The art of unparenting: How doing nothing helps everyone
It’s simple science
Imagine you’re at the gym lifting a set of weights. A trainer tells you to bounce the dumbbell a few times up and down. After a little while, you feel great as your muscular strength begins to improve. Now, picture being asked to hold that same weight motionless for 30 minutes straight. Your muscles would scream in protest. Your joints would ache. Instead of growing stronger, you’d risk serious damage—torn fibers, strained ligaments, maybe even lasting harm to your bones.
Mental stress is no different. A short burst of stress is healthy, beneficial and even necessary. It works like a powerlift for our nervous systems. If I wrote a book called How Stress Helps Us Survive, here’s what it would say…
Our ancestors who lived as hunter-gatherers in forests and caves were basically snack options for saber-toothed tigers. Each time our ancestors came across a predator, their bodies went into panic mode. Their hearts began racing, palms began sweating, stomach did a few somersaults. This wasn’t just anxiety; it was their bodies prepping for the ultimate showdown: fight or flight. Stress, in small doses, was their survival superpower.
Their hearts pumped faster to send oxygen to their muscles and brain, their muscles tensed up for quick action, their pupils dilated so they could focus better, and their bodies released stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol to give them a temporary boost of energy and focus. All of this was orchestrated by the sympathetic nervous system, which is basically your body’s way of saying, “Hey, you’re about to get eaten. DO something!”
But as soon as the stimulating event is over and our ancestors have killed the predator, our brain sends signals to our body to calm down. This turns on a second system: the parasympathetic nervous system. It handles what’s known as the rest-and-digest response.
Here, our heart rate and breathing become slow and steady. Our muscles relax. Stress hormone levels lower, and feel-good hormones (such as oxytocin and serotonin) become somewhat higher. This lets us feel safe. We now can think calmly, digest food and sleep, all processes vital to our brain and overall health.
Simply put, stress responses make us faster, stronger, and more alert—perfect for outrunning a tiger or, in modern times, catching the bus we are late for. But here’s the kicker: if you’re constantly in this state, your body starts to think it’s in a never-ending tiger chase. That’s essentially what happens with chronic stress.
The former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a warning recently that mankind was facing an epidemic of chronic stress. During his tenure as surgeon general, Murthy took a “listening tour” across America. The recurring theme he heard was that “the stresses in people’s lives were causing them great pain and they didn’t always know how to deal with them. This chronic stress was leading to an increase in inflammation in the body and risks of cardiovascular diseases, cancer, anxiety, depression and a host of other illnesses. If we are not addressing stress and emotional well-being, we are missing a major contributor to our health.”
Till I read this warning, I had not realised that I too lived with some form of chronic stress. Most days I went about like an Olympic sprinter from one post to another, with a to-do list and a schedule that was longer than any supermarket receipt. Some mornings when I glanced at my work schedule and to-do list for my household and kids, my heart would go racing, my palms sweating and pupils dilating. I tried hard to outrun that tiger of my to-do list, but rarely succeeded, and ended up staying in that heightened state of ‘to-dos-pursuit’ stress.
I shared this tragicomic tale with a friend, who nodded sympathetically. We both reminisced our childhood years and wondered if our parents had gone through similar stress levels, or were we just really the two most useless and under-capable human specimens that turned out to be parents. My friend then highlighted to me a piece of data that Mr.Vivek Murthy had unearthed, which helped us understand our condition better.
He had found that parents of my generation were both working longer hours AND spending more time with their children, than people of any generation before us. That meant that they were cutting out a lot of the time from things that helped them unwind (often, these included walking to and from a grocery store that was 20 mins away or just catching up with a neighbour for a cup of coffee and gossip).
Murthy says mothers are now spending 40% more time each week on child care, compared to 1985, and fathers are now devoting 154% more time each week to child care than they used to. Virtual working options mean many parents are working longer and more varied hours, which increases the need for primary child care. They are left with little to no time for their para-sympathetic nervous systems to bring their stress hormones down.
I read this update on my friend’s phone, sighed and went my way. At that time, I assumed this was just the universal plight of parents in my generation. I wanted to do a bit more research on this and looked for data from across the world. And then, like a plot twist in a Netflix drama, I came across a BBC survey that revealed something shocking. Kids as young as eight and teenagers are now experiencing stress levels that would make even a corporate CEO sweat. Their overpacked schedules and never-ending to-do lists are often as bad a problem as it is for adults.
Kids today juggle homework, extracurriculars, and social pressures on a scale never seen before. Their schedules are so packed that their nervous systems stay locked in high alert, pumping out stress hormones with little chance to wind down. Without downtime, their parasympathetic nervous system—the body’s "brake pedal" for stress—never gets a real chance to kick in, leaving heart rates elevated and stress levels simmering.
This reminds me of a scene from R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days, set in a sleepy Indian town where time moves at the pace of a wandering cow.
Three schoolboys—Swaminathan, Mani, and Rajam—spend a summer afternoon loitering by a sunbaked roadside. When a bullock cart trundles into view, they block its path, pretending to be stern police inspectors. They "inspect" the cart, mock-scold the driver for his "unwashed" bullock, and finally issue him a fake road pass before letting him go. The whole episode is pointless, mischievous, and utterly perfect.
Isn’t that aimless loitering—sitting under a tree, watching dust swirl on an endless road—exactly what lets a child’s nervous system finally exhale? Compare that to the modern "15-day summer holiday" we often plan, crammed with sightseeing checklists, meal stops on a timer, and city-hopping every 48 hours. For the nervous system, it’s just another workday—or school day—in disguise.
It is precisely for this reason that many of us reminisce about our childhood summer vacations spent at a grandparents’ place. There were no sightseeing lists. Both adults and children went about life like those three boys in Malgudi during summer vacation.
This may also explain why some adults today feel the need for a holiday after a holiday—to unwind from the stress of that fast-moving, 15-day "vacation."
Vivek Murthy makes these three important suggestions for both adults and kids to regain a sense of normalcy in their lives.
a) Sleep longer and better - Sleep is when our brain regenerates and forms memories and our body tissues heal. When we don’t sleep enough, it impairs our ability to make decisions, learn and heal and hormonal disturbances occur. If you do not sleep enough, you lose your sense of wanting to be creative-—you just want to get through the day.
b) Meditation has been shown to be incredibly important and helpful when it comes to stress. But sadly, meditation has had a serious branding problem, because people think you’re talking about an Indian yogi sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours and hours. It does not have to be that. Meditation is simply about focusing on something. You can sit and admire a painting or listen to sounds in a garden or even just focus on your own breathing while going for a 20 min walk outside. Any of these help us improve our attention and awareness, and help us achieve a mentally clear and stable state.
c) Regular exercise (with music thrown in for good measure) - Regular exercise is far more important than we have understood and can function as a great antidepressant. Guidelines recommend that adults get at least 2 1/2 hours a week of moderately intense physical activity. Children should be active at least 60 minutes every day.
Attention, Overachievers!
Kids: Look at your to-do list. Does it include things like "Become piano prodigy by Tuesday" , '“Win a soccer trophy like Messi this weekend” and "Master quantum physics before snack time"?
None of us needs to be the next Mozart and Virat Kohli and Einstein and Theatre star all at once. Pick one thing you like and are okay-ishly good at.
Parents, here’s the magic part: When your kid’s schedule isn’t busier than a squirrel on espresso, yours gets simpler too. Fewer carpools and less frantic schedule planning! You will have time to walk down the lane to your grocery store AND catch up with a friend for coffee.
Summer time podcasts to listen to - unwind while listening to this as you go for a walk
Menaka Raman, a mother of teenagers, speaks about how she became an author.
Food technologist Sarika Singh speaks about how food labels can be misleading, and why Bournvita and Horlicks are not health drinks.
Harry Potter - which house would you like to be sorted into?
References and sources
Vivek Murthy on why parenting is more stressful than ever. TIME article
Vivek Murthy discusses stress and solutions
Why are young people anxious and how can we help? BBC article