Part I: On Rest
“Do you ever sleep?”
“8 hours each night,” I responded. My coworker looked amazed. She had just learned about my transcontinental run and was giving me a compliment. We joked a little about how sleep deprivation had become a badge of honor for so many – how sometimes folks tend to try and outdo each other with under-rest. The logic stands – the less you rest, the more you work, and the more you work the more impressive and important you must be.
Not me. I need my rest – especially during my busiest periods. Without it, I’m stressed out, unhealthy, and aggressively unproductive. This is true as a professional, a mom, and a runner.
Rest is a critical part of a golden triangle of balance and happiness for me – a triad completed by work and play. The TED Radio Hour podcast just completed a series on Work, Play, and Rest – which got me thinking about how I balance those same ideas in my own calendar. I naturally started with “work” (as did the TED Radio Hour producers), likely because work is such a big part of my life – of so many people’s lives. It’s often the first question we ask when we meet someone new. It’s where we spend the majority of our waking hours during the week – either in paid or unpaid work. We are a culture of workers.
But we are a species of rest. Of the work-play-rest triad, rest is the first thing we learn to do – to sleep (some of us not as well as others I know). It was amazing when I brought my son home just how many hours a day he slept, how many hours he needed to sleep. He needed 18 hours or more a day of rest. Why? Because he was growing, and quite rapidly.
He needed it, because rest is more than just a pause in work, a pause in progress. Rest IS progress. For athletes, physical rest is where the growth happens, quite literally. Rest days are when the muscles repair themselves and grow bigger, stronger, and more capable.
Not only that, rest ensures endurance. Rest prevents injury and burnout. Taking a break today so often means you can get back out there tomorrow, the next day, and for years after that.
Because here is the thing – the work is never done. Not as a mother, not in my career, and not even as a runner. Race day isn’t the finish line, the finish line isn’t even the finish line. There is always another challenge, another goal right behind the first one – a longer distance or faster time. And that’s ok. It’s ok to always be striving, to look towards the next thing. I’ve never fully bought into the whole “living in the moment” idea. I’m a planner. Thinking, working, and struggling towards the next big thing brings me joy.
But we all have to rest.
So how? We know how to rest the body, that is relatively easy. To rest, you simply stop moving. During an ultramarathon, this is simple. You sit down. You close your eyes and put your feet up, maybe even fall asleep for a few minutes. Each night (hopefully) we put our bodies to rest, to recover from the day and to prepare for the next day’s work. We build rest days into our training calendar - sacred rest days that are to be protected at all costs.
But how do we rest the mind? How do we rest the soul?
The human brain is never at rest. It regulates the entire body, at all times – it has to. Even when we sleep, we dream, our brain still working through the night. We cannot simply stop the brain like we do with the body.
But we can slow it down, pull some things out of the circuitry and allow the brain a break. At the same time we can give slow, restful nourishment to our soul. This looks different for many people. For some, it’s a long soak or sitting around a campfire with no one around for miles. For others, it’s a long loud brunch with too many belly laughs and many an extra round of mimosas.
Rest doesn’t have to be solitary. The best form of relaxation for some is ASMR or autonomous sensory meridian response. You know those videos with the soft and relaxing noises? Research from Craig Richards into this effect shows that ASMR, the physiological effect, only comes in situations when a person is receiving positive personal attention from someone who is kind and caring, in a safe environment. That safe environment turns off your flight/fight/freeze stress response and allows you to ease into deep relaxation.
And maybe that’s the hardest part about rest – security. We understood this in the Marine Corps – posting “fire watch” throughout the night, two Marines charged with protecting the security of the entire unit while everyone else slept. We know that trusting in a training plan leads to athletes respecting a rest day. In the dangerous and unpredictable wild, hibernating animals first find a secure cave or protected underground dwelling to settle in for the long winter.
For us humans, I suspect that our chronic lack of rest has more to do with real or perceived insecurity as much as it has to do with our “hustle” mentality or our protestant work ethic.
We cannot rest if we do not feel secure – in ourselves, in our jobs, or in our training. When we feel threatened, our biological instinct is to keep moving, to keep working, to keep grinding. We power through exhaustion, illness, and injury because we fear the worst will catch up to us when we stop.
The past 2+ years of a global pandemic has left us all feeling threatened, unable to rest. It’s not going backto work that has us all burnt out – it’s that we never really stopped working. We shifted to our homes and added in the emotional toll of surviving a deadly pandemic (while homeschooling and navigating tricky political waters). It is not that no one wants to work anymore, it’s that no one has gotten any rest since this whole thing began. And not the Netflix marathon weeks of rest either (been there, done that), but the true, deep rest that only comes when we feel secure.
The human mind, body, and spirit are incredible things, together capable of seemingly impossible feats. The work it can do is enormous, the play they can create is inspiring – but only, only if all three are allowed to rest.