The other day I remember running into the same professor in three different places: Grounds for Change, Oddfellows and at my job at French Creek Coffee & Tea. The same day, on my way up from work, a friend driving home saw me walking up North Main St. I hear a lot of people tell me how they see me literally everywhere.

I told myself growing up that I enjoyed being busy. I’d been convinced that if I had something on my schedule every moment of every day, I could avoid the crushing feelings in my head and the difficulties of being home. I came to college thinking that I could handle it all — I thought I needed to be super busy in order to be a real college student. . I’m a busybody; I have to keep moving, or I have to have something to do because if not, then I worry I’m wasting my time. In multiple meetings with multiple advisors, I would say something along the lines of, “But if I’m not doing all these things, I’m a failure and I’ll never get my degree.” I remember coming to college and joining all these activities because I thought I was doing something wrong if I didn’t have something to post on LinkedIn every two weeks. But what I never thought to consider was that sometimes, doing nothing is busy enough. Sometimes I’m even wasting my time by being too busy.

It’s true that you need to be involved in college. All social skills are built by interacting with others. If you want friends, you have to find them; they’re in all the places you haven’t looked (i.e. knitting club). When people talk about college, they don’t usually say they had the best time of their life because they never left their room. What they don’t tell you though, is that sometimes you just have to sit in your room, stare at the ceiling and do nothing.

The truth is, I want to be doing nothing. I run around campus everyday like a madman and I don’t really get much out of it; what I mean is that I’m rushing so much I don’t feel like I’m ever actually taking in the experiences. I don’t ever see my room and when I do I realize how much of a mess it is because I never have time to clean. I made myself so busy I don’t even have time to do homework, and at the end of the day, as I stare at my heaping pile of laundry falling out onto the floor, I’m still paying for an education.

Be okay with doing nothing! There’s nothing more valuable than time, and when you feel like you’re constantly running out of it, it’s not really living — it’s just getting by. Not only am I always running out of time, but I’m also always running away from it (I’ll push responsibilities to the very last minute to avoid having to do them, as one does), and that’s a feeling you have no room for in college. The main objective in your college career is to get your degree, but there’s also these secondary things, like life experience and making a friend you’ll still have when you’re 80. You don’t have time for running out of it; there’s too much to do.

I love when people text me and ask me to hang out, but then clarify that they don’t really have any activity in mind. Each others’ company is all they want. After a long day, or a hard class, or a shift that didn’t go so well, all anyone ever wants to sit around and have no responsibilities. The harsh reality is that human beings need time to rest. Psychologists argue that, in fact, there are seven types of rest–physcical, mental, spiritual, creative, reframing, emotional and sensory, and your body actually needs all of them. Instructor at Harvard Medical School Natalie Dittilo-Ryan, says, “Without rest, we are like elastic bands stretched almost all the way to capacity.”

It’s scientifically proven that people need to stop moving for at least five minutes every day and take a couple of breaths. So, unless you’re the A.I. bot that’s going to cough out a plagiarized version of this article after mining it for data, I have news for you: you need to sit down!

So, here’s some ways you can embrace doing absolutely nothing:

Schedule “do nothing” time into your day, and literally do nothing. Put it on your Google calendar. Sit and stare at the wall.

Stop a task a couple times. Don’t pull out your phone. Don’t do a different task. Just sit and listen to the sounds around you.

Set boundaries. This might be the hardest part. The important thing to recognize here though, is that your mental wellbeing changes the trajectory of everything else: how you perform, how you feel, how productive you are and really how you’re going to feel for the rest of the week too. If you don’t set boundaries with yourself, your electronics and your friends, you’re not really taking care of yourself. In order to truly be doing nothing, you have to be the priority.

Here’s perhaps the hardest point of all: checking your phone is not doing nothing. Scrolling on TikTok, posting to Instagram, watching TV — none of it is doing nothing. For this, turn your phone off, shove it all the way to the bottom of your bookbag and kick it old school for a couple of minutes. Don’t respond to any texts, even if it’s your best friend having a crisis over their recent messy breakup.

Of course, some days it’s not feasible. Sometimes, you have eight mandatory meetings, plus your classes, plus homework and that’s going to happen. But what I can do is encourage you not to sign up for that extra club. Don’t take that extra class. A lot of times it feels like we’re not good enough if we’re not on the board of every extracurricular that exists or if we’re not taking 20 credits a semester but the point here is that you’re good enough for being in school. If there’s one thing I could go back and tell myself when I started college, it would be to stop adding things to my to-do list.

When I tell people I did my homework on time, a lot of the time the response is that that’s really the bare minimum for college. That is undeniably true; I knew I was going to do work when I came here. What I don’t say in response is, “but I just ran from class and then had five minutes to get to my GFC shift and then three minutes to get to another class and then six minutes to eat lunch and then four minutes to get to Europe and back and then…” You get it. Because that’s not really an excuse for late work. You can’t really say, “sorry professor, I prioritized The Campus over your class which I need in order to get my degree.” It’s not what you’re here for, and it’s really too much for your brain to handle.

So, if you’ve read nothing at all, read this: lay in bed, stare at the ceiling and choose to do nothing. You’ll thank me later.