Niksen is a Dutch verb that means, roughly, "to do nothing" — or, more literally, "nothinging." It went global after journalist Olga Mecking wrote about it for The New York Times in 2019 and later expanded it into her 2021 book, Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. The word is old; the interest in it is new, driven by burnout.
What makes niksen worth decoding is how much it differs from the other things that promise the same relief. Here's what it actually asks of you.
1. It means doing nothing with no purpose attached. Niksen isn't a productivity hack in disguise. You're not doing nothing in order to recharge for work — the point is to have no point. Staring out a window, sitting in a chair, listening to rain. The moment it has a goal, it stops being niksen.
2. It's not meditation. Meditation asks you to focus — on your breath, on the present, on a mantra. Niksen asks nothing of your attention at all. There's no technique to get right, which is part of why it appeals to people who find meditation stressful.
3. It's not scrolling. Reaching for your phone feels like rest, but it's input, not stillness. Niksen specifically means no screen, no podcast, no book — the mind is left genuinely unoccupied rather than fed a quieter stream of stimulation.
4. It was popularized as an answer to burnout. Mecking framed niksen explicitly around work-related stress. The experts she interviewed connected unstructured idle time to feeling less mentally depleted — a counterweight to cultures that treat every empty minute as wasted.
5. Idle time is when the mind solves things in the background. The reason "shower thoughts" and walk-in-the-park ideas are a cliché is that they're real: the brain's default mode, active when you're not focused on a task, is linked to creativity and problem-solving. Niksen protects the conditions those ideas need.
6. It works best in small, guilt-free doses. You don't need an empty afternoon. A few minutes of deliberate nothing — before a meeting, between tasks, waiting for the kettle — is the realistic version. The hard part isn't the time; it's giving yourself permission not to fill it.
Today, take five minutes to do nothing on purpose. Sit somewhere, put the phone in another room, and don't try to relax, meditate, or plan — just let the time be empty. Notice the urge to reach for something, and don't.
Niksen won't fix an overloaded life, and the Dutch aren't uniquely idle. But the idea is a useful permission slip: rest doesn't have to be earned, optimized, or productive to count. Sometimes the most restorative thing you can do is, deliberately, nothing.