Every morning before he opens his laptop, Vikas Kumar stands in front of a blank wall in his Gurugram apartment and does something that would have seemed ridiculous a year ago. He stares at it for 10 minutes. No podcast. No phone. No meditation app reminding him to breathe. He simply lets his mind drift. “It felt strange at first because I kept reaching for my phone,” says Kumar, a 30-year-old construction engineer whose workdays are packed with site inspections, vendor calls, structural drawings and AI-powered planning tools. “Now those 10 minutes help me slow down. I don’t try to think about anything in particular. I just let my mind wander before the day begins.”
Ask around any office in Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru and you are likely to hear a version of the same complaint. Work is faster than ever, yet the mind rarely gets to switch off. Which is perhaps why a forty-year-old Dutch word—niksen, is quietly making a comeback.
Niksen, for the uninitiated, is the Dutch art of doing nothing. Not napping. Not scrolling. Not even meditating in the disciplined sense yoga teachers recommend. Just... nothing. Staring out of a window because there is a window. Sitting on a park bench without reaching for your phone. Waiting for the kettle to boil without filling those ninety seconds by checking WhatsApp. It sounds absurdly simple. Which is precisely why so many people now find it surprisingly difficult.
For Kumar, the ritual began after he realised every spare moment, from his commute to his lunch break, had quietly been consumed by work or by the urge to check his phone. The digital tools that promised efficiency had left him feeling oddly depleted instead.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that has no proper name in English. It’s not the exhaustion that follows a day of physical labour. It’s the fatigue that comes from a day spent looking—at screens, at notifications, at emails, at the blinking cursor of an AI chatbot waiting for the next prompt.
“For many professionals doing nothing is scary, it means wasting time, it means being unproductive and above all they do not know what it is to ‘Just Be’.”Jyoti Pande, psychologist
The word briefly entered the English-speaking wellness lexicon around 2019 after writer Olga Mecking introduced it to a global audience. With advent of AI, the meaning soon changed. Today, niksen has found an entirely new audience. It’s increasingly being seen as a response to AI overload—a world where our brains spend the day prompting, verifying, editing and second-guessing machines until even moments of silence begin to feel uncomfortable.
That discomfort is showing up in workplaces across the world. Surveys this year point to a growing phenomenon researchers are calling AI fatigue. Researchers at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that 14 per cent of employees who rely heavily on AI while needing to closely oversee its outputs experience what they describe as “AI brain fry”—a mental fog marked by difficulty concentrating and cognitive exhaustion. Layered on top of notification overload, endless scrolling and digital multitasking, it has created a peculiar paradox: people are getting more done than ever, yet feeling mentally depleted.
The numbers back up what clinicians are seeing. A recent Harvard Business Review study of 1,488 full-time employees found that workers who spent more time supervising AI systems reported 12 per cent higher mental fatigue, 14 per cent greater mental effort and 19 per cent more information overload. AI may be getting smarter, the researchers suggest, but the cognitive burden of constantly checking, correcting and keeping pace with it is quietly shifting back onto the humans meant to oversee it.
“Those 10 minutes practising niksen help me slow down. I don’t try to think about anything in particular. I just let my mind wander before the day begins.”Vikas Kumar, practices niksen
According to psychologist Jyoti Pande, these moments of intentional rest are crucial. “To many professionals doing nothing is scary, it means wasting time, it means being unproductive and above all they do not know what it is to ‘Just Be’.”
This is where niksen differs from mindfulness. Mindfulness asks you to anchor your attention in the present. Niksen asks for almost the opposite: permission to let the mind wander wherever it likes, untethered and unsupervised. The absence of metrics is why it works as a counter to information overload.
“During periods of intentional rest or “doing nothing,” the brain activates the Default Mode Network (DMN), which supports self-reflection, autobiographical memory, future planning, imagination, problem-solving, social cognition, and creative associations,” explains psychologist Shreya Pahwa.
None of this is an argument against AI. Infact, the professionals embracing niksen are the same people who spend their workdays using AI. They are not pushing back against technology, but the unspoken assumption that every spare minute must be spent, utilised, and filled.