THE POWER OF LAZINESS

Laziness gets a bad rap. We're constantly being told we should do more, work harder, maximise productivity. But there's another side to the story. Being lazy, it turns out, can be good for both our physical and our mental health. In fact, it may even be at the heart of what makes us human - and it's certainly a successful strategy for the sloth.

Rather than tracked and killed over a long hunt. We are masters of offloading work to machines. If this is laziness, then laziness is a hallmark of our species. More than tools, language or culture, we are marked by the complex accessories that we build to do our work for us, both physical and mental. There are many tool.using animals. from chimps to cockatoos. A whole host of animals communicate using vocalisations that we could describe as language. A few animals build cultures by handing information down the generations. But only humans build systems to relieve them of those tasks. Artificial intelligence is simply the next stage in a long history of automation that's taken us from horses to steam to silicon and beyond.

LAZY BY NATURE 

We humans can be quite judgmental about our lazy peers, hut laziness is among the most valuable adaptations for successful life. And it's not just a human trait. In the animal kingdom, laziness is a necessity. Any animal - indeed, any organism -has to maintain a balance of energy in and energy out. If an animal profligately wastes energy by, say, moving around or working hard, and does not compensate for this with plenty of eating. then that animal will not survive for long. Laziness tells an animal how to manage this: if you do not absolutely need to do something, don't. This lazy impulse is just one of many impulses that propel an animal's life - so it does not always win out, and animals do frequently prance and play and preen - hut the drive to conserve precious energy is always there.

Whenever we yoke an ox to a plough. or set an algorithm investing, we are, in a sense, achieving new heights in this common drive to laziness. More than just waiting to plough until we need to and then only ploughing what we need, we've arranged things so that we do not have to do the ploughing (at least not the hard part of it), but still get to do the eating. Our chimpanzee relatives are some of the smartest non-humans on the planet, but they don't come close to that kind of clever facilitation of doing nothing. In general, clever animals seem to be able to spend more of their time on laziness, and chimpanzees are no exception -they nap, socialise and play in a way that a mouse, constantly in desperate straits to stay alive, could only dream of. Despite this, though, chimpanzees still have hard work to do. Being large animals, they need to consume a lot of food and vitamins, and may spend almost 30 per cent of their time foraging- more than half their waking hours. They may be able to use stick-tools to catch nutritious termites to save some time, but we humans, with fast food and ready meals, spend almost none of our time sourcing food. Nor do many of us work in food production. Back in 1400, almost 60 per cent of the British work force was involved in agriculture. Today, our laziness­ enabling technology has that number down to around 1 per cent. Our ingenuity allows us to be lazier than tho chimps.

But there's true laziness, and then there's efficiency. Every animal benefits from efficiency. Efficient strategies mean you can either get more energy in or reduce energy out in a shorter lime or with less effort. In other words, efficiency is ultimately in service of laziness. The same drive to laziness that animates (or rather, dis-animates) all animals motivates our own labour-saving technology. A truly lazy ape would have embraced, at a species-wide level, the opportunity for laziness that our technology allows. We, however, rebel against its we always have.

Instead of satisfying ourselves with lives of supine relaxation, we are constantly looking for ways to be more efficient. With agriculture, we made keeping ourselves fed more efficient. We could have become lazy-producing enough to eat in less time, and committing the spue hours to relaxation. Instead, we produce extra food, feed our livestock and eat them instead. A lazy ape would have stopped with basic vegetable farming, but we put extra-effort in because we like the taste of meat. We domesticated horses to allow some other beast to do some of our walking for us. A lazy ape would have stopped there, but we found we liked speed, and so have built every manner of vehicle to make transit faster and more comfortable. We built computers to handle our memory and calculations for us, but unsatisfied with that we are now trying to build artificial intelligence to make decisions without even asking us. A lazy move, to be sure, but a truly lazy ape would never have made it that far. Once they had enough to survive, they would've stopped.

So more than the lazy ape, instead I think we're the building ape· We create laziness-enabling machines to free up more time and more resources to build something bigger. We scaffold technology upon technology and idea upon idea in pursuit of goals of which a lazy ape would never dream. Like every animal, we needed laziness to keep ourselves alive in times of scarcity or to discourage any activity where costs might outweigh the benefits. But we have come out the other side of laziness. Most humans who read this won't have known real, threatening scarcity like the majority of animals face. We have the technology to be the laziest animal on Earth, and yet we are not lazy. We want to make things more better, bigger, different and more complex. Even once all of our needs are met, we stand up, get back to work, and build.

DON'T WORRY, BE LAZY

It's tempting to kick back and relax over the warm summer days. Happily, there's scientific proof that this is exactly the right thing to do.

SLOW DOWN AND IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH 

Taking time out from the daily grind can benefit both body and mind.

In a now-famous study carried out in 1999, psychologist Dr Robert Levine analysed the pace of life in cities in 31 countries, measuring things such as the speed at which people walk and the time it takes post office staff to hand out stamps. He found that the fastest pace of life was in Western Europe and Japan, and the fastest-living countries also had the highest rates of coronary heart disease. When British psychologist Prof Richard Wiseman repeated the experiment in 2006 by simply measuring walking speed, he found tho pace of life had increased by 10 per cent.

The bigger the city, the faster our pace of life, and we're living faster than ever before. Dr Stephanie Brown, a psychologist who's written a book on the topic, describes our hunger for fast-paced living as an addiction. "People can't stop wanting to go faster," says Brown. "You begin to need more and more time on the computer. People talk about sleeping with their phones. You start to log on first thing in the morning. You cannot not do it. Your behaviours start looking like that first drink in the morning. You need it."But there are signs of recognition of the problem ... Society is hitting a tipping point." says Brown. "I hope its going to become embarrassing to have your phone out while you're eating dinner."'

Brown suggests taking baby steps to overcome our addiction to living fast- perhaps first reducing the amount of time we spend checking email on our phones each day by five minutes, then introducing other slaps. She says our gadgets are likely to have in-built limits as culture changes. Apple has already announced that iOS 12 lets users monitor how much time they're spending on their devices and apps.

As well as our overall pace of life, there's good reason to slow down a few other things, such as how quickly we eat. A study of nearly 60,000 Japanese people showed that those who ate slowly, or at "normal speed" were less likely to become overweight than those who gobbled. It's thought that it takes 15 to 20 minutes for our body's feedback mechanisms to tell us we're full, so eating more slowly gives more of an opportunity for this to kick in.

ACHIEVE MORE BY WORKING LESS 

Breaks and naps are no obstacle to a good day's work.

The logic sounds simple: if you work more hours you'll get more done. But studies consistently show that our brains area bit like muscles in that the more we use them. the more they get tired, so short, sharp stints of work with plenty of breaks is the way to go.

According to a study by software company Draugiem Group, the two magic numbers when it comes to the work-rest balance are 52 and 17- that's 52-minute working sprints with 17-minute breaks. It reached this conclusion by analysing data from productivity app DeskTime. Workers who achieved the most were the ones who tended lo work in this pattern.

So what should you do during your well-earned breaks? Well, look at cute photos of kittens and puppies, of course. A study by researchers at Hiroshima University in Japan found that after students viewed images of kittens and puppies- as opposed to the adult versions of the animals -they were far more focused and performed better at a number-search game, as well as a game similar to Operation I hat required dexterity.

This may be because the cute critters triggered the participants' inbuilt caregiving instinct, making them more attentive and vigilant.

As well as taking more breaks, even getting some daytime shut-eye can help. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that people who napped for an hour at lunchtime performed better in recall tests and tests that involved solving maths problems than those who didn't nap, as naps give the brain a chance to recharge. Lengthy spells in the land of nod can oven help keep the weight off. In a study of more than 1,500 middle-aged adults. Simona Boat the University of Turin found thal the adults who became obese in her six-year study period slept on average 6.3 hours a night compared with 7.2 hours for those who stayed at a healthy weight.

By Anthone Martinho and Andy Ridgway in "BBC Focus Magazine", UK, Summer 2018, n.29, excerpts pp. 38-44. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.