Why Does Doing Nothing Make You Tired?

You didn't move all day. So why are you exhausted? There's an experiment where people were left alone in a room for fifteen minutes with nothing to do — and a button that gave them an electric shock. A lot of them pressed it. They'd all said, minutes earlier, that they'd pay money never to feel it again. This video is about what your brain is actually doing in those empty minutes, why concentrating is a kind of rest, and why the day you did nothing ends with you feeling like you failed at something. SOURCES Wilson, T. D. et al. (2014). "Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind." Science, 345(6192): 75–77. Fox, K. C. R., Thompson, E., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Christoff, K. (2014). "Is thinking really aversive? A commentary on Wilson et al." Frontiers in Psychology, 5: 1427. Wilson, T. D. & Gilbert, D. T. (2014). "Would you fund this movie? A reply to Fox et al." Frontiers in Psychology, 5. Raichle, M. E. & Gusnard, D. A. (2002). "Appraising the brain's energy budget." PNAS, 99(16): 10237–10239. Raichle, M. E. (2010). "Two views of brain function." Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(4): 180–190. Raichle, M. E. et al. (2001). "A default mode of brain function." PNAS, 98(2): 676–682. Fox, M. D. et al. (2005). PNAS, 102(27): 9673–9678. A note on the experiment: the shock study is famous and it has been argued with ever since. Most participants never pressed the button at all, and the researchers have gone back and forth about what the result actually means. Both readings are in the papers above. #doingnothing #tired #psychology #brainrot #rest #burnout