Often, when we find ourselves at a loose end, we reach for our phones. We visit a café, and use it to photograph it and post online or on the family WhatsApp group. We track our personal growth on smart watches; we don’t simply walk, we must do our steps, productivity apps tell us how much time we made; we answer emails outside working hours; turn hobbies into side hustles; give us one empty afternoon and we have a task list. And, increasingly, we make travel into a performance, too: we make memories. 

The world gets under our skins. What do you do when you have nothing to do? is therefore a surprisingly difficult question. Holidays are the socially sanctioned period in which to be idle, but some of us are better at taking time off and rather less good at really switching off. 

What we do when we do nothing 

When we stop concentrating on external tasks, the brain does not switch off but enters different patterns of activity associated with internally directed thought, autobiographical memory and mind-wandering. We may begin remembering things, making connections, imagining possibilities or simply noticing what is going on inside of us.

This is what the culture of being externally productive diminishes within us. The argument is not that work is bad. It can provide meaning, identity, structure, social contact and financial security; for many people, it may be an important part of how we understand ourselves. 

Rachel Wiseman writing for The Point in “Switching Off: Joseph Brodsky and the Moral Responsibility to Be Useless,” recounts the case of the poet who was prosecuted by the Soviet state for ‘social parasitism’ because his work did not fit the definition of productive employment. He said he was thinking about stuff, and writing. But the authorities believed that either you were building the state by being productive, or ‘screwing it up.’ The moral responsibility to be useless is a jarring phrase because while, nowadays, we won’t go to jail for slacking, but we can be made to feel faintly immoral nonetheless. 

The counterculture of the 1960s, too, challenged the equation of work, consumption and productivity with a meaningful life. Communal living, wandering, meditation, psychedelics, idleness and infamously ‘dropping out’ were attempts to imagine another life. I do not endorse dropping out, but what if life did not have to be organised around economic usefulness? Even contemporary neuroscience and occupational psychology are pondering that old free-spirited idyll. A 2009 study by Jessica de Bloom and colleagues found that taking time off had a measurable positive effect on health and wellbeing, although much of the benefit faded after people returned to work. 

We know the feeling. A holiday makes us feel better for a bit but cannot indefinitely compensate for a life organised around exhaustion.

Another 2018 controlled trial involving 40 middle managers, 67.5% men and 32.5% women. Twenty spent four nights in a hotel outside their normal environment and twenty stayed at home. Both groups improved, but the hotel group experienced a greater reduction in strain suggesting that changing environment may confer some additional benefit.

Our nervous system requires recovery but a houseboat in Kerala is not restorative if you are responding to Slack, or thinking of Monday in a Tuscany vineyard, either. 

Sonnentag and Fritz’s 2015 stressor-detachment model is useful here. Their review found that psychological detachment means mentally disengaging from work during non-work time, and that poor detachment is associated with greater strain and poorer wellbeing.

The evidence was developed further in a 2025 analysis by Grant, Buchanan and Shockley which examined 32 studies containing 256 effect sizes. Unlike the 2009 meta-analysis, it found a large positive effect of vacation on employee wellbeing, and the benefits did not fade as quickly as the earlier research suggested. They also analysed eight studies comprising 69 effect sizes concerning activities and recovery experiences during vacation. Psychological detachment and physical activity emerged as particularly beneficial.