Rest is not idleness: Reflection is critical for development and well-being
Lost in Tim Kreider’s summer piece for the New York Times about our society’s busyness (The Busy Trap, profiled on the DailyHap blog) was that anyone can make time for idleness, and in order to create productivity, one absolutely must.
Science is backing up his anecdotal claim: a UCSB study found that taking a break to do something mindless helps you come up with more clever ideas for a creative project. Ten minutes is the perfect amount of break time—longer constitutes procrastination.
A new article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, also suggests that the long-lost art of introspection—and daydreaming—is an increasingly valuable part of life. Findings from a collection of studies suggest that brain activity during rest is correlated with self-awareness, moral judgment, learning, and memory.
USC researcher and article author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues argue that mindful introspection allows people to engage in constructive internal processing and productive reflection. Research indicates that when children are given the time and skills necessary for reflecting, they often become more motivated, less anxious, perform better on tests, and plan more effectively for the future.
Immordino-Yang says, “Consistently imposing overly high-attention demands on children, either in school, through entertainment, or through living conditions, may rob them of opportunities to advance from thinking about ‘what happened’ or ‘how to do this’ to constructing knowledge about ‘what this means for the world and for the way I live my life,’ ” Immordino-Yang writes.
No, the brain at rest is not at all idleness. The brain at rest allows us to understand and manage ourselves in the social world.