The Space Between

Why the Pauses in Your Day Are Not Wasted Time — They're a Longevity Practice

Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash

Something shifted in my clinic a few months ago.

I started using an AI scribe. This is a tool on my phone that listens to my patient visits and generates the clinical note in real time. I knew it would save me time. What I didn’t expect was what it would do to the quality of that time.

I can look at my patients now. Actually look at their face, their hands, the way they pause before answering a question. Instead of splitting my attention between the person in front of me and the screen beside me, I am just there.

But the change I didn’t anticipate was what happens between patients.

Before, I would immediately open the next chart, still mentally in the previous visit. My mind was never quite where my body was. There was no transition.

Now I close the chart with the note complete and often have a minute, sometimes a few. I can sit with what just happened before moving to what’s next. I can arrive at the next patient as my best self: curious, settled, actually ready.

I am someone who has been very bad at this. I have always moved from patient to patient, meeting to meeting, task to task. Multitasking, always mid-something, with no space between any of it. Feeling busy became my norm. It became my practice.

But the AI scribe helped me realize what I’d been missing. And once I noticed it in clinic, I started noticing its absence everywhere.

Always Mid-Something

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the burnout conversation in medicine. We talk a lot about volume and having too many patients, too little time. We talk about administrative burden. Both are real.

I also wonder if part of what makes the current model so depleting is something subtler: the absence of space between.

When you move from patient to patient to documentation to inbox to patient again without a single moment of transition, something accumulates. It’s not tiredness. It’s a kind of fragmentation and the sense that you are never quite whole in any one moment because the last moment hasn’t finished and the next one has already started. You are always mid-thought, mid-feeling, mid-something.

Over time, I think it erodes the very things that drew most of us to medicine: the curiosity, the connection, the sense that this work means something. Those things need space to breathe.

What the Space Between Actually Is

The space between is not downtime. It is not inefficiency. It is not the absence of something useful and productive.

It is when things become possible.

It’s where a thought that was forming in the background finally has room to surface. It’s where curiosity gets to ask its question.

In medicine, the space between is where you notice the thing the patient didn’t say. Where empathy has a moment to catch up. Where a physician can remember that they are a human being caring for another human being, not just moving through a queue.

This is not only true in medicine. It is true in every life. And I think protecting it is one of the most underrated longevity practices we have.

Stillness and presence are what help make life feel rich rather than just full. And this richness of life is what the longevity practices are actually for.

We Have Engineered the Space Between Out of Existence

Our days now have minimal gaps. Phone to meeting to email to podcast to scroll to phone again. We fill every available moment. Silence feels like a problem to solve instead of a resource to protect.

For most of human history, transition was built into the structure of daily life… the walk between places, the wait without a screen, the meal without a notification. These were the moments in which the mind processed, integrated, and reset. We have replaced them with stimulation and called it productivity.

Research on the brain's default mode network (the system that activates during rest and mental quiet) shows that these unstructured moments are when the brain consolidates memory, processes emotion, and generates creative thought. Stillness is a different kind of work.

The Space Between as a Longevity Practice

Protecting the space between is a practice. It’s a practice that compounds over time in ways that matter for how we age.

Research confirms that regular periods of present-moment awareness consistently improve outcomes across chronic pain, stress, depression, sleep, and immune function. This is a daily longevity practice.

Periods of mental stillness are good for you. They are good for you today, and they are good for your future decades.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The space between doesn’t require an intensive meditation retreat or a digital detox. It is about the small, repeated decisions to not fill every moment.

It is the walk taken without headphones, just once this week. The few minutes between finishing one task and starting the next, spent looking out a window rather than at a screen. The meal eaten without a phone on the table. The transition between work and home life that is actually a transition.

It is also something worth asking of the systems we work within. The AI scribe in my clinic gave me back the space between patients… for now. But health systems, administrators, and employers are not always inclined to protect this for us. We need to actively resist the default toward filling the space between. We have to protect it and treat it like the resource it is.

I’ve been in recent meetings where the conversation has turned to productivity, and the idea that now that providers have AI scribes, we should have capacity for more. More patients, tighter schedules, greater outputs. I completely understand the business reality behind these conversations.

But I also find myself sitting in these meetings thinking: this is exactly how the space between gets taken away again. The efficiency gain gets absorbed back into volume, and the provider is still busy but with better software.

I want the space between to be treated as a clinical asset. Because a provider who arrives at each patient curious, settled, and actually present is not wasting time.

The Space Between Is Where You Live

Most of our life is made up of ordinary moments in ordinary days. It’s made up of the transitions between events. It’s made up of our quiet minutes.

How these moments feel, whether they are rushed or spacious, reactive or present, shapes everything including your relationships, your health, your capacity for joy and curiosity and connection.

I‘ll be honest… I’m still bad at this. The AI scribe gave me back some space between patients, but I still fill the space between everything else. I still pick up my phone in the transition between work and home. I still multitask when I could pause. I am practicing this imperfectly.

But that’s what a practice is. You don’t arrive. You just keep returning.

My AI scribe gave me back some of that space in clinic. It changed what my time feels like. And it reminded me of something I think I knew but had forgotten how to practice: The space between is not just time to fill between the things that matter.

The space between IS what matters.