I Don't Find Relaxing Relaxing

I love work. Properly love it. The truth is, I don't find relaxing very relaxing, and I've stopped feeling odd about admitting it. Hours can go by at my desk solving something and I'll surface hungry, stiff and thoroughly pleased with myself, having barely noticed the time pass.

That state has a name: flow. Full absorption, effort that stops feeling like effort, time genuinely disappearing.

Work isn't the only place I find it, though. I love clay pigeon shooting, and I joke that it's my meditation because I physically cannot think about anything else while I'm doing it. Not the invoice I haven't sent. Not something irritating somebody said earlier that day. Not the dreary admin my AI should be doing for me anyway.

You raise the gun, shout pull, follow the clay and fire, all within a couple of seconds, but when it's right, time seems to slow down. I know I'm in flow because it feels easy. The second a random thought sneaks in, I know before I've pulled the trigger that I'll miss, because it stops feeling instinctive and starts feeling like effort.

People hear meditation and picture sitting cross-legged with their eyes shut. Mine involves a shotgun. Same effect, though. My brain, the busy, chattering, seventeen-tabs-open version of it, goes completely quiet. It comes back properly rested in a way an actual quiet room never quite manages. Beautiful.

It is the same reason a climber's mind goes quiet when he is hanging off a rock face. I am not comparing myself to a free solo climber. My idea of danger is leaving a sandwich unattended for 30 seconds when the dog is in the room. But give the mind something that genuinely needs all of it, something you actually care about, and the daily noise can't get a word in.

We all recognise flow, even if we have never had a name for it. Everything comes to you, time stands still and moves quickly at once, the effort disappears and the result is usually excellent.

We know the opposite just as well. Nothing lands, every sentence takes three goes and whatever you eventually produce will probably need redoing tomorrow. Loving flow at your desk isn't the problem. The problem starts when it has quietly left and you carry on anyway, forcing an hour out of a job that should have taken 10 minutes.

We have all been sold the idea that doing nothing is the finish line. Feet up, no demands, brain switched off. We chase total rest as though peace is what automatically appears when everything else stops, but often it doesn't.

There is a term for what can happen instead: psychic entropy. When the mind has nothing meaningful to focus on, attention becomes disordered and starts grabbing at whatever is available. In my case, that is more likely to be new ideas, jobs I could be doing, things I could improve and problems that suddenly need solving, but it certainly isn't rest.

An idle brain doesn't rest. It devours itself.

I think that is what we get wrong. What we are really craving isn't always the absence of activity, it is the absence of mental noise, and those aren't the same thing. Doing nothing doesn't necessarily quieten the mind, but flow does. It takes all those competing thoughts and points them in one direction.

For me, it is a task just difficult enough to shut my brain up, with isochronic tones playing on YouTube in the background. The important part is not picking up my phone the moment the work gets difficult, because that is always when I want to reach for it. If I can resist that urge, and then resist it again five minutes later, I usually get through the awkward bit and into flow.

The phone is the enemy of it, really. Every time I pick it up, I make my brain start all over again.

So, what is your version of meditation? Mine is clay pigeon shooting. Yours might be running, painting, gardening, cooking or sorting out the spreadsheet that has been irritating you for six months.

Flow might give you the rest, or the rest might be what hands you the flow. Chicken or egg situation, I've stopped trying to work out which comes first.

So no, I still don't find relaxing very relaxing. It turns out I never needed to switch off, just to understand what switches me back on. I'm not skipping rest for work.

Work is where quite a lot of my rest happens.