This totally resonates! Similarly my friend and have taken to using the categories "brain rest" and "body rest." scrolling in bed is obvs body rest - fine, necessary, but doesn't feel good if what you actually need is brain rest (which for me would be something like baking)
i think this all hit the nail on the head for what i’ve been thinking about lately. i’m in grad school and at the end of long days where ive used a ton of energy forcing myself to focus all i want is to let my mind loosen and do what feels good — but i’ve limited my time on instagram (only 30 mins a day split into two 15 minute stints, only after 4pm), deleted twitter and tiktok, and am trying not to shop because i don’t have the financial means lol. and now it feels like i really don’t even have anything like this anymore, especially between tasks in them middle of the day. this leaves me to only more time consuming dopamine-making tasks, like watching an episode of tv or playing a game or calling a friend. and often times i still need to cook dinner or do other tasks, so what i really want to slot in is a social media scroll, but now that i really can’t, i feel this intense urge to find something that will just make me LAUGH. and yes, avoid thought, be mindless, etc, but laughing is a huge part of it i think. it’s just weird how easily i can notice this urge now and how despite having limited my social media for a pretty long time, it still stubbornly sits there. now, all i really have unfettered access to is the substack app, which is filled with political content and does NOT usually fill this urge to experience a good feeling by way of staring into my phone. thank god for podcasts (including maybe baby!), which are like the nicotine patch for social media addicts, and give me this feeling while freeing me up to make dinner or do other chores.
This makes me think so much about how society is set up!! With all of us in our individual pods, there's a lot less texture to fill our time. Like what if there were more third spaces for you to mingle in when you needed a break? What if during your rest time you were more likely to be around other people who could, say, make you laugh? Makes me think about the recent Atlantic piece about how actually a lot of modern alienation didn't start with phones, but CARS. Living far away from each other, and bringing things like parks and theaters into our homes (now backyards and TVs) and and other modern tweaks so that we never have to leave home. Social media is trying to fill a real need but it just isn't up to the task, or has too many negative externalities. Still though, when it's gone you feel void
i once heard this term “time confetti” — it’s all the little moments of free time throughout our day. take someone who “has no free time” but they have 5 minutes between meetings, 15 minutes here, 10 minutes spent laying in bed instead of getting up. the idea is that we feel like we have no time because we fill our time confetti scrolling on our phone, which pushes our eventual “all done” time in the evening further and further back, until even then we have no time for anything longer than 15-30 minutes of ordering food and scrolling as opposed to more time consuming, fulfilling activities. i’m not really sure this applies for caregivers since children likely go to bed every night at the same time regardless of how much you got done that day lol. but nevertheless it has lived like a specter in my brain ever since, this idea that scrolling is chipping away at from my free time minute by minute through constant phone pick ups. i don’t know if it’s a helpful way to think, maybe i would just fill that time with staring off into space or reading my book if i didn’t have technology, because my brain needs a break sometimes … nevertheless, this idea has been the main driver behind curbing social media use
The equivalent of spent time confetti in my life are what i like to call "car sits", wherein I literally sit in my driveway parked and on my phone (car on or off depending on outside temp) for sometimes as long as 20 minutes before going inside to settle back in, whether it is after work, after errands or a workout. Doesn't always happen but it does at least 3x/wk. I've been wanting to stymie this
Love this articulation - I’ve recently started art lessons (part of a New Year’s resolution to do things I’m bad at) and they take place on Sunday mornings, a time I would historically have spent ‘rotting’ in bed, on an endless TikTok scroll. Now I have to force myself out, ignore my body tiredness and sit for an hour and a half, away from my phone, thinking in lines and shapes instead of words like I’m used to. It’s astoundingly restorative. I’ve begun to look forward to them as times where I can’t ruminate, where all my concentration is fixated on light and dark. It feels like ‘active rest’ to me and I think I finally understand what everyone means when they harp on about ‘flow’.
yeah experiences like what you describe here really make me wonder just how much exactly we miss out on simply because we have all these other relatively meaningless distractions (phones, etc) -- like in the cumulative. it really concerns me!
Omg recharging in a hotel room, I had a visceral reaction to that. You’re so right, it’s heaven.
Loved this, Haley. Between Midwest winter and recently leaving my job to be home with kids, the pull toward “rotting” has never been higher so this was timely for me. As your writing always seems to be ❤️
I really like Sam Kriss’ very pithy take on this: “A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.”
Like we SHOULD be feeling all those things we are putting off with scrolling, they are the actual stuff of being human - but the natural instinct is ugh I don’t want to think about that.
The thing that helped me immensely with this is morning pages (shout out to The Artist’s Way!) - journalling first thing forces you to sit with all that stuff you want to avoid and over time you become more able to tolerate it, at least in my experience
Ok fine that's a good argument for morning pages!! Do I have to do them now?
Also love that sam kriss line. I do wonder though if seeking out distraction from big questions and anxieties can be a healthy impulse in us and the problem is we just don't have the sense of community/interdependence around us to accommodate the level of healthy distraction we require!! So we turn to our phones for a pale shade of it
I think between this comment and the one above about the Atlantic article, you're hitting on something. this is all happening in conjunction with losing touch with people and feeling more "connected" but actually just more alone. it shouldn't be this hard to see our friends, especially in the suburbs
Wanted to pop in here and say thanks for taking that car metaphor too far ;) It actually helped me conceptualize this really distinctive sensation I’ve been having of two kinds of energy drain. One’s the gas drain of using the engine, one is the passive drain of the battery. Simple, but actually SUPER helpful, as my “rest” hasn’t been particularly restful lately. If you’d just jumped straight to “rot” I don’t think I would have made the connection, so thank you for stretching that metaphor into a helpful transition. It was effectively written <3
i wonder whether the urgent pitch of the rot-rest aporia might be lowered by reading a publication rather than twitter. not only for the page vs screen reason but because of the slowness of the mechanisms of publishing, printing, and the way these things are brought into your home: reading something you chose, that was made with a shared care and labour i think does hold more intention, (yours and others) even if the intention is not present in the present. i hope i can say this gently—it’s not actually hard to stop reading twitter. looking at and looking away are the same action.
Well said. I totally agree all phone time is not equal!! I think that's sometimes missed in the phones-are-to-blame discussion. Like texting my friends often feels energizing/social
Yesss. Thought about this topic a lot during the pandemic actually. One of the things that made that period of time feel difficult was that there was never that feeling of satisfying rest you describe — being out all day with friends and coming home, making late night food after a night out. It was a lotttt of idling, scrolling, and rotting…and unsurprisingly I always felt exhausted! (Though I do know that being able to do that was a privilege in many ways.)
Love this essay and love your writing style! The older I get the more I think about my energy and how that relates to my internal mental state, and as a result my ability to do the things I want to do. Not only physical energy, but spiritual energy like you alluded to, where avoidance is a symptom of low spiritual energy and motivation is high spiritual energy. It's interesting to observe when I'm high and low and I don't really understand it yet. Loneliness definitely saps it, but solitude can be recharging. A single good song can get me out of my chair and take me higher. I particularly want to understand what motivates me, since I used to feel much more motivated and I think it stemmed from feeling needed, like there were so many problems in the world that needed to be solved. There still are, obviously, but it's hard in the day to day to feel that as strongly when most people in my immediate circles are doing "fine" if not fantastic, and the scale of the problems we face are so large and at the same time distant. Anyways, I think motivation as the counterweight to avoidance/rot would be an interesting topic to explore!
I relate to so much of this! Sometimes it feels like energy is such a mystery (when it comes, when it goes), but oftentimes if I think creatively/honestly enough I can sort out why I do or don't have it
I am not a resolution person at all, but I did decide to give myself more “idle brain time” this year and it’s crazy how after a few days I felt like I was coming out of a fog. Stopped listening to things when I shower/clean/fold laundry/wash dishes/walk my dog + started listening to Ethiopian jazz (lmao) instead of pods/tv while I work to just allow my brain to focus and wander as it pleases, and I swear I’m having my own thoughts for the first time in years and significantly less anxiety. Our brains just didn’t evolve for this amount of stimulus!
Also I know this was a question you asked SO long ago, but my best friend got both of us bricks (https://getbrick.app) for Christmas and it’s changed my life. No other method of app limits worked for me (bc you can easily bypass or it just feels too restrictive), but making it an active physical choice to unlock social apps BUT still having the choice at any time has cut my social media time down 90%. I totally support your idling bc I know parents need breaks haha, but wanted to share in case that’s still something you’re working on
my version if this resolution was inspired by a line in This Side of Paradise that i read in early january: "have an hour a day to think in" - when you think of it that way, you have to be so intentional with your walks, chores and downtime. (the whole line is "If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels")
As someone who doesn’t have kids, I actually find that babysitting (for about 2-3 hours) can be some of the best active rest. I cant be on my phone but instead have to be present and engage with the world through a different perspective. Obviously this won’t be applicable to parents, but there’s something about being with a kid, putting on some music, and just sitting on the ground for a while that fills me up.
Although I don’t get to do it often I’ve come to appreciate long drives alone in the car as weirdly restful. A solo drive just listening to music is one of the few times I actually let myself think and let my mind wander, rather than automatically reverting to scrolling and avoiding any original thought as I tend to do in other “resting” moments. I literally can’t scroll or watch TV while driving, of course, but it’s also the rare relaxing activity that’s also productive and necessary (getting from point A to point B) so I don’t feel guilty while doing it. And I’m always pleasantly surprised by how positive and entertaining my thoughts turn out to be over the course of an hour or two in the car, and feel much happier / more refreshed afterward.
This totally resonates! Similarly my friend and have taken to using the categories "brain rest" and "body rest." scrolling in bed is obvs body rest - fine, necessary, but doesn't feel good if what you actually need is brain rest (which for me would be something like baking)
loved the toddler goss pods <3
i think this all hit the nail on the head for what i’ve been thinking about lately. i’m in grad school and at the end of long days where ive used a ton of energy forcing myself to focus all i want is to let my mind loosen and do what feels good — but i’ve limited my time on instagram (only 30 mins a day split into two 15 minute stints, only after 4pm), deleted twitter and tiktok, and am trying not to shop because i don’t have the financial means lol. and now it feels like i really don’t even have anything like this anymore, especially between tasks in them middle of the day. this leaves me to only more time consuming dopamine-making tasks, like watching an episode of tv or playing a game or calling a friend. and often times i still need to cook dinner or do other tasks, so what i really want to slot in is a social media scroll, but now that i really can’t, i feel this intense urge to find something that will just make me LAUGH. and yes, avoid thought, be mindless, etc, but laughing is a huge part of it i think. it’s just weird how easily i can notice this urge now and how despite having limited my social media for a pretty long time, it still stubbornly sits there. now, all i really have unfettered access to is the substack app, which is filled with political content and does NOT usually fill this urge to experience a good feeling by way of staring into my phone. thank god for podcasts (including maybe baby!), which are like the nicotine patch for social media addicts, and give me this feeling while freeing me up to make dinner or do other chores.
This makes me think so much about how society is set up!! With all of us in our individual pods, there's a lot less texture to fill our time. Like what if there were more third spaces for you to mingle in when you needed a break? What if during your rest time you were more likely to be around other people who could, say, make you laugh? Makes me think about the recent Atlantic piece about how actually a lot of modern alienation didn't start with phones, but CARS. Living far away from each other, and bringing things like parks and theaters into our homes (now backyards and TVs) and and other modern tweaks so that we never have to leave home. Social media is trying to fill a real need but it just isn't up to the task, or has too many negative externalities. Still though, when it's gone you feel void
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/
omg yes, I think about how awful cars have been for community/togetherness all the time. thanks for sharing that piece!
sooooo true
ok one more thing lol.
i once heard this term “time confetti” — it’s all the little moments of free time throughout our day. take someone who “has no free time” but they have 5 minutes between meetings, 15 minutes here, 10 minutes spent laying in bed instead of getting up. the idea is that we feel like we have no time because we fill our time confetti scrolling on our phone, which pushes our eventual “all done” time in the evening further and further back, until even then we have no time for anything longer than 15-30 minutes of ordering food and scrolling as opposed to more time consuming, fulfilling activities. i’m not really sure this applies for caregivers since children likely go to bed every night at the same time regardless of how much you got done that day lol. but nevertheless it has lived like a specter in my brain ever since, this idea that scrolling is chipping away at from my free time minute by minute through constant phone pick ups. i don’t know if it’s a helpful way to think, maybe i would just fill that time with staring off into space or reading my book if i didn’t have technology, because my brain needs a break sometimes … nevertheless, this idea has been the main driver behind curbing social media use
The equivalent of spent time confetti in my life are what i like to call "car sits", wherein I literally sit in my driveway parked and on my phone (car on or off depending on outside temp) for sometimes as long as 20 minutes before going inside to settle back in, whether it is after work, after errands or a workout. Doesn't always happen but it does at least 3x/wk. I've been wanting to stymie this
car sits are sooooo real omg
I caught myself doing this today...! def happens more than I'd like to admit.
Love this articulation - I’ve recently started art lessons (part of a New Year’s resolution to do things I’m bad at) and they take place on Sunday mornings, a time I would historically have spent ‘rotting’ in bed, on an endless TikTok scroll. Now I have to force myself out, ignore my body tiredness and sit for an hour and a half, away from my phone, thinking in lines and shapes instead of words like I’m used to. It’s astoundingly restorative. I’ve begun to look forward to them as times where I can’t ruminate, where all my concentration is fixated on light and dark. It feels like ‘active rest’ to me and I think I finally understand what everyone means when they harp on about ‘flow’.
yeah experiences like what you describe here really make me wonder just how much exactly we miss out on simply because we have all these other relatively meaningless distractions (phones, etc) -- like in the cumulative. it really concerns me!
Omg recharging in a hotel room, I had a visceral reaction to that. You’re so right, it’s heaven.
Loved this, Haley. Between Midwest winter and recently leaving my job to be home with kids, the pull toward “rotting” has never been higher so this was timely for me. As your writing always seems to be ❤️
“Dinner’s in 2 hours, should we go back to the room to shower and recharge?” Nirvana
I really like Sam Kriss’ very pithy take on this: “A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive.”
Like we SHOULD be feeling all those things we are putting off with scrolling, they are the actual stuff of being human - but the natural instinct is ugh I don’t want to think about that.
The thing that helped me immensely with this is morning pages (shout out to The Artist’s Way!) - journalling first thing forces you to sit with all that stuff you want to avoid and over time you become more able to tolerate it, at least in my experience
Ok fine that's a good argument for morning pages!! Do I have to do them now?
Also love that sam kriss line. I do wonder though if seeking out distraction from big questions and anxieties can be a healthy impulse in us and the problem is we just don't have the sense of community/interdependence around us to accommodate the level of healthy distraction we require!! So we turn to our phones for a pale shade of it
I think between this comment and the one above about the Atlantic article, you're hitting on something. this is all happening in conjunction with losing touch with people and feeling more "connected" but actually just more alone. it shouldn't be this hard to see our friends, especially in the suburbs
Wanted to pop in here and say thanks for taking that car metaphor too far ;) It actually helped me conceptualize this really distinctive sensation I’ve been having of two kinds of energy drain. One’s the gas drain of using the engine, one is the passive drain of the battery. Simple, but actually SUPER helpful, as my “rest” hasn’t been particularly restful lately. If you’d just jumped straight to “rot” I don’t think I would have made the connection, so thank you for stretching that metaphor into a helpful transition. It was effectively written <3
THANK YOU
i wonder whether the urgent pitch of the rot-rest aporia might be lowered by reading a publication rather than twitter. not only for the page vs screen reason but because of the slowness of the mechanisms of publishing, printing, and the way these things are brought into your home: reading something you chose, that was made with a shared care and labour i think does hold more intention, (yours and others) even if the intention is not present in the present. i hope i can say this gently—it’s not actually hard to stop reading twitter. looking at and looking away are the same action.
Well said. I totally agree all phone time is not equal!! I think that's sometimes missed in the phones-are-to-blame discussion. Like texting my friends often feels energizing/social
Hate when I can’t play sudoku bc a show is too good and I have to pay attention to it
Hahahaha
Yesss. Thought about this topic a lot during the pandemic actually. One of the things that made that period of time feel difficult was that there was never that feeling of satisfying rest you describe — being out all day with friends and coming home, making late night food after a night out. It was a lotttt of idling, scrolling, and rotting…and unsurprisingly I always felt exhausted! (Though I do know that being able to do that was a privilege in many ways.)
So well written <3
Not a rich or interesting comment, but wanted to drop in anyway to say that this essay is one of my favourites so far :) thank you!
Hahaha didn’t mean to put PRESSURE on the situation
same!!
"entertainment packing peanuts" tickled my brain
Love this essay and love your writing style! The older I get the more I think about my energy and how that relates to my internal mental state, and as a result my ability to do the things I want to do. Not only physical energy, but spiritual energy like you alluded to, where avoidance is a symptom of low spiritual energy and motivation is high spiritual energy. It's interesting to observe when I'm high and low and I don't really understand it yet. Loneliness definitely saps it, but solitude can be recharging. A single good song can get me out of my chair and take me higher. I particularly want to understand what motivates me, since I used to feel much more motivated and I think it stemmed from feeling needed, like there were so many problems in the world that needed to be solved. There still are, obviously, but it's hard in the day to day to feel that as strongly when most people in my immediate circles are doing "fine" if not fantastic, and the scale of the problems we face are so large and at the same time distant. Anyways, I think motivation as the counterweight to avoidance/rot would be an interesting topic to explore!
I relate to so much of this! Sometimes it feels like energy is such a mystery (when it comes, when it goes), but oftentimes if I think creatively/honestly enough I can sort out why I do or don't have it
Hello, Haley.
I'm Japanese and reading this through Chat GPT.
I have an 11-month-old baby. This topic was interesting.
I miss the quiet moments of the past. Right now, my struggle is having no rest, no time alone, and the pressure of work. I just want to rest.
In Japanese Zen philosophy, mental space is created between conscious repetitions of actions.
I am not a resolution person at all, but I did decide to give myself more “idle brain time” this year and it’s crazy how after a few days I felt like I was coming out of a fog. Stopped listening to things when I shower/clean/fold laundry/wash dishes/walk my dog + started listening to Ethiopian jazz (lmao) instead of pods/tv while I work to just allow my brain to focus and wander as it pleases, and I swear I’m having my own thoughts for the first time in years and significantly less anxiety. Our brains just didn’t evolve for this amount of stimulus!
Also I know this was a question you asked SO long ago, but my best friend got both of us bricks (https://getbrick.app) for Christmas and it’s changed my life. No other method of app limits worked for me (bc you can easily bypass or it just feels too restrictive), but making it an active physical choice to unlock social apps BUT still having the choice at any time has cut my social media time down 90%. I totally support your idling bc I know parents need breaks haha, but wanted to share in case that’s still something you’re working on
my version if this resolution was inspired by a line in This Side of Paradise that i read in early january: "have an hour a day to think in" - when you think of it that way, you have to be so intentional with your walks, chores and downtime. (the whole line is "If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels")
As someone who doesn’t have kids, I actually find that babysitting (for about 2-3 hours) can be some of the best active rest. I cant be on my phone but instead have to be present and engage with the world through a different perspective. Obviously this won’t be applicable to parents, but there’s something about being with a kid, putting on some music, and just sitting on the ground for a while that fills me up.
Although I don’t get to do it often I’ve come to appreciate long drives alone in the car as weirdly restful. A solo drive just listening to music is one of the few times I actually let myself think and let my mind wander, rather than automatically reverting to scrolling and avoiding any original thought as I tend to do in other “resting” moments. I literally can’t scroll or watch TV while driving, of course, but it’s also the rare relaxing activity that’s also productive and necessary (getting from point A to point B) so I don’t feel guilty while doing it. And I’m always pleasantly surprised by how positive and entertaining my thoughts turn out to be over the course of an hour or two in the car, and feel much happier / more refreshed afterward.