Retirement is an amazing time. I find it both interesting and amusing that I had to put effort into doing nothing in retirement. Before retiring it seemed it would be a no-brainer handling time just doing nothing. But in reality, after many decades of serving the employment masters, there is a whole slew of conditioning geared toward productivity that has to be unwoven.

The “doing nothing” definition flips after retirement and for me it is a humorous mind trip. There is doing nothing from the working stiff perspective and another point of view from the retirement side of living. That’s because from our time in school and throughout our working lives, doing nothing has been given a bad reputation. Well not anymore. Doing nothing in retirement is a useful skill.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I’m Always Looking For Ways To Improve My Early Retirement

The truth is we can be way too busy in retirement. It’s easy to over commit and cram in as much as we can. Especially early in retirement. You can’t really grasp that until you are retired and living it. It doesn’t matter how many times you heard it from other retirees before entering the retirement zone yourself.

I have written about how I stay busy and how rarely I catch TV or anything close to being sedentary before 5 PM. Like it’s something to be proud of and a measurement of my early retirement success by having no chance to ever be bored. But something was missing. I now admit that it took my having a few years of early retirement under my belt to wise up. It took me a little time to learn how to be better at doing nothing. I jokingly call it a retirement skill because it is something that you get better at with practice.  

Skillfully Doing Nothing In Retirement

First off, having some structure in our retirement is a good thing. But sometimes we just trade one over-structured lifestyle for another. One that leaves no room for just doing nothing. I find it a little funny that I can become the most demanding boss I’ve ever had.

Part of the problem is all the cautions about having the non-financial aspects of retirement covered. Those constantly drummed warnings about people who retired into misery because of boredom. It’s best that we know what we plan on doing with all of our free time. Those cautions really do apply.

But there should be another caution in the retirement for newbies handbook: Beware of overdoing it with the commitment of your hard-won free-time. Our brains seem oddly wired to be productive and we can try to overcompensate once our initial retirement honeymoon of leisure ends. Mine sure did.

Four Steps To Mastering the Skill of Doing Nothing in Retirement

Step #1- Start by Recognizing the Health Benefits of Doing Nothing

It sounds strange but doing nothing is actually doing something. Doing nothing allows for us to have down-time from a busy retirement schedule to improve our mental and physical health. This is an important step because it all starts here for reasons that became clear to me in later steps.

We took breaks when we worked. The reasons for those breaks still come into play in retirement. Those of us who retired early are an ambitious lot. It’s something that carries on into retirement.

Doing Nothing will:

• Allow time to clear our head and rest.
• Improve our mood and wellbeing.
• Lower our heart rate.
• Increased our brain health.

I didn’t immediately embrace the concept that doing nothing would have health benefits. But I had to acknowledge that over the ages meditation has been shown to bring peace to one’s health and mind. Meditation is the ultimate form of doing nothing.

I now listen to my mind and body for signs that it’s time to step back and start a little retirement do nothing time. My doing nothing episodes lasts as long as it needs to. I just jump back into my busy retirement schedule when I am ready to step back into it.

Step #2- Embrace The Idea That it’s OK to Spend Time Doing Nothing

I had to ask myself: Why was my occasionally doing nothing OK when still working but not now?  Why did I let it bug the crap out of me now that I am retired? Taking a break is necessary, even in retirement. When I was a worker I used to spend whole weekends doing nothing. Especially after a busy and stressful work week. I would even proudly brag I did nothing over the weekend. That was my time-out from being under “The Man”. I’m now the boss. What is different now is that in retirement I get to decide when and take as long as I want or need to do nothing .

After decades under the control of the corporate world it’s no wonder I struggled with this aspect of freedom. It was too easy in retirement to push myself beyond a leisurely pace to fulfill my passions and interest goals. I was at times stressing myself out and it was a total mind-warp. I now know that the skill of doing nothing had to be learned through practice after all the years spent in the working mindset. This is the necessary mind-shift I had to complete from my worker self to my retired self. I had to reconfigure an ingrained doing nothing belief system. Retirement means never having to earn approval for downtime.

I gave myself permission by saying: Dude, you have already recognized the health benefits of stepping back and doing nothing, just let it rip. I made a mental flip to embrace doing nothing as valued and stopped caring about what others think. When I’m on a do nothing day and asked what I have been up to I smile and admit it instead of trying to always have something productive to answer back with. Remember, most everyone still working already thinks retirees are doing nothing anyway, no matter how we answer.

Step #3- Control The Productivity Beast Within

There is only so much time in a day and I had to stop prioritizing my chosen activities based on its productive merits. Productive purpose seemed to always come before purposeful fun. It was like one of those vacations where everyday there was something fun scheduled to do. Running from one thing to another where there was no down time to just enjoy a day of leisurely sloth to slow down. When the productive vacation ends you’re run down instead of rested and feel like we need a vacation from our vacation. Just because something should be fun, if we don’t pace ourselves, we end up turning it into something else.

I stopped assigning productive purpose to everything I do in retirement. It’s alright to do things that have productive purpose but it shouldn’t dictate it’s priority at the expense of doing nothing or even activity done solely for the fun of it. For instance, de-emphasize reading based on educational value. Enjoy reading without assigning or needing a side motive. Repurpose biking and hiking from exercise to fun by slowing down and enjoying the scenery. Taking a nap just because I want to. Turn on the TV and catch an afternoon oldie or movie and tune out for a while. The list goes on and on. Tame the inner productivity beast by understanding that purposeful doing nothing in retirement is different from wasting our valuable retirement time.

Step #4- Everything in Moderation

Warning: Doing nothing can be addicting. Overdose can result in boredom and severe procrastination. Like everything else in life, moderation is required. Doing nothing in retirement can be highly addictive and create unwanted habits. The retirement boredom cautions are very real and worthy of concern. There has to be a balance of productivity and purposeful doing nothing.

It took time for me to admit I had a productivity bias against doing nothing and had to adjust my thinking to accept it. I only do what I want to do in my retirement but I still lean a bit towards the productive side of things. There are still goals to meet and things that I want to accomplish that won’t happen when doing nothing. But I also see the benefit of doing what I can to master the skill of doing nothing in retirement.