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What do you do with the emptiness when work goes quiet?
Karolien Koolhof •
Summer is often a quieter time at work. Projects have wrapped up, colleagues are on holiday, and the inbox that overflowed for months suddenly looks manageable. For many people that comes as a relief. But if you are someone who runs on intensity, that quiet can feel uncomfortable instead. Rather than rest, you notice restlessness, or a vague emptiness you can't quite place. And that is confusing, because surely you should be glad things are calm for once.
You are not the first to notice this. The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl described what he called the Sunday neurosis: the low mood that comes over people the moment the bustle of the working week falls away and the emptiness inside suddenly becomes noticeable. As long as you are busy, you barely feel that emptiness. It is only when the work drops away that you come face to face with the question of what your days are actually filled with. Frankl saw this not as a sign of illness, but as something that belongs to a person who is searching for meaning.
For anyone who needs a lot of mental activity by nature, this plays out more strongly. Psychologists talk about need for cognition, a concept introduced by Cacioppo and Petty in 1982. It describes how much someone needs to think and enjoys doing so. People who score high on it don't seek out complex problems out of a sense of duty, but because their mind needs them. It is not a matter of being smarter, but of an inner engine that wants to run. Work often gives that engine exactly the fuel it asks for: a difficult problem or a new field to unravel. Take that away, and the engine keeps running with nothing to do. Your mind doesn't switch off, it starts searching. And when there is nothing to chew on, it begins to chew on itself, in the form of rumination or that vague feeling that something is missing.
Self-worth
On top of that there is often a second layer, and it has to do with self-worth. The psychologists Crocker and Wolfe showed that our sense of self-worth is not a fixed quantity, but moves along with how well we are doing in the areas on which we have staked our value. For someone who draws much of their identity from what they contribute and solve, a quiet week is more than just annoying. It feels like a kind of disappearing. The question of who you are when you are not needed for a while doesn't have to be asked out loud to still get under your skin.
The reflex is almost always the same: to fill it. You look for a new course, start a side project, get a head start on next month's work, or end up packing the calendar full again. That helps for a while, but it also quietly confirms the assumption that you are only okay as long as you are busy. That quiet is something to get through quickly rather than something you are allowed to sit in. So the question is not so much how you fill that emptiness, but what the emptiness is trying to show you.
Listening
Sometimes the answer is simple. You are tired after an intense period and rest is exactly what you need. But sometimes that empty feeling points to something else. It may be that your work has been giving you too little for a while, and that you couldn't hear it amid the busyness. The quiet makes it audible. It is worth listening to that for a moment before you smother it with the first activity that comes along.
The fact that your mind needs fuel doesn't mean it always has to be your work that supplies it. You can channel that need somewhere else too. A demanding book, or something with your hands that asks for your full attention, can feed your thinking just as well. It doesn't have to be useful. The point is that a mind that likes to work needs something to connect with, even when the work is on pause for a while.
Not indispensable
The hardest part, and perhaps the most important, is something else. It is practising not being the one who solves things for a change. Not indispensable. Noticing that the world keeps turning while you contribute nothing, and that you are still here. At first that feels like a loss, but it is more of a discovery: that your worth does not depend entirely on what you achieve.
That emptiness is the flip side of a brain that likes to work, and of a life in which you draw meaning from what you do. And at the same time it is an invitation to discover who you are when you don't have to solve anything for a moment. Perhaps you will find that you don't have to look for that rest in an empty calendar, but that you can be perfectly yourself at a moment when there is nothing to do.
About the author
- Karolien Koolhof is a coach voor introverts and gifted individuals
- Author of the book Introvert Leadership
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