We are terrible at inactivity. A 2014 study found that people preferred giving themselves electric shocks to sitting quietly alone for six to 15 minutes. That isn’t even long enough for a hot cup of tea to go cold. It isn’t just that we’re bad at downtime – though we do seem to be – apparently we can’t handle it.
As we head into the summer break, we fully intend to switch off. So why do we so often waste our precious leisure time or feel that we have?
We anxiously check our work emails like someone poking a sore tooth with their tongue. We scroll Instagram to gawk at other people’s more expensive and luxurious holidays, instantly rendering our own less valuable than it seemed five minutes ago.
We sit on the beach and, instead of feeling the breeze and the muscle-relaxing properties of warm sand, we worry about what our belly looks like. We fill desperately needed downtime with stress and anxiety.
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Aristotle talked about a concept called “scholê”. It’s loosely translated as “leisure”, but it’s far more than time off. It’s best thought about as time for. The pursuit of things that help you to flourish and feel fulfilled. Time in nature. Time inside your own body rather than self-defeating, anxiety-provoking rumination.
Scholê is not passive or empty time. It’s about constructive contemplation and connection to the people and environment around you. Aristotle wasn’t a big doomscrolling guy.
“Easier said than done, Aristotle,” you might say. After all, he didn’t live in the era of online dating, middle managers and the terrible Sex and the City reboot.
So how can we facilitate scholê in light of the preposterous dissonance of modern life?
In three ways – all of which might feel unnatural, uncomfortable or unintuitive at first. That this is so is because we resort to whatever we’re accustomed to doing to feel better, even when trying something new might be more effective.
1. Move your body to quiet your mind
We reach for our phones as a very effective form of distraction, yet this instinct to get out of our own heads can be a good one. There is a time for ruminating on our life and our choices and failures. The one break we get from work a year may not be it.
To get out of our heads, we need to get into our bodies. It’s not about outcomes or optimising our time, it’s just about noticing and physically experiencing the environment around us.
You could call this mindfulness, but you don’t have to if that feels like more work.
Not all activity is distraction – it can be scholê. Taking a swim or enjoying a deeply incompetent game of hide and seek with the kids, throwing a ball around or climbing a hill with friends and family. Enjoying an ice cream and thinking actively about that experience while it’s happening. Going for a walk or run along a new route – denying ourselves the option of the habitual thing, so we have to pay active attention to whatever is going on in our environment.
2. Block distractions, digitally or physically
Some people have success with blocking and focus apps such as Freedom or Opal, which allows you to schedule block sessions and discourage phone use during blocked hours by giving you confronting data about your (definitely unhealthy) level of phone usage.
Still, it doesn’t always feel like self-actualisation to outsource our self-control to the same technology we feel is eroding it.
When you are trying to get into a mindset that facilitates scholê, your phone is a barrier between you and whatever is happening around you. While you’re posting about your holiday on social media, you’re missing the holiday.
A 2017 study suggests that our phone being visible at all – even facedown on the table – reduces our available cognitive capacity. It distracts us, diverts our focus, and takes us out of the moment. So lock it away physically or digitally if that works for you – just take it out of the equation, so it can’t feel like the solution to a problem it’s creating.
3. Ritualise the shift from work to rest
When you set work aside and demarcate downtime, creating a ritual to signal the shift in mindset can help. It seems silly, but it helps in forming new habits over time. We have to consciously reclaim the time we unconsciously give away.
Whether you change your clothes, take a shower, put some music on or place your laptop on a high shelf in another room, you’re signalling to yourself that now it’s time for something else. Not all leisure time is extensive, but we all need at least some every day.
Aristotle may not have had to generate little rituals to stop pathologically checking his work email, but the rest of us might.
