Modern life treats every spare minute as an opportunity. Waiting in line means checking email, a commute means a podcast and a lunch break means catching up on messages out of habit. Doing nothing has quietly become something to feel guilty about, a sign of laziness or a lack of ambition.

Yet some of the most capable thinkers have habits that look, from the outside, completely useless. They stare out of windows. They step away from important work at inconvenient moments. They let whole stretches of the day pass without filling them.

This isn’t about slacking off. It’s about understanding something the brain has always known: thinking needs space, and intelligence depends as much on how we rest our attention as on how hard we apply it . Here are two “useless” habits that tend to signal a mind working exactly as it should.

Habit 1: They Carve Out ‘Pockets Of Stillness’

Pockets of stillness are the small, unstructured gaps scattered through a day. They might be the five minutes on a bench before a meeting or the train ride spent looking out the window instead of at a screen. They can be as small as the pause after finishing a task, before starting the next one.

Picture two people waiting for a coffee order. One pulls out a phone within seconds, scrolling headlines, answering a message and glancing at a notification. The other simply stands there, watching the room and letting their thoughts drift. The first looks efficient. The second looks idle. But only one of them is giving their brain a chance to catch up.

Most people fill these gaps by reflex, largely because we expect them to be boring. Yet a 2022 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General found that people consistently underestimate how enjoyable and engaging it is to simply sit with their thoughts. We reach for a phone to escape a silence we’d likely enjoy more than we expect. The sharpest thinkers often tolerate that silence and even seek it out, not because they have less on their minds, but because they sense that stillness is where their thinking gets sorted.

That instinct has a neurological basis. When the brain stops focusing on the outside world, a system neuroscientists call the default mode network becomes more active. This network is tied to imagination, self-reflection, planning and the ability to connect ideas that seem unrelated. It’s the part of the mind that replays a conversation and suddenly understands what the other person meant, or links an idea from a book to a problem at work.

Think of the mind as a snow globe. Every notification, message and headline gives it another shake. A pocket of stillness is the moment it’s set down and allowed to settle, and only then can you see clearly what’s inside.

There’s a memory benefit, too. A 2025 meta-analysis published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that “wakeful rest,” a few minutes of quiet, undistracted rest after learning something, can help the brain consolidate new memories. A pocket of stillness gives new information a chance to settle instead of being immediately overwritten by the next input.

One nuance matters here. Not all mind-wandering is helpful. Involuntary, ruminative drifting, such as replaying a mistake or bracing for worst-case scenarios, is associated with lower mood. The benefit seems to come from letting the mind roam freely and with some curiosity, rather than being pulled into worry.

Habit 2: They Take Regular ‘Mental Recess’

Remember recess at school? It wasn’t a break from learning so much as a reset that made the next lesson possible. Mental recess is the adult version: deliberately detaching from demanding work so that you can return to it sharper.

This can look counterproductive. Imagine someone who has spent an hour trying to write the opening of an important proposal. Every draft feels wrong. Instead of forcing a fifth attempt, they close the laptop and go for a walk. Twenty minutes later, somewhere between the corner store and home, the right first sentence arrives fully formed.

Psychologists call this the incubation effect. When we set a problem aside, the mind may keep working on it in the background. Stepping away also loosens our grip on the unhelpful assumptions we’ve been stuck on. The longer we stare at a problem, the more we tend to see it in the same narrow way, and distance breaks that pattern.

A 2025 study published in Scientific Reports found that mind-wandering during a break from a creative writing task predicted a boost in creativity afterward, suggesting the break works best when it leaves the mind free to roam.

History is full of examples. The mathematician Henri Poincaré famously described the solution to a problem he’d struggled with arriving as he stepped onto a bus during a trip, at a moment when he wasn’t thinking about mathematics at all. It’s the same reason so many people report their best ideas coming in the shower rather than at the desk.

Research on recovery from work points in the same direction. A 2022 review published in Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior concluded that unwinding from everyday work is important for sustaining well-being, motivation and job performance.

People who genuinely switch off, mentally as well as physically, tend to report less exhaustion and often perform better when they return. Being physically away from the office while mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s meeting doesn’t count. The recess has to be real.

The key word is deliberate. Mental recess isn’t procrastination, where we avoid a task because it feels unpleasant and return to it just as stuck. It’s a strategic pause, taken because the person recognizes that more effort on a tired mind yields diminishing returns. The intelligent move isn’t always to push through. Often, it’s knowing exactly when to step away.

Still thinking about work long after you’ve logged off? Find out how much of your attention you’re leaving behind with this science-inspired test: Attention Residue Quiz