Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing (and Why Your Brain Needs It)

There is a word in Dutch for something you have almost certainly forgotten how to do. Niksen means, quite literally, to do nothing: to sit by the window without a phone, to let the kettle boil without checking anything, to be present in a chair with no better justification than the chair. It is not meditation, which has a technique. It is not mindfulness, which has an aim. It is nothing, done on purpose, and the Dutch, a famously industrious people, have kept a word for it the way one keeps a key to a room the family no longer visits. The rest of us, meanwhile, have built lives in which every idle moment is instantly filled, and we wonder why our minds feel like train stations. Niksen is the modest, radical suggestion that the station might occasionally close.

What niksen actually means

The word comes from niks, the Dutch for nothing, and its genius lies in its refusal to dress itself up. Other cultures have given us aspirational loanwords: hygge arrives with candles and cashmere, ikigai with a sense of purpose, wabi-sabi with an aesthetic. Niksen brings nothing at all, which is precisely the point. Staring out of a window qualifies. So does lying on the sofa watching the ceiling, sitting on a bench without a podcast, or standing in the garden with a cup of tea going cold in your hands. The only rule, and it is a strict one, is purposelessness. The moment you decide you are doing nothing in order to be more productive afterwards, you have wandered out of niksen and back into work by other means. The practice asks you to waste time honestly, and to discover that it was never wasted at all.

The science of an idle mind

What looks like idleness from the outside is anything but idle within. When you stop directing your attention at tasks and let the mind off its lead, the brain shifts into what neuroscientists call the default mode network: a constellation of regions that becomes more active precisely when you are doing nothing in particular. Researchers reviewing this work have argued that this inward mode is where some of our most important mental business gets done. Rest, they conclude, is not idleness: constructive internal reflection during wakeful rest supports memory consolidation, the making of meaning from experience, imagining the future, and the quiet moral work of understanding ourselves and other people (Immordino-Yang et al., 2012, Perspectives on Psychological Science). In other words, the daydreaming state that niksen protects is not a gap between the important things. It is one of the important things, and a culture that fills every pause with a screen is quietly starving it.

The daydreaming state is not a gap between the important things. It is one of the important things.

Why doing nothing feels so difficult

Try it for five minutes and you will meet the resistance almost immediately: the itch for the phone, the sudden memory of an email, the low hum of guilt that arrives whenever a modern person is caught being unproductive. This discomfort is worth examining rather than obeying. Much of it is simply habit; an attention accustomed to constant feeding experiences its first empty moments as hunger. And some of it is cultural inheritance: we have been taught, more thoroughly than we realise, that time must be justified by output, and that a person gazing out of a window owes the world an explanation. Niksen declines to provide one. It helps to remember that the fidgety first minutes are not a sign that you are doing it wrong. They are the practice. Sit through the itch without feeding it and it softens, the way a room seems to grow quieter the longer you stay still in it.

How to practise niksen

• Start with edges, not hours: the two minutes the kettle takes, the wait for a bus, the moment after lunch. Simply decline to fill them, and let looking around be enough.
• Give the body somewhere undemanding to be: a chair by a window, a bench, a patch of garden. Niksen is easier when you are comfortable and hardest when you are holding a phone, so put it in another room.
• Let the eyes graze rather than focus: clouds, leaves, traffic, rain on glass. Watching without analysing is the closest thing niksen has to a technique.
• When guilt arrives, and it will, greet it like weather rather than a verdict. It passes more quickly when you do not argue with it.
• Protect one longer stretch a week, fifteen or twenty minutes, and treat it with the seriousness you would give an appointment. Doing nothing reliably requires, at first, a little planning.

Nothing, with something to rest the eyes on

Purists may insist that true niksen needs no accompaniment, and on a good day they are right. But most of us are apprentices at emptiness, and an apprentice is allowed a handrail. The Dutch have their windows, which face the street precisely so that there is something unhurried to watch. I have my own equivalents: a fire when the season allows it, the garden when it does not, and on restless evenings a slow drift of colour from Feelsy on the autoplay setting, one texture folding into the next with no decisions required of me. The point is not the screen or its absence; the point is an object soft enough that attention can rest on it without being taken anywhere. Whatever your window turns out to be, the practice underneath is the same, and it is older than any of the words we borrow for it: stop, stay, and let the mind wander home by its own route. You will be surprised what it brings back.

Feelsy is a wellness product, not medical advice. If stress, anxiety or sleep problems persist, please speak with a qualified professional.