Why Can’t You Sit Still?
Long ago, when I was a fledgling journalist, I learned from an eminent editor about the concept of Sitzfleisch. It was a German word, he explained, that referred to the ability to sit still for a long time. “If you want to be a professional writer, you need Sitzfleisch,” he told me. Although it was important to “get out there” and “report,” it was also inevitable that I’d have to plant myself at a desk for whole days and weeks, focussing unremittingly on the production of words; many talented writers, he suggested, had failed to progress because they wrote beautifully but not for long enough.
Under different guises, I was already familiar with Sitzfleisch. In a prior life, as a graduate student in English, I’d spent entire days reading. This was reading for work, not for fun, and I frequently had to force myself to occupy the same library armchair from morning til night, squinting at the pages until my vision blurred. I’d discovered, during this period, that not all Sitzfleisch was created equal. You could succeed at sitting in a chair while your mind wandered. Often, it was movement that pushed you out to sea. In those days, I read lots of productivity books, and one of them, “How to Work the Competition Into the Ground and Have Fun Doing It,” was particularly centered on the struggle against “mind drift.” Its author, John T. Molloy, had carefully observed himself at work, and determined that episodes of drift began when he leaned back in his chair. Accordingly, he placed a sign that read “GET BACK TO WORK” near the ceiling, at the exact spot where his gaze tended to alight when he reclined. Seeing it, he’d immediately lean forward, returning to a state of Über-Sitzfleisch—the higher kind of sitting.
The problem is an odd one, fundamentally. Newton’s first law of motion holds that bodies at rest stay at rest. But it doesn’t apply, apparently, to human bodies. Why are we so antsy? Why can’t the body content itself with stillness, leavened, perhaps, by the fluttering of fingers over a keyboard or the occasional arcing turn of a page? When I attempted extended Sitzfleisch, I sometimes felt as if every joint in my body had its own will, my fingers wanting to bunch and unbunch, my legs to cross and uncross. Standing and pacing were just an eyeblink away.
This past June, I broke my ankle, and so had to spend much of the summer in bed. The desire to move—even to move the broken ankle itself—became, at times, overwhelming. This was the problem of Sitzfleisch, amplified. And yet my nervous energy could be temporarily suspended by meditative breathing, or extinguished for hours by a fast-paced book or an absorbing show on Netflix (or, on good writing days, by the flow of work). What was sometimes impossible was at other times effortless. Just sitting there, it turned out, was complicated.
“Why do we and other animals have brains?” the neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert asked, in a 2011 TED talk. You might think that brains are for perceiving the world, or for having ideas, but this would be wrong, Wolpert said: “We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements.” At bottom, brains help us figure out where and how we’ll move next; even perception and communication are forms of movement (the saccade of an eye, the enunciation of a syllable). In general, living things that don’t move don’t have brains. The sea squirt, Wolpert pointed out, has a brain, and uses it to find a good rock on which to make its home—but then it immediately digests most of its brain, because it never needs to move again.
Learning this, you might imagine the brain as an issuer of clear movement commands—as a general, or a choreographer. But this doesn’t capture the full story. In reality, the brain is a collection of subsystems that are, to varying degrees, interconnected and autonomous. Many of these subsystems hatch their own individual movement plans, creating a range of possibilities, all competing. The competition is adjudicated in the basal ganglia, structures deep inside the brain that repress all the plans except one. The basal ganglia get better at their job during the first thirty years of life; this is partly why kids are more impulsive and restless than adults. Disorders such as Parkinson’s and Tourette’s involve a malfunctioning of the basal ganglia. So we might say that, beneath the surface of stillness, there’s an ambitious cacophony that must be controlled. Our brains are wild, and yet rein themselves in.
Instead of imagining a binary between motion and stillness, should we picture a spectrum of activity, ranging from the brashest, biggest movements to the minute ones that we use to investigate the world or put down our thoughts? My eight-year-old son seems to sit still while playing Minecraft; when he’s not doing that, he runs laps around the house. But, when he’s Minecrafting, is he really still? Actually, he’s immersed in a flow of typing and mousing, imagining and deciding, venturing and inspecting; with his eyes and hands, he is in constant motion. Similarly, he can curl up in a chair for an hour, trying to get faster with his Rubik’s Cube. Is that Sitzfleisch? If so, Sitzfleisch is really about maintaining momentum. You don’t lean back in your chair when you’re making progress on the problems you’re facing; you do it when you’re stuck.
In a short story called “Catch That Rabbit,” from 1944, Isaac Asimov imagined a futuristic scenario in which engineers test a robot nicknamed Dave, which controls six “subsidiary” robots, orchestrating their movements in the excavation of a mine on an asteroid. Dave is supposed to be able to operate without human supervision. But whenever he encounters a truly vexing or overwhelming problem—an imminent cave-in, say—his subsidiary robots act strangely, performing what, to trouble-shooters, look like “callisthenic exercises.” Why is the team of robots working hard one moment, and marching in formation the next? The engineers conclude that, when Dave doesn’t know what to do, he enters a “moronic maze” and starts “twiddling his fingers.” This reverses the picture we might have of Sitzfleisch. My editor presented it as though people with Sitzfleisch stay in one place so that their minds can work. But it might be because your mind is working that you can sit in place.
In “The Principles of Psychology,” from 1890, William James compared our thoughts to a river. On the whole, he wrote, “easy simple flowing predominates in it.” Yet “at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs.” This “stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the other way.” If a river were self-aware, how would it feel about those eddies? James thought it would experience them as “places of effort”:
The sensation of mental effort isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, James thought, “the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life,” comes from the sense that we’re the ones pushing our mental lives forward. From this perspective, it’s because Sitzfleisch eludes us that we know we exist. If you’re not struggling to sit still, are you even alive? Or are you just a sea squirt, happily brainless on its rock?
In schoolrooms and offices, there are worksheets and spreadsheets to be done; around the world, there are probably millions of Google Docs open in millions of browsers, cursors blinking. There are lots of reasons to try to repress our nervous energy, and so it’s no surprise that there’s a big-time campaign against mind drift. I’ve certainly profited from honing my Sitzfleisch skills. I know when not to lean back in my chair, lest it lead, God forbid, to going for a walk.
But it’s worth noting that sitting still and doing just one thing for a long time is, in many respects, at odds with the essential nature of the human mind. And it’s also good to ask whether, for many tasks, it’s capability, rather than discipline, that allows us to concentrate. When you can’t move, you desperately want to fidget; it’s when you don’t know what to think that your mind darts to something else. Often, you want to get up from your desk because you’ve stumbled across the limits of what you know how to do. You can respond by forcing yourself to sit there, banging away at the problem with whatever resources you have. Or you can get up, do the dishes, and hope that the solution will come to you. Maybe, the next time you encounter a logjam, you’ll be able to stay in the flow a little longer. ♦