Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

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Author: Celeste Headlee

Publisher: Harmony

Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 1984824732
ISBN 13: 978-1984824738

“A welcome antidote to our toxic hustle culture of burnout.”—Arianna Huffington
“This book is so important and could truly save lives.”—Elizabeth Gilbert
“A clarion call to work smarter [and] accomplish more by doing less.”—Adam Grant

We work feverishly to make ourselves happy. So why are we so miserable?

Despite our constant search for new ways to optimize our bodies and minds for peak performance, human beings are working more instead of less, living harder not smarter, and becoming more lonely and anxious. We strive for the absolute best in every aspect of our lives, ignoring what we do well naturally and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. Why do we measure our time in terms of efficiency instead of meaning? Why can’t we just take a break?

In Do Nothing, award-winning journalist Celeste Headlee illuminates a new path ahead, seeking to institute a global shift in our thinking so we can stop sabotaging our well-being, put work aside, and start living instead of doing. As it turns out, we’re searching for external solutions to an internal problem. We won’t find what we’re searching for in punishing diets, productivity apps, or the latest self-improvement schemes. Yet all is not lost—we just need to learn how to take time for ourselves, without agenda or profit, and redefine what is truly worthwhile.

Pulling together threads from history, neuroscience, social science, and even paleontology, Headlee examines long-held assumptions about time use, idleness, hard work, and even our ultimate goals. Her research reveals that the habits we cling to are doing us harm; they developed recently in human history, which means they are habits that can, and must, be broken. It’s time to reverse the trend that’s making us all sadder, sicker, and less productive, and return to a way of life that allows us to thrive.

Review

“Through deep research and evocative storytelling, Celeste Headlee shows us how to break free from constant pressure and live the life we truly want.”—Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global

“Despite working harder than ever, people have never been more depressed, anxious, and unhappy. Without a doubt, our modern way of life is not working. In fact, it’s killing us. But what is to be done? With intelligence and compassion, Headlee presents realistic solutions for how we can reclaim our health and our humanity from a technological revolution that seems hell-bent on destroying both. I’m so grateful to have read this book. It delivers on its promise of a better life.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love

“Celeste Headlee makes a powerful case that productivity is not an inherent virtue—if you’re not careful, it can become a vice. Sometimes you accomplish more by doing less.”—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, and host of the chart-topping TED podcast WorkLife

“At a time when so many people are feeling overworked, overwhelmed and addicted to busyness, work, and ever-present technology, Celeste Headlee offers a pathway out. Drawing on extensive research and her own experience, Do Nothing is a powerful reminder that taking the time to stop, connect with others, and forge real bonds is vital for building community, fostering empathy, and ultimately leads to joy.”—Brigid Schulte, author of the New York Times bestselling Overwhelmed, and director of The Better Life Lab at New America

“I needed this book. And chances are you need it, too. Celeste Headlee does something amazing in Do Nothing. She battles this hectic, stressful time and highlights the things that makes our lives better. Connection. Experience. Self-care. And, above all, she reminds us to get busy living.”—Jared Yates Sexton, author of The Man They Wanted Me to Be

“In this thought-provoking, well-researched book, Celeste invites readers to push back against the I’m-too-busy narrative and discover what it means to be truly successful.”—Laura Vanderkam, author of Off the Clock and I Know How She Does It

“This book is honest, heartbreaking, and hopeful. It's that kind of gem that you read and know you need to hear, know you need to embrace, even if it's challenging. Incredibly well-researched and yet never preachy or dull, this book will help us all reclaim a bit of our humanness if we allow it.”—Nataly Kogan, author of Happier Now

“[Do Nothing’s] conversational tone draws readers in, and it will appeal to those looking beyond self-help to something more meaningful.”—Booklist

About the Author

Celeste Headlee is an award-winning journalist and professional speaker, and is the bestselling author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. She is cohost of the new weekly series Retro Report on PBS and season three of the Scene on Radio podcast—MEN. Celeste serves as an advisory board member for Procon and the Listen First Project. In her twenty-year career in public radio, Celeste has been the executive producer of On Second Thought at Georgia Public Radio and has anchored programs including, Tell Me More, Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. She also cohosted of the national morning news show The Takeaway for PRI and WNYC, anchored World Channel’s presidential coverage in 2012, and received the 2019 Media Changemaker Award. Celeste lives in Washington, DC.

Introduction

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
— BERTRAND RUSSELL, “In Praise of Idleness,” 1932

We answer work emails on Sunday night. We read endless articles about how to hack our brains to achieve more productivity. We crop our photos and use filters before we post them on social media to earn approval. We read only the first couple paragraphs of the articles we find interesting because we don’t have time to read them in their entirety. We are overworked and overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. We are members of the cult of efficiency, and we’re killing ourselves with productivity. The passage at the beginning of this Introduction was written in 1932, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, which caused the Great Depression. Russell’s description of the “cult of efficiency” predates World War II, the rise of rock and roll, the civil rights movement, and the dawn of the twenty-first century. More important, in my mind: It was written before the creation of the internet and smartphones and social media.

In other words, technology didn’t create this cult; it simply added to an existing culture. For generations, we have made ourselves miserable while we’ve worked feverishly. We have driven ourselves for so long that we’ve forgotten where we are going, and have lost our capacity for “light-heartedness and play.”

Here’s the bottom line: We are lonely, sick, and suicidal. Every year a new survey emerges showing more people are isolated and depressed than the year before. It’s time to stop watching the trend move in the wrong direction while we throw up our hands in despair. It’s time to figure out what’s going wrong.

All my life, I’ve been driven. That word has been used to describe me since elementary school.

Driven isn’t always a compliment, especially when it’s used to describe a woman. It’s not quite the same as ambitious, and it has a slightly different meaning than aggressive. Honestly, I think driven fits me fairly well. I’ve always viewed all forward progress as inherently virtuous and good.

Even as a child, I made long to-do lists in my daily planner (I had a daily planner by the ripe old age of twelve) and made sure I finished more tasks than I added every day. When I was dieting, I motivated myself by saying I would weigh less tomorrow than today, even if it was only by a fraction of an ounce. If I spent an afternoon watching monster movies on TV, I felt guilty. I was terrified that someone would see me sitting idly on the couch and call me lazy.

My drive has helped me succeed in life. It sustained me through single parenthood, layoffs, and physical injury. I’ve pushed myself to accomplish incredible amounts of work both at home and in my career. But at some point, drive became inextricably intertwined with dread: dread that all my work and effort would never be enough.

Eventually, I got lucky. I achieved much of what I wanted by the time I hit my forties, and I had time to stop, take a breath, and reexamine my way of life. While I’d always been driven, I’d also been exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed. I assumed depletion was a natural side effect of being a single parent with multiple jobs and not enough money to cover all my expenses. My underlying assumption was that when I achieved financial stability, my stress would end.

That assumption, like so many assumptions, was wrong. My long-dreamed-of moment finally arrived a few years ago: I reached a level of stability that should have made me more comfortable, and I paid off my student loans (at last!). In fact, I paid off every debt I owed. I even had a respectable amount in savings and a real retirement account. I looked forward to nights of relaxation and relief. I expected to feel a lift, an easing of the stress I’d suffered for two decades, but that relief never came.

My daily planner (still an old-school one with paper pages) was as packed with tasks as it was before I’d paid off my debts, if not more so. My workload was as heavy with one job as it was when I had four. In the evenings, I was as worn out and exhausted as ever.

I realized it was not my circumstances that caused my stress but my habits. While my list of duties got shorter at the office, I found new duties to fill the empty space and called more meetings. At home, I decided I finally had time to make my own bread and learn Spanish. Instead of cooking the tried-and-true favorites in my recipe book, I searched the internet for new and exotic dishes that required an hour of driving in order to gather the ingredients. I agreed to serve on two advisory boards and chose to start writing a blog. And every week, I collapsed onto my couch on Friday night and thought about how I used to meet my friends for drinks, but now I didn’t have time.

I had some tough questions for myself. Why? Why do I do this? Why do any of us do this?

For the past several years, I’ve searched for the answer to those questions. Reading that eighty-seven-year-old essay from Bertrand Russell brought a flash of insight. I considered the fact that I did things rarely for their own sake, but in service to my drive to constantly improve and be productive. Far too many of us have been lured into the cult of efficiency. We are driven, but we long ago lost sight of what we were driving toward. We judge our days based on how efficient they are, not how fulfilling.

We search for the best method of doing everything, from holding meetings to exercising to barbecuing, and we are lured by the “ultimate tools” to improve our lives. We are like mechanics who build a car by assembling the top-of-the-line parts, focused only on finding the best of everything and not on whether those parts work well together. The end result is a car that struggles to start and keeps stalling out.

What is the cult of efficiency? It’s a group whose members believe fervently in the virtue of constant activity, in finding the most efficient way to accomplish just about anything and everything. They are busy all the time and they take it on faith that all their effort is saving time and making their lives better.

But they’re wrong. The efficiency is an illusion. They believe they’re being efficient when they’re actually wasting time.

Imagine that you need to learn how to swim. You read books on swimming, you buy a DVD series on the subject, you participate in a webinar about it. Maybe you install several apps on your phone that track your swim time and help you find the nearest pool. You do everything you can to learn how to swim except get into the water.

More and more, this is our approach to problem-solving.

We are investing our time and energy and hard-earned money in things we think will make us more efficient, but those things end up wasting our time, exhausting us, and stressing us out without bringing us closer to our goals. We take extraordinary measures to become more productive, only to become less so. Is there a good explanation?

The human drive to constantly improve and grow is innate and, in most ways, commendable. The modern human has been around for only about 300,000 years (compare that to the 66 million years or so that dinosaurs existed), and yet we’ve come a long way from the mud huts of the first Homo sapiens.

We have endured incredible hardship and unspeakable tragedy, but we developed a coping mechanism to prevent us from slipping into despair. It’s called the hedonic treadmill. It’s a tendency in our species to adjust our mood so that no matter what terrible things happen, we quickly return to the same level of happiness we enjoyed before the traumatic event.

There’s a catch, though: It also works in reverse. In other words, if an incredibly happy change occurs in our lives, we don’t move forward as happier people. Instead, the hedonic treadmill brings us right back to the state of mind we were in before the raise in pay, new house, or lost weight. It means that, for many of us, we are never satisfied.

Imagine you finally earn a million dollars. Euphoria ensues, right? Wrong. Your mind will adjust and send you right back to your happiness set point. As Dr. Alex Lickerman, author of The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self, explains, “Our level of happiness may change transiently in response to life events, but then almost always returns to its baseline level as we habituate to those events and their consequences over time.”

That makes us all vulnerable to those who promise more happiness and a better life through the use of their product, system, or software. We crave more joy and satisfaction. No matter what we achieve, no matter how many extra hours we work, we remain unfulfilled.

Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving

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Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving