Your Daily Brush: Do Nothing from Time to Time
Be sure to take time to let your body rest and recover from the demands of the week. Recharging your battery is a necessity, not a luxury.
Dear Friends,
It’s Friday evening and this marks the 32nd consecutive Daily Brush post!
Thanks for reading along!
I decided to give the Daily Brush a try because a key element of mental hygiene involves taking proactive steps daily, and even a few times a day, in much the same way we brush our teeth in the morning and night, or wash our hands many times during the day.
Today’s Daily Brush is not at all like a homework assignment. Well..I still am making suggestions, but today I suggest you consider doing nothing.
Earlier today, I was reminded during a phone call with a dear friend and colleague, who is also a therapist and writer, that the act of sitting in stillness and “doing nothing,” is still “doing something.”
What a wonderful paradox that should make every Type A person happy: being unproductive can, in fact, be at times productive.
So go ahead and just for a few hours or a day, drop the performance parameters. Take it easy. Sleep in longer than usual and maybe even wear your pajamas all day. Go ahead and skip flossing your teeth for just one day…(oops…did I really just say that!?!?…Hmmm… on second thought, well maybe best not to skip brusing and flossing daily.)
As important as goals and objectives are for our success and well-being, it is equally important to have down time so that you can relax and rejuvenate your mind, body and spirit. This is part of your mental hygiene tool kit and is one of the ways you can sustain yourself in a healthy manner for the long run.
The Science Behind This: Roy Baumeister is a social psychology researcher who talks about Ego Depletion. A central idea behind this is that self regulation takes effort and at some point the work involved in self regulation leads to a diminished ability to continue to self-regulate.
This is something you can intutively understand and may have even observed in yourself: for instance, when you are engaged in a state of high performance activities, you have to pause and recharge in order to ensure sustained quality in your work.
The problem arises when we end up in work or other situations where we are called upon to perform non-stop. As productive as non-stop may sound, non-stop is a no-go because diminised performance can lead to such things as patient errors for instance, or a lessening of one’s abitlity to communicate with team members when under stress.
Rx: Remember - if you regulate, you must rejuvenate!
Make conscious relaxation part of your weekend. What you do to relax is up to you. But whatever you choose to do, be sure it is something that is not goal oriented or performance oriented.
As you seek to rejuvenate, give up prefectionism, except for the pursuit of doing nothing perfectly. As for me, tomorrow I will take the day off from writing Your Daily Brush and go join the Rubber Duckie below.
See you on Sunday evening or Monday morning.
To your health!
