The Power of Doing Nothing

In my work with small business owners, I have noticed a trend that deserves acknowledgement. They will often reach out to me because their "marketing is trash," or they "know what to do but are completely overwhelmed." I see this more often in my female clients—the high-achieving ones who seemingly have it all together. Outwardly, they are kicking ass and taking names, but inwardly they feel the weight of the world every single day. Maybe they no longer find joy in their business.

I hear you, and I hope you know you are not alone. As a business owner myself, I often feel the overwhelming sense of trying to keep all the balls in the air. I feel the effects of hypervigilance—the fear that one of the balls might drop. Then the doubts creep in. "Are you really the one to be doing this?"

I am writing this because one Sunday morning recently, I woke up with nothing to do. I had been saying for weeks that I needed this day because our farm has been in a busy season, we are sixteen months into building a house, decisions are coming fast, and my consulting business has been growing. I JUST NEEDED A DAY OFF.

Yet as soon as I woke up, my mind said, "Wake up! There is a problem we need to handle! You haven't designed your closet yet, and this is something you will have to use every day!"

I generally try to be self-aware, so I reminded myself that I didn't even have the measurements for the closet. There was no reason to worry about it in that moment because there was literally nothing I could do. My mind then went into overdrive. "Then what do we need to do or fix? We can't just do nothing!"

Nothing is exactly what I did. I set the timer on my phone for ten minutes and did nothing. My mind immediately tried to turn those ten minutes into an activity. "We're meditating!" Nope. We're doing nothing.

That may not sound like much of a distinction, but for me it was. My mind was desperate to assign a purpose to those ten minutes. It wanted a task, a goal, something to accomplish. Simply existing didn't feel acceptable.

Maybe you have been taught that your self-worth is tied to your output and your success. It isn't. Maybe you feel like you are being lazy if you take ten minutes to do nothing. You aren't.

I would encourage you to try it. Set a timer for ten minutes and just exist. If someone called and asked what you were doing, the only answer should be, "Nothing." If you can put any other label on it, you probably aren't doing nothing.

Your mind may not like the exercise. Mine certainly didn't. But after those ten minutes, I realized something my mind had forgotten: not every moment has to produce something. Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is simply give ourselves permission to exist without solving, fixing, planning, or producing.

If you're overwhelmed today, maybe the answer isn't another productivity hack. Maybe it's ten minutes of nothing.