Name: Why it's important to sleep, nap and be lazy (sometimes)
Uploaded: 2025-05-02T14:49:28.000Z
Duration: 36 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

From an early age, we're taught the benefits of hard work.

What you don't hear much about is the real value of doing nothing.

With Susan Spencer, let's all take it easy.

For most of her working life, Celeste Headley never made any time for any time off.

I used to say, I can outwork anybody. That used to be like my calling card.

A single mother, at one point she was balancing childcare with seven different jobs.

I am a professional opera singer, so I sang for the Michigan Opera Theater.

I also did a lot of writing jobs. I wrote for the Detroit News.

I was filing freelance pieces for National Public Radio.

I was irritable all the time. I was tired all the time.

I mean, I started getting sick, and I'm a very healthy person.

I mean, I don't generally get sick, so obviously I was overworked.

And that was a problem that had to be solved.

Second, equally drastic move, she took a two-week cross-country train ride, much of it without Wi-Fi, just to see what would happen.

For the first three or four days, it was panic.

You know when you leave your house, and you realize you don't have your cell phone on you, and you're like, oh! But eventually, it just started to feel okay.

By the time she got home, she'd had an epiphany.

Idleness, leisure time, is necessary for our own health and well-being.

The title of Hedley's recent book says it all, but she argues social pressures make doing nothing hard to do.

After all, we might be accused of the dreaded sin of laziness.

If somebody's lazy, right, they're not earning their place in society. They're a bum.

So you think laziness has become a bad word?

Laziness gets a bum rap from religion. It gets a bum rap from capitalism.

It gets a bum rap because we are trying to be productive in our lives.

And productivity is the real priority in America, says Professor Lonnie Golden, who teaches economics at Penn State Abington.

The big payoffs in the U.S. are making yourself available for promotion or building your own business from scratch.

There's no reward for being lazy, I think it's fair to say.

When you're at your high school reunion, you don't want to be saying, you know, I've been doing nothing.

According to a recent survey, Americans value hard work over just about everything else, including self-fulfillment, marriage, patriotism, religion, and tolerance for others.

Even retirees have a hard time doing nothing.

It gets to be what's called the conspicuous busyness.

Like, hey, look how busy I am and look how much time I'm spending.

Maybe it's volunteering, but it should be okay to say I'm retired.

And as a result, I can be lazy when I feel like being lazy.

Yeah, we have all been basically brainwashed to believe that we have to work hard or we're not of value.

Which may explain why employers seem to love employees who say they can multitask.

Businesses ask candidates, are you good at multitasking?

Professor Earl K. Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, has sobering news for a culture obsessed with juggling jobs.

We can hold only one or two thoughts in mind at a time.

You mean it is physically impossible to multitask?

I mean it is physically impossible to multitask.

Our poor brains, when struggling to multitask, instead simply slow down and make mistakes.

A far better plan, says Professor Miller, is to try doing no tasks at all.

You know, a lot of times some of your best thoughts come to you when your conscious mind is out of the way, when you allow these unconscious thoughts to bubble up, right?

And sometimes it's good to be lazy, not lazy, but to tune out a bit and let these thoughts bubble up.

That advice is a way of life at the 93-year-old Institute for Advanced Study, an academic research center in Princeton, New Jersey, where remarkably, doing nothing does not have a bad name, says Director David Nirenberg.

When not gathering for tea each day, scholars may take a walk in the woods, sit by the pond, or even nap.

We all need space for non-intentional activity, non-intentional thought, contemplation.

That's why weekends exist. I think that's why so many of our faith traditions have introduced days of rest.

I think it's a crucial part of being human.

The Institute has been an intellectual home to Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and 35 Nobel laureates.

Some of the most productive and renowned people in history worked maybe four hours a day.

Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Henri Poincaré.

I mean, these are people who had a focused time of four hours, and the rest of the time, what were they doing?

They were dining, they were sitting in the garden, they were hanging out with friends.

Yeah, to our 21st century eyes, yeah, they were being lazy.

And Celeste Headley wants all of us to start living our lives, too.

So if you had one message about laziness, what would it be?

The most successful animals on the planet are the laziest.

Think about how long lions lie around on the savanna.

And when they need food, there's a burst of energy and activity, and they get it, and then they go back to lying around.

If you look at the apex predators, some of the most successful species on planet Earth, they spend a good amount of their time doing nothing at all.

From L.A. to Chicago to New York, noise is one big reason why one in three American adults doesn't get enough sleep.

You might have an upstairs neighbor that has loud shoes, garbage trucks at three in the morning, ambulances, fire trucks.

Psychologist Matthew Eben learned all about noisy nights years ago when he bought an apartment in Queens, New York.

It was about a half block away from the LIRR.

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