If you're on the couch and you think you're happy and resting, you're drugging!

If we see a person lying on the couch with the phone we think he’s resting. If we’ve seen a person in front of the computer for three hours, we think he’s working, so he’s probably stressed out. But are we sure this really works? Lately I think more and more that we confuse the type of activity with the way that activity is lived. The sofa automatically becomes rest. The computer automatically becomes work. The scroll becomes pause. Writing becomes fatigue. Training becomes sacrifice. But maybe we’re classifying things the wrong way. The problem of the mental browser When I spend a lot of time jumping from content to content or between different doing nothing I have a particular feeling. I’m not as tired as after four hours of work. I’m tired in another way. It’s like I opened fifty pages in the head browser without closing any. A video. A message. It’s news. A person. An idea. Another chiat. Another request to gemini Everyone lasts very little and nobody really comes somewhere. There is no progression. There is no closure. There is not even that small satisfaction that comes when something was incomplete and is now over. It seems rest because we are doing nothing difficult. But the head keeps moving. It’s a crazy car. The engine always turns and anyway. At that point, I often think it’s worth walking her. Working without hearing to work There is also the opposite situation. I can spend three hours on the same page, on the same problem or on the same project and not really perceive it as a job. It happens to me with this blog. It happens when they laugh. When I read something I care about. When I try to disassemble an object. When I think about how to redesign it. When I make a problem just to try to solve it. When I imagine a startup. When I train. In some cases, I’m not even particularly good at what I’m doing. And there is not necessarily an external result. Nobody pays me. Nobody evaluates me. Nobody puts me a vote. I do it because I like to do it. Formally it could be work. Psychologically it looks a lot more like a hobby. Then the question becomes: if I work but perceive it as a hobby, am I really working in the negative meaning we normally give to the word? Fun and well-being are not the same thing This distinction concerns me because I think we often confuse having fun with being well. I’d found some flow studies that I was impressed by. People engaged in more active activities could not describe themselves as particularly “fun” at the moment, but showed greater involvement and a better feeling and well-being. Passive activities can be very pleasant immediately. They don’t ask for anything. They extremize you like drugs, immediate well-being and long-term negative consequences. But being absorbed and being well is not necessarily the same. It is a distinction that I recognize very much in my experience. I can’t do anything for hours. Then I finally do. And after a while I feel worse than before. On the contrary, I can live very intense weeks, in which I study, write, train, project things and continue to fill the days. Maybe at the moment I complain. But if I look at the whole period, they are often much more serene. Not necessarily happier minute by minute. More peaceful. It’s a huge difference to me. Where the head goes I was impressed by a phrase read in a study: “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. ” I am particularly interested in a consequence. Maybe it matters less what we’re doing than where our head is when we do it. You can be on the beach and ruminate continuously on something. You can be in front of Excel and completely immersed in the problem. Which one is resting? It’s not that obvious. During the Francigena I felt this very much. The body was walking. But the head could go anywhere. And when the mind enters certain loops, no matter how beautiful the landscape around it is. Keep bringing you behind the same thing. Rumini. Turn it. Rigiri. It’s the engine on in the crowd again. Perhaps the real rest is to close the cycles So I’m starting to think about rest differently. Not as a lack of proactivity, of ‘production’ or work. But as a reduction in background noise, even because if the brain band is already all occupied by an activity there is no room for ruminating. A walk can rest more than zapping. Training can rest more than sleeping. Reading can rest more than one video. Working on a problem that absorbs me completely can leave me mentally cleaner than a past afternoon without doing anything. Because in all these cases the mind has a direction. It doesn’t open new windows all the time. He keeps one open and we’re long enough. Perhaps a part of well-being comes from the feeling of progress. I was here before. I’m a little forward now. Work is also a mental category This also changes the way I think about work. If I always think: “I have to work now” “I must sacrifice myself” “This is heavy” probably that narrative enters the experience. But many of the activities I would like to do in life are activities I would do anyway. Write. Reason. Create. Fixing problems. Talk to interesting people. Imagine something that didn’t exist before. Of course, when they become a job, deadlines, responsibilities, boring parts and people with whom you might not want to deal with. I don’t want to romanticize it. But there is a huge difference between working on something that you feel like an imposition and working a lot on something that you would still partly do for free. From the outside, hours can look identical. They are completely different from the inside. I want a full life, not necessarily an empty life I think I have sometimes pursued a wrong idea of rest. Do less. Have empty days. Don’t have anything to do. When those days come, they don’t make me feel particularly good. I’m bored. The mind starts wandering. I’m looking for stimuli. I open things. I’ll open some more. And at the end of the day I am tired without doing anything and often more than if I focused on something specifically. The paradox is that in full periods I can be physically tired but mentally more stable. It doesn’t mean filling every second. In fact. I want real breaks. Walk. Be quiet. Talk to someone. Leave your mind free. But I no longer want to automatically confuse inactivity with recovery. And above all I do not want to judge a day from how much work related to the place or the social idea of what it means to rest. Maybe I should judge her from something else: How do I feel after I’ve lived it? If I spend six hours doing something that seems to work from the outside but in the end I feel more lucid, calmer and more alive, maybe that thing gave me energy. If I spend six hours on the couch and in the end I feel fragmented, nervous and tired, calling it “happy” does not change what happened. The categories are used to describe reality. It should not be the reality to adapt to categories.