Gerald, 58, semi-retired architect, told me something over coffee near Tanjong Pagar a few months ago that I haven’t been able to shake. He’d just come back from a week alone at a place in Langkawi, a trip his wife had been encouraging for over a year. “I lasted two days before I downloaded three new apps, reorganized my entire reading list, and started sketching plans for a renovation nobody asked for,” he said. “By day three I realized I wasn’t relaxing. I was building a fortress out of tasks so I wouldn’t have to sit with whatever was underneath.”

Most people would hear that and think Gerald just has a strong work ethic. That’s the conventional reading. We’ve been trained to admire people who can’t sit still, to interpret relentless activity as ambition or discipline. Productivity culture has made busyness synonymous with worth. The person who’s always doing something, always optimizing, always on to the next thing, gets praised. The person sitting quietly on a bench gets asked if they’re okay.

But Gerald wasn’t being productive in Langkawi. He was fleeing. And what he was fleeing from was himself.

The avoidance engine disguised as a calendar

Psychologists have identified a pattern known as experiential avoidance. It describes the tendency to avoid internal experiences, including thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations, even when doing so creates long-term harm. The compulsively busy person isn’t necessarily avoiding a specific emotion. They’re avoiding the act of feeling altogether. Every task, every errand, every reorganized drawer becomes a tiny wall between them and whatever lives in the silence.

What makes this so hard to spot is that it looks productive. The inbox gets to zero. The house is immaculate. The side project launches. From the outside, it reads as competence. From the inside, it functions as anaesthesia.

I know this because I spent years doing exactly the same thing.

The podcast wall

I’ve written before about how, a few years ago, I couldn’t walk my whippet without earbuds in. True crime podcasts, mostly. I told myself it was curiosity, that I was learning something, that the walks were multitasking. But the truth was simpler and less flattering: I couldn’t tolerate twelve minutes of unnarrated silence. Not because the silence was boring. Because the silence was loud.

The moment the earbuds came out, the inventory started. Things I hadn’t dealt with. Questions about whether the decisions I’d made across nearly two decades of building companies were the right ones. A low hum of something I couldn’t name that lived somewhere between restlessness and grief. The podcasts weren’t entertainment. They were a wall.

I eventually stopped wearing them. Not through some dramatic epiphany. I just forgot them one morning and noticed, about halfway through the walk near Boat Quay, that the discomfort I’d been avoiding wasn’t actually as unbearable as I’d assumed. It was uncomfortable, yes. But survivable. That distinction matters.

Stillness as a lost skill

Research has found that solitude exists on a spectrum, and that the capacity to be alone without distress is something that varies enormously between individuals. Some people experience solitude as restorative. Others experience it as a kind of emergency. The difference often comes down to whether the person has practiced being alone with themselves or spent decades ensuring they never had to.

That word, practiced, is the one that struck me. Being alone with your own mind is a skill. Like any skill, it atrophies without use. And the modern world provides an almost infinite number of ways to avoid using it: notifications, to-do lists, streaming queues, social feeds, voice memos, meal prep routines, side hustles. None of these are inherently harmful. All of them can be recruited as avoidance strategies.

The question isn’t whether you’re busy. The question is what happens when you stop.

What the body does when the schedule empties

I started paying closer attention to this pattern in myself around the time my partner and I got the whippet. There was a stretch where I’d fill every pause in the day with something. If the dog was sleeping and my partner was out, I’d open my laptop. If the laptop was closed, I’d clean the kitchen. If the kitchen was already clean, I’d check my phone. The sequence had no purpose beyond continuity. I was keeping the machinery running so I wouldn’t have to notice what the machinery was covering up.

What it was covering up, I eventually realized, was a kind of low-grade anxiety that had been there for so long I’d mistaken it for personality. I thought I was “driven.” I was agitated. Those are different things, though they wear the same clothes.

The concept of dynamic solitude helped me reframe what I was experiencing. The idea is that true solitude isn’t about being physically alone. It’s about being mentally unoccupied enough that your own inner landscape becomes the primary terrain. Most people who say they enjoy being alone are actually filling that aloneness with content, scrolling, listening, watching. Dynamic solitude means sitting in a room with yourself and not reaching for anything.

Most of us can’t do it for five minutes.

When productivity becomes the problem

Rachel, 51, a financial advisor I’ve known for about nine years, described her own version of this to me last year. She’d taken a sabbatical. Three months. She expected to feel liberated. Instead, she felt seasick. “I didn’t know what to do with my hands,” she said. “I’d sit on the couch and within ninety seconds I’d be making a list. A list of what, I don’t even know. Just a list. Something to hold.”

Rachel isn’t lazy. Rachel is one of the most capable people I know. But her capability had become a shield. Every competent act was also a deflection. As long as she was solving something, she didn’t have to feel anything. And when the sabbatical removed the problems to solve, she discovered that the feeling she’d been outrunning for decades was still there, patiently waiting.

She described it as “a kind of emptiness that isn’t empty.” I knew exactly what she meant.

The childhood roots of compulsive doing

Where does this come from? For many people, the pattern starts early. Children who grew up in environments where value was tied to usefulness, where love felt conditional on contribution, where being idle invited criticism or neglect, often carry a deep equation into adulthood: doing equals safety. Not doing equals exposure.

I’ve written about how children praised as “mature for their age” often develop a lifelong habit of performing capability because that performance was the thing that kept them safe. Compulsive busyness is the adult expression of that same survival strategy. The child who learned that sitting quietly invited scrutiny becomes the adult who can’t take a vacation without turning it into a project.

This doesn’t require a traumatic childhood. It just requires a childhood where stillness wasn’t modeled as valuable. Where rest was treated as laziness. Where someone, even with the best intentions, communicated that your worth lived in your output.

The discomfort underneath

So what’s actually in the silence? What are people running from?

It varies. For some, it’s grief that never got processed because there was always something more urgent. For others, it’s doubt about whether the life they’ve constructed actually reflects who they are. For many, it’s a nervous system conditioned to interpret stillness as threatening. The specifics differ. The mechanism is the same: constant motion as a regulatory strategy.

There’s a video by Justin Brown that looks at why feeling like a fraud is actually a sign you’re growing—it’s a useful companion to this idea, because both busyness and imposter syndrome often stem from the same uncomfortable place: not wanting to sit with who we actually are when we strip away the performance.

The tragedy is that the strategy works well enough to prevent the person from ever questioning it. They stay busy. They stay productive. They stay ahead. And they never sit with themselves long enough to discover that the discomfort they’re avoiding might have something important to tell them.

Gerald told me something else that day near Tanjong Pagar. He said that on day four of his Langkawi trip, after he’d exhausted his renovation sketches and run out of apps to download, he sat on the balcony and cried. Not about anything specific. Just a release that had been queued for what felt like years.

“I didn’t know what I was crying about,” he said. “But my body did.”

What happens when you let the engine idle

People who genuinely enjoy long stretches of solitude aren’t fundamentally different from the rest of us. They’ve just practiced tolerating what shows up when the schedule empties. They’ve built the muscle. They’ve learned that the discomfort of stillness, like most discomfort, has a peak and then a descent. That the thoughts you’ve been avoiding don’t destroy you when you finally let them in. That the silence isn’t actually empty. It’s full of you.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve mastered this. At 44, I still catch myself reaching for my phone during moments that don’t require it. I still sometimes fill an empty afternoon with tasks that could wait. The difference is that now I notice. And noticing, I’ve found, is the thing that breaks the loop.

I still walk the same route near Boat Quay every morning with the whippet. No earbuds now. Some mornings my mind is calm. Some mornings it’s a storm. Both are fine. The point was never to make the silence comfortable. The point was to stop being afraid of it.

Gerald texted me recently. He’s planning another trip to Langkawi. This time, he said, he’s leaving the sketchbook at home.

I told him to leave the phone too.

He sent back a single emoji. A grimace. Then, a few minutes later: “Maybe.”

That “maybe” is where most of us live. Somewhere between knowing the busyness is a shield and being willing to put it down. The space between those two things is narrow, but everything that matters happens there.