Being lazy is the best thing you can do right now
Feeling rundown or burned out? Being lazy might just be the best thing you could do for yourself.
by: E.B. Johnson
When was the last time you were lazy simply for the sake of being lazy? For most of us in western society, we’ve been sold the idea of laziness as the ultimate sin. To be lazy, we’re told, is to lose out on all the good things in life. In truth, though, laziness is a powerful self-care tool that can help ground us and re-center us around the things we love most in life. Do you feel as though you’re stuck in the crunch of a high-pressure lifestyle? Mindful laziness may be just what the doctor ordered.
Don’t fall for the laziness lie.
We’ve been brought up in a capitalist society in which hard work is the only thing which guarantees you eat. In our western societies, you are only able to succeed when you reach certain levels of accomplishment. This has created the idea that we must always be at work, though, and that we must always be exerting ourselves in the name of others. The problem here, however, is that endless business does not equal success, and it certainly doesn’t equal happiness.
Laziness isn’t a sin. It’s a blessing that signifies your life is full.
For centuries, we’ve been fed the idea that to be lazy is a sin. This lie has kept us trapped in cycles of burnout and dis-attachment that leaves us miserable and lonely in our own homes. Are you feeling rundown? Burned out? Rattled to the point of absolutely catastrophic exhaustion? It’s time for you to reject the laziness lie and embrace some downtime in the name of your own joy. Believe it or not, the best gift we can often give ourselves is the gift of nothing. Doing nothing at all is exactly what we need when we’re feeling stressed and out of sorts.
Signs it’s time for you to do nothing.
Is laziness the answer you’ve been looking for? Do you need to put down the laptop, put down the family planner, and learn to let go? When we’re at our breaking point, our inner voice (and our body) has a lot of different ways of signaling to us. Are you listening to yourself? Or are you ignoring the signs of an impending breakdown? If the below symptoms sound like you, it may be time for you to embrace the art of laziness as a means of self-care.
You’re burned out
Are you burned out at home or at work? Are you struggling to stay connected to yourself or the people that you love most? We’re not machines, and we’re not meant to put ourselves continually under high pressure. Doing that creates cracks in our happiness, and cracks in our sense of self. In order to build lives that are fulfilling and stable, we have to learn to take time for ourselves.
Your relationships are snagged
When we suffer, our relationships generally suffer across the board too. Are you fighting more with your partner? Not making time for one another anymore? What about your family? Are you getting along? When our relationships become snagged, it can often be a result of our own personal chaos. As the pressure from work and life crushes us, we take it out on the people who love us most at home.
Your family doesn’t know you
Do your children know who you are? Do they know your favorite color? Have you ever told them the stories of your childhood? Or even your fondest memories of life with them? Your family suffers when you allow yourself to be pulled under by the chaos of life. One of the best ways to get back to them is to get back to yourself, and laziness is often the first step in this process of decompressing.
You’re about to snap
Do you feel as though you’ve come to the edge of a big cliff in life? Is all the pressure of work, the pandemic, and even your relationships beginning to get to you? Our mental and emotional wellbeing can’t take the continued battering of hardship. If you continue to push yourself, you will go over the edge. This could result in you saying or doing things that you regret. In order to step back from the edge, we have to step away from the activities and experiences n life that bring us stress (even if only for a temporary time).
You don’t know who you are
Awareness of self is so crucial. The more aware we are of our authentic self, the more in command of our lives we become. This awareness gives us the ability to map out our futures and build better relationships and opportunities for ourselves. Being crushed by the chaos and pressure of an overly full life can rip this awareness away, though. It becomes a wall that prevents us from seeing our true selves and our emotional needs.
Your body is falling apart
Have you noticed increasing problems with your physical body? Have you gained a lot of weight? Are you dealing with a lot of aches and pains? Acne problems? Our physical bodies are a reflection of our emotional ones. When you’re crumbling on the inside, you’ll crumble on the outside too. An exhausted body is a sick and painful one, and it could be signaling that it’s time for you to sit out.
How to perfect the art of being lazy.
Laziness is not a sin. It’s not a selfish act, and it certainly isn’t a waste of time. When you’re on the cusp of being burned out, being lazy actually becomes an act of passive self-care. We simply need to let our physical and emotional batteries recharge sometimes, and doing nothing is often the best way to do that.
1. Let other people be accountable
If you are someone who feels like they’ve come to the end of their rope, then there’s a good chance you spend a lot of your time seeing to the needs of other people. In order for you to effectively use the art of mindful laziness, you’re going to need to let go of this compulsion and allow other people to accountable for the day. This involves trusting other people, but it involves trusting yourself too.
Stop taking on the weight of the world. Stop believing you have to finish everyone else’s to-do list, or meet their needs when they fail to do it. The world will not disappear or stop moving if you stop taking care of everyone around you for one single day.
Let other people be accountable for 24 hours. Let them sit in their mess. Let them deal with their dishes, and the messes they make with the boss at work. You don’t have to be the forever-fixer every day of the week. It’s okay to take your foot off the gas and hand the wheel over to others from time to time. They will figure out what needs to be done. They will figure out how to carry on in your absence. Take some time for you and let other people figure out what they need to figure out.
2. Drop your need for perfection
Perfectionists have a hard time stepping back and doing nothing. That’s because many of them believe the lie that doing nothing means you’re not doing something right. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Sometimes doing nothing is exactly the action we need to take for our mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. To do nothing effectively, however, you have to let go of your need for perfection.
There is no such thing as perfect, no matter what you were told and no matter what you believe. The closest thing we can strive for is “ideal” but that’s not something that comes easily or quickly either. If you want to embrace laziness, drop your endless need for perfection in everything that you do.
You don’t need to be the perfect person. You don’t need to be everything to everyone all the time. It’s okay to get things wrong. It’s okay to cut off early when you need a break. It’s okay to take 15 more minutes for lunch when you feel like you’re going to have a nervous breakdown. You don’t owe your time and your energy to others, and you don’t owe them a version of yourself that doesn’t exist either. You’re human. Embrace it an admit you need time to do nothing.
3. Reconnect with your passions
Being lazy is going to feel extremely foreign if it’s something you’ve never allowed yourself to do before. Your mind will still be in an accelerated state, and your body will be expecting the busy exhaustion you always throw at it. In order to dip your toes into the pool of mindful laziness effectively, reconnecting with your passions is a great way to get started. Look for small pleasures that double as big distractions.
Get outside of all your tasks and to-do lists. Look around. What do you enjoy doing simply for the sake of doing it? What interests you most in this world? What feeds your soul? What possesses you entirely with joy when you invest in it? Reacquainting yourself with your passions is a powerful way to get engaged with artful (and beneficial) laziness.
If you’re someone who is always on the go, getting back into your passion for painting could be a great way to spend a “lazy” afternoon. That’s the thing about laziness. It’s not a matter of disappearing into the couch (although it can be). Truly beneficial laziness is something that simply allows us to be present in the moment and totally absorbed in what we’re doing. You blink, and you’re back in reality; you become so engrossed with what you’re doing that you feel like you’re doing nothing at all.
4. Give yourself a big reward
Laziness — as a tool — is only effective if it’s used regularly within an established self-care routine. Like changing any other habit in our lives, it can be hard to get used to doing nothing on a regular basis. A great way to do this is by using positive reinforcement (just as we would if we were trying to pick up a jogging habit or a new diet plan). Give yourself a big reward when you get the lazy game right and you’ll become more comfortable with it.
Start small with your laziness goals and give yourself a big reward when you manage to still yourself long enough to do nothing. This is a form of positive reinforcement, and one which can help us feel more comfortable with that act of being lazy in our home environments.
Treat yourself to a nice meal, or that movie you’ve been dying to snag on Blu-Ray. There’s no right or wrong reward to give yourself. What’s important is that you learn to associate your lazy time with a positive feeling. Order some takeaway and binge a season of that show your friend has been talking about. Get online and grab that outfit you’ve been pining for. Do something special for yourself and find the comfort in doing nothing at all.
5. Follow it up with productivity
Being lazy when you’ve always been productive can feel scary. You might feel like important deadlines are passing you by, or that you’re not getting enough done to feel “comfortable”. A great way to rectify these fears is by following up your mindful laziness sessions with a productivity session. This is another form of positive reinforcement and one which can prove just how valuable your downtime really is.
Follow up your lazy sessions with easy-to-tackle productivity. Accomplishing some simple goals after a day of laziness makes you feel rewarded for the act. It also reassures that sense of panic you may be dealing with. It becomes easier to see that recharging your battery could equal big results later on.
After all, that is the whole point of using laziness as a self-care tool. You’re not actually wasting a day or wasting productive time. You’re plugging back into yourself so that you can recharge and rebalance. This is how our bodies heal, and this is how our minds heal too. We need space from all the pressure and all the stress of our day-to-day lives. Being lazy isn’t being a waste or being selfish. It’s a grand act of self-care and one we should all be mindfully using.
Putting it all together…
Because we live in a ruggedly capitalistic western society, we’ve been conditioned to believe that laziness is the ultimate evil. Nothing could be further from the truth, though. When we’re feeling stressed out or pressured to the max, laziness is exactly what we need to get some space and recharge our mental and emotional batteries. Is your body beginning to fail you? Are your relationships falling apart? What you need most is time to do nothing at all.
Let other people be accountable for the to-do lists and endless tasks — even if it’s just for 24 hours. You don’t need to be everything to everyone all the time. They can clean up the messes too. Drop your need for perfection and embrace the idea of doing nothing when you need it most. Reconnect with your passions and get back into old hobbies that make it easier for you to disengage and focus on simply being quiet and present in yourself and your happiness. Reward yourself when you manage to take some time, and use this positive reinforcement to reframe the way you view your downtime. When you’re done, follow up your laziness session with an easy-to-tackle list of productive tasks. Getting things done after doing nothing at all will also reinforce the idea that this act of passive self-care is exactly what you needed.
- Knowledge, I., 2021. The Importance of Doing Nothing. [online] Forbes. Available at: <https://www.forbes.com/sites/insead/2014/07/01/the-importance-of-doing-nothing/> [Accessed 14 March 2021].
