict often takes a familiar form. There is always a text that could be read, an assignment that could be started early, or an exam that could be studied for a little longer.
“A person studies while thinking about resting and rests while remembering what they still need to study. With this mindset, they are not truly present in either one”, Davi says.
According to the psychologist, this feeling can arise when someone believes there is always something left to do and that they have never done enough. The pressure may come from outside, but it can also come from the rigid standards we create for ourselves.
In the end, the person does not truly rest, but neither can they work as productively as they would like. They remain caught between what they are doing and what they believe they should be doing.
Not Every Moment Needs to Have a Purpose
If doing nothing feels uncomfortable and resting causes guilt, it would be easy to conclude that the solution is to force ourselves to stop. But turning rest into yet another task would only repeat the problem.
There is no single correct way to rest. What is at stake is recognizing that not every space needs to be filled, optimized, or justified. “The more we respond to boredom with an immediate stimulus, the less we learn to remain still without needing to change something. Boredom itself does not need to be a problem to solve. Not every moment needs to have a purpose”, Davi concludes.
Perhaps we have not only forgotten how to rest. Perhaps we have also forgotten how to accept that some moments do not need to become an achievement, a memory, an answer, or even a story to tell.
And perhaps the answer will only appear when we have fifteen minutes with nothing planned and resist the urge to fill them with something. It may be uncomfortable. It may be lighter than we imagined. Or it may simply be a break, with no name, goal, or justification.
Not every moment needs to be made the most of. Some can simply exist. And so can we.
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The article above was edited by Isabella Simões.
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