Introduction:
So there's an old saying that goes, "An idle mind is a devil's workshop". It's December of 2024 right now and the more I live, the more I realise that an idle mind is truly a devil's workshop. I wanted to go through this wonderful topic today and make folks realise what is an idle mind and how can it transmit poison in your life. One thing I have noticed through personal experience is that I tend to think more negative and bad thoughts whenever I am idle. From the last 5 days I was watching the Boxing Day test match India vs Australia and after that I would also listen to the commentary on YouTube by some journalists who were just trying to create a drama. My mind started wandering and I almost was in a position where I stopped thinking. Because we did not have any work in the last few days in the office, I also started watching more reels and shorts on YouTube and instagram respectively. This further deteriorated the quality of my thoughts. Now, even worse, I also started having sexual thoughts, thoughts of jealousy, and thoughts that were plain bad in my opinion to my overall health. All of this came in just because I was idle, no office or work. This is when I remembered the old saying called, "an idle mind is a Devil's workshop" and it truly is a devil's workshop in my experience. Now the point here is not to regret too much about what happened in the past and what kind of thoughts were coming in my head, but it's more about to look forward, understand that my mind was idle and that's why it was thinking those thoughts and it's very easy to make my mind working and busy. Oh well, this blog is totally not about my story or about what I am doing, it's also about helping the community of readers to understand the statement in more depth, "Idle mind is a Devil's workshop".
Benefits of staying busy:
Firstly, let's understand one thing. By staying busy, I am not here trying to say that keep doing your work all the time. Absolutely not, that's burnout. I am saying being busy can also be washing dishes, ironing your clothes or even going for a walk in the park. That is also being busy. Being busy is also doing your work diligently. Being busy can also mean talking to your friends and hanging out with your friends. As long as you are not idle and thinking about the past or the future, you can be busy with something in the present.
1. Allows you to stay in the present: The more I focus on the present, the better my future will be. Now, when we stay busy, we force our minds to focus on the task at hand, whether that means listening to a friend, learning to play guitar or even cleaning your dishes. So when you stay busy you are more naturally in the present and you don't really have to work too hard to stay in the present.
2. Increased Productivity: When you have a schedule and you are busy executing your schedule it naturally becomes more easy to be productive. You would know what things needs to be done when and thus you would keep working towards that.
3. Personal Growth and Skill Development: When you are busy, there would be a time which would be a bit idle. That's the time you can try and fill the time with either reading books, learning new skills or just talking to your friend about personal growth. This way you can have more personal growth just by staying busy.
4. Combats Overthinking: When you are busy, you do not get much time to think about negative thoughts either about yourself or the world. This way you can combat overthinking and you will have a sense of purpose as well.
5. More experiences: When you are busy, it leads you to more experiences, for an example, you are having a vacation and you want to increase your experience during the vacation, you would go ahead and plan a trip to an unknown place during the vacation thus giving you more experiences that you can remember. So yeah being busy will help you in getting more experiences as well.
Quotes:
Now, let's observe what's been written and truly analyse it. "If I'm alone too long I think too much, and I am not interested in doing that. That won't lead anywhere good. I'm sure. If I'm busy I tend to stay out of trouble. An idle mind is the devil's playground." Now, take a deeper look at how beautiful this quote really is, the speaker acknowledges over here that if she's alone she will think too much and she is not interested in doing that at all. Understandably so, but here's what's more interesting to me, she is talking more about being alone vs being with people. So she is saying that when she's with people, engaged in a conversation or any kind of verbal talk, she tends to overthink less and lives the moment a little more.

Now, I would say this is not just for man. But even for woman or in general any person who's living on earth would be the happiest when they are improving themselves physically, mentally and financially. An idle mind is a depressed man. Wow, depression is too strong a word to use but an idle man is a depressed man is a true thing. We need to do something, whatever that something is, keep doing that. Good or bad, movement is important. Go play a sport. Go out for concerts if you have free time. Go out and meet friends and discuss life if you have time. Most importantly act, don't just think that's very important.
How to stay busy:
Over here I am not going to talk about the regular cliches on the topic like have a time table or a schedule. This is a discussion more on the ways to be busy and what can we do to fill in time.
Pursue a hobby: As we grow up, we forget what we loved when we were a child. We would love to listen to music, we would love to play cricket or for that matter anything, we would love to play hide and seek, we would love to dance, and some people would love to swim. But as we grow up as adults we forget these habits and we tend to let go of these habits for whatever reason. Sometimes it's the burden of responsibilities or the social pressure of doing better than your next door neighbour. Of course, I am not saying that don't be ambitious and don't care about your responsibilities, I am trying to say that there's a way to balance it out. Having a hobby like reading, listening to music, playing a guitar, or even playing cricket will turn out to make your mind more active and more activity means your mind will always be exercised and charged up to do anything good.
Learn something: When you have free time, learn something new. You can learn a new language, you can learn a new dance step or you can learn any new skill you want to. But learn something new. Fill your time by learning something cool and new. It can be even rifle shooting. Today you have so many resources at your disposal like coursera and other platforms that learning a new skill is not too difficult.
Engage in social activities : Meet your friends, family or even your colleagues for social occasions and talk to them. If you don't have friends nearby find ways to make new friends by going to meetup.com, and other online events as well. I am not super sure of how many of these are there, but you can go there and make new friends. Next is you can always make more friends using a lot of other resources at your disposal.
Volunteering Activities: Let's say you don't find anything interesting to do. Go and find a volunteering activity. Find an NGO or contribute to sharing your technical skills to people who really really need it. This way you can also be useful to the world.
Read books and practice self-care: There would be a time where you don't have anything to do, that's when you read books, or practice self care. Personally, reading books is an act of self care for me but it can be anything for you. Doing skin care, exercise, going for a walk anything can be considered as an act of self care but do that for the sake of you. Because no one knows yourself better than you do.
In summary, I would just say that being busy will help you overcome all your negative thoughts and will help you stay in the moment. You wouldn't have anxiety about the future or the regrets of the past. You will truly live the moment and be happy with whatever you have. So just go ahead and have wonderful life ! And a very happy new year !
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