When was the last time you gave your brain a true break? And I mean a total step back from the autopilot of your daily routine. At university in particular, putting your foot on the break hard enough to actually stop, for even just a moment, is not as easy as it seems.
Upon all of our returns to university in mid September, with a whole new semester ahead of us, it’s completely understandable that we are trying to hit the ground running with our academics, new gym or sports team memberships, cooking, settling into new flats, and summer catch ups. This productivity boom is often canonical to the beginning of each fresh semester, however, in its midst, a reminder of the value in practicing doing nothing particularly special, extravagant, or ‘personally productive’ is probably due.
I will admit that often when I find myself with a precious moment of free time, my brain craves a quick dopamine hit, and I quickly turn to social media. Whilst it may serve as a pause in my day, my brain is still running in the background, and I’m simply giving my brain a passive distraction in the bottomless pit of my TikTok feed. Even if you don’t find yourself turning to social media, you may question ‘what can i do?’ or ‘what should i do?’ Maybe exercise, journal, clean, or improve ourselves in some way or another. Yet again, this isn’t an escape from your mental schedule, and the productivity autopilot that is so normalised and imbued into our everyday activities. Instead of constantly looking to ‘do do do’ it’s even more valuable to seek out the things that give us a moment to simply ‘be’.
There is a strange expectancy at university to constantly be improving yourself and optimising your time. Standards are high, and perfection feels like the ultimate goal. There is also an underlying pressure in the ‘live while you are young’ mentality, pushing us to pack as much as we can into our fleeting university years. Whilst this ambition is great in many ways, sometimes our focus is on what we get out of what we are doing, rather than what our daily activities are doing for us. This can make us lose sight of what we genuinely enjoy, and what makes us feel most like ourselves.
The recent online surge of ‘optimization culture’ which is flooding our algorithms is also reinforcing this implicit narrative of hyper-productivity. Whether we like it or not, we are being taught that something is only valuable if it contributes to some greater personal outcome. Everyday activities gain a performative quality and are curated for online personas. Suddenly everything feels part of a grand task: eating healthy, running, socialising, or coming across as being interesting, funny, and educated.
The outside pressure to ‘do’ can encroach on how we have downtime, but often what feels like nothing is the most productive practice. Properly turning off, resetting, and doing something simply for our own enjoyment is a valuable practice for any balanced life. Maybe that’s knitting, drawing, taking a long bath, speaking to friends and family, meditation, or simply going outside. It’s just as important to make room in our bustling university routines for genuine breaks, that aren’t tasks, or for self improvement, or to sneakily optimise time, but to decisively stop.
Whilst we keep ourselves busy this semester with all the new and exciting experiences ahead (and not so exciting deadlines), let’s also, for our own sakes, make sure to do a whole lot of nothing.