The Pursuit of Laziness

For 2021, I decided to be lazy and selfish.

As a mental health therapist and small business owner, “lazy” and “selfish” are the antithesis of how I’d normally measure success, but as 2020 drew to a close, they were exactly the anti-virtues that I needed to survive.

Those of us in helping professions--doctors, nurses, therapists, teachers, and many others--are given mixed messages. On one hand, we’re told to practice self-care, but on the other hand, we’re expected to give all of ourselves. We’re called heroes and praised for our selflessness. While these titles may feel empowering in the moment, the term "hero," or even "essential worker," carries expectations of extreme self-sacrifice and at times, self-effacement.

Workplace wellness programs amount to little more than asking us to carry the same mental load, but with an added bonus on yoga and meditation, activities that take mental bandwidth and uninterrupted free time, two things that are a premium in today’s climate. Taking days off is always an option for self-care, but that, too, comes with its own burden. For traditional workers, that might mean coming back to a full inbox and a backlog of work. For those of us who are self-employed, it means going without pay. Either of those options tinges vacation days with a sense of dread, to the point that a break may be more of a burden than a respite.

On top of the logistical challenges of setting limits on work, there’s the social media problem. In a state of lockdown, the collective expectation is that we make the most of our time: Learn to bake sourdough bread. Finish the novel you never had time for. Color code your pantry and rid yourself of everything that doesn’t spark joy. Although there’s been a cursory public acknowledgement that it’s just not realistic for most people to do these things with consistency in the middle of the most stressful period in recent collective memory, once those expectations are out there, they can’t be taken away easily.

With every Instagram-perfect photo of your old friend’s artisan focaccia or gleeful news about your co-worker who got a publishing contract, there are more of us who are fumbling our way through this, fearful, uncertain, and unwilling admit that Netflix and a bowl of cereal for dinner constitutes our best effort.

In the earliest days of the pandemic, I wholeheartedly bought into the notion that I needed to use my lock-down time productively. I started work on a new professional credential. (That lasted about two months.) I began drafting the TV pilot that I had been plotting in my head for the past year. (I finished two pages.) I moved, and started the process of unpacking and organizing my new home. (As I write this, I stare at the basket of clothes I need to sort through that have been sitting in my office for seven months.)

By the end of 2020, my failure to complete both my big projects and the mundane ones started to wear on my self-esteem. If everyone else was able to tackle these things, why wasn’t I?

To compensate for my feelings of inadequacy, I tried to push myself harder in my counseling work. My five-day workweeks turned into six, and then into seven. At first, I just saw a client or two on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but before long, Sundays turned into a full-fledged 8 hour workday. I told myself it was because it was my ethical obligation in a pandemic; I was rising to the challenge of meeting the public’s growing mental health needs in an uncertain, critical time. Except that it wasn’t just about my clients; it was also about my own feelings of being “not enough”: Not productive enough, not resourceful enough, and not driven enough. I couldn’t get a handle on the things toted as self-care: A regular exercise routine, mindfulness, and stepping away from work.

I was pummeling toward complete burnout when I began to acknowledge the reality that something big needed to change, and not just taking a three-day weekend once a month or doing deep breathing exercises between clients. My personal epiphany came while working with a long-term high-functioning client who tried everything in the self-care playbook with wholehearted mindfulness, and still felt exhausted and depressed.

“Did you ever think that maybe this is just your body and mind trying to tell you it needs to be lazy?” I asked her.

It hadn’t occurred to her, just like it hadn’t occurred to me until that point.

I buy into the idea that all emotions exist to tell us how things are going and what we need to do differently. For example, feeling happy and content is a greenlight to keep up things as they are and anxiety is a sign that we’re in real or perceived danger. Along these lines, feeling tired, unmotivated, and lazy is a sign that our body and mind feels overwhelmed and needs a break, a break that doesn’t involve taking courses, developing new culinary skills, or writing the next Great American Novel. It’s a sign that we might need a break that involves neglecting a skink full of dirty dishes and binge-watching trashy TV. I gave myself the freedom to do that in 2021. I let go of expectations for “real” resolutions and told myself that this could be the year of being unproductive and selfish if that’s what I needed.

Remarkably, after I gave myself permission to be lazy and put my emotional needs first, my productivity increased almost immediately. Projects that had been on hold for the better part of 2020 started to feel more appealing. I was able to bring more emotional energy to my clients (who it turns out never even had the expectation that should be available to them seven days per week.) I wasn’t necessarily getting more rest or changing my schedule much, short of cutting back on my weekend work hours. What changed was my mindset. I was consciously rejecting the idea that I must be productive and instead learning to accept that I could be productive if that’s what I wanted and needed. Productivity was an option, not a mandate.

For the first month of 2021, my energy and ambition has ebbed and flowed. Some days I’ll have the emotional bandwidth to write, organize, and pursue new projects. Other days, I’ll spend all my free time scrolling mindlessly on my phone and putting off responsibilities for tomorrow. Neither choice is morally superior or worthy of praise. It’s just what I need at that moment.