I believe there are two ways to spend the occasional moments of down time during the day.
1. You can do something that will “slow down” time and creates a restful pause.
2. You can do something that will speed time up. Something that gets you lost into a black hole where you emerge on the other side not knowing how long you were out of it.
Shawn Blanc describes, simply, his deliberation in spending the extra time he finds at home during the shelter-in-place.
Whether out of boredom or avoidance, many of us indulge in time-sinks. As Shawn describes, we can lose hours, even the major part of a day watching streaming shows or scrolling endlessly through social sites, living in a constantly distracted state. Then it becomes a habit, and one’s default state of awakeness.
This makes for two problems.
One, the mind does its best to bring reality into our consciousness. If you’re distracting yourself from being bored, occasionally you might find your mind suddenly blank, or suddenly aware of a hole. If you’re avoiding, it might emerge as a vague recurring thought during the day or in some garbled form in a dream/nightmare. Either way, it’s not something you can will away.
Two, the constant low-effort entertainment strengthens reward pathways in your brain, leading to what is essentially an addiction. This is well-known by now:
… they reinforce the association between a particular stimulus or sequence of behaviors and the feel-good reward that follows. Every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward, these associations become stronger through a process called long-term potentiation. This process strengthens frequently used connections between brain cells called neurons by increasing the intensity at which they respond to particular stimuli.
But it also means that your brain will find it difficult to focus, whether at work or during a conversation. Your lowered self-control will make it that much more difficult to, say, resist over-indulging in food or drink. This is hard to reverse because the deliberation that will be needed itself requires attention.
Excluding the case of people who distract themselves to avoid facing trauma, we will have to learn/re-learn being okay again with the passing of time one second every second, not worm-holing our way through our days. Our very quality of life depends on it.