Many of us feel a small flicker of guilt when we sit down with nothing to do. We can feel the need to do something productive, catch up on messages or emails, or do more than one thing. Somewhere along the way, we may have developed the idea that every spare moment should be filled — with a podcast, a scroll, a task ticked off a list. When we do allow ourselves to rest, we often treat it as something we have to earn.

For many of us, the busyness runs deeper than habit. Filling every gap can be a way of not having to feel the worries, the low mood, or the restlessness sitting underneath the noise. Staying constantly occupied, or reaching for our phone the second things go quiet, can end up doing a very different job to resting. It’s a pattern many of us will recognise in our own lives, not just something we notice in others.

Neuroscientist Dr Joseph Jebelli comes at rest from a different direction — the neuroscience of it. In his book The Brain at Rest, he argues that we’ve built our lives around a story about productivity that the science doesn’t actually support, and that letting our brains idle, rather than constantly pushing them to perform, is where some of our best thinking, creativity, and wellbeing come from.

The part of our brain that switches on when we switch off

The central idea in Jebelli’s book is something called the default mode network — a set of connected brain regions that becomes active precisely when we’re not focused on an external task. It switches on when we daydream, reminisce, imagine the future, or let our minds wander while we’re doing something automatic, like walking or having a bath.

It’s worth being clear about what this is and isn’t. It isn’t the same as being busy, and it isn’t the same as being entertained. The default mode network switches on in the space where there’s no task pulling our attention outward — no goal to chase, no screen asking for a response, no game being played. That’s a different state to filling time so we don’t have to feel something, and different again from passive stimulation like TV. Both of those keep our attention occupied. The default mode network needs our attention to have somewhere to go.

Researchers overlooked this network for a long time, simply because it didn’t show up when they asked people to perform a task in a brain scanner. It only became visible once they looked at what the brain was doing in the gaps. Jebelli’s point is that this “gap” activity isn’t wasted time. It’s when our brains consolidate memory, process emotion, and make the loose associations that often turn into a good idea.

If we treat every idle moment as something to eliminate, we’re closing off one of the few times our brains get to do this background work.

When busyness is really avoidance

Not all busyness is the same. Sometimes we’re genuinely occupied with things that matter to us. Other times, the busyness has a different job — keeping us ahead of whatever we’d otherwise feel if we slowed down.

Many of us will know this pattern. It is a reluctance to sit in the car in silence, reaching for the phone the second a task finishes, a general sense of needing to be doing something. Short term, it works — it keeps difficult thoughts and feelings out of view. Long term, it tends to keep us stuck, because the discomfort doesn’t go anywhere. It just waits for the next quiet moment, which is often why rest starts to feel harder rather than easier the less practised we are at it.

Whether we’re overfilling our days because we’ve picked up a productivity rule or myth, or because being still brings something uncomfortable to the surface, the result is the same. Our brains rarely get the unstructured time they need.

Not everything that looks like rest is rest

One of the more useful distinctions Jebelli draws is between rest and distraction. Scrolling our phone, watching TV, half-listening to a podcast while we tidy up — all of it can feel like a break, but it keeps our brain in the same reactive, externally-focused mode as work does, just with different content. Genuine rest seems to need something closer to quiet: time without a task, a screen, or a demand for a response.

If any of these are our particular version of staying busy, they’re doing double duty. They don’t let our brain rest, and they keep us from noticing what we’re feeling underneath them. Both are easy to miss, because they look like downtime from the outside — and often feel like it too, right up until we switch off and realise we don’t feel any more settled than before we started.

What counts as rest, according to the research

Jebelli draws on a range of studies to argue that certain activities reliably activate the default mode network:

• Walking, particularly somewhere with natural surroundings
• Quality sleep, which plays its own distinct role in memory consolidation
• Unstructured time with no goal attached — people-watching at a cafe, staring out a window, having a bath
• Mind-wandering during simple, repetitive tasks
• Daydreaming and creative mind-wandering

None of these require a retreat or a big block of free time. What they have in common is the absence of a demand for focused attention on an external goal — and often, the absence of anywhere to hide from what’s going on inside us.

Why this isn’t just about feeling nice

It’s tempting to file this under self-care and leave it there, but Jebelli’s argument is more specific. He connects default mode network activity to creativity, problem-solving, and — over the longer term — markers of brain health.

Rest isn’t a nice-to-have alongside productivity; it’s part of how our brains generate the thinking we usually associate with being productive in the first place.

That  holds whether our busyness comes from believing rest has to be earned, or from avoiding what rest brings up. Either way, the questions worth asking are similar: am I being lazy, or is my brain doing something useful right now that I can’t see — and, just as importantly, what am I keeping myself busy enough to avoid feeling.

A different way to think about our day

None of this is an argument for doing nothing all day, and it isn’t a suggestion that busyness is always a problem. It’s a reason to notice our own pattern — whether we’re avoiding rest out of habit, out of guilt, or because slowing down brings something up we’d rather not feel.

A few small shifts that reflect this:

• Building short unstructured breaks into our day, rather than filling every gap with activity
• Protecting a walk, especially outdoors, as non-negotiable rather than optional
• Noticing when our “rest” is actually just a different kind of stimulation
• Getting curious about what comes up when we do slow down, without needing to fix it
• Treating sleep as part of our cognitive work, not just biological maintenance

Our brains don’t do their best thinking under constant demand, and we don’t get to know ourselves particularly well while we’re avoiding stillness.

Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is let ourselves wander — and stay long enough to notice what’s there.

Reference: Jebelli, J. (2024). The Brain at Rest: How the Art and Science of Doing Nothing Can Improve Your Life. Crown.