Why doing the ironing is good for you
It’s the last thing a modern woman wants to hear. But a surprising new book insists mind-numbing chores actually boost your mental health
Modern life does not make it easy to be bored. When we wake up, the radio is playing; over breakfast, we rush to ready everyone for the day.
on the commute, we listen to a podcast or read the news often with our mobiles at full glow in our hands. once at work, we check our emails.
And so it goes on until we return home and slump in front of the telly — the over-50s spending almost five hours a day watching TV. What we don’t do is switch off. ever. But what if boredom was good for you?
As a psychologist and a leading researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience, co-director of the Institute of Behavioural neurobiology at the University of Tubingen in Germany, I have been studying the workings of the human brain for almost 50 years and reached the conclusion that thinking is overrated.
By contrast, regularly ‘ emptying’ our brains carries all sorts of health benefits, both mental and physical. It is the ultimate stress-buster, helping to boost the immune system, increase feelings of wellbeing and guard against depression.
In fact, the brain has an ‘emptiness mechanism’ that it likes to switch on repeatedly through the day — the socalled ‘twilight state’, in which external stimuli are limited and brainwaves follow a pattern similar to that seen between waking and sleeping.
It does this to protect itself. The fact is the brain still works much as it did in prehistoric times.
When we perceive danger, signals are sent to the adrenal glands to begin pumping out stress hormones, resulting in the classic high-tension fight- or- flight response — blood pressure and pulse rate rise, muscles tense, digestion and pain perception are rolled back.
of course, this defence system is no longer triggered by poisonous berries or sabre tooth tigers. But in a complex, busy, stressful world, it is activated often — probably far more so than it ever was — and in some people is on permanent high alert, sapping energy and lowering our resistance to all sorts of disease.
emptiness can offer respite and relief from this. It helps to put things into perspective, making them seem less catastrophic, and it stops our bodies from overreacting in ways that can make us ill.
But that’s not all. Studies have shown that emptiness of the kind that arises from sensory deprivation can make us feel more creative, profoundly relaxed and even blissful.
Some philosophers even postulate that emptiness is the source of a special kind of existential happiness.
So we need to welcome in this emptiness; this profound lack of thought. To nurture a special kind of ‘boredom’, or ‘zoning out’.
And the ways to go about it are surprisingly easy . . .
SO, JUST HOW DO YOU EMPTY YOUR MIND?
When scientists used eeG technology to measure the brainwave patterns of meditating Buddhist monks, they found something fascinating. The longer the monks meditated, the more two kinds of brain wave patterns came to dominate — alpha waves, which are typical of a relaxed, dozy but waking state ( just imagine lying in a soothing warm bath); and theta waves, the lowfrequency waves typical of the brain’s ‘twilight state’.
Those are the activity patterns that usually occur while we are falling asleep, but not during sleep itself.
To achieve an empty, stress-free brain, this is the pattern we need to encourage ( at the expense of high frequency beta waves, which indicate active concentration or tension).
Imagine lying in a hammock on a warm spring day, relaxed and no longer quite awake but at the same time not quite unconscious.
In such a state, our brain activity is almost certainly dominated by theta waves. Under normal circumstances, we can only enjoy that state for a moment immediately before we fall asleep — but it can be prolonged.
And it seems these Zen meditation practitioners were able to do exactly that, to ‘catch’, i.e. prolong, the twilight waking state we feel as sleep descends upon us. The key is to be alert and yet to empty the brain.
A Zen master once said: ‘In the deepest meditative state, all impressions from the five senses are present, but do not trigger any inner thoughts.’
Sign up to a meditation class or download one of the many meditation apps out there.
TRY 40 MINUTES IN A FLOTATION TANK
IT TAkeS years of sacrifice and hardship to become a true Zen master. But a similar state is much more easily attained in a warm, dark flotation tank, where the senses are deprived of all stimulation.
researchers have shown that theta waves increase strongly after about 40 minutes of sensory deprivation (some subjects studied actually fell asleep in the tank, but most did not).
In California, flotation tanks are common, and some people even
have their own tank at home. The ideal length of a floating session is between an hour and an- hour- and- a- half — easily included in a normal weekly routine, since it doesn’t have to be done every day.
A GOOD REASON TO MAKE TIME FOR SEX
During foreplay, our senses are heightened, particularly the senses of smell and touch, but during the sexual act itself, we are fully focused on the matter at hand, and the world around us fades into the background.
From a sensory point of view, indeed, sex can be compared with an isolation tank: we become immersed in a world of senselessness.
This includes a reduced sensitivity to pain: many people perform acts of acrobatic prowess during sex that they would normally find excruciatingly painful!
A pivotal role in this ‘ zoning out’ is played by the thalamus. it closes its gates, putting consciousness on the back burner. This pushes us further towards a state of emptiness, eventually culminating in orgasm.
Men ride an extremely high wave of physical arousal during orgasm, as testified by a rapid pulse rate and frenzied breathing, but inside their heads the complete opposite is the case.
And brain scans of women show an even greater reduction in cerebral activity than in men.
in one experiment, the left orbitofrontal cortex, which is responsible for controlling urges, was barely active, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex — responsible for self-control and social judgment — was also shown to be working in powersaving mode.
This suggests women’s brains are empty of all thought and emotion when they orgasm.
TUNE OUT WITH FAVOURITE MUSIC
We know it’s possible to lose ourselves in music, but which music best induces that state of emptiness? At Tubingen university, we measured the electrical brain activity of people listening to different kinds of music and found that simple melodies in which rhythm is dominant cause neurons to fire off in those important low-frequency alpha and theta patterns.
What that means is that military marches, folk music, pop, samba, blues, boogie, rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop and techno take us closer to a state of emptiness than classical music or jazz.
Some music can transport us beyond even this, provoking such a strong emotional and physical response, scientists refer to it as a ‘skin orgasm’.
The neuroscientist Psyche Loui of Wesleyan university in Connecticut has worked out precisely how it does this.
By analysing the brains of subjects listening to music, she discovered that low- frequency brainwave patterns are indeed induced by rhythm, but that the ‘ecstatic’ state of emptiness only occurs when the listener’s expectations are violated.
‘This can be a sudden change in loudness,’ she explains. ‘Or a change of key, a spontaneous phrasing of the melody or a syncope in the rhythm.’
Loui’s list of pieces that fulfil that criteria especially well include any Bach toccata, rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 2, the song Someone Like You by Adele and Wonderwall by Oasis.
SMOOTH AWAY CARE WITH THE IRON
Our brain is a resonator that loves to ‘get into the groove’ of any rhythmical oscillations in its environment.
When we ‘drift off’ on a train journey or boat trip, it has much to do with rhythm: the rise and fall of the waves or the rattle of the tracks. Meditation usually also includes a rhythmical element, such as measured breathing or the chanting of mantras.
Anything that contains a mildly rhythmical element (in technical terms, at a rate of four to 12 Hertz, or waves per second), chanting in time as part of a crowd, rowing a boat, even ironing while breathing in time to the movement, can achieve a bit of emptiness.
it happens when soldiers lose themselves in the lock-stepped marching of their corps, too. in all of these activities, wide areas of the brain become synchronised, with the nerve cells dancing and singing in step over great distances.
This means oscillation patterns are superimposed on each other, reinforcing them. And the slower that shared rhythm is, the more alertness and consciousness fade into the background. even newborn babies have a predisposition to find a regular rhythmic beat soothing.
CAN INSOMNIA CLEAR YOUR HEAD?
THe romanian philosopher emil Cioran (1911-85) suffered from such terrible insomnia, he claimed he barely slept in seven years. Yet eventually he saw the ‘white nights’ of sleeplessness as bizarrely liberating.
We don’t advocate this as a good route to emptiness, incidentally, merely as another way of looking at insomnia.
indeed, Cioran’s interpretation of insomnia is not for the faint-hearted. He stresses that you must pursue it to its end, passing through the first stage of unrest, anger, sadness and other inflaming emotions, in order to cross over into the second stage of the second half of the night.
it’s then that our overtaxed mind becomes increasingly dulled and empties in a kind of ecstasy.
‘During bad nights,’ writes Cioran, ‘there comes a moment when you stop struggling, when you lay down your arms: a peace follows, an invisible triumph, the supreme reward after the pangs which have preceded it.’
Cioran undoubtedly seems strange to us, but he was right about the state of emptiness induced by insomnia.
Although we think of sleep as being an ‘empty state’, in fact, brain research has shown it’s the opposite.
There is rather a lot going on when we sleep. not only is sleep regenerative, but its memorystoring function also continues the activities of the day inside our heads and thus prevents us from entering the realm of emptiness.
However, Cioran saw that after a long period of insomnia, we can finally arrive at it.