You sit down, at last, with nothing to do. The afternoon is yours. And within less than ten seconds your hand has found the smooth comfort of your phone. Whether it’s genuinely interesting Substacks or the void of the infinite scroll, soon the seconds, minutes and hours have rolled into one. This is the paradox of modern rest: we have never had more ways to ‘switch off’, and never been less able to do so.

There is a paradox going on inside our bodies at these times too. We treat rest as an off-switch. Close the laptop, silence the notifications, intending to let the brain wind down like a machine at the end of a shift. But the brain can actually be busiest when you’re officially doing least. ‘Stopping’ your mind is not possible; it doesn’t work in negatives. If I tell you not to think of a pink elephant, the picture appears instantly in your mind. To switch off, to NOT think, we have to replace what we don’t want to think about with something known as ‘restorative attention’. 

Psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan called it soft fascination; the effortless pull of something that asks nothing of you. Forest trees shifting in the breeze, starlings murmuring at sunset. Your attention is engaged gently, with soft hands, leaving no room for the effortful, top-down attention you need a rest from. In one study, people who walked through an arboretum came back measurably sharper on tests of focus than people who walked the same distance through busy streets. The walking itself didn’t make the difference, rather the proximity to something natural, gentle and unpredictable. A lapping tide.

Your screen feed, however tailored to your interests and desires, doesn’t hold the benefits of this softness. Technology is hard fascination - built to grip and work the brain you were trying to rest. Rather than quieting the system, it deliberately applies bellows, to keep everything burning. That’s why you can sit still for an hour with a screen and stand up more tired than you sat down; stillness of the body is not rest for the mind. The absence of movement does not mean the presence of rest.

Our bodies respond to being in nature in amazing, hidden ways. In a controlled trial, a 90 minute walk in a forest raised a marker of frontline immune defence and lowered cortisol, the stress hormone. The forest, the beach, the hilltop - these views ask nothing of you. No notifications, no one waiting on a reply. Given a space that wants nothing, the body does something you can't feel it doing - puts down its guard and allows itself to take what it needs. 

The uncomfortable tension here is that by filling every gap with productivity, we’re losing the capacity our bodies have to shut down, shut up and recharge. Doing nothing, on purpose, with nothing to show for it, is a skill. Standing and staring is a skill; noticing details that only emerge after minutes of seemingly useless contemplation. And like every human capability in the age of optimisation for optimisation’s sake, it survives only if we practise.

So this summer, the struggle isn't to do more with our time off, but neither is it to allow ourselves to drop into the infinite scroll in the name of nothingness. It's to do less in the way your body was made for. Uncomfortable? Maybe. Beneficial? Absolutely.