September inherits a school-calendar reflex: the summer is over, so it is time to return as a better worker, partner, friend and parent. That reflex now has an industry behind it — a culture of optimisation visible in the habit of bolting “-maxx” onto everything, as if every human trait were a stat to be farmed.
The cost is measurable. Mental Health UK reports that up to 91% of adults were at risk of burnout over a recent twelve-month period. Rebecca Cope’s Guardian feature collects researchers on work, attention and social connection who mostly agree that the response to that number should not be another improvement plan.
Intensification is now the baseline
Heejung Chung, a professor of work and employment at King’s College London, locates the problem in collective expectations rather than individual discipline. “In the age of digitisation, from work to socialising, we are seeing everything intensify,” she says. “But by doing everything, we’re also creating a culture where it’s seen as normal. So you are not only creating a standard for yourself, but for everyone else as well. There is a creeping set of collective expectations that we can do everything, especially women, and we need to change it.”
Her argument about rest is the one worth keeping. Athletes do not treat recovery as optional — it is how they perform — and Chung thinks knowledge work behaves the same way. “If your job involves creative thinking, problem-solving or knowledge work, rest isn’t wasted time. It’s what enables you to perform at your best.” Long hours worked into the night degrade the work done at the time, and the work done the next day.
Small talk is not wasted either
The most counterintuitive finding in the piece concerns strangers. Gillian Sandstrom, whose book Once Upon a Stranger covers the science of small talk, argues that even trivial exchanges with a barista or someone at a bus stop improve mood, and that they do it partly by slowing you down — you start noticing the people and the surroundings instead of the schedule.
She points to a 2012 study with the useful title Giving Time Gives You Time, which found that spending time on other people leaves you feeling you have more time rather than less. “When we’re busy, we feel like we can’t spare time for other people, but if we never take that time, we’ll never stop feeling busy,” she says.
Boredom as a resource, not a failure
For parents, the piece makes the case against filling every hour. Stephanie O’Dea, author of Slow Living, calls boredom part of the human experience: “This is how creativity, imagination and independence begin. A child saying they are bored isn’t an indictment of your parenting.”
Dr Maral Amani, a paediatric physical therapist, offers the practical version: a child is more likely to play independently if you spend time with them first, and the useful response to “I’m bored” is to resist solving it immediately. “Hmm, I wonder what you’ll come up with” communicates that you believe they can find something themselves. Often what a bored child wants is connection rather than entertainment — which is why “do you want to keep me company and tell me a story while I do this?” tends to work.
Attention is easier to keep than to schedule
Mark Williams, founding director of the Oxford Mindfulness Foundation, says the pause most people can actually manage comes immediately after finishing something, because “finishing one task simply acts as the trigger to begin the next.” His version of mindfulness is habit-stacked onto ordinary activity rather than added to the calendar: pay attention to eating lunch, or ask yourself while walking, “What else is here, apart from all the thoughts in my head?” Appreciation of a roofline, a bird, the light on a building is not decorative — positive mood increases creativity.
He also notes that “most of us walk leaning into the future, mentally rushing towards whatever comes next,” and that simply walking or standing more upright changes how you feel.
Claudia Hammond, author of Overwhelmed, supplies the workday version: schedule meetings for five past the hour so there is always a gap between them, and take two-minute micro-breaks each hour — staring out the window, doodling, closing your eyes — which the research links to better mood and therefore better concentration.
Social life without the production values
The last target is the cost of keeping up friendships. Hammond notes that organising to see friends can itself become a job, with deposits, bookings and competing priorities. The fix is lowering the bar: a walk counts. The same logic applies to hosting, where the meal matters less than the sharing of it — and to the seasonal advice from food writer Jago Rackham, who frames September as a month for “fortifying yourself for the winter” with long lunches and early dinners that catch the last of the light.
Read as a whole, the piece is less a list of tips than an argument about what rest is for. The optimisers treat time off as a deposit against future output. The researchers cited here treat it as the input itself — the condition that makes attention, creativity and friendship possible in the first place.