Stopping the constant chase for productivity to stare into space isn’t laziness—it’s a revolutionary act that allows the brain to regenerate and create.
- Niksen is the Dutch concept of doing absolutely nothing, without any purpose or productive goal.
- Unlike mindfulness, it requires no cognitive effort or specific focus on the present moment.
- It allows the brain to enter the Default Mode Network, the state where the best ideas are born.
- Practicing conscious idleness drastically reduces anxiety and burnout levels linked to performance culture.
- Practicing it means disconnecting from every device and allowing yourself the luxury of wasting time with joy.
- Just ten minutes a day is enough to transform mental emptiness into valuable fuel for your creativity.
What Are You Doing? Nothing. And Why That’s the Healthiest Answer You Can Give
You’re sitting on the couch, eyes lost on that damp spot on the ceiling that vaguely resembles Tasmania, and someone walks into the room asking what you’re doing. The instinctive, almost defensive response is usually “nothing,” uttered with that slight tone of guilt reserved for someone caught with their hand in the cookie jar. And yet, that “nothing” is one of the most complex, sophisticated, and biologically necessary activities you can undertake.
We are the children of a culture that has turned time into a currency to be spent, preferably with a high interest rate. If we aren’t producing, we’re learning; if we aren’t learning, we’re optimizing our bodies; if we aren’t optimizing our bodies, we’re at least frantically scrolling a feed to make sure we don’t miss a tiny piece of the world. Emptiness scares us because it feels like a system failure. Instead, staying there watching the rain hit the glass without asking what the friction coefficient of water might be is exactly what we need to avoid imploding.
Niksen: The Dutch Art of Flipping the Switch
The concept of Niksen comes from the Netherlands. It literally means “to do nothing,” but its application is much more subtle than simple laziness. It’s not watching a TV series—that’s content consumption—and it’s certainly not scrolling through Instagram, which is a form of digital self-flagellation disguised as leisure.
Niksen is idleness without a purpose. It’s the mental equivalent of putting the car in neutral while going downhill: the engine idles, you don’t burn fuel, yet you’re still moving. It’s an exercise in resisting the dictatorship of the calendar, where the only rule is to have no rules. It’s just being there, simply existing, allowing thoughts to flow like clouds pushed by the wind, without trying to give them shape or, worse yet, writing them down on a to-do list.
The Difference Between Niksen and Mindfulness: Why Sometimes You Shouldn’t Even “Observe”
We often confuse rest with mindfulness. Let’s be clear: mindfulness is an extraordinary tool, but it requires effort. To practice mindfulness, you have to be present, you have to observe your breath, you have to gently lead your mind back to the fold every time it wanders off. It is, in its own way, work.
Niksen is lazier, and that’s exactly why it’s liberating. It doesn’t ask you to be mindful of anything. If your mind decides to wander between the memory of that embarrassing moment in middle school and a sudden craving for a mango, let it. There is no center to hold, no “here and now” to guard with a bayonet. If Mindfulness is a yoga session for the soul, Niksen is staying in your pajamas until noon because it’s raining outside and the bed is warm. You don’t have to observe the flow: you just have to let it soak you.
The Benefits of Emptiness: How Boredom Ignites Creativity
Why should you do it? Because when your brain isn’t busy solving problems or answering emails, it activates what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network (DMN). It is in this state of apparent flat calm that neurons begin to make bizarre connections, joining dots that the logic of productivity keeps miles apart.
The best ideas almost never arrive while you’re hunched over the keyboard racking your brain. They come in the shower, while walking aimlessly, or while staring into space waiting for the coffee to brew. Emptiness is not a lack of content; it is the necessary space for new content to emerge. Boredom—that condition we try to avoid like the plague with a smartphone always within reach—is actually the fertile ground of creativity. Without the silence of Niksen, your mind is like a room that’s too crowded, where no one can hear their own voice.
How to Practice Niksen (Without Picking Up Your Phone)
Practicing Niksen sounds easy, but for us modern Westerners, it’s incredibly difficult. It requires training in passivity. The first step is to identify the “dead” moments of the day and, instead of compulsively filling them with your phone, let them breathe.
Try this: sit near a window. Don’t listen to a podcast, don’t put on background music (unless it’s just an indistinct soundscape). Look outside. Observe the movement of the leaves, the color of the sky, or even just the traffic flowing by. If you feel the urge to check your notifications, recognize it as a withdrawal symptom and let it pass. Start with five minutes. You’ll find that, once the initial irritation of “lack of stimulation” fades, a sense of relief takes over. Niksen is an act of kindness toward yourself: it’s telling the world it can wait while you reclaim your fundamental right to be useless to everyone except your own mental sanity.