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‘Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.‘ David Whyte

I’ve been reading about rest, from a few angles.  Partly because I think our relationship to rest is getting a bit wonky and partly to help me think about the ways that rest might be a form of love (which is the theme for the next Acts of Love workshop later this month). 

I pulled together some thoughts and put them here.

‘Good at rest’

People often comment that I’ve nailed rest, that I do it well, that I role model it healthily.

I think that too. And sometimes I just say ‘thanks’.

But it’s funny how I also take that as a form of veiled criticism. Some form of ‘and you should be working harder – hard enough that rest should a difficult thing to take’.

And how often I feel I need to justify it with ‘sure, but remember I have no kids’.

But I learned about rest the hard way.

Learning about Rest

In 2010 or thereabouts, I had Chronic Fatigue. It lasted about 2 years and I spent most of that time living a half-life. I was still working but had left a full time role because I just couldn’t work that much, so went freelance. No social life – just didn’t have the spoons. I had to stop all my much loved activities like rock climbing, cycling, swimming and big hill walks – and was doing about half a yoga class and a walk around the block. Otherwise, I was in bed. Sleeping, reading.

Generally resting.

It wasn’t optional. I simply couldn’t function without bed rest.

Slowly, slowly, I recovered. What helped me mend? Time – I think the stress just worked its way out of my system. Yoga probably, and focusing on nutrition. But mostly I think I did a decent job of ‘resting my way out of it’.

It took many years though for me to adjust my identity from ‘someone with CFS’ to someone without. And to trust that my body can take a decent amount of activity now without it crashing. I didn’t get back the pool for years. And I never went back to running. And I haven’t left behind the fear of overdoing it.

‘Overdoing it’ was what brought it on. Not a virus. Just pushing myself too hard in the last difficult 12 months of one job and the first very difficult 12 months of the one that followed – and thinking that I just needed to try harder to make it work. Trying too hard broke me.

So, that’s a bit of back story.

How come I’m writing about rest now?

Because I feel the draw of compulsion to try harder. I’m troubled by the pressures I see on my coaching clients and clients working in organisations with 10 hours to back to back meetings and no lunch break, or consulting colleagues who don’t take holidays. I’m worried for all of us about our general human ‘carrying capacity’ to hold what’s happening in our lives as well as what’s coming down the line in terms of the climate breakdown, war and conflict and the impact of bullying fundamentalist leaders.

So I’ve taken another look at rest to see if there’s anything helpful in some of the books on my shelves, and what I could learn when I read or reread some of them on a week’s stay on Welsh coast at the end of Aoril. Here’s what I’m picking up so far:

‘How to’ do rest

It seems that rest is a mostly treated as technical issue rather than adaptive issue. If you know much about Robert Kegan’s work about competing commitments most books treat resting more as an easy problem to be solved, as if by simply doing some of the things they suggest then you will build in more rest.

Yet we all know that ‘take a lunch break every day’ or ‘spend more time in nature’ is way more difficult (if not impossible) than it sounds because the commitment to taking a lunch break is not as powerful as a the competing commitment to keeping your head above water at work, to look like you can cope with the workload, needing to keep on top of things because there are cuts coming, fear or failing etc etc.

‘Mapping’ rest

That said, I found reading about the ways we might rest was super helpful – doing so made me much more aware of myself and the choices I was making.

Partly, rest is seen as vital for wellbeing. We are living systems and not machine. But it’s also positioned as a way to help us be more productive and creative in life. Here’s some of what I took away from Claudia Hammond’s The Art of Rest:

A survey for her BBC programme offers us a hierarchy of things we find restful. Reading came out as #1 and watching TV was #9. No surprises to find that time alone (#3) was more restful than spending time with family and friends. At #2, spending time in nature was right up there along with ‘a good walk’ at #6. And other activities called ‘doing nothing in particular’ (#5) and ‘daydreaming’ (#8) featured too.

I did appreciate the fact that me taking a week’s solo time, with books, and going for long walks in nature, pretty much ticked all the boxes for rest, according to Hammond. For some people though, that’s their idea of an awful time and certainly not restful. And it’s also something that I can only do because I’m privileged enough to have the money and the discretionary time (and I have no children) to be able to do that.

So already, we’re in the discission about whether that sort of rest is only for the privileged and the lucky. Trica Hersey (of which more later) is clear about this.

The takeaway was that doing something active but that would also let your mind roam freely made a huge contribution to productivity and creativity.

Hammond sums us rest as:
• Taking a break from other people
• Resting your mind as well as your body
• Exerting your body in order to rest your mind
• Being distracted from your worries
• Allowing your mind to wander
• Giving yourself permission not to achieve anything in particular

(Another excellent book is Rob Poyton’s Do Pause. He starts with ways we can take micro rests and moves into way they might be extended. Highly recommended)

Our relationship with rest

But survey results like Hammond’s tends not, at least not explicitly, to recognise that we have another problem – a set of competing commitments to our commitment to rest. And these get in the way of us getting more rest.

Not much is said about our relationship with rest. Many books imagine that it’s a straightforward issue that we can crack if we just apply logic and discipline, instead of recognising it as a complex and messy problem that we can never fix. Why? Because things are always changing, we have competing demands on us, and we have to deal with system pressures that are beyond our individual control – and they get in the way of our being able to rest.

That lunch break I mentioned above – it’s increasingly difficult to make it something other than a time we use to get loads of life admin done, or catch up on calls that are overdue.

Oliver Burkeman cornered the market on this problem with his recent books on how our relationship to time – and our assumptions about how our minds engage with time – need to be factored in if any of the time management hacks and techniques are to be helpful to us at all. Much more of an adaptive approach to things.

(Take a look at his Meditations for Mortals and Four Thousand Weeks)

And we need these activities, these spaces, these leave-of-absences – we need times when we go AWOL – when our days now are often 10 x 1 hour meetings back to back. We might call that working, but we certainly can’t call that living. We need what Nick Petrie calls ‘opposite worlds’ to balance the outrageous ways that the system we work in makes us its servants.

Rest as resistance

And so then another theme, and certainly in the mini library of books that I took away with me the other week, speaks more to treating rest as a political act, and taking rest as an act of resistance. A bit like some of the thinking on resilience says: why are we helping people be more resilient just to be able to function in a toxic system – surely we need to change the system.

These authors – and I’m drawing especially on Jenney Odell’s How To Do Nothing and Tricia Hersey ‘s Rest is Resistance (both excellent) – say let’s not treat rest as an instrumental way to get through life without burning out, or a way to be more productive for the tyrannical capitalist system that we all operate in.

Rest is not an indulgence of the privileged, they say, but a basic human right for all. They come at the importance of rest in the way that Audre Lord did, saying ‘caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare’.

So in their writing, we have:
• The importance of building in time that we do not have to optimise or make productive – because we are not human machines
• A questioning of why this oppressive focus on productivity
• A personal and collective fight to find our ‘non working selves’ and find ways to recognise how we have ‘donated our lives’ to the grind culture
• The need to de-programme ourselves from overstimulation, performance pressure and urgency
• The absolute necessity of stepping away and ‘standing apart’ and finding time when we can hear our own voice separate from the cacophony of everything else coming at us
• Finding our ‘individual [and collective]capacity for self directed action against the abiding flow’
• How the overwork and exhaustion of the grind culture keeps us numb and zombie-like
• Tiny acts of resistance that say ‘capitalism cannot have me … and taking a long lunch break as a small, selfish act of resistance’
• The ways that taking more rest individually (we have to take it – no one will give it to us) allows us to collectively care for each other in ways that make rest possible.

How taking rest is problematic

However, when I think of this, how having rest is a human right and how taking rest is a political act, I think of my single-parent-of-two-teenagers friend who has three jobs topped up by benefits. She doesn’t rest. She doesn’t recognise ‘lunch break’.

And I also think of the (very) many decently paid people in organisational life who feel they don’t have enough margin, enough of a buffer in life, to start sticking it to the man, and who are terrified of losing their jobs or being made vulnerable in their organisation in some way if they did pause or take more rest.

Many of us so feel the precarity of our lives at the moment that taking more rest, or any rest at all, seems like something that’s just not possible, no matter how oppressive our workload. Many of us are not workaholics: but we’re driven by a very real fear of consequences of not performing.

Odell says: if you have enough margin, if you’re lucky enough to be out of the way of the worst consequences, if you have the privilege and good fortune to be able to take rest without negative consequences – you must do it. It’s a form of activism, taking rest, and it’s not for you – but for others.

And you know I’ve written about how ‘we can’t be a hurried person and loving person’? Isn’t it the same that we can’t be a hurried person and a rested person? Not necessarily says Robert Poynton because yes, we need long pauses to reconnect with the ‘undermined’ our intelligent unconscious. But he also is an advocate of micro pausing, saying ‘whatever you may be doing and whatever speed you’re moving at, there is always a chance to pause’.

Rest as my choice

The other thing I picked up from Odell in particular is that we all have to do all we can to place our attention where WE want to place it, as opposed to having it placed for us by the tech algorithms we’re in hock to, or the macro social algorithms that we’re equally unaware of yet put us into an automatic and mostly unconscious way of living our lives.

Rest is about ME choosing what I want to do with my time – not anyone else, not influenced the requirements of work, however much say I love my job, or the unquestioned introjections of our currents ways of living. Taking back some power by choosing – for even a breath or two – where I put my attention.

In closing, having done this bit of reading:

I think I do rest well. I take breaks (‘sure, it’s because I have no kids’ 😊 and I have the margins …). But I do. I go back to bed in the afternoons often (a beautiful habit I never lost after CFS). I’ll keep doing all the stuff I do.

In addition:

I want to think further about how my resting helps and benefits others resting, how my rest can contribute to some sort of wider or collective rest. I haven’t made that link yet.

And I have become a lot more conscious about who is deciding were my attention is going in this moment. In full acknowledgement of my compulsive relationship to my phone and to scrolling, I am determined to think more consciously about where I want to place my attention.

‘Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it, rested we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way’. David Whyte.

If you’re reading this before 21 May 2025, then do come along to one of my (free) workshops, Acts of Love for Tough Times where I’m exploring love-as-rest. Details and sign up here.

And if you’re not already subscribed to my monthly Newsletter, you can do that here.

(pic: Farben des Lebens)