[19] What does it mean to Rest?

Dear Readers,

Hope you had a good long weekend (esp. if you got the holiday off).

We can’t believe it’s the end of May. We are taking a break from Web 3 and releasing our month-end longer form essay. Today we will explore the concept of rest.

Rest, downtime and taking a break are some of the most important things for us to do… but it seems particularly hard for high achievers to rest.

Check out: Life in Color Twitter for summary threads of our our pieces there. 🧵🪡

If you enjoy reading, please share the Life in Color Substack with others and ask them to subscribe!

Thanks for the continued support!

---

---

For many high achievers, downtime is a hard thing to master.

The idea of doing nothing sounds scary.

The internal dialogue usually looks something like this… when we are staying in place, we aren’t accomplishing and therefore, we should feel bad about ourselves.

Take the holiday season as an example, in the US this is usually around late November to most of December.

Maybe it goes something like this: You start your vacation, there is excitement in the anticipation of rest… “finally, I get to take a break.” But as the vacation starts, you find yourself worrying about things, thinking about work, feeling guilty that you have time off.

The “doing nothing” void starts to eat away at you and creates a downward spiral.

You look at your calendar and you start thinking “I should have done this or that by now…” Measuring yourself against what you “should have done” inevitably leads to one thing: guilt…

This starts this cycle of “I need to be this way or that way”, basically every which way other than yourself on vacation enjoying some downtime.

Talk about tiring… 😔 😮‍💨

To remedy all of this, some high achievers default to what they do best… set some goals!

“On my one week off, I am going to accomplish this list of a thousand things, and I am also still going to leave time to chill and hang out and truly decompress.”

Sound familiar?

High achievers face this dialogue regularly and not just on vacation. On vacation, it's just a bit more pronounced.

The time we carve out for ourselves to recharge gets slowly taken away one goal at a time and before you know it, you get to the end of vacation and you just feel bad for whatever you did.

“Whatever you did” is the operative phrase here, because it seems like no matter what you did, you’ll feel like you didn’t do much.

This sucks…

Who wants to feel this way?

We can all agree the concept of rest is important… but are we acting on it accordingly with principles and values aligned to ourselves?

Are we coming back from rest recharged and ready to seize the day, or are we coming back from break feeling like crap?

At heart, what this is about is slowing down and creating systems that enable you to rest. 😴 😴 😴

On a day-to-day basis

We can start at a very micro level.

On a day-to-day basis, we need rest. Whether we think we need it or not, we need it.

It’s biology and our nature, and one cannot escape either.

But sleep seems to be one of the hardest habits to master… everything from falling asleep, to staying asleep, to waking up feeling refreshed.

So even in our daily routines, we can probably be better at resting.

How many times have you read a study on the importance of sleep and how many times have you tried to actively act on it?

Sleep is one of those things that is easy to take for granted when you have a good night’s sleep, but one of those things that has outsized negative impact on a day when you don’t have it or when you sleep poorly.

But for daily routines like sleep, we are probably better at knowing that we need to do it and do it well, so the question becomes execution.

My hope is that most of us don’t feel guilty for getting a good night’s rest. ✌️

On a weekly basis

On a weekly level, we have weekends.

Weekends are notoriously tricky, especially if you work a job where you feel the pressure to check email and work on the weekends.

It’s a treadmill of sorts. We run on the treadmill all week, we work our butts off all week and yet when we get to the weekend, we think we can/should keep going.

We feel the need to stay on the treadmill. 🏃🏽‍♀️🏃🏽

And we probably convince ourselves that we aren’t on the treadmill or we find some way to rationalize.

The voice in your head: “I should probably check this email or I should probably knock this work out.”

Look, if you love your job and are working on a weekend and it doesn’t feel like work, then more power to you. But even then, you’d probably want some rest to recharge.

Once you rationalize it’s okay, you solve your very short-term problem of maybe feeling guilty and you say… okay, I don’t really have to feel guilty now because I am getting to it, I am working on the weekend!!

The problem is that it doesn’t work that way: you might not feel guilty in the moment, but it’s not like the guilt and everything you give up by staying on the treadmill goes away… if anything, it builds.

The danger of not taking a break on a weekly basis is that your productivity might actually decrease over time. You are occupying your mind with the same thing over and over (e.g. work) and likely begin to neglect other areas of life.

The only way this behavior is positive over the long-run is that your job is all that matters and you don’t care about the things you are neglecting. Which is to say, this doesn’t work… because our lives are more than our jobs and more than the treadmill.

One cannot simply run forever, but we all try to because we don’t think we deserve the rest.

On a monthly (months) basis

Next level up is in the few months or quarterly basis.

If you’ve been neglecting rest, daily, weekly or just in general, what happens is at some point you hit burn-out…

So now you finally take that much needed vacation because you have to get off the treadmill.

But when you finally take the vacation you’ve been waiting for, you don’t know what to do with yourself and you don’t know what you should be feeling.

So… you operate from your default mode: you start to plan, you start to want to accomplish again, and then a vacation becomes this constant battle between you and yourself.

Enter guilt, enter imposter syndrome, enter the spiral that leaves you coming back from a vacation telling others you feel recharged and renewed (because no one likes to hear the negatives anymore) and the cycle repeats.

Then now you feel like you are in survival mode.

And maybe you run away from survival mode and end up looking for another job. You finally get off the treadmill and then you get on another treadmill and it all sort of repeats again… similar themes, new context.

And even if you survive, you also have to question at what cost.

Okay, I won’t extrapolate this over multiple jobs and years, but hopefully you get the point.

To Rest or Not To Rest… That is the Question

How do we allocate time to rest and respect it on a daily and regular basis?

Remember a lot of our lives are pre-wired and influenced by external factors beyond our control. We cannot change without some serious effort and more importantly, deliberateness.

So at heart, the question we all have to answer first is “WHY is rest important?”

Until we can actually answer that, it’s not important enough for us to prioritize and actually do something about.

Remember, change is very hard and requires multiple steps: see reality, want to change, create a plan to change and then finally change… along these steps, you have to fight a lot of external factors telling you not to change.

See our article on “Why is change so hard?”

Why is change so hard?

But if you DO change, life becomes very different.

So… Why is rest important?

Rest is the time you carve out to allow yourself the time and space to change.

And take “rest” for whatever you want it to mean. Whether it’s sleeping well daily or regularly taking breaks throughout the week. What rest looks like for you will be different than what it looks like for me… and maybe it’s helpful to understand the concept as “rest from what…” or “take a break from what…”

Adding the “from what” is how high achievers can square the circle when it comes to taking breaks. Breaking free from the idea that your self-worth is only tied to one goal or activity in your life. Just because you take a break from work doesn’t mean you are lazy and not accomplishing anything. You just need to understand that perhaps you are just focusing on other areas of life, which might ironically end up supercharging you at work at anyways!

The internal dialogue can look something like this: I am taking a week off from work or I am resting from work so I can focus on “x”.

The “what” or the “x” is also very important because it needs to be something that you truly want to do. If it becomes something you “should do,” you aren’t going to want it enough to actually do it and execute on it… then what happens is you just created an arbitrary goal that you likely won’t accomplish… but you’ll feel bad about when you come back from your break. For most high achievers, it’s usually something like “I should be productive and therefore I will move mountains on my vacation…”

Resting, Deliberately

Being deliberate is a key theme to all of this.

Do what you want, or rather find ways to do what you want even if you cannot invest a lot of time to do what you want regularly. This doesn’t always happen at work, and for many people this isn’t their work construct. But outside of your work construct, you take steps / create routines daily / regularly to pursue bigger goals to create the life you ultimately want.

The problem that most of us face is a measurement one, we try to measure things like self-worth with an external lens… i.e. how society defines it and don’t measure things with an internal lens… how we (want to) define it.

The good thing is this is all within our control, but like most things in life requires some level of work and effort, ups and downs, norming and storming to get it right.

Of course it’s also hard since a lot of external measurement systems define most of our lives.

But you can start simple: If on vacation all you wanted to do was play video games or read fiction, then go for it, and the reason can be as simple as “because I want to…”

If you lean into the things you like, maybe you can actually find something in them you can pursue in a bigger way and devote more of your time and life to it. But that only happens when you give yourself permission to take a break and rest from this other thing.

This can happen daily… for example: if working out is important to you, or writing is important to you, make time for it in your day. Start small, but do start.

No one is saying take a break from living, but taking a break from something to explore something else is a natural part of being human.

It’s just the systems you are in tend to make you feel bad for it because in you exploring something else, it might take away from their success.

They aren’t looking out for you.

But you have to step up and look out for yourself.

It is not too much to ask to rest. Resting and recharging is a part of life and a large part of success.

Nothing can run forever, so why hold yourself to that impossible standard?

And if you run forever, think about what you are missing.

Sometimes the best way to make progress is to take a break… a fresh mind and a recharged mind bring insights you may have missed when you were in the thick of it.

Rest when you need to… you are the only one you need permission from to do so.

🥱 😴 💤