Stillness: Ideas for rest and attention. - Page 9

Editor’s note

Stillness

For moments when you want to slow down, reflect or pay attention.

StillnessHealth

People with strong social relationships tend to live longer. A 2010 review of 148 studies, covering more than 300,000 people followed for seven and a half years on average, found that they had a 50 per cent greater likelihood of survival than people with weaker ties.

The review was led by the psychologist Julianne Holt-Lunstad and published in the journal PLOS Medicine. Researchers separate two ideas: social isolation means having few contacts, while loneliness is the painful feeling that your relationships fall short of what you need. Both are linked with poorer health. Friends and family may help by easing stress, encouraging healthier habits and noticing when something is wrong. Studies like these show a link rather than proof of cause, but the pattern has been found again and again. In 2023 the US Surgeon General, the country's leading public-health official, described loneliness as a public-health concern, and in June 2025 a World Health Organization commission estimated that loneliness is linked to about 871,000 deaths a year and affects one person in six worldwide.

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StillnessHealth

The nose prepares every breath for the lungs. Its lining warms and moistens the incoming air, while hairs and sticky mucus catch dust and pollen, so by the time the air reaches the lungs it is close to body temperature and almost fully humidified.

Much of this work happens on the nasal conchae, three curled shelves of thin bone on each side of the nose, covered in a lining rich in blood vessels. They split the airflow into narrow channels and give it a large, warm, moist surface to pass over. Tiny hair-like structures called cilia then sweep the trapped dirt, caught in mucus, towards the throat, where it is swallowed. Most people also have a nasal cycle: every few hours one side of the nose swells slightly while the other opens up, so the two sides take turns doing most of the work. Breathing through the mouth skips much of this conditioning, which is one reason it can leave the throat feeling dry.

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StillnessHealth

In a 2019 study of nearly 20,000 people in England, those who had spent at least 120 minutes in nature in the previous week were more likely to report good health and high wellbeing. The benefit peaked at around 200 to 300 minutes, and it made no difference whether the time came in one visit or several.

The study, led by Mathew White at the University of Exeter and published in Scientific Reports, used a national survey of how people in England spend time outdoors. It shows a link, not proof that nature causes better health, but other research points the same way. In 1984 the researcher Roger Ulrich found that patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in a Pennsylvania hospital went home sooner and needed fewer strong painkillers when their window looked out on trees rather than a brick wall. Suggested explanations include more exercise, cleaner and quieter surroundings, and attention restoration theory, proposed by the psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan: natural scenes hold our attention gently, which gives the mind a rest from constant concentration.

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StillnessArt

Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican between 1508 and 1512 standing on a tall wooden scaffold with his head tilted back, not lying down as is often imagined. The ceiling, about 35 by 14 metres, holds more than 300 figures.

Pope Julius II commissioned the ceiling. Michelangelo saw himself as a sculptor rather than a painter and accepted reluctantly; the contract was signed on 8 May 1508. He rejected the first scaffold, which hung on ropes through holes in the vault, and had a freestanding one built instead. His early biographers Giorgio Vasari and Ascanio Condivi both say he worked standing, and Vasari describes the discomfort of painting with his head bent backwards for so long. The lying-down version comes from another writer of the time, Paolo Giovio. Michelangelo is thought to have joked about the strain in a comic poem to a friend, with a sketch in the margin of a figure painting overhead. The ceiling was painted in fresco, on patches of fresh plaster laid each day, and the modern restoration mapped each of these daily sections. It was unveiled on 31 October 1512.

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StillnessArt

In true fresco, the painter brushes pigment mixed only with water onto fresh, wet lime plaster. As the plaster dries, it reacts with the air and binds the colour into the wall itself, which is why frescoes can last for centuries.

Fresco means “fresh” in Italian. Wet lime plaster absorbs carbon dioxide from the air and slowly turns into calcium carbonate, a kind of limestone, trapping the pigment as it hardens. The plaster sets within the day, so each morning only as much fresh plaster is laid as can be painted that day. This patch is called a giornata, Italian for “a day's work”, and its faint seams often remain visible. A mistake means chipping the plaster off and starting again. Some colours, especially blues such as ultramarine, did not work in wet lime, so they were added later on dry plaster, a method called secco (“dry”); paint applied this way flakes off more easily. Among the oldest known true frescoes are Minoan wall paintings from Crete and Santorini of the second millennium BC. Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel in Padua and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling are famous later examples.

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StillnessArt

Chiaroscuro, Italian for “light-dark”, is the use of strong contrast between light and shadow in a picture. Shading from light to dark makes figures look rounded and solid, and a bright patch set against darkness draws the eye and adds drama.

Painters in ancient Greece already shaded their figures; the Athenian painter Apollodoros, in the 5th century BC, was remembered as a pioneer. The word itself began in Renaissance Italy for drawings on tinted paper, where artists worked up to the light with white paint and down to the dark with ink. Leonardo da Vinci used soft chiaroscuro to model faces. Around 1600 Caravaggio pushed it to extremes, lighting figures with a single hard beam against near-black backgrounds, a style called tenebrism, from Italian tenebroso, “dark”. Rembrandt, Georges de La Tour with his candlelit scenes and Joseph Wright of Derby followed in different ways. Cinema borrowed the idea: the deep shadows of the black-and-white crime films of the 1940s, known as film noir, are chiaroscuro lighting.

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StillnessArt

Negative space is the empty area around and between the subjects of an image. Artists and designers treat it as part of the composition: it gives the eye somewhere to rest, sharpens outlines and can even form hidden shapes of its own.

A famous demonstration is the Rubin vase, devised around 1915 by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin: the same outline can be seen as a white vase or as two dark faces in profile, but never both at once. Psychologists call this figure–ground perception: the brain's habit of splitting a scene into a subject and a background. Designers use it on purpose. The FedEx logo, designed in 1994 by Lindon Leader, hides an arrow in the white gap between the E and the x. In page and screen design the same idea is called white space: generous margins and gaps between lines make text easier to read. Japanese has the word ma for a meaningful gap or pause, used of gardens, buildings and music, where a well-placed silence does what empty space does in a picture.

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StillnessArt

Complementary colours sit opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as blue and orange, red and green, or yellow and purple. Placed side by side they make each other look more intense; mixed together as paint they cancel out into a dull grey or brown.

The effect was studied scientifically by the French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, who became director of dyeing at the Gobelins tapestry works in Paris in 1824 after complaints about its colours. He found that the criticised black dye was in fact excellent; it only looked weak and reddish when surrounded by blues and purples. His 1839 book on “simultaneous contrast”, the way neighbouring colours shift each other, was widely read by painters, including the Impressionists. The eye plays a part too: stare at a red patch for half a minute, then look at a white wall, and you see a blue-green afterimage, because parts of the visual system briefly tire. Van Gogh used the effect deliberately; of The Night Café (1888) he wrote that he had tried to express terrible human passions with red and green.

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StillnessArt

Mark Rothko painted huge canvases filled with soft-edged blocks of colour, but insisted they were about emotions such as tragedy and ecstasy, not about colour. When viewers wept in front of them, he took it as proof that the feeling had reached them.

Rothko (1903–1970) was born in Daugavpils, in today's Latvia, and moved to the United States as a child. From about 1949 he painted the works he is known for: large, glowing rectangles of colour on a coloured ground, a style often called colour field painting. In a 1956 conversation with the writer Selden Rodman, later printed in Rodman's book Conversations with Artists, he said he was interested only in basic human emotions, and that people who wept before his pictures were having the same religious experience he had while painting them. He made the canvases big so that viewers would feel inside them, advised standing as close as about 45 cm, and asked for soft, low lighting. His last great project was the Rothko Chapel in Houston: 14 dark canvases for a quiet room open to people of all faiths, which opened in 1971, a year after his death.

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StillnessLiterature

Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems, yet only about ten were printed in her lifetime, all without her name and most altered by editors. After her death in 1886, her sister Lavinia found the rest, many copied into small hand-sewn booklets.

Dickinson spent almost all her life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and in her later years rarely left the family home. Between 1858 and 1865 she copied about 800 poems into 40 booklets, now called fascicles, and no one knew they existed. The first selection was published in 1890 by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but they reshaped her poems to suit the taste of the time, changing words and replacing her many dashes with ordinary punctuation. Her rhymes were unusual too: she often used slant rhymes, words that almost but not quite rhyme, such as “room” and “storm”. Only in 1955 did Thomas H. Johnson publish all her poems close to the way she wrote them.

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StillnessLiterature

A haiku is a very short Japanese poem that captures a single observed moment, often tied to a season. The classical form has 17 sound units in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5.

Haiku grew out of the hokku, the opening verse of renga, a long chain poem that several poets wrote together, taking turns. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) raised that opening verse to an art of its own; his best-known poem, from 1686, shows an old pond and the sound of a frog jumping in. The name haiku was made popular in the late 19th century by the poet Masaoka Shiki, who treated it as a poem in its own right. Japanese counts on, short sound units that do not match syllables in other languages: the name Nippon (Japan), for example, is four on (ni-p-po-n) but only two syllables. A classical haiku usually includes a kigo, a word that signals the season, and a kireji, a 'cutting word' that creates a pause. For this reason many poets in other languages write short lines rather than counting 5–7–5 exactly.

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StillnessPhilosophy

The Stoics drew a sharp line between what is up to us (our own judgements, intentions and choices) and what is not, such as health, wealth, reputation and other people's actions. Peace of mind, they taught, comes from putting our effort into the first.

Stoicism was founded in Athens around 300 BC by Zeno of Citium, who taught at the Stoa Poikile, the Painted Porch, which gave the school its name. The clearest statement of this line comes from Epictetus (about AD 50–135), who was born enslaved in Hierapolis, today's Pamukkale in Turkey, was later freed, and taught philosophy in Rome and then in Greece. His student Arrian wrote down his teaching, and the Enchiridion, or Handbook, opens with exactly this division. Epictetus did not ask people to stop caring about results, only not to let their peace of mind depend on things they cannot command. Marcus Aurelius drew on him, and in the 20th century Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, pioneers of cognitive behavioural therapy, took up his idea that we are upset less by events than by our judgements about them.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself.

Confucius (551–479 BC) was a teacher and official in the state of Lu, in today's Shandong, China. In Analects 15.24 his disciple Zigong asks whether one word could guide a whole life. Confucius answers shu, 'reciprocity' or 'consideration', and explains it with this line. The Analects, sayings gathered by his followers, were studied for China's civil service exams until 1905. This 'do not' form is sometimes called the Silver Rule, beside the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be treated.

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StillnessPhilosophy

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

These are the closing words of The Myth of Sisyphus, a 1942 essay by Albert Camus (1913–1960), the Algerian-born French writer. Camus calls the clash between our hunger for meaning and a world that offers none 'the absurd'. In Greek myth Sisyphus, king of Corinth, cheated death and was condemned for ever to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll back down. Camus pictures him walking back to the rock, fully aware of his fate and refusing false hope. For Camus that clear-eyed persistence is a form of revolt.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), closing line: 'Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.' English and Turkish rendered from the FrenchRead card

StillnessPhilosophy

Epicurus, who taught in Athens around 300 BC, held that happiness comes from modest pleasures, friendship and freedom from fear, not from excess.

Epicurus (341–270 BC) was born on the island of Samos and around 306 BC bought a house with a garden in Athens, where he founded his school. It became known simply as the Garden, and unusually for the time it welcomed women. He taught that pleasure is the goal of life, but by pleasure he meant the absence of pain in the body and of anxiety in the mind, a calm he called ataraxia. Simple food, friendship and clear thinking about death and the gods were the way there. In a letter he wrote that bread and water give the greatest pleasure to someone who is hungry, and he once asked a friend for a small pot of cheese so that he could have a feast. Later critics caricatured his followers as pleasure-seekers, and in English an epicure came to mean a lover of fine food.

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StillnessHealth

About 90% of the body's serotonin, a chemical messenger, is made in the gut, where it helps move food along. Serotonin cannot pass from the blood into the brain, so the brain makes its own supply separately.

Serotonin was named in 1948 by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic, who found a substance in blood serum that tightened blood vessels: sero- for serum, -tonin for tone. An Italian scientist, Vittorio Erspamer, had already found it in the gut in the 1930s and called it enteramine; in 1952 the two proved to be the same molecule. In the gut, lining cells called enterochromaffin cells release it when food arrives, making the intestine contract. Platelets, the blood cells involved in clotting, soak up much of the rest. The brain's serotonin, only about 1 to 2% of the total, is made by small clusters of nerve cells in the brainstem called the raphe nuclei. A protective filter, the blood–brain barrier, keeps gut serotonin out, so the gut's large share does not mean it directly controls mood.

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StillnessHealth

Non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) is a recent name for guided relaxation done lying down and awake, often for 10 to 30 minutes. Most versions borrow from yoga nidra (“yogic sleep”) and the body scan, in which a voice moves your attention slowly through the body.

The term was coined by the Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who promoted it on his podcast as a plain-language label for practices such as yoga nidra, “yogic sleep”. Yoga nidra in its modern form was spread in the 1970s by the Indian teacher Satyananda Saraswati; it draws on older yoga as well as Western relaxation methods of the early 20th century. A session asks you to lie still, notice your breath and follow instructions that move attention from one part of the body to the next. Research is still small. A 2002 Danish brain-imaging study found more dopamine, a chemical linked to motivation and reward, released in part of the brain during yoga nidra, and small trials report better sleep and less anxiety. NSDR is not a single clinical method, and no study shows it can replace sleep.

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StillnessHealth

Studies of places with unusually many very old people, the so-called Blue Zones, have found recurring habits such as plant-rich diets, daily movement and close social ties, but they have not established a proven recipe for long life.

The idea began in Sardinia. In the early 2000s the researchers Michel Poulain and Gianni Pes mapped villages in the island's mountainous Nuoro province where unusually many people, especially men, reached 100, circling them on the map in blue ink. In 2005 the writer Dan Buettner popularised the name in a National Geographic cover story on Sardinia, Okinawa in Japan and Loma Linda in California; the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica and the Greek island of Icaria were added later. Critics point out that habits are tangled up with genes, healthcare and migration, and that some age records are unreliable: Okinawa's family registers were largely destroyed in 1945 and rebuilt afterwards. In 2024 the researcher Saul Newman won an Ig Nobel Prize, a satirical award for research that first makes people laugh and then think, for showing that many record ages come from places with poor birth records.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Amor fati is Latin for “love of fate”. Friedrich Nietzsche made the phrase famous in 1882: it means not only putting up with what happens, hardship included, but embracing it as a necessary part of your life. The Stoics had taught a similar acceptance nearly two thousand years earlier.

Nietzsche, a 19th-century German philosopher, first used the phrase in The Gay Science (1882), in a passage written for the new year. There he resolves to learn to see what is necessary in things as beautiful, and one day to be only a yes-sayer. In Ecce Homo, written in 1888, he called amor fati his formula for greatness in a human being: wanting nothing in one's life to be otherwise, in the past, the future or for all eternity. The Latin words do not appear in the ancient Stoics, but the idea is close to theirs. The Greek Stoic teacher Epictetus advised his students not to wish that events would happen as they want, but to want them to happen as they do. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius urged himself in his Meditations to love only what fate brings him.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Memento mori is Latin for “remember that you must die”. For centuries the phrase has reminded people that their time is limited: Stoic philosophers turned it into a regular practice, and painters filled their pictures with skulls, hourglasses and burnt-down candles to make the same point.

The idea is older than the Latin phrase. The Stoic philosopher Seneca filled his letters with advice to reflect on death. Epictetus told his students that when they kissed a child or a friend they should remember that person was mortal, just as, he said, someone stood behind a Roman general during his triumph to remind him that he too was mortal. From the Middle Ages the theme ran through European art and tomb sculpture, from the Dance of Death, which showed skeletons leading people of every rank, to the Dutch vanitas still lifes of the 1600s, where skulls, wilting flowers and soap bubbles sit among fine objects. Psychologists have tested whether thinking about death makes life feel more precious: in a 2011 study, people who vividly imagined their own death for a few minutes afterwards reported more gratitude than a comparison group.

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StillnessHealth

Drinking a very large amount of water in a short time can dilute the sodium in your blood to a dangerous level, a condition called hyponatraemia. Healthy kidneys can clear only about 0.8 to 1 litre of water an hour, so drinking much faster than that can overwhelm them.

Sodium, the main salt in blood, keeps water balanced between the inside and the outside of cells. Normal blood levels are about 135 to 145 millimoles per litre, and anything below 135 counts as hyponatraemia. When the blood becomes too dilute, water moves into cells and they swell. Brain cells are most at risk because the skull leaves no room, so symptoms include headache, nausea, confusion and, in severe cases, seizures. The problem is rare in everyday life but well known in endurance sport. In a study of the 2002 Boston Marathon, published in 2005, 13% of the 488 runners tested at the finish had hyponatraemia, and the main risk factors were taking more than four hours to finish and putting on weight during the race, a sign of drinking more than was lost in sweat. International sports medicine guidelines now advise drinking according to thirst.

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StillnessArt

Painters often use warm colours such as red, orange and yellow to bring things forward, and cool blues and greens to push them back. The trick copies what we see in nature, where distant hills look paler and bluer, and it creates depth on a flat surface.

The natural effect is called aerial or atmospheric perspective: the air between us and a distant object scatters blue light into our view, so faraway things lose contrast and shift towards blue. Roman wall painters already used it, as landscapes preserved at Pompeii show, and Leonardo da Vinci wrote about it and painted it into the misty blue landscape behind the Mona Lisa. In his Theory of Colours, published in 1810, the German writer Goethe described blue as a colour that seems to draw away from us, and yellow and red as lively colours that seem to advance. There is also an optical reason, called chromostereopsis: the lens of the eye focuses red and blue light slightly differently, so red shapes often seem to float in front of blue ones.

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StillnessPhilosophy

Stoic philosophers such as Seneca advised imagining setbacks in advance, like losing money, falling ill or being sent into exile, so that if they came they could be faced calmly and with a plan rather than with shock.

Seneca, the Roman statesman and Stoic writer who had tutored the emperor Nero, returns to the idea in his Letters to Lucilius. In one letter, written after fire destroyed the Roman city of Lugdunum, today's Lyon, in a single night, he argues that nothing should take us wholly by surprise if we have thought it through beforehand. The idea is older: the Roman orator Cicero traced it to earlier Greek thinkers and called it praemeditatio futurorum malorum, 'thinking ahead about future evils'. In his Meditations, the emperor Marcus Aurelius reminds himself in the morning that he will meet rude and ungrateful people that day. Modern writers call the practice negative visualisation, and managers use a relative of it, the pre-mortem, in which a team imagines that a project has already failed and asks why.

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StillnessHealth

Laughter is mostly social: in Robert Provine's studies, people laughed about 30 times more often with others than alone, and fewer than one laugh in five followed anything like a joke. Laughing together also releases the brain's own pain-easing, feel-good chemicals.

Provine, an American neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his students noted down 1,200 laughs they overheard in everyday settings. Most followed ordinary remarks rather than jokes, and speakers laughed about 46% more than their listeners. He concluded that laughter is above all a signal of friendliness and shared mood. Brain scans later showed what happens inside. In a 2017 study at the Turku PET Centre in Finland, 12 men watched comedy clips with close friends for half an hour, and their brains released endorphins, the body's own opioids, which ease pain and bring pleasure. The Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar, one of the authors, argues that shared laughter helps humans bond in groups too large for the one-to-one grooming that keeps ape friendships going. Laughter also starts early: babies laugh months before they say their first words.

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