Is this not a form of meditation? I've never been able to keep a meditation habit, but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like staring at a wall would serve the same purpose.
As someone who's maintained a meditation practice since 2013, this is definitely meditation.
And by "maintain a practice", I mean it's more like something I return to with frequency and less a daily compulsion.
Focusing on the breathe or ambient sounds is "easy", and is precisely the reason meditation is seemingly difficult. The mind craves more than simplicity; for some this occurs after a few seconds, for others after a few minutes...it all depends on the day. Learning to observe when the mind wanders is one part of the practice. Labelling the quality of thought that caused the wandering (planning, worrying, visualizing, replaying, etc)and returning to the simpler act of focus on breathe or sounds is another part of the practice.
This article is very much the author discovering some variation of meditation; if they feel the need to "invent" something and share it in a blog post...then here's hoping it promotes more people to give it a shot and maybe it'll lead to at least one person developing a new practice for themselves.
staring at a wall is basically the zen practice of shikantaza [1], except you’re not staring, it’s more of an eyes half closed yet alert gaze. you don’t do anything, not even counting the breath. you just sit, that’s the entire practice. in my experience, the more you intellectualize it, the more difficult it becomes!
it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent.
In Zen Buddhism for example you are always striving to increase awareness, by constantly monitoring your internal monologue, pulling yourself back from day dreaming, expanding from focus on the breath to all near by sensation and phenomena.
True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.
> it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent.
> True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.
There are different forms of meditation and the one with the most evidence is also the easiest to do, mindfulness [1].
Very little intent is needed to get the majority of the benefits from meditation. I don't know that zen meditation offers more benefits, perhaps it does. But I do know that the "fake" forms of meditation are still beneficial.
I am a practicing Zen Buddhist and I wouldn’t agree with this description, at least not in my experience and the community that I’ve participated in.
Specifically I would say the concepts of “striving” and “intent” aren’t ones I would use.
What it actually is takes a little more to pin down (famously) but I would consider the concept of surrender to be more applicable. In fact I would say the absence of striving would be a good sign you’re on the right track.
I would consider staring at a wall without intent to be completely compatible with Zen practice.
This! The famous Zen Koan of the Master, the Professor, and the overfilled tea cup illustrates this beautifully...
I'd highly recommend checking it out! (Overall, the Blue Cliff record is a treasure trove of Koans, for anyone keen on the theme comes highly recommended)
The Zen approach, more than any other, seems to precisely emphasize the purity of 'sit down and shut up'. Shikantaza - literally means 'simply sitting'. It fundamentally involves no staring at walls, no koan to grasp and struggle over, even following your breath is not really a part of it... It really, really is 'just' sitting, in every systemic sense. A practice which has no clear goal or intent, instead focused on removing anything that could act as such, act as any tether over awareness. Awareness untethered, unbounded, past distinction.
Lao Tzu comes to mind... he said it much more succinctly: Wei - Wu Wei (do - not doing). The action of effortlessly being adrift with the flow, the action of surrender of your 'self' and the infinite schemes/designs/narratives that it builds (as someone in the discussion above here aptly suggested).
Another quote comes to mind from elsewhere:
'Let go your earthly tether, enter the void, empty and become wind.'
After reading your comment, I was reminded of my first and last visit to a zen meditation center where we had to meditate by staring at a wall sitting on some sort special cushion designed for this sort of meditation.
this is known as trataka meditation in the yogic tradition. trataka falls under the umbrella of kriya (purification) techniques which is why it helps with focus and intention
Yep. You don’t have to have to have your eyes closed to meditate. You can keep them open to focus on the flame of a candle or something else… in this case, a wall!
Seems like it would be better and easier to just take a walk instead. Whenever you feel information overload, it's time for a break: step outside, get some fresh air, stretch your legs, etc. Not a panacea, obviously, just common sense. Staring at a wall while forcing your mind to "think of nothing"... maybe try it once and see how it goes.
> Seems like it would be better and easier to just take a walk instead.
Unfortunately for many, and few managers will admit it even though it's true - there is a performative aspect to physical presence at work. Being away from your desk, idle on slack, etc to go take that walk is a problem in many work environments.
Probably one reason why SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE.
> Probably one reason why SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE.
SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE because it is (or was) an easy way to get a high paying job without an extended education period like becoming a doctor or lawyer. You could go straight into a six figure job after 4 years of college and even wear shorts to work, while your med school and lawyer friends were just getting started and had years of grunt work ahead of them and debt to pay off. SWEs are also disproportionately represented on online spaces like Reddit and forums where FIRE was popularized.
SWE jobs have been the most flexible I’ve had and seen across my career. I also had a manager who would police time spent in seats, but at every other job going for a walk was not an issue.
Contrast that with many of my friends in other careers who, still to this day, have stories about their managers imposing dress codes or forbidding headphones in the office. The average SWE is spoiled in workplace flexibility, even if there are exceptions.
Going for a run helped formulate so many of my best ideas and solved so many tricky problems I was facing. It was always one of three places: on a run, in the shower, or right before falling asleep.
Getting outside/walking can be good but there's still a lot of activity hitting your senses. People, cars, animals, sounds, or all of the above. If you can find a quiet park bench to sit and sort of defocus it might work. But more than just taking a break, when you "stare at a wall" you are engaging in deliberate sensory deprivation, which might be a better reset for your analytical mind. All that said, if taking a walk works for you, great!
You're suffering some sort of burnout, and you want to try some hack to be _more_ productive? Looking at a wall so I can crank out _more_ work? No, screw that. If I'm ever feeling that way, I'm going to try and work _less_ and take _more_ breaks.
Thanks for saying this. I live in a small, bleak, brown town just recovering from winter, and even despite this, getting out into nature and staring at the water flow past in the local river gives so much benefit.
Reading this article is a great reminder that we all need to disconnect and ground ourselves again. My brain (and likely most of ours) just can't handle 100% up-time all day and needs that break.
Tangent - I used to go cycling a lot, and required a lot less wall/river-staring then. Of the people I knew who I cycled with, 95% of us were coping with some kind of mental health issue in some way and had found our fix on the bike. I miss it.
I feel like this is on to something. I remember earlier in my career whenever I hit a really, really hard problem I'd have an instinct to try to stare of into the far distance (especially if there's like a distant skyline) and sort of zone-out. It was like shower-thinking or almost sleeping, and then come back with a deeper understanding of the problem.
Psychology research backs this up -- I think there are studies that show students who have a break between two classes before better in both classes (it's called interference).
Anyways it felt weird to me that our work never accommodated this, I think peak performance requires tuning the environment to the human biology, not management optics.
> Extrapolating that trend, we would be at about 87 GB worth of data today.
Throw in YouTube Shorts / TikTok etc and it makes me wonder if that estimate is drastically too low. We went from the information age, to the brainrot overload age, to let's both have brainrot and let computers think for us.
If that trend really wants to measure the quality of video etc. as well, it would definitely be way more. But that assumption seems very flawed to me, e.g. watching a full 4K movie would amount to way more data than scrolling through memes, even though the latter is way more of an attention-stealing activity.
I've always done this. As I got older I found out that I have really bad astigmatism. It takes a lot of work to keep my eyes in focus. It feels great to just zone out and "stare" at nothing, it's like a bunch of tiny muscles in my skull get to relax.
In a lot of these there could logically be someone sitting across from them making them laugh, but the woman with the cherry tomato in her fingers is just smiling for the love of the salad.
I could never do this. I would forget that I am staring at a wall within 30 seconds.
The suggestion of going for a walk at least means when you get absorbed by something in your mind, you are still out on a walk, You can't just turn around and start working on some new idea if you are out on a path somewhere.
Totally agree with the absorption thing. I've always found myself at a great calm, ever since I was a kid, from sitting en transit and looking out the window. A train ride is great for this reason. I think about things. I actively think about things. These things are often not daydreams, hard problems, rumination. I know what those feel like, and they are definitely different from depressive rumination or furiously working through tasks.
Again, I want to emphasize, that in none of these are you explicitly practicing the act of leashing in your mind.
All in all, I think the popular conception of meditation, Youtube-ized since the 2010s, has more nuance. Maybe people see this distinction and think it's obvious. To me, as someone who unironically feel like I'm net negative from self-help content than net-positive, this matters to me, personally.
If you want to get mystical, there are plenty of stories of deep Eastern masters practicing their craft every day. They certainly are thinking about their act - they are not trying their best to "get rid of all their thoughts". These are different activities, each with their own merits, both much different states than the common state of the modern man today.
That being said, meditation and the surrounding ideas have helped me overall, if not just because the specific influencers that I do hold as valuable had a good attitude when approaching it. But nowadays I'd imagine it's been silently incorporated into the very underlying forces they were trying to avoid (I have to meditate because it makes me a more improved human being compared to my peers!)
it could probably work as well to close your eyes instead of staring at a wall.
i've always found meditation types revolving around focusing on one thing (candle, wall etc), or nothing (empty mind) to be really hard. my mind just wanders and i end up super anxious, frustrated, and exhausted - resulting in me giving up pretty quickly
What I've found is that focusing on "everything" - ie sitting still and trying to observe your surroundings, your body, all sounds simultaneously seems to work much better. It's easier to get to a calm state this way.
Also, doing this while walking can also work - but perhaps easier to accidentally start thinking about something else
The idea as far as I understand it is that it’s the point exactly to sit with and process whatever comes up in your mind when you don’t distract yourself. The more often you do it, the more present you become, and the more ability you develop to discriminate between what really is there and what is your imagination/unprocessed memories of the past. The object you focus on merely serves as a still reference point from which you look at what else is showing up (feelings, thoughts, memories).
There will always be anxiety, otherwise you would have processed it already and not hurried away into other activities. It sure feels life-threatening, but as long as you don’t give in to the illusion and remind yourself that it is not, there is no rational reason to jump away. Breathing is a typical way to remind yourself that you are safe in the present environment. And the gift you receive is more and more clarity and a relaxed base state from which to face what’s next.
A lot of people are referencing meditation. Ultimately that's not a terribly well-defined word. It may match some broad ones, but there's a lot of narrow ones that it wouldn't.
If staring at a wall helps then don't let me stop you but I've sometimes done something very similar by just sitting in a chair without any cell phone, book, electronic item, etc. until I'm very bored. Not like "gritting my teeth, come on we can do another 15 minutes let's goooooo" like an exercise push, but definitely waiting past the first couple of twitches of boredom until it's a constant. It's kind of an interesting way to start a vacation, really helps disconnect from work very quickly. It can be some hours, though.
I do find that this only happens for me if I'm "doing nothing". I see others suggesting exercise, or something else, and those are absolutely good in their own way. But they are not the same thing as just doing nothing. It's still trying to do something and "use the time productively".
The downside is that the family just sees a guy sitting there "doing nothing" and can find a dozen reasons to interrupt... it's hard to do this when there are any other people around, and while I'm not an absolutist about a plan that can be summed up as "sit until you can't" without much loss, the interruptions do very quickly diminish the utility. There's a huge difference between sitting uninterrupted for an hour, and sitting for 15 minutes, putting away the dishes, sitting for 15 minutes, getting up to help reach something, sitting for 15 minutes, explaining that yes you really are sitting there just doing nothing would you please just let me do that, and sitting for 15 minutes.
This particular thing doesn't match "meditation" to me, because I'm not even doing the minimal thing meditation involves; I'm not concentrating on breathing, not trying to "not think", not trying to do anything. If the mind races, let it race until it is done racing[1]. In this point in particular this certainly doesn't match a lot of specific meditation traditions. If the thought of doing something occurs to you, that meditation technique of letting it pass through you until it disappears can be useful.
If meditation is a deliberate attempt to slow down, or a deliberate attempt to concentrate on some particular thing, or a deliberate attempt to empty one's mind, it still has a deliberative goal. If you're willing to broaden the term to encompass not even having that much of a plan, then I have no objection. But this feels to me too low level to even justify the term meditation as most people use it. If you're "trying" to do anything at all, then this isn't really what I'm talking about here. I'm not saying this is "better" than meditation, I'm more saying I'm not sure this even rises to that level, as low as some of them may be. It's really just "rest", a concept our century and culture has largely lost track of.
(Of course the obvious semantic argument about "well are you trying to not try, hmmmmmm?" is there and you are free to debate that in your own head, because like I said, I'm not trying to be absolutist about this. This isn't a program I'm proposing so much as an experience report. You do whatever and call it whatever and argue about definitions as much as you like.)
[1]: If your mind literally never stops this may not work for you... that said, in the 21st century, are you sure your mind never stops racing if you just let it run itself to exhaustion? Have you ever tried? It could be some hours, plural. Again, I fully acknowledge that some people reading this can say "yes". I acknowledge the existence of great neurodiversity. But if you've never tried just letting it run itself to exhaustion you may be surprised what happens if you can find the time to let it.
It’s amazing how people recommend very quickly: ”Go to walk in a forrest amongst green leaves, talk to the squirrels…” instead of practice you can do anywhere anytime that cost nothing.
Like do you understand that everyone is not rich working home next to a nice park or great forrest? Like many, many, many in this world people have to travel 1,5h to work middle of an urban metropolitan area with almost no trees and definitely no fresh air, and their living conditions are no improvement? But this practice or other types of meditation you can do even during your remote, or even in a solitary confinement? And if you get good at this hou can do small few minute/seconds of meditations or “wall staring” during the day?
I am very privileged and there’s deers walking 5min from where I live, but I don’t have the audacity to think everyone in this world are as lucky.
Whenever people describe the living conditions of your average person all I can think is what a colossal failure our system is, to imprison so many millions in such an utterly shit existence.
Like yes it's cool to have air conditioning and basically any food anywhere at any time, and many have transportation that can take us across the country at a moment's notice. There are marvels now that our ancestors would die of shock trying to comprehend. That said, it seems still that we've made a remarkably awful place for the vast majority of people to live and work in, more the latter than the former, while a handful of people basically live in a never-ending theme park.
> What I didn’t expect was how difficult it would be. Sitting for 5-10 minutes staring at a wall without thinking of anything is hard! I relate it somewhat to the feeling I have with working out.
So why not combine working out directly instead of staring at a wall? Ride a stationary bike at low zone 2/lower in my experience allow for uninterrupted focus during that time at work. While on bike, the mind shuns distraction and focus on "what's next" in the workstream (distraction includes HN, evidently I haven't gotten on the bike yet).
My homeopathic theory is that I have a total mental energy that is the sum of focused energy and a distracting energy. This distracting energy can be temporarily used at task at hand but it results in mental exhaustion, or left alone it leads to distraction seeking behavior. While on the bike, distracting energy is fully consumed by riding, allowing for focused energy stay focused. If I go above low zone 2, it starts eating into focused energy and I lose efficiency.
Zen meditation for an hour staring at a wall is a marathon that at the end results in a semi-psychedelic state for me.
Exercising and sitting b meditating are two related but seriously different things. Which is why there are many other types of meditation to practice (walking, working, silent, etc) but zen mostly considers sitting and looking at a wall the OG
basically reinventing breathing practices and calling it "wall staring" is peak 2026, but honestly - whatever gets you off the doom-scroll and into something resembling rest, go off
The same video showed up on my feed last week. I didn't try wall staring, but I did try a day (last Tuesday) with only a single screen active for the entire work day. I was extremely productive that day... but, and I know this is bad, I don't want set expectations too high. So here I type to you on a screen / device that should be turned off.
> A paper published in 2012 showed that in 2008 the average person was receiving 34 GB of information daily, with a daily information exposure growth rate of about 5.4% per year
The paper linked to justify this just talks about media that people consume which is growing. But that has nothing to do with the point this post is trying to make?
Your eyes "stream 4k video" anytime your eyelids are open regardless if you're watching a movie or looking at a wall? Why would me watching more videos say anything about how much information my brain processes?
I understand your point, but a slightly more positive reading might be that the quantity of information consumed, while perhaps unable to be precisely quantified, can be related to the type of content being perceived.
Staring at wall produces little information in and of itself, perhaps through reflection, but staring at a TV produces a load of information, most of which is useless like names of characters, their favorite dresses, what food is being eaten where, etc. You can learn a lot by just passively observing even "dumb" TV especially if it contains foreign content or skills like cooking or sports. Again, not saying all of it is relevant to your life, but that's a different issue.
I dunno I feel like brains are always going? It's not like if I'm staring at a wall my thoughts slow down vs if I'm watching a movie. If anything I'll be more "focused" on my thoughts so maybe they are more intense than the "shut brain down" effect of mindlessly consuming media? And I gave example of a wall, but what about scrolling tiktoks vs walking in the woods? Am I really processing more information scrolling tiktok than walking in nature? Hard to believe for me!
I don't think "Sitting in an office you sit in every day" or "Sitting in your living room" are the same amount of bandwidth/storage as "Travelling around the moon". I'm sure we have compression algorithms for this stuff and it's somewhat related to novelty.
I'm aware of an association between perception of time to number of photons received in the eyes.
These relate to both how much time the events appear to take subjectively as well as how well remembered they are or how long they feel retrospectively. As in there is an actual physiological explanation for "time flies when you're having fun".
There probably is something to also be said for attention too. Increased awareness and attention will undoubtedly use up more 'bandwidth' or 'storage' too.
Instead of dismissing it, perhaps just give it a try for 15 minutes. Couldn't possibly be worse than watching a mindnumbing 15minute youtube video / tv / reel-type content.
Maybe while riding on a stationary recumbent bike I suppose. I get one life on this earth no one is really going to convince me to spend time staring at walls.
Is this not a form of meditation? I've never been able to keep a meditation habit, but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like staring at a wall would serve the same purpose.
As someone who's maintained a meditation practice since 2013, this is definitely meditation.
And by "maintain a practice", I mean it's more like something I return to with frequency and less a daily compulsion.
Focusing on the breathe or ambient sounds is "easy", and is precisely the reason meditation is seemingly difficult. The mind craves more than simplicity; for some this occurs after a few seconds, for others after a few minutes...it all depends on the day. Learning to observe when the mind wanders is one part of the practice. Labelling the quality of thought that caused the wandering (planning, worrying, visualizing, replaying, etc)and returning to the simpler act of focus on breathe or sounds is another part of the practice.
This article is very much the author discovering some variation of meditation; if they feel the need to "invent" something and share it in a blog post...then here's hoping it promotes more people to give it a shot and maybe it'll lead to at least one person developing a new practice for themselves.
staring at a wall is basically the zen practice of shikantaza [1], except you’re not staring, it’s more of an eyes half closed yet alert gaze. you don’t do anything, not even counting the breath. you just sit, that’s the entire practice. in my experience, the more you intellectualize it, the more difficult it becomes!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza
Reminds me of the “Wallfacers” in Cixin Liu’s “The Dark Forest.” I believe the term was derived from that meditative practice you refer to.
Precisely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trāṭaka
Very powerful but takes much practice
it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent.
In Zen Buddhism for example you are always striving to increase awareness, by constantly monitoring your internal monologue, pulling yourself back from day dreaming, expanding from focus on the breath to all near by sensation and phenomena.
True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.
> it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent.
> True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.
There are different forms of meditation and the one with the most evidence is also the easiest to do, mindfulness [1].
Very little intent is needed to get the majority of the benefits from meditation. I don't know that zen meditation offers more benefits, perhaps it does. But I do know that the "fake" forms of meditation are still beneficial.
[1] https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation
No need to gate keep meditation. The wall stare does have intent: to increase focus and calm the mind.
I am a practicing Zen Buddhist and I wouldn’t agree with this description, at least not in my experience and the community that I’ve participated in.
Specifically I would say the concepts of “striving” and “intent” aren’t ones I would use.
What it actually is takes a little more to pin down (famously) but I would consider the concept of surrender to be more applicable. In fact I would say the absence of striving would be a good sign you’re on the right track.
I would consider staring at a wall without intent to be completely compatible with Zen practice.
But also. Is there really a 'true zen'?
I have heard of zen described as 'just sit down and shut up' and stare at a wall. With no goal, no purpose.
This! The famous Zen Koan of the Master, the Professor, and the overfilled tea cup illustrates this beautifully... I'd highly recommend checking it out! (Overall, the Blue Cliff record is a treasure trove of Koans, for anyone keen on the theme comes highly recommended)
The Zen approach, more than any other, seems to precisely emphasize the purity of 'sit down and shut up'. Shikantaza - literally means 'simply sitting'. It fundamentally involves no staring at walls, no koan to grasp and struggle over, even following your breath is not really a part of it... It really, really is 'just' sitting, in every systemic sense. A practice which has no clear goal or intent, instead focused on removing anything that could act as such, act as any tether over awareness. Awareness untethered, unbounded, past distinction.
Lao Tzu comes to mind... he said it much more succinctly: Wei - Wu Wei (do - not doing). The action of effortlessly being adrift with the flow, the action of surrender of your 'self' and the infinite schemes/designs/narratives that it builds (as someone in the discussion above here aptly suggested). Another quote comes to mind from elsewhere: 'Let go your earthly tether, enter the void, empty and become wind.'
After reading your comment, I was reminded of my first and last visit to a zen meditation center where we had to meditate by staring at a wall sitting on some sort special cushion designed for this sort of meditation.
I think your parallel is spot on!
this is known as trataka meditation in the yogic tradition. trataka falls under the umbrella of kriya (purification) techniques which is why it helps with focus and intention
Yep. You don’t have to have to have your eyes closed to meditate. You can keep them open to focus on the flame of a candle or something else… in this case, a wall!
It sounds exactly like meditation, but a boiled down, modern technique that doesn't use the word.
It's maybe more along the lines of some of the mindfulness protocols, which are a form of meditation.
There's one where you are at rest and slowly shift the focus of your gaze from near to middle distance to far away, and back.
It's supposed to be a grounding exercise to bring your mind back to a state of rest and just observing.
Blanking out is afaik the exact opposite of "mindfulness".
This is almost exactly like Transcendental Meditation, even down the to the length of time of ~20 minutes.
I was taught to aim for "mind blanking" when meditating, so does seem like it!
This is what I do when trying to sleep, and often wonder what’s the difference with meditation.
I predict this thread will now spiral into a dozen different definitions of meditation.
Seems like it would be better and easier to just take a walk instead. Whenever you feel information overload, it's time for a break: step outside, get some fresh air, stretch your legs, etc. Not a panacea, obviously, just common sense. Staring at a wall while forcing your mind to "think of nothing"... maybe try it once and see how it goes.
> Seems like it would be better and easier to just take a walk instead.
Unfortunately for many, and few managers will admit it even though it's true - there is a performative aspect to physical presence at work. Being away from your desk, idle on slack, etc to go take that walk is a problem in many work environments.
Probably one reason why SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE.
> Probably one reason why SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE.
SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE because it is (or was) an easy way to get a high paying job without an extended education period like becoming a doctor or lawyer. You could go straight into a six figure job after 4 years of college and even wear shorts to work, while your med school and lawyer friends were just getting started and had years of grunt work ahead of them and debt to pay off. SWEs are also disproportionately represented on online spaces like Reddit and forums where FIRE was popularized.
SWE jobs have been the most flexible I’ve had and seen across my career. I also had a manager who would police time spent in seats, but at every other job going for a walk was not an issue.
Contrast that with many of my friends in other careers who, still to this day, have stories about their managers imposing dress codes or forbidding headphones in the office. The average SWE is spoiled in workplace flexibility, even if there are exceptions.
"FIRE"???
This:? Financial Independence and Retire Early (FIRE) ?
I mean. Sure, who wouldn't want Financial Independence. Let me get right on that.
Kind of a stretch from staring at a wall.
Going for a run helped formulate so many of my best ideas and solved so many tricky problems I was facing. It was always one of three places: on a run, in the shower, or right before falling asleep.
Getting outside/walking can be good but there's still a lot of activity hitting your senses. People, cars, animals, sounds, or all of the above. If you can find a quiet park bench to sit and sort of defocus it might work. But more than just taking a break, when you "stare at a wall" you are engaging in deliberate sensory deprivation, which might be a better reset for your analytical mind. All that said, if taking a walk works for you, great!
Yup. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system because of the mild exercise. It also levels out your hormones such as insulin and cortisol.
I don't get this productivity hacking mindset.
You're suffering some sort of burnout, and you want to try some hack to be _more_ productive? Looking at a wall so I can crank out _more_ work? No, screw that. If I'm ever feeling that way, I'm going to try and work _less_ and take _more_ breaks.
What are you talking about? Dude is literally describing a break, just not a type of break that feeds the attention economy. Are you opposed to that?
Instead of a wall may I recommend trees, fresh air, and just enjoying it away from anything electrical.
I had a same issue and I found it helped to just step away and blank out in nature.
Also try delaying your first coffee to after the first hour of being awake.
Thanks for saying this. I live in a small, bleak, brown town just recovering from winter, and even despite this, getting out into nature and staring at the water flow past in the local river gives so much benefit.
Reading this article is a great reminder that we all need to disconnect and ground ourselves again. My brain (and likely most of ours) just can't handle 100% up-time all day and needs that break.
Tangent - I used to go cycling a lot, and required a lot less wall/river-staring then. Of the people I knew who I cycled with, 95% of us were coping with some kind of mental health issue in some way and had found our fix on the bike. I miss it.
I feel like this is on to something. I remember earlier in my career whenever I hit a really, really hard problem I'd have an instinct to try to stare of into the far distance (especially if there's like a distant skyline) and sort of zone-out. It was like shower-thinking or almost sleeping, and then come back with a deeper understanding of the problem.
Psychology research backs this up -- I think there are studies that show students who have a break between two classes before better in both classes (it's called interference).
Anyways it felt weird to me that our work never accommodated this, I think peak performance requires tuning the environment to the human biology, not management optics.
In case someone wants to look at a wall:
https://unsplash.com/photos/red-bricks-wall-XEsx2NVpqWY
Nice find. I'm going to print this and put it on my wall.
> Extrapolating that trend, we would be at about 87 GB worth of data today.
Throw in YouTube Shorts / TikTok etc and it makes me wonder if that estimate is drastically too low. We went from the information age, to the brainrot overload age, to let's both have brainrot and let computers think for us.
If that trend really wants to measure the quality of video etc. as well, it would definitely be way more. But that assumption seems very flawed to me, e.g. watching a full 4K movie would amount to way more data than scrolling through memes, even though the latter is way more of an attention-stealing activity.
I've always done this. As I got older I found out that I have really bad astigmatism. It takes a lot of work to keep my eyes in focus. It feels great to just zone out and "stare" at nothing, it's like a bunch of tiny muscles in my skull get to relax.
Loosely related, though I don't think Benjamin Bennett's intention was ever to improve focus/productivity
But it never ceases to amaze me the consistency and time spent sitting and smiling and other similar endeavors by Benjamin - https://www.youtube.com/@BenjaminBennetttt/streams
I thought it'd be the male version of https://www.thehairpin.com/women-laughing-alone-with-salad/
In a lot of these there could logically be someone sitting across from them making them laugh, but the woman with the cherry tomato in her fingers is just smiling for the love of the salad.
I could never do this. I would forget that I am staring at a wall within 30 seconds.
The suggestion of going for a walk at least means when you get absorbed by something in your mind, you are still out on a walk, You can't just turn around and start working on some new idea if you are out on a path somewhere.
Totally agree with the absorption thing. I've always found myself at a great calm, ever since I was a kid, from sitting en transit and looking out the window. A train ride is great for this reason. I think about things. I actively think about things. These things are often not daydreams, hard problems, rumination. I know what those feel like, and they are definitely different from depressive rumination or furiously working through tasks.
Again, I want to emphasize, that in none of these are you explicitly practicing the act of leashing in your mind.
All in all, I think the popular conception of meditation, Youtube-ized since the 2010s, has more nuance. Maybe people see this distinction and think it's obvious. To me, as someone who unironically feel like I'm net negative from self-help content than net-positive, this matters to me, personally.
If you want to get mystical, there are plenty of stories of deep Eastern masters practicing their craft every day. They certainly are thinking about their act - they are not trying their best to "get rid of all their thoughts". These are different activities, each with their own merits, both much different states than the common state of the modern man today.
That being said, meditation and the surrounding ideas have helped me overall, if not just because the specific influencers that I do hold as valuable had a good attitude when approaching it. But nowadays I'd imagine it's been silently incorporated into the very underlying forces they were trying to avoid (I have to meditate because it makes me a more improved human being compared to my peers!)
@aselimov3 Thank you for the reminder! This is something I used to do all the time when I was younger, and I have gotten away from it. Very helpful.
this sure seems like meditation.
it could probably work as well to close your eyes instead of staring at a wall.
i've always found meditation types revolving around focusing on one thing (candle, wall etc), or nothing (empty mind) to be really hard. my mind just wanders and i end up super anxious, frustrated, and exhausted - resulting in me giving up pretty quickly
What I've found is that focusing on "everything" - ie sitting still and trying to observe your surroundings, your body, all sounds simultaneously seems to work much better. It's easier to get to a calm state this way.
Also, doing this while walking can also work - but perhaps easier to accidentally start thinking about something else
The idea as far as I understand it is that it’s the point exactly to sit with and process whatever comes up in your mind when you don’t distract yourself. The more often you do it, the more present you become, and the more ability you develop to discriminate between what really is there and what is your imagination/unprocessed memories of the past. The object you focus on merely serves as a still reference point from which you look at what else is showing up (feelings, thoughts, memories).
There will always be anxiety, otherwise you would have processed it already and not hurried away into other activities. It sure feels life-threatening, but as long as you don’t give in to the illusion and remind yourself that it is not, there is no rational reason to jump away. Breathing is a typical way to remind yourself that you are safe in the present environment. And the gift you receive is more and more clarity and a relaxed base state from which to face what’s next.
Goddamn this post reads like my daily challenge / struggle cycle just about every day. I’m gonna go stare at some walls!
Theta re reinventing meditation from first principles
I have to say that the reworded title is what made me read the article. It is almost poetic. I could see it being a title of a campy movie.
John Fogerty used this method to write his early CCR albums. I thought it odd. Maybe I will try this!
A lot of people are referencing meditation. Ultimately that's not a terribly well-defined word. It may match some broad ones, but there's a lot of narrow ones that it wouldn't.
If staring at a wall helps then don't let me stop you but I've sometimes done something very similar by just sitting in a chair without any cell phone, book, electronic item, etc. until I'm very bored. Not like "gritting my teeth, come on we can do another 15 minutes let's goooooo" like an exercise push, but definitely waiting past the first couple of twitches of boredom until it's a constant. It's kind of an interesting way to start a vacation, really helps disconnect from work very quickly. It can be some hours, though.
I do find that this only happens for me if I'm "doing nothing". I see others suggesting exercise, or something else, and those are absolutely good in their own way. But they are not the same thing as just doing nothing. It's still trying to do something and "use the time productively".
The downside is that the family just sees a guy sitting there "doing nothing" and can find a dozen reasons to interrupt... it's hard to do this when there are any other people around, and while I'm not an absolutist about a plan that can be summed up as "sit until you can't" without much loss, the interruptions do very quickly diminish the utility. There's a huge difference between sitting uninterrupted for an hour, and sitting for 15 minutes, putting away the dishes, sitting for 15 minutes, getting up to help reach something, sitting for 15 minutes, explaining that yes you really are sitting there just doing nothing would you please just let me do that, and sitting for 15 minutes.
This particular thing doesn't match "meditation" to me, because I'm not even doing the minimal thing meditation involves; I'm not concentrating on breathing, not trying to "not think", not trying to do anything. If the mind races, let it race until it is done racing[1]. In this point in particular this certainly doesn't match a lot of specific meditation traditions. If the thought of doing something occurs to you, that meditation technique of letting it pass through you until it disappears can be useful.
If meditation is a deliberate attempt to slow down, or a deliberate attempt to concentrate on some particular thing, or a deliberate attempt to empty one's mind, it still has a deliberative goal. If you're willing to broaden the term to encompass not even having that much of a plan, then I have no objection. But this feels to me too low level to even justify the term meditation as most people use it. If you're "trying" to do anything at all, then this isn't really what I'm talking about here. I'm not saying this is "better" than meditation, I'm more saying I'm not sure this even rises to that level, as low as some of them may be. It's really just "rest", a concept our century and culture has largely lost track of.
(Of course the obvious semantic argument about "well are you trying to not try, hmmmmmm?" is there and you are free to debate that in your own head, because like I said, I'm not trying to be absolutist about this. This isn't a program I'm proposing so much as an experience report. You do whatever and call it whatever and argue about definitions as much as you like.)
[1]: If your mind literally never stops this may not work for you... that said, in the 21st century, are you sure your mind never stops racing if you just let it run itself to exhaustion? Have you ever tried? It could be some hours, plural. Again, I fully acknowledge that some people reading this can say "yes". I acknowledge the existence of great neurodiversity. But if you've never tried just letting it run itself to exhaustion you may be surprised what happens if you can find the time to let it.
It’s amazing how people recommend very quickly: ”Go to walk in a forrest amongst green leaves, talk to the squirrels…” instead of practice you can do anywhere anytime that cost nothing.
Like do you understand that everyone is not rich working home next to a nice park or great forrest? Like many, many, many in this world people have to travel 1,5h to work middle of an urban metropolitan area with almost no trees and definitely no fresh air, and their living conditions are no improvement? But this practice or other types of meditation you can do even during your remote, or even in a solitary confinement? And if you get good at this hou can do small few minute/seconds of meditations or “wall staring” during the day?
I am very privileged and there’s deers walking 5min from where I live, but I don’t have the audacity to think everyone in this world are as lucky.
Is having a park or woods nearby a symbol of wealth? Do you live in the middle of the Sahara desert?
Whenever people describe the living conditions of your average person all I can think is what a colossal failure our system is, to imprison so many millions in such an utterly shit existence.
Like yes it's cool to have air conditioning and basically any food anywhere at any time, and many have transportation that can take us across the country at a moment's notice. There are marvels now that our ancestors would die of shock trying to comprehend. That said, it seems still that we've made a remarkably awful place for the vast majority of people to live and work in, more the latter than the former, while a handful of people basically live in a never-ending theme park.
A wall or a goat?
> What I didn’t expect was how difficult it would be. Sitting for 5-10 minutes staring at a wall without thinking of anything is hard! I relate it somewhat to the feeling I have with working out.
So why not combine working out directly instead of staring at a wall? Ride a stationary bike at low zone 2/lower in my experience allow for uninterrupted focus during that time at work. While on bike, the mind shuns distraction and focus on "what's next" in the workstream (distraction includes HN, evidently I haven't gotten on the bike yet).
My homeopathic theory is that I have a total mental energy that is the sum of focused energy and a distracting energy. This distracting energy can be temporarily used at task at hand but it results in mental exhaustion, or left alone it leads to distraction seeking behavior. While on the bike, distracting energy is fully consumed by riding, allowing for focused energy stay focused. If I go above low zone 2, it starts eating into focused energy and I lose efficiency.
Zen meditation for an hour staring at a wall is a marathon that at the end results in a semi-psychedelic state for me.
Exercising and sitting b meditating are two related but seriously different things. Which is why there are many other types of meditation to practice (walking, working, silent, etc) but zen mostly considers sitting and looking at a wall the OG
a large piece of modern / abstract art works just as well, without it needing to be a blank wall
basically reinventing breathing practices and calling it "wall staring" is peak 2026, but honestly - whatever gets you off the doom-scroll and into something resembling rest, go off
Sounds like someone reinvented mindfulness
They made instructions for mindfulness direct and unambiguous which is great.
I’d subtract a wall and substitute the breathe.
But a wall would probably do just fine as well.
The same video showed up on my feed last week. I didn't try wall staring, but I did try a day (last Tuesday) with only a single screen active for the entire work day. I was extremely productive that day... but, and I know this is bad, I don't want set expectations too high. So here I type to you on a screen / device that should be turned off.
I went from a single monitor setup to triple monitor a decade ago, and then back down to single monitor.
It helps me focus to have just one active “feed”. And I put my phone away when I work to eliminate that screen as potential distraction.
Where I still kinda “fail” is during natural downtime. Like if I’m waiting somewhere, e.g the Dr office, I’ll pull out my phone and browse mindlessly.
> A paper published in 2012 showed that in 2008 the average person was receiving 34 GB of information daily, with a daily information exposure growth rate of about 5.4% per year
The paper linked to justify this just talks about media that people consume which is growing. But that has nothing to do with the point this post is trying to make?
Your eyes "stream 4k video" anytime your eyelids are open regardless if you're watching a movie or looking at a wall? Why would me watching more videos say anything about how much information my brain processes?
I understand your point, but a slightly more positive reading might be that the quantity of information consumed, while perhaps unable to be precisely quantified, can be related to the type of content being perceived.
Staring at wall produces little information in and of itself, perhaps through reflection, but staring at a TV produces a load of information, most of which is useless like names of characters, their favorite dresses, what food is being eaten where, etc. You can learn a lot by just passively observing even "dumb" TV especially if it contains foreign content or skills like cooking or sports. Again, not saying all of it is relevant to your life, but that's a different issue.
I dunno I feel like brains are always going? It's not like if I'm staring at a wall my thoughts slow down vs if I'm watching a movie. If anything I'll be more "focused" on my thoughts so maybe they are more intense than the "shut brain down" effect of mindlessly consuming media? And I gave example of a wall, but what about scrolling tiktoks vs walking in the woods? Am I really processing more information scrolling tiktok than walking in nature? Hard to believe for me!
Obviously the blank wall compresses better
I don't think "Sitting in an office you sit in every day" or "Sitting in your living room" are the same amount of bandwidth/storage as "Travelling around the moon". I'm sure we have compression algorithms for this stuff and it's somewhat related to novelty.
I'm aware of an association between perception of time to number of photons received in the eyes.
These relate to both how much time the events appear to take subjectively as well as how well remembered they are or how long they feel retrospectively. As in there is an actual physiological explanation for "time flies when you're having fun".
There probably is something to also be said for attention too. Increased awareness and attention will undoubtedly use up more 'bandwidth' or 'storage' too.
I’d venture that there’s less to process staring at a wall. Unless you’ve got exciting walls in your parts.
See also:
Show HN: Improve cognitive focus in 1 minute (oneminutefocus.com) 741 points by junetic on Feb 7, 2024 | 287 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39288039
https://oneminutefocus.com/
No thank you, my time on Earth is limited.
Yeah, you're only here for a short while, so why not make the worst of it?
Instead of dismissing it, perhaps just give it a try for 15 minutes. Couldn't possibly be worse than watching a mindnumbing 15minute youtube video / tv / reel-type content.
Maybe while riding on a stationary recumbent bike I suppose. I get one life on this earth no one is really going to convince me to spend time staring at walls.
The title could have been "People who stare at walls". The subtle patriarchy of hacker news users peeps up it's head once in a while.
But then it would not have been a "Pune" or "play on words"
I think it's supposed to be a riff on "men who state at goats".