Just be: Skilful doing nothing is calming, pleasant, and easy — not aversive

Abstract

The most well known study on doing nothing concluded that being alone for 15 mins with nothing to do but think is aversive. Here we examine skilful doing nothing in the form of Stillness Meditation. Meditation-naive adult participants (N = 165) were randomly allocated to 15 mins of Stillness Meditation or one of two active controls (Focused Attention and Audiobook). Stillness Meditation participants were found to have acquired the basic skill of doing nothing in the 15 min session. They typically reported the session was calm, pleasant, and easy, and their mean interbeat interval and heart-rate variability significantly increased relative to pre-session baseline. Scores for our primary measure of self-reported calm were significantly higher in the Focused Attention condition than for Stillness Meditation and Audiobook, but there were no significant differences for easiness, pleasantness, or the cardiac measures. The findings validate our Stillness Meditation protocol and provide evidence that skilful doing nothing is calming, pleasant, and easy — not aversive. The protocol constitutes a novel experimental tool that can be used in future studies to enable highly controlled investigations of pure consciousness, the state aimed for in the practice.