I Learned a Word That Broke My Brain a Little

I am a systems thinker.

I connect dots. I look for patterns beneath patterns. I turn what I learn into language other people can use.

So when I first heard the Dutch word niksen — pronounced NICK-sen — my immediate instinct was to systematize it.

Niksen is the practice before the Right-Braining practice.

Doing nothing creates space for better thinking.

Rest without purpose leads to insight.

I had half a framework built before I realized I was doing exactly what niksen warns against: turning stillness into an assignment.

Because niksen is not a strategy.

It is not a productivity hack wearing rest’s clothing.

It is doing nothing without requiring the nothing to justify itself.

And in the culture I live in — maybe the one you live in too — that might be the most radical thing I have encountered in a long time.

The Attention Problem We No Longer Notice

I have been studying attention lately. Not because it is trendy, but because I am building Shirley’s 2 Cents around something I call Right-Braining — the practice of carrying a meaningful question through your life without immediately Googling it, asking AI, or borrowing someone else’s conclusion.

And the deeper I go, the clearer it becomes: we are asking our brains to function inside an environment they were never designed for.

Our technology has changed rapidly. We can move between messages, videos, emails, headlines, work documents, podcasts, social media posts, and AI conversations within minutes. We call this multitasking.

But we are not multitasking.

We are task-switching. Rapidly. Constantly. And those switches are not free.

Research on task switching has repeatedly found that switching creates performance costs, even when people have practiced doing it. Early research on heavy media multitaskers also found that they were often less effective at filtering irrelevant information and managing competing streams of input. (The relationship between media habits and cognition is complex — but the core finding holds: access has expanded much faster than our capacity to give everything meaningful attention.)

We can open thirty tabs.

That does not mean we can deeply process thirty things.

We can receive hundreds of pieces of information in one day.

That does not mean our minds have had time to understand, organize, question, or integrate them.

“We are not necessarily unintelligent. We are not necessarily lazy. We may simply be cognitively crowded.”

And here is what makes it dangerous: attention overload can become normal.

We become accustomed to checking our phones during conversations. To watching television while scrolling. To listening to something while working on something else. To reaching for stimulation the moment there is silence.

Eventually, an uninterrupted moment feels uncomfortable.

Rest feels like boredom.

Stillness feels like wasting time.

Doing only one thing feels unproductive.

And because everyone around us is functioning similarly, we may not recognize how fragmented our attention has become.

We just know we are tired. Irritable. Unable to finish a thought. Full of information, but unsure what we actually think.

The Sleep Connection Nobody Treats Seriously Enough

The discussion I was watching about attention also emphasized something that sounds obvious but is rarely treated with the seriousness it deserves:

Our ability to pay attention is deeply connected to sleep.

Sleep is not simply the period when we stop being productive. It supports memory consolidation, learning, cognitive functioning, and emotional processing. Research has linked inadequate sleep with increased emotional reactivity and weaker communication between parts of the brain involved in emotional responses and regulation.

That means sleep affects more than whether we feel physically tired.

It affects our patience. Our judgment. Our ability to regulate our responses. Our capacity to interpret what is happening around us accurately. Our ability to practice emotional intelligence instead of simply knowing what emotional intelligence is.

One fact from the research stopped me cold.

A frequently cited study comparing fatigue with alcohol-related impairment found that after approximately seventeen hours awake, participants’ cognitive and psychomotor performance was comparable to performance at a blood alcohol concentration of about 0.05 percent. After twenty-four hours awake, the estimated impairment was comparable to approximately 0.10 percent.

Think about that.

We may be trying to make wise decisions, regulate our emotions, lead people, care for our families, analyze information, and discern what is true — while operating from a brain that has not been adequately restored.

And then we blame ourselves for not functioning well.

That is why sleep routines matter. Maintaining a reasonably consistent bedtime and wake time, creating a cool, dark, quiet sleeping environment, and reducing bright light and stimulating screen use close to bedtime are among the healthy sleep habits recommended by the National Institutes of Health.

This does not mean there is one perfect bedtime or one routine that works for everyone.

It means our attention is not separate from the way we care for our bodies.

We cannot discuss reclaiming attention while treating sleep as an inconvenience.

What Niksen Actually Is (And What It Is Not)

Niksen is not sleep.

It is not meditation.

It is not journaling.

It is not reading.

It is not watching a documentary so we can learn something.

It is not going for a walk because we need to hit ten thousand steps.

It is not resting so that we can return to work and produce more.

Niksen is doing nothing without requiring the nothing to justify itself.

It may look like sitting by a window. Staring at the ceiling. Watching the trees move. Drinking a cup of coffee without doing anything else. Simply allowing your mind to wander without directing it toward a particular outcome.

Unlike mindfulness, which usually asks us to bring focused awareness to the present moment, niksen gives the mind permission to drift.

And that may be the most difficult part.

We live in a culture that knows how to turn almost anything into an assignment:

* Rest so you can become more productive.

* Walk so you can burn calories.

* Meditate so you can perform better.

* Journal so you can reach your goals.

* Sit quietly so you can generate your next great idea.

Even our stillness is expected to produce something.

Niksen challenges that expectation. The practice is not supposed to come with a required outcome. It is simply permission to stop filling every available space.

I will be honest: that is difficult for me. I naturally want to connect the dots. I can easily take a practice about doing nothing and turn it into a structured five-step process for becoming more insightful.

Which would mean I had missed the point entirely.

Doing Nothing Is Not the Same as Nothing Happening

When we stop actively directing every moment, the mind does not necessarily become blank.

It may wander.

It may revisit unfinished thoughts.

It may connect ideas we had not consciously placed together.

It may notice something we have been too occupied to recognize.

One study found that a simple, undemanding task that allowed the mind to wander was associated with improved performance on a previously encountered creative problem. That does not mean every wandering thought will produce insight, or that staring through a window guarantees a breakthrough. Mind-wandering can also become rumination, especially when we are already distressed.

But it does suggest that an undirected mind is not necessarily a useless mind.

Something may be happening beneath our conscious effort.

The challenge is allowing that process to exist without demanding that it produce a result on schedule.

Niksen Is Not Right-Braining (And That Distinction Matters)

I want to make something clear, because I have been talking about both ideas and they are easy to conflate.

Niksen and Right-Braining are connected, but they are not the same practice.

One makes room. The other gives us something to notice after the room exists.

That is why I think of niksen as the practice before the practice.

We May Need Space Before We Need Another Question

When I created Right-Braining, I said it would be a weekly practice of asking questions that cannot be Googled.

But I am realizing that asking better questions is only part of the work.

We also need somewhere inside ourselves for those questions to land.

If every silent moment is filled with a podcast, a notification, a video, a headline, a conversation, or another person’s conclusion, we may receive the question without ever truly encountering it.

“We cannot carry a question if we never put anything else down.”

That may be why this work begins with more than curiosity.

It begins with capacity.

With sleep.

With space.

With moments that are not being claimed by someone or something outside of us.

With relearning how to exist without immediately consuming.

This Is Not About Rejecting the Modern World

Let me be explicit about something, because I know how these conversations can sound.

I use AI. I use social media. I watch videos. I listen to podcasts. I love information.

We cannot reverse the world we live in, nor do I want to.

But we can become more intentional about how we live inside it.

We can stop pretending that unlimited access creates unlimited capacity.

We can notice when our minds are crowded.

We can protect our sleep more seriously.

We can create small stretches of unoccupied attention.

We can remember that boredom is not always an emergency.

We can let a thought finish before inviting the entire internet into it.

We can come back to ourselves.

The 10-Minute Niksen Experiment

At some point this week, give yourself ten minutes of niksen.

Not ten minutes of meditation.

Not ten minutes of journaling.

Not ten minutes of planning.

Not ten minutes of scrolling while calling it rest.

Here is exactly what to do:

* Put your phone in another room.

* Sit somewhere — by a window, on a chair, on your floor.

* Do not journal. Do not meditate. Do not plan.

* Let your eyes rest on the room. Let your mind drift. No destination required.

* When the 10 minutes end, do not evaluate whether it “worked.”

That’s it. That’s the practice.

For ten minutes, allow nothing to be required of you.

Then leave the moment alone.

The Question to Carry

When was the last time you did nothing without needing the nothing to produce something?

Do not rush to answer.

Notice whether the idea makes you uncomfortable.

Notice whether you immediately begin calculating what you could gain from it.

Notice whether rest feels irresponsible unless you can justify it.

Notice what becomes audible when nothing else is asking for your attention.

Niksen creates the silence.

Right-Braining helps us listen differently.

Welcome back to Shirley’s 2 Cents.

That’s just my two cents.

Now, go create one thought that wasn’t given to you today.

About the Author

Shirley L.A. Brooks is an author, executive coach, business advisor, and Founder of YSWS Growth Firm. Her work is shaped by twenty-three years inside global logistics and other high-consequence systems, where she learned to recognize complexity, anticipate breakdowns, and notice the patterns others often overlook.

She is the author of Outsourced Judgment, The Hidden Cost of Quiet Leadership, and Laid Off, Passed Over, or Ready to Pivot, as well as two editions of The Quiet Leadership Journal. Across her books, speaking, advisory work, and Shirley’s 2 Cents, she explores quiet leadership, discernment, attention, agency, AI, work, culture, and what it means to remain deeply human in a rapidly changing world.

Through the Right-Braining Practice, Shirley invites people to ask better questions, reclaim their attention, and become authors of their own thinking again.

“My discernment is my authority. And so is yours.”

Deeper Reading & Resources

If you want to go further, here is what I have been reading and watching:

* “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Odell — A deeper philosophical exploration of refusing the demand to be constantly productive. Odell’s argument about “context collapse” changed how I think about public space and attention.

* “Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention” by Johann Hari — A journalistic investigation into the forces fragmenting our attention, from technology design to nutrition to pollution.

* NIH: Healthy Sleep Habits — The National Institutes of Health’s evidence-based recommendations for sleep hygiene, including consistent bedtimes, environment optimization, and screen reduction. (sleepfoundation.org and nih.gov are good starting points.)

* Task-Switching Research — Look for work by David Meyer and Jeffrey Evans on multitasking costs, and Clifford Nass‘s early research on media multitaskers and cognitive filtering. The field has evolved, but these studies established the foundational finding that switching carries a cost.

* Mind-Wandering and Creativity — The study I referenced about undemanding tasks and creative problem solving connects to the broader literature on incubation effects in creativity research. Benedek et al. and the work on default mode network activity during rest are relevant here.

* Sleep Deprivation and Impairment — The study comparing wakefulness to BAC levels is often attributed to Williamson & Feyer (2000) and related research on occupational fatigue. The precise figures vary by study, but the 17-hour / 0.05% and 24-hour / 0.10% estimates are well-established in the literature.

What About You?

I am genuinely curious:

When was the last time you did nothing without needing it to produce something?

Does the idea of niksen make you feel relieved, anxious, skeptical, or intrigued?

Drop a comment. I read every single one.

And if this piece gave you permission you did not know you needed, consider forwarding it to someone who might need it too.

Shirley

Shirley’s 2 Cents

niksen, Dutch doing nothing, attention span, right braining, cognitive overload, sleep and brain, task switching, mind wandering, burnout recovery, intentional rest, slow living, digital wellness, deep work, create more than consume, philosophy of rest, attention economy

#Niksen #DoingNothing #AttentionSpan #RightBraining #MentalClarity #SlowLiving #IntentionalLiving #DeepWork #BurnoutRecovery #MindWandering #SleepAndBrain #InformationOverload #My2Cents #CreateMoreThanConsume #PhilosophyOfRest #DigitalWellness #CognitiveLoad #RestWithoutGuilt

Welcome to this week’s practice.

Have you ever lost something and not realized that was what happened until you found it again?

That is how I feel about my voice.

I haven’t written on Substack since May. If I’m honest, I thought I had lost my inspiration. I thought maybe I had run out of things to say, which would be strange considering how much writing I actually do.

I have written multiple books this year. I have built websites, developed business ideas, worked with AI, thought deeply about leadership, and created more words than I could begin to count.

So I had not stopped writing.

But Substack has always been different for me.

This has been my heart-connection space. The place where I write because something has been sitting with me, stirring in me, or asking me to examine it more closely.

And for the past few months, I could not figure out what I felt connected enough to say.

I had ideas. I could have written commentary on current events. I could have talked about AI, leadership, faith, burnout, culture, work, womanhood, or any number of things I care about.

But having a good topic is not the same as having a heart connection to it.

Without that connection, even a perfectly good idea can feel empty.

So I paused.

At first, I thought the pause meant something was wrong. Now I wonder whether it was necessary.

Maybe I needed to stop producing long enough to notice what I was missing.

We have become very good at the how

The idea for Right-Braining came to me while I was watching something about how the two hemispheres of the brain attend to the world differently.

I am not using “Right-Braining” as a scientific diagnosis. I am not claiming that one side of the brain is intelligent while the other is creative, or that one hemisphere is somehow better than the other.

This is simply the language I am using for a practice.

What caught my attention was the suggestion that one way of engaging with life is especially useful for understanding the how, while another helps us remain connected to the why.

And I started wondering whether we have become exceptionally good at the how while becoming less practiced at the why.

We know how to become more productive.

How to lose weight.

How to build a business.

How to market ourselves.

How to grow on social media.

How to use AI.

How to optimize our mornings, organize our calendars, improve our habits, and turn nearly every part of life into a system.

And when we do not know how, we can find someone ready to explain it in a podcast, a video, a course, a post, a book, a thread, or a ten-step checklist.

We can Google almost anything we want to know.

But I started wondering how often we stop to ask:

Why does this matter to me?

Why do I believe this?

Why am I giving this my attention?

Why do I want this?

Why have I accepted this conclusion?

Why does this person’s opinion carry so much weight in my life?

Is this actually what I think, or is it simply the thought I have heard repeated most often?

Those are not always questions the internet can answer for us.

In fact, the moment we search for someone else’s answer, we may interrupt the process of discovering our own.

I remember when wondering lasted longer

I was born in 1979.

I remember life before smartphones, social media, Google, streaming platforms, and information following us into every room.

I remember going to the library.

I remember looking through an encyclopedia.

I remember wondering about something and not being able to resolve the question within thirty seconds.

Sometimes you forgot the question.

Sometimes you asked another person.

Sometimes you sat with it.

Sometimes you created your own theory, even if it was completely wrong.

But the space between the question and the answer existed.

That space gave imagination, curiosity, observation, and original thought somewhere to live.

My son was born in 2007, right as the world was entering another stage of digital life. I do not believe phones, social media, or technology are solely responsible for everything happening around us. Life is never that simple.

But I have watched the shift.

I have watched access become constant.

I have watched boredom become something we are expected to eliminate immediately.

I have watched attention become a commodity companies compete to capture.

I have watched the distance between curiosity and consumption almost disappear.

And as a parent, I have wondered what that means for my son’s generation. I have also had to ask what it means for mine.

Because this is not simply a problem affecting young people.

We are all being trained by the same environment.

The platforms may be different. The content may be different. But many of us have become accustomed to reaching outward the moment there is an empty space within us.

A question appears, and we search.

A feeling appears, and we scroll.

A moment of boredom appears, and we reach for the phone.

A thought begins to form, and before it finishes, we invite a hundred other voices into the room.

Our attention is almost always directed without.

Toward the feed.

Toward the comments.

Toward the headlines.

Toward the opinions.

Toward what everyone else is saying, doing, buying, fearing, celebrating, or condemning.

And somewhere in all of that outward attention, it becomes harder to hear what is happening within.

This is not an anti-technology movement

I want to be very clear about something.

I am not anti-AI. I use AI every day.

I am not anti-technology. Technology fascinates me.

I am not anti-social media. Many of you found me through social media.

I am not anti-information. I love learning, and I deeply appreciate the access we have now compared with the access I had growing up.

This is not about rejecting the tools.

It is about making sure we do not lose ourselves while using them.

A tool can be valuable and still change us in ways we need to notice.

Convenience can be useful and still weaken a muscle we no longer have to exercise.

Access to answers can be a gift and still make us less comfortable living with uncertainty.

AI can help us think and still become a substitute for thinking if we are not intentional about how we use it.

The issue is not that answers are available.

The issue is that we have become so accustomed to receiving them that we may be losing the patience required to form our own.

We have more information than at any other point in human history.

More experts.

More content.

More podcasts.

More notifications.

More headlines.

More algorithms suggesting what deserves our attention.

More people explaining what happened, why it happened, what it means, how we should feel about it, and what we should do next.

And yet somehow, many of us have fewer opportunities than ever to hear our own thoughts.

We have also become suspicious of questions

There is another reason I believe this practice matters.

We live in a time when questioning can be treated as opposition.

Ask the wrong question and someone may assume you are difficult, negative, disloyal, uninformed, problematic, or anti-something.

Sometimes, we are expected to choose a side before we fully understand the issue.

Sometimes, curiosity is interpreted as resistance.

Sometimes, asking for context is treated as refusing to accept the truth.

Sometimes, saying “I need to think about that” is viewed as weakness because everyone else has already formed an immediate opinion.

This happens in politics.

It happens in workplaces.

It happens in families.

It happens in faith communities.

It happens online.

And it happens anywhere power benefits from people accepting conclusions without examining them.

But questioning does not automatically make someone oppositional.

Sometimes questioning is discernment.

Sometimes it is responsibility.

Sometimes it is intellectual honesty.

Sometimes it is how we recognize manipulation.

Sometimes it is the beginning of wisdom.

Sometimes it is how we protect our agency.

I do not believe critical thinking has disappeared. I believe we are using it less often in certain areas of our lives, while simultaneously being encouraged to see questioning as a threat.

That combination should concern us.

Because when people stop asking questions, someone else gets to decide which answers are allowed.

We don’t carry questions anymore

At some point, I asked myself:

When was the last time I carried a question for an entire week?

Not Googled it.

Not asked AI.

Not watched a video about it.

Not searched for an expert’s opinion.

Not rushed to post a reaction.

Just carried it.

Observed it.

Wondered about it.

Noticed how it appeared in different parts of my life.

Changed my mind about it.

Allowed it to challenge something I believed.

Allowed it to change me.

I could not remember.

And I realized I probably was not alone.

We have become remarkably good at collecting answers while becoming less practiced at carrying questions.

There is a difference.

Collecting an answer can take seconds.

Carrying a question requires attention.

It requires patience.

It requires curiosity.

It requires us to tolerate uncertainty.

It requires us to observe our lives instead of immediately escaping them.

It also requires humility because we may discover that our first answer was incomplete, borrowed, or simply wrong.

A question carried long enough can reveal things an instant answer never will.

It can expose a contradiction between what we say we value and how we actually live.

It can show us where fear has been disguising itself as wisdom.

It can help us recognize that an opinion we have defended for years was never really ours.

It can uncover grief, desire, resentment, hope, conviction, or possibility.

A question can become a mirror.

But only if we resist the urge to turn it into another search term.

Creation begins with our first question

For years, I have said that we need to become more creators and less consumers.

When I said that, I thought I was talking about businesses, books, podcasts, art, videos, and content.

Now I think I meant something much simpler.

Not everyone will write a book.

Not everyone will start a business.

Not everyone wants to create content.

But every one of us can create a thought that was not given to us.

That is creation too.

In fact, it may be the most fundamental form of creation.

Before we create a book, a business, a movement, a solution, or a new way of living, we create a thought.

We notice something.

We wonder.

We ask.

We make a connection that did not exist for us before.

Consumption often ends with someone else’s conclusion.

Creation begins with our first question.

That is why this matters to me.

If someone reads one of these practice sessions and leaves agreeing with everything I said, that may be nice, but it is not the mission.

The mission is that you leave thinking.

Not repeating.

Not reacting.

Not borrowing my conclusion.

Thinking.

My goal is not to tell you what your answer should be. That is none of my business.

My goal is to invite you to answer.

What Right-Braining means to me

Right-Braining is my practice of asking questions that cannot be Googled.

It is a practice in paying attention differently.

It makes room for curiosity, reflection, imagination, discernment, and meaning.

It asks us to pause before reaching for someone else’s conclusion.

It asks us to direct some of our attention inward again.

It asks us to become more comfortable with the unfinished thought, the unanswered question, and the possibility that wisdom may require more than a quick response.

This is not about thinking harder every minute of the day.

It is about becoming intentional about what we allow to shape our thinking.

Because attention is where agency begins.

What receives our attention influences what we notice.

What we notice influences what we believe.

What we believe influences what we choose.

And what we repeatedly choose eventually shapes the life we live.

That is why I believe agency is the new currency.

In a world overflowing with information, the ability to choose what deserves our attention, examine what we are being told, and form our own conclusions may become one of the most valuable human capacities we can protect.

Welcome to the weekly practice

Every Sunday, I will offer one question for us to carry into the week.

Not a question you need to answer immediately.

Not a question with one correct response.

Not a question I expect everyone to answer the same way.

I will share my two cents. I will tell you what the question brought up for me, what I noticed, and where my thinking led me.

Then I will invite you to discover your answer.

You may share it in the comments.

You may reply by email.

You may discuss it with someone you trust.

You may write it in a journal.

You may change your mind three times before Friday.

You may decide that your answer is private.

There is no performance required here.

The point is not to sound intelligent.

The point is not to win an argument.

The point is not to arrive at the “right” answer faster than anyone else.

The point is practice.

A weekly practice of reclaiming our attention.

A weekly practice of strengthening discernment.

A weekly practice of exercising agency.

A weekly practice of creating one thought that was not handed to us.

My hope is that these questions lead us into conversations about leadership, faith, AI, relationships, work, culture, identity, and what it means to remain deeply human in a rapidly changing world.

But mostly, I hope they lead us back to ourselves.

The goal is not to agree with my two cents.

It is to discover your own.

The first question to carry

When was the last time you carried a question long enough to allow it to change you?

Do not rush to answer.

Do not search for the most impressive response.

Carry it with you this week.

Notice what comes up.

Notice whether you are tempted to escape the question.

Notice the last question that truly unsettled, challenged, clarified, or changed something in you.

Then, when you are ready, answer from your own life.

Welcome to Right-Braining.

Welcome back to Shirley’s 2 Cents.

That’s just my two cents.

Now, go create one thought that wasn’t given to you today.

About the Author

Shirley L.A. Brooks is an author, executive coach, business advisor, and Founder of YSWS Growth Firm. Her work is shaped by twenty-three years inside global logistics and other high-consequence systems, where she learned to recognize complexity, anticipate breakdowns, and notice the patterns others often overlook.

She is the author of Outsourced Judgment, The Hidden Cost of Quiet Leadership, and Laid Off, Passed Over, or Ready to Pivot, as well as two editions of The Quiet Leadership Journal. Across her books, speaking, advisory work, and Shirley’s 2 Cents, she explores quiet leadership, discernment, attention, agency, AI, work, culture, and what it means to remain deeply human in a rapidly changing world.

Through the Right-Braining Practice, Shirley invites people to ask better questions, reclaim their attention, and become authors of their own thinking again.

“My discernment is my authority. And so is yours.”