You Need More Yutori: the Life-Changing Japanese Concept of Mental Spaciousness
Time hunger, why creativity requires yutori, and the beauty in having mental space
Modern life and time hunger
Your alarm goes off. You crawl out of bed, make a coffee while checking email. You respond to your boss while drinking the coffee. You then spend the tube journey replying to emails and fixing something that is urgent. You get to work, are in and out of Zoom meetings all day, you get lunch at 3pm. By the evening, you’ve left it too late to exercise, so you head home, make a quick dinner that you eat with Netflix, and then scroll Instagram until you need to go to sleep. Alarm set. Do it all again. Ad infinitum.
This disembodied sequence is a familiar day for many people. A review for a popular meditation course (I interviewed the creator of it Dave Potter a while back) started:
"I felt lost – desperate even – to feel connected and present in my everyday life. I felt like I was watching my life drift past me; like I was watching a movie of my life and not really participating in it..."
This sums up how many people feel - a crammed day, with barely a moment to think, let alone feel. Busyness becomes the badge of honour, and busyness also becomes the opioid - addictive and numbing. I was intrigued, therefore, when I discovered the Japanese word ‘Yutori’ - the word for ‘mental spaciousness’ - an antidote to this time-impoverished routine.
Yutori, and the art of mental spaciousness
‘Yutori’ is today seen as a concept of ‘mental spaciousness’, literally meaning ‘leeway’. It alludes to that feeling of having ‘space in our life’, a feeling of time spaciousness, not being in a rush. You might feel it when spending time in nature, arriving at the airport with time to spare, having a Sunday afternoon with no obligations, leaving your phone in the other room as you read before bed. It allows space, so we can expand our energy. As Japanese culture expert Azumi Uchitani describes it, it is a not just time spaciousness “but also money and finance as well… some extra capacity in life.”
Yutori relates to both physical and mental space. You can have a sense of expansion - just from cleaning up the clutter in your flat, or having a little money left over at the end of the month. And with more Yutori, explains Uchitani, comes more peace and creativity.
Via Instagram
The Japanese have a gift for coming up with words for previously undefined concepts. Yūgen, for example, means ‘beauty only partially perceived—fully felt but barely glimpsed by the viewer’ - a mysterious profundity that, when we’re lucky, we experience in everyday life. It feels to me that Yutori is similarly metaphysical in nature - describing that mental state where we have a sort of peripheral, soft awareness of the whole picture instead of intense focus on a single point or object (sort of like what we try to do in meditation - soften the focus to allow the distance between our thoughts, to allow us to not identify so heavily with them).
Yutori and the value of mental spaciousness for ideas
I previously wrote about the value of what I call ‘inefficient curiosity’. I hadn’t discovered the word yutori then, but I suppose in some ways that was what I was describing - a freedom to roam so we can come up with original thought. When we are able to have space we can discover things that we can’t do when we are hyperfocused.
You’ve probably had that experience when you come up with a brilliant idea on a run, or in a shower, or have a fresh perspective on a situation when you’re on holiday. It’s like when people say you only find your keys when you’re not looking for them. History is littered with moments like this - slack moments in time revealing huge breakthroughts. The famous tale of Archimedes, who shrieked “Eureka!”, while taking a bath in a tub when he made his remarkable discovery of buoyancy (now known as the Archimedes Principle). Isaac Newton, sitting idly under a tree only to be hit by an apple, making the connection and discovering gravity. Neither Newton or Archimedes discovered their ideas in a lab.
This is not to say we should only be taking space. We need hard work too. In the brilliant book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, Bernbach argues that coming up with a good idea requires at least two key phases: a research phase, a phase of intense input where you take in as much information as possible about a topic, and then a phase where we think about something completely different and allow the neurons to make the connections. We need time and space to come up with creative ideas, as well as industry and hard work.
Integrating Yutori
When researching, I soon found the origin of Yutori has a much more complex, and ambivalent, history than this explanation allows. It orginates from the Yutori Education policies in Japan in the 1990s and early 2000s, which encouraged a laxness and creativity of teaching. This Yutori education - creating what is sometimes called the ‘Yutori Generation’ - was a response to the post-war mechanical learning techniques of memorisation, techniques that were feared to reduce creativity and independence of thought. Introducing these policies of reduced hours and curriculum to kids - it was argued - because of poor implementation and teaching - didn’t go as planned. I’ll write more on this here soon, but today, as so many of us today have so little yutori in our life, let’s start by looking at the ideals of yutori outside of the education system, and how you might apply it today. Here are some ways:
Take time off. Explore. Be in nature. Know that this is adding to your potential to build and create amazing things in the world - not distracting from it.
Dedicate some space every week to wonder, and wander. Even if it’s a walk to a coffee shop, or leaving your phone down one evening. Give your brain time off to process everything you’ve done and make connections.
Cut your personal to-do and to-buy list. Each thing you do has an invisible network of new actions come out of it. E.g. if you’re buying a blender, you need to research it, get it delivered, return it if it’s faulty. See what you can reduce here, mental overwhelm often comes from overextending ourselves and outstanding tasks.
Meditate. Honestly. Meditation is one of the best ways to create mental distance, to give you space in the day between the obligations. It’s a way to reduce stress and improve focus, to stop distracting yourself with your phone in every moment of stillness, and become more mentally expansive.
SLOW DOWN Yutori is about having enough time and peace of mind to enjoy life without being constantly under pressure. See if you can move more slowly, eat more slowly, and live more slowly.
I wish more people gave themselves ten minutes for mental spaciousness. It’s good for you, and for your work. This is why I’m hosting a 4 week meditation course in September for people who want to introduce more mental spaciousness, for just 20 minutes twice a week. We’ll do some simple breathwork, and a short 10-15 minute meditation. Spaces are capped so, if you want to try it out, sign up here.