Ask around you, on the eve of the holidays: how many women can picture themselves spending a whole day producing nothing, with no list, no phone buzzing, no vague sense of forgetting something? Very few. Summer promises rest and, in practice, relocates it: you change the scenery, rarely the mental regime.
This difficulty is neither a whim nor a lack of willpower. It has roots in the biology of the brain, in economics, and in a wellness industry that sells calm at a steep price. Untangling the three is more useful than yet another relaxation programme.
The brain never switches off
Intuition suggests that the brain goes idle at rest. That's false, and the demonstration is not new. In the early 2000s, neurologist Marcus Raichle, at Washington University in St. Louis, observed that brain activity barely drops when you focus on a task. A demanding mental task raises the brain's energy expenditure only a few percentage points above its baseline level. In other words, most of the energy is spent continuously, task or no task. Raichle named this state the “default mode” (Raichle et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, United States, 2001).
This default mode corresponds to a network of brain regions that activates precisely when you're not doing anything in particular. It underlies mind-wandering, self-reflection, autobiographical memory, the consolidation of what you've lived through. When you stare at the sea thinking of nothing, this network is at work: sorting, filing, connecting. (On this organ that never stops manufacturing meaning, also read is the brain the creator of life?)
Rest isn't an absence of activity, it's a change of channel.
The brain shifts from a task oriented toward the outside world to processing turned inward. That clarifies two things. First, why inactivity is rarely felt as restful at first: cutting off external stimulation leaves the field open to this inner noise, which brings back worries as readily as pleasant memories. Second, why this “empty” time isn't wasted. The ideas that surface in the shower or while walking don't come from nowhere. They come from there.
Why switching off costs so much
If rest is an active state, mental silence, for its part, isn't something you can simply decree. Mental load — that invisible work of anticipating and organising — doesn't take a holiday just because the body does. A study led by sociologist Leah Ruppanner and her team (University of Melbourne, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2024) puts a number on this imbalance: mothers carry an average of 71% of the household's cognitive load — the share that consists of thinking, planning and remembering for the whole family.
Mothers carry an average of 71% of the household's cognitive load. — Leah Ruppanner et al., Journal of Marriage and Family, 2024
This load is invisible and doesn't set itself down. It follows on holiday, where it even tends to swell: a full house, multiplied meals, guests to host. This is where “doing nothing” becomes a matter of gender. Many women can't stop, because no one else is holding the thread while they do. One person's break often rests on another's uninterrupted vigilance. As long as this division goes unnamed, the injunction to rest turns back against the very women it's addressed to: they're asked to let go without any lightening of what they carry. (On what bonds, for their part, do for your balance, read how friendship rewires your brain.)
The marketing of emptiness
A genuine need to catch a breath has met a market. In recent years, slowness has been sold under names that sound like age-old traditions. The most widely exported is niksen, a Dutch word for “doing nothing,” popularised by Olga Mecking's book, Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). The term has spread as an ancestral Dutch way of life. It's nothing of the sort: it's a recent media construction, to the point that Dutch critics have accused the author, who wasn't born there, of inventing a trend out of whole cloth.
The distinction matters, because it separates the commercial from the well-founded. Niksen as a product — subscription meditation apps, digital-detox retreats priced at a week's salary, silent hotel getaways — belongs to a market thriving on a genuine shortfall.
What is actually documented, by contrast, is more sober and free of charge. A longitudinal study published in PLOS ONE (14 January 2025, the British “Wellbeing of the Workforce” cohort) shows that people able to psychologically detach from work showed, a year later, better well-being, less anxiety and greater life satisfaction. The decisive factor isn't a posture or an app: it's the capacity to mentally unplug from work, and the fact that this capacity improves over time. You can train it without buying a thing.
The sorting is simple to state. What works is a genuine break from demands on your attention, enough sleep, unproductive time claimed without guilt. What is largely marketing is the idea that you need an object, a subscription or a foreign word to get there.
Rest as a privilege
That leaves the blind spot of every discourse on disconnecting: it assumes you can afford to. In economies where a second job, informal work and getting by aren't a choice but a condition of survival, unplugging is less a mental-hygiene practice than a luxury. The worker topping up an insufficient salary with cleaning jobs, cakes sold from home or an undeclared side activity doesn't switch off in the evening: she changes shift. Rest is unevenly distributed, like income.
Voluntary disconnection is, moreover, a far more Western than Maghrebi object of study, and that asymmetry speaks for itself. In the sociology of Arab leisure time, free time rarely appears as a withdrawal into the self: it's relational, collective, often negotiated with family and public space (Jeunesses arabes. Du Maroc au Yémen, reviewed in Critique internationale, 2014; the work of French-Algerian sociologist Rachid Amirou on the imagination of travel). The language itself resists praising idleness: the word waqt denotes the right time, the moment attached to a specific action, not an emptiness to be stretched out.
To date, no Maghrebi survey specifically devoted to idleness or fare niente could be consulted for this article. The absence is, in itself, a piece of data.
Switching off, for real
Switching off, then, doesn't mean imitating a Dutch trend or paying for silence. It means recognising that the brain needs this seemingly useless time to do its background work, and that this time is rarer and more unevenly distributed than you might think.
For many women in the Maghreb, the first obstacle isn't a lack of method, it's a lack of backup: you can't rest alone when you alone run an entire household's logistics. The real question isn't how to do nothing, but who is granted this respite, and at the cost of whose invisible work. Until that's answered, disconnecting will remain a summer word for some and one more burden for others.
