Have you ever gone on vacation where getting there wore you out so badly that you spent the first three days just coming down?

That’s most of my trips.

Some of you know this already, but my mom is Swiss, and every year I take her back to her village in the Alps. She’s eighty. And it seems like everybody in that valley lives forever and looks about fifteen years younger than they are.

I think part of the reason is that they actually live.

You’ll walk up to a shop and the hours posted on the door say Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Two to five. That’s it. That’s the whole week.

The first time you see that, it’s a little shocking.

So I’m sitting on the piazza in Poschiavo with a cappuccino, visiting with family, watching the farmers market fill up the square. Flowers, cheese, people stopping to talk to each other for way longer than anybody needs to.

It was lovely. And about twenty minutes in, I got anxious.

Hustle culture stuck its head right back in and said, you should get up. You should be doing something.
Why does the brain do that?

There’s a study I think about a lot. Christopher Hsee and his colleagues gave people a fifteen minute wait and two options. Drop off a survey at a nearby spot and sit for the rest of the time, or walk to a further spot and come right back. Same reward either way.

Most people picked the nearby one and sat. But when the researchers gave them any reason at all to walk, a different snack at the far location, they walked. And the ones who kept moving reported being happier than the ones who sat.

Hsee called it idleness aversion. We don’t like being still. But we won’t move without a reason, so we’ll take almost any reason we’re handed.

That’s the whole thing. My brain wasn’t telling me something was wrong on that piazza. It was hunting for a justification to get up.

Two things I’d try, and I’m saying this to myself as much as to you.

When the urge shows up, treat it as a symptom, not information. It feels like a message that you’re wasting time. It isn’t. Sit through it for ten more minutes and watch it pass.

And stop earning your rest. If you only sit down after the list is done, you will never sit down, because the list is never ending.

Can’t believe I flew five thousand miles to learn how to sit down.