We have a similar expression in Danish.

In Danish It’s:

“Ledighed er roden til alt ondt”.

When translated (using Google translate), it translates to this:

“Unemployment is the root of all evil”.

I remember this expression (the Danish one) from when I was a kid. I always believed that it was coined to prevent slackers from not working. In Denmark we have a fairly well-functioning well-fair system – but in order for it to balance properly, you need to have more contributors than “takers” in the system. Of course, if you don’t work you normally don’t get paid (unless you receive public well fair), so to me it always seemed kind of redundant to have such an expression.

However, I’ve recently come to realize that the word “ledighed” has multiple translations/interpretations.

The word “ledig” in Danish can also be translated to “vacant” or “idle”.

Seeing the English expression “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” for the first time recently, I realized that the phrase that I often heard in my childhood maybe wasn’t always a jab at the unemployed – but rather the people who had a tendency towards having idle hands. You know, the lazy people – like me! 😛

That then led me to ponder about the periods of my life, where I felt like my head had been busy, but my hands had been idling. Of course such periods (still) comes and goes. For a while I actually managed to ruminate myself into a mild depression. There of course were other factors involved, but the main driver behind my depression was simply because I was spending too much time inside my own head. I saw a therapist for a few sessions, and what I basically learned from those sessions was: Stop thinking about it!

Of course that it easier said than done. When you have a tendency to overthink in general (I’ve realized this about myself a long time ago), thinking too much about your own thoughts or wellbeing quickly turns into rumination, which is not a good thing.

My therapist also told me this: You can’t think yourself well, but you can think yourself ill.

This was also a big eyeopener for me. You can think yourself ill. So if that indeed was the case for me, then all I had to do to “fix myself” was to stop thinking about it!

So I did. Of course this is a lot easier said than done. Often it feels like the thoughts are involuntary, but there is only one person in the world who can control your thoughts; you.