The Art of Doing Less

A while back, I caught up with an old friend over lunch. We hadn’t seen each other for a while, so he launched in and gave me a quick update: Wife and kids are good. Work’s fine. No big health issues or major life challenges. But it was kind of weird: As he went down the list and noted all these positive things, the tone of his voice made it sound like he was unhappy.

So I pressed him a little bit. He told me that while everything in his life seemed OK on the surface, he didn’t feel OK. He felt off, and he was feeling more and more off every day.

I just sat there and let him talk.

After a while, he came to his own conclusion: He had no space whatsoever in his life. He was doing all the time.

He went on to describe how the first thing he did every morning was grab his phone. Only seconds after opening his eyes, he was already scrolling through messages and emails, checking posts, and skimming news articles that were only vaguely interesting.

This morning routine set the tone for the rest of his day. From that moment until his head hit the pillow again at night, his life was a race from one activity to the next.

The closest he got to a moment of calm was binge-watching a TV show to distract himself from the daily grind. He just didn’t have enough energy to do something that felt more meaningful.

My buddy had been playing the game for so long that he didn’t know how to stop. And even when he tried, he couldn’t.

Is any of this sounding familiar?

You’re not alone. Many of us are living some version of this story: We’re so busy doing that we don’t know how to stop.

So...why is this happening?

Our brain is a habit machine. It’s constantly being influenced by forces around us. But we can also take more responsibility for our own brains by cultivating healthy habits of mind. It’s up to us to decide what we want to teach our brains. We can let our brains be influenced by forces that we don’t control, or we can take more responsibility and actually teach our brains to be healthier and more balanced.

So, is it really a surprise that we’re all getting stuck in overdrive?

We receive countless messages every day telling us that every moment that we’re not getting something done is a moment wasted.

The world finds millions of ways to tell us that our only hope is to work harder, do more, and be better than we are right now.

This image of the ideal life is a mirage.

"If I just put in a few extra hours at work..." we tell ourselves. "If I can just get my diet and exercise regimen just right. If I can just stop being so anxious, if I wasn’t so reactive, getting so stressed out all the time…maybe then everything would fall into place."

With every step forward, we feel there’s even more work to do. The belief that keeps this whole thing spinning is the idea that who we are and what we have is not enough, that we need a new and better experience than the one we’re having right now.

Another Way to Live

But what if who we are is enough? What if our self-worth is based on who we are, not on what we do?

We are, after all, “human beings,” not “human doings.”

There is another way to live. Just as we learned to be this busy and overwhelmed, we can learn to bring more space into our lives, more calm into the body and mind, and enjoy a lightness of being that gets lost in the shuffle of our daily routine.

Mindfulness Essential Reads

The Freedom to Be Human in the Age of Algorithms

Mindful Mantras for Everyday Life

Your mind is perfectly fine just as it is. In fact, it’s better than fine. It already has all the qualities you might think you’re missing.

Mindfulness can help us tap into these qualities.

It’s the skill of just being. It’s the art of doing less. When we’re mindful, we’re not waiting for the future to be better than the present. We’re not getting caught up trying to improve everything. We just are.

Now, this might sound a little New-Agey, but we all have the capacity to learn the lost art of being. But it's not enough to have this capacity. We need to nurture it.

As human beings, we are born with certain basic capacities. Take the capacity for language, for example. Every human being comes into the world with a capacity for language. But in order for that capacity to be expressed, we need to be raised in a community that supports that. The capacity needs to be nurtured and supported. The same is likely true for a capacity like mindful awareness—every human being comes into the world with this precious gift of awareness. With this gift comes the capacity to simply be—to rest in a state of mindful presence. But to tap our full potential in this area, mindful awareness needs to be nurtured. It requires training. We need to learn the difference between "being" and "doing" and actually practice this lost art. In other words, we are built to experience a sense of calm confidence that won’t get derailed by the ups and downs of everyday life. We just have to practice.

At first, it will probably feel like mindfulness is about paying attention to the breath or being attentive to sounds or some other experience.

But those are just techniques, practices to bring us out of our heads and back into the experience we’re actually having.

It might seem like not much is going on when we take a few mindful breaths, but beneath the surface, important things are happening. We’re connecting with a part of ourselves that was never broken, that doesn’t need to be fixed.

For now, don’t sweat the details. Wherever you are on your journey is perfect.

Just pause from time to time. Take a few slow, deep breaths. Notice the sounds, colors, and textures all around you.

There’s plenty of time in each day for doing. What we’re doing here is creating moments in life where we can simply be.

This is an excerpt from the Healthy Minds Program app, a free mobile application that helps you learn skills related to mindful awareness.