I've found that one of the hardest things a person can do in life is to do nothing. By nothing, I mean the ability to consciously shut down your brain and to stop the bullet train of thoughts you have. This is an important topic because I can't think of a smaller thing to write about than the act of doing nothing. It was a skill that we all had at one point and then magically it became a lost art. I find myself constantly always doing something. There is never a moment where I can just stop and breathe to see the larger picture of what I'm doing. Perhaps its one of the abilities we have as a child and then we slowly grow out of it.
I find that there are 2 extremes to life. You are either always doing something or you are always doing nothing. But people are often unevenly distributed between the two and live a life closer to the latter than the former. I think that the only people who truly can do nothing or come close to it are monks that practice meditation. Its easy to say that a person who sits on the couch and watches television all day does "nothing". But that person is collecting information, understand culture, learning colloquial phrases, following a story, and feeling emotions. That is how some people learn another language. A person does a lot of things when watching tv. In fact, I can't think of a better way to follow someone's depiction of a story than through a cinematic experience.
Personally, I find myself sitting down stuck behind a screen for most of the day where the last thing I want to do it watch tv. I bring up the act of "watching tv" to show how there are things considered to be "nothing" but actually generate thoughts. When people say "Stop watching tv. Stop doing nothing. Get off the couch", they are really referring to stop wasting mental energy.
The biggest use of my energy doesn't go to physical activity for me, but rather the thoughts I have. Most of the thoughts I have, I can never remember. The thoughts I have are often about reviewing the past or trying to predict the future. When I think about the past, my thoughts revolve around events that happened and about choices I could have made. There is often a limit to the number of choices I have for any given event, but to predict how the event would have played out given a change in a prior choice leads to endless possibilities. When I think about the future, I think of endless possibilities given my current state. The future hasn't happened yet so anything is possible. I feel as though my thoughts are unbounded at both ends but my brain will try to bounce back and forth between the two ends as if there were bounds. It will say "If I had only done X, I would be happier" or "I know that is where I am going, I should do Y to speed this up".
I argue for the act of doing nothing because of the wasted energy we expend everyday on things that produce thoughts that have no impact on our lives. I am not doing it, to get people to quit their jobs. It is an important concept to understand because it is an action towards preserving your energy for the things you find meaningful in life. If you think you are bad at your job because you never have any energy for it then maybe you need to meditate for some time and try to minimize how much you think. If this is your first time doing it, this will be difficult. By reducing these thoughts that tax your body you will begin to feel as though you have more energy.
If you have a lot of thoughts that cross your brain at any moment then that is a sign of intelligence. I think that intelligent people often waste energy on thoughts that will never happen. My theory is that they are non stop creating thoughts in hopes that one thought of the endless thoughts they generate will get them farther in life. This is especially true for academics who are always trying to make a breakthrough in their field. What is the next novel thing? Intelligent people also rarely forget the past so they have a growing surplus of experience to pull from to create wasted energy.
For me I found a couple of things to help with the thoughts I generate.
The primary way is to meditate in a dark room for the time it takes me to let go of stress I have built up in my brain. This is hard because for some this could take hours and for other it could take minutes. I would describe this feeling of stress as mental tension. I can never consciously contract the muscles in my brain but I can consciously relax them. When I begin to relax my jaw I feel this band around my head slowly come into perspective and then get weaker. It's as if that tension was always there but I was ignoring it until I decided to let it go. Thoughts do come up and that is okay. When they do, instead of repressing them I just come back to my breathe.
In addition to mediation you can write about the thoughts that come into your head. It slows you down to the pace you can write or type. This helps decrease the number of thoughts you have because you now have to put them on paper and helps you to stay on a topic so that the fewer thoughts you have are better in quality. This lets you see patterns in how you think and can create opportunities for perspective. This should supplement the meditation because once the thoughts are on paper there is a lower likely hood that you will ruminate on it. This is a very active activity and I would not consider this to be "doing nothing". I am putting it here because I know that it can make meditation easier.
Lastly, I go to therapy. I have found that talking about your issues to someone helps get the thoughts outside of you so it is no longer internal. It is similar to writing but uses verbal communication instead of written communication. Verbal communication gets thoughts outside of you in a special way. They end up being more organic because you don't have the option to erase or undo what you said. Once it's out there, the other person takes it for what it is. You can look at that as double edge sword. Therapy is good because you are bouncing your thoughts off of a person who is looking to get you to see how you think. This is also an active activity.
The act of doing nothing is difficult. But it is a pivotal step that often goes overlooked for people to achieve their goals. The act of doing nothing is really another way to phrase that "less is more". It allows one to conserve energy that gets expended randomly and chaotically. If we spend as much time meditating on our thoughts as we do unconsciously creating them then maybe we could have the energy to spend being more engaged in conversations with friends and family and creating thoughts that get us to where we need to be.