The False Narrative of Rest

So often we – especially women – believe that taking time to rest and find renewal is lazy. Or we convince ourselves that we don’t have time to take even 5 minutes in our day to find respite. The internal refrain of “I don’t have TIME for this!” often repeats in our brains, especially at times of highest stress.

If we look to the lessons of nature, we may more easily recognize that pushing past our limits will only make us less productive, more anxious and perhaps even physically sick. All beings take time to rest – it's in their very nature! Tulips bloom for a short time in the spring, then die back to recharge their bulb’s energy for the following year. Trees lose their leaves, and bears hibernate. Everything needs to rest and find renewal. For each of us, our Essential Nature can help inform us what we need in the daily cycle of life, and how best to build time into each day to recenter and move through times of stress. And by recognizing Nature’s necessity for rest, we can limit self-judgment and make our wellbeing a priority.

HERE is the link to the Month of Mindful Minutes Calendar.

Transcript

00:00:40

Hey, everyone. Welcome to no shrinking violets. I'm your host, Mary Rothwell. And today we're going to talk about rest.

When I say rest, you probably got some kind of image in your mind or you had some thought whether you instinctively thought about sleep or you thought more about just relaxing or taking a break and really resting is all of those things and every living being needs a way to rest. Animals, plants, insects.

00:01:17

I think as humans, we often think that we shouldn't need to rest – that if we do, it's a sign of weakness or we are wasting time because we should be able to keep going, and we should be able to function at optimal capacity.

00:01:36

Now we are starting to learn more and more about how important a good night's sleep is. There are so many things about sleep that make it crucial to good health, and in future episodes, we're going to talk more about sleep itself and ways that we can improve it. Why it is important, why it changes in menopause.

00:02:00

But today the subject really is more respite. I like that word. Respite, to me, means that you're just taking a break. You're kind of stepping away from what you're doing, and you're down shifting a little bit.

00:02:13

We often think that we should push past the times when we need rest. Or we will think, “Well, I can't rest right now. I'll rest when X happens. When I get this done or when I get through the holidays, or when I get to the summer.” Or, “I have to get this work project done.”

00:02:34

But we aren't machines. So when we try to push past that, it's going to impact us. We are in nature. If you've listened to any episodes before now, you know this is one of my huge beliefs about how we function optimally in the world –to focus on our essential nature and recognize that, just because we have higher level thinking skills doesn’t mean we don't have things in common with even the common plant. When I think about rest, one of the things from the animal world that I think about are bears. We know bears hibernate, right? So bears are certainly animals that are big and robust and a little bit intimidating.

But bears that live in colder regions actually hibernate for up to seven months. In warmer regions, it can be two to five months.

00:03:34

Bears hibernate. That's how they rest. It could be getting cold, but they don't think, “Well, I'm going to wait another week because I don't really feel like hibernating now” or, “I see Stan over there in the other part of the woods. He's not hibernating yet. So what if he thinks I'm lazy for hibernating now?” Bears just know when they need to hibernate! It's triggered by things such as temperature change. Amount of daylight. So if we're living anywhere in the United States, we know that the amount of daylight has changed recently. It's getting dark much sooner than it did in the summer, and our nights are longer. That's one of the triggers, not only for animals, but for plants to know that they need to rest. 

The other issue with animals that hibernate is the availability of food. So in the winter, obviously there's not as much food available, so they have to conserve the energy that they have. And that is something that plants do, too. Many plants will take time in the winter to rest. Let's think about trees. We know that with deciduous trees, their leaves turn colors and they drop. And a lot of those trees are bare limbed all winter. That's part of the way they rest.

00:05:03

Autumn is one of the most beautiful times in the northern eastern United States, and people will drive for miles around just to look at the leaves. It's a beautiful spectacle, but we don't talk about trees like they're lazy. Like, “Look at that. They can't even keep their leaves! They're taking all this time to do nothing, and they're going to start over in the spring.” That's what they do! It’s in their Essential Nature. Think about bulbs: bulbs such as tulips or daffodils. We plant them in the fall because they need the cold. It's called vernalization. They need that cold to be able to rest and get their resources ready.

And then in the spring, they send the stems up, they send the leaves out and they bloom. And it's amazing! If you've ever seen fields of spring bulbs, it's spectacular. But after a few weeks, they die back. And you don't even know they were there.

00:06:05

But I've never heard somebody say, “Look at those damn tulips. I mean, they're so lazy. They only bloom for a couple weeks, and then they rest for, like, months.” And it seems silly to say, but when it's a plant, we don't question it. We know that they need that ability to rest and renew.

00:06:26

And for some reason, we've become convinced that we, as humans, don’t need rest. So when we have times where we feel run down, or we are not sleeping well, and we're extra tired during the day or maybe our minds are buzzing with higher levels of stressful events, many of us think we should just push through.

00:06:47

Maybe we have more anxiety because there's a lot more going on. Those are times when our body is telling us we need to take a step back, and we need to chill out. However, the need for this is different for everyone.

00:07:06

It's like I've said before, it's based on our Essential Nature. We all need different things. We all have a different level of ability to sustain through stressful times or sustain through challenges and difficulties.

00:07:24

And that's OK. And there are also times where we as individuals may have more stamina than we have at other times. So if we put the lens of Essential Nature on this, and we think about how we determine when we need rest and when we're just kind of “being lazy,” that can be a hard call. In fact, I don't really like the word lazy because I think we are too quick to assign that to ourselves.

00:07:54

If we feel that we cannot cope with something that's coming up that day or an event that's coming up in the future, there is a reason that we're feeling that overwhelm. And that's a signal for us that we need to attend to that. So again, thinking about examples of Essential Nature: introverts and extroverts. Their need for rest and the way that people rest sometimes depends on whether they're more wired as an introvert or an extrovert. They can be very different. I first want to give you a definition of introversion because I think we have made that into a trait that is undesirable.

00:08:41

I think we really misunderstand what introversion means. Introverts are some of the most prolific people. They are wonderful speakers and presenters. They aren't people that don't want to be around others. They just are wired to need a way to recharge that has more solitude. Introversion and extroversion is really about how people get energized.

Extroverts get energized by the environment around them. They are energized by other people. They tend to love parties. They tend to love being around other people. Introverts, on the other hand, can be very social. However, most of them would not choose a loud, noisy party as their preferred social event. But they can usually handle it. However, they tend to prefer smaller, more intimate gatherings, where people can discuss things, and you can hear each other and exchange ideas. But even in those situations, most extroverts will then need some time alone to recharge.

00:09:50

So it's about managing energy. And actually there aren't only two types of people. Introversion to extroversion is more of a continuum, and there are people that are ambiverts. Basically, that means there might be days where they function very much like an extrovert, and other times where they function more as a traditional introvert.

00:10:13

None of these ways of being are wrong. If you went through the holidays recently and maybe you had a work party.  And then there was a family gathering and then there were friends gatherings. If the thought of that wore you out before you even got to a party, it's OK to have boundaries and decline invitations.

00:10:36

If somebody has an opinion about that your choice to socialize, that's about them. That's not about you. So it's OK to be any way that you need to be to get your rest. I talked about introversion and extroversion. Additionally, we might experience a differing need for rest depending how we handle stressful life events.

There are some people that don't have a lot of reserves when it comes to stressful or unpredictable situations.

00:11:01

They get overwhelmed very quickly. Other people will have more of a capacity to manage that. If you have obligations and responsibilities that you can't just shuffle off onto someone else, like children or pets, there is a little bit of a different level of expectation there. However, you can still build in rest, and we're going to talk about that.

00:11:26

So you have your own Essential Nature that informs how you need to build rest into your day. There should be time in every day where there's some quietness and that might only be 5 minutes.

00:11:47

I have a friend who, ever since she's worked, would get up half hour to an hour before her family and she would enjoy her coffee in the quietness of the house. Some other people may stay up a little bit past when everybody else goes to bed.

00:12:06

At work, I would often find a place where I could go that was quiet. I was a master at finding little nooks and crannies. I worked at a college, so I would find places on the campus where I could go for simply 5 minutes. I would take little walks through the day. That would be the way I could rest my brain, because often it was a very high stress, busy environment where I worked.

00:12:31

So I've talked about how we react when we have situations that give us a higher need for rest and rejuvenation and renewal. But one of the most important things is actually prioritizing rest before we need it to combat something like a virus or environmental toxins or something that has made us unwell.

00:12:55

If we put the lens of wellness – staying well – on our need for rest, it should be something that is actually built already into your week or into your daily time. Maybe it is 10 minutes of stretching. For example, I had a coworker who would often take 10 minutes to just do stretches at lunchtime. Be quiet with his mind. And that was something that gave him renewed energy for the rest of the day.

00:13:29

So when thinking about your week, it would be important to have times where you can find those minutes of quiet. And if you build it into other things to support wellness, then it's even more powerful. For instance sleep, which we will get into more in future episodes.

00:13:50

One of the most powerful ways to regulate your sleep is to see the sunrise or look at the sun early in the morning before it's fully up in the sky and also, experience dusk and sunset to actually know where the sun is in the sky. And that tells our brain to produce melatonin in the evening when we see the sun setting. When the light is waning, that's when our brain says, “OK, I need to get ready to sleep,” Seeing the sun rise is important, too.  

00:14:26

You might be thinking, “Good Lord woman, I don't want to see the sunrise!”

For those who aren’t up with the sun: they actually make alarm clocks that, instead of having the noise to wake you immediately, the light of the alarm clock will come on and get brighter until the alarm goes off. We may think that, because our eyes are closed, we don't perceive that, but we can see that light through our eyelids to a degree. 

00:14:51

So try to build into your day time to go outside and just look at the sky in the evening and in the morning, regardless of the temperature. Just go outside with your coffee, without your coffee. Take a few deep breaths and just look at the sky. Use those exhales to have the stress exit your body. That's a way to build in healthy support for your circadian rhythm and, at the same time, have those little moments of quiet.

00:15:20

So rest doesn't have to be that you're going to go to a spa for a whole day, although I would make that a future goal.

00:15:27

I build in pedicures even in the winter, and that's my 45 minutes where I'm just sitting there, “being.” I might just close my eyes. I definitely turn on the massage function with the chair. That's one of those things. I look forward to that as just “me time.” But you can have a respite without spending any money. You can drive somewhere on your lunch hour and just sit and look at the trees or have some kind of music that you listen to on your lunch break or first thing in the morning.

00:16:01

You could also do just 5 minutes of mindfulness. Or if you do yoga, you know what shavasana is. It's when you lie on your back, sometimes called corpse pose, and you just connect to the earth, and you breathe that stress out of your body. Being able to do that physically, do that mentally and emotionally is really important, because then when we have times where we have higher stress levels, we have reserves.

00:16:33

When you have high levels of stress, that tends to create anxiety. It can feel like physical pressure. Your heart races more, you feel shakier. You forget to take your deep breaths. Maybe you eat faster because you want to get that over with.

00:16:52

So when we build a habit and prioritize times in our week where we just have stillness, we can much more easily access that when we have times that are more trying or more stressful. If we have a crisis, we're going to be able to get back to baseline more quickly because our bodies remember, “Oh yeah, this is what that stillness feels like. This is what it feels like to focus on that inner peace.”

00:17:23

So strategizing to have rest in your day or rest in your week really is very important. I would suggest starting to consider what your typical day looks like prioritizing the things that you put into your schedule. 

00:17:47

First, you have a jar. And you have a bunch of rocks in different sizes. The largest rocks are your priorities. They are the things that really are not negotiable: we have to eat, we have to sleep, (even though many of us don't get enough sleep), and we have to go to work. These are the major things that we have to do. But I would suggest that one of those big rocks that should go into your jar first, before all the little rocks that are less significant and will fill leftover space around it, is rest! Taking some mindful time as a priority.

00:18:24

Figure out when in your day a respite is going to happen for you, or be more willing to step away from situations where you feel that vibration of anxiety because you have more stressors happening. Sometimes we might think, “I don't have time for that.”

00:18:44

That might be one of the refrains that you hear. “How could this happen? I don't have time for this!” But often, there are things that take a lot less time than we think they do. I know for me, one thing I would put off at work is taking a bathroom break. It's crazy. I would wait and think, “I can wait, I can wait. I need to get this task done.”

00:19:04

When I look at it now I'm like, “Well, that's just silly!” But I also reframed it in a way that it could work for me. It doesn't take that long to take a bathroom break. Right? Surely you have 4 minutes to go to the bathroom.

So I would make that my break – my respite. I would walk slower. I would focus on my breathing. I would take extra time to wash my hands, feel the warmth of the water. I would make that bathroom break twice as long because guess what? That's only four more minutes. As long as nobody's bleeding out or no one’s having a crisis. Take care of yourself! You have times where you take the bathroom break, you go get a second coffee or get a tea or fill your water bottle.

Don't run. Walk slowly. 

00:20:06

The other times I think that I learned that I don't need to rush is driving.

I don't know the math, but I heard at one point that, if you drive, 5 to 10 more mph, you only get there a few minutes sooner. So again, unless somebody's bleeding out and you're headed to the ER, just ease back on the gas pedal. Listen to some music. Take your time. 

If somebody else is in a hurry, let them hurry. Let them in front of you. You're going to have times where you will continue to think, “I don't have time for this,” or “I'm going to keep pushing through this. I need to push through. I don't have time to waste.”

00:20:43

If you are more of a type A personality, it's going to be harder for you to step back, but remind yourself that everything in nature rests and we were designed – every being was designed – to thrive if they live in an optimal way. Meaning, if you get the nutrients you need, you get the sleep that you need, you get the movement that you need, we will thrive. Nature doesn't make mistakes with that. 

00:21:24

The bulbs that get the winter to rest, they are more beautiful and vibrant in the spring. The Bears that hibernate during the winter, they come out ready to eat but ready to go on with life. We are designed to take breaks. It makes us into the most optimal people we can be. 

So if you have a little bit of guilt, or you're hearing those old narratives in your mind, “I take a day off, I'm lazy.” If you just want a day to be, you just want to read a book or go to a movie in the middle of the day, do those things! 

If you feel like you need a break, and taking that break would make you feel some joy or some contentment, take the time to do that.

00:22:06

Because that's your body telling you, “We need to take a little bit of a break, and it is OK to take it.”

 So I'm going to challenge you until we talk again to take that time when you have that inner feeling that you could really use a break. The inner critic might speak up.

He or she probably will, but you can still do it. And remember that you're not doing it because you're lazy. You're not wasting time. You need to need rest, and you're going to come back from that better. And if you can build it into your everyday life.

00:22:45

You're going to have more resilience when things get tough, so start to build in those respites. Be gentle with yourself when you need those things. 

If you liked what you heard today, I would love if you gave me a review or made a comment. Or share this with your friends! 

You can find me online at maryrothwell.net.

You can find me on social media at Mary Rothwell, Integrative Wellness and on Instagram at Mary Rothwell_LPC. 

In the show notes I will have a link to a 30 day mindful calendar free download. It helps you each day to take a minute to just take a break. It has fun little exercises that take no more than 4 or 5 minutes. You can do them in order, or you can pick a random one each day. Share it with a friend.

If one of your kids needs help to make a positive habit of taking a break because they're hard on themselves, do the activities together. 

So until we talk again, go out into the world and be the radiant, vibrant Violet that you are.

HERE is the link to the Month of Mindful Minutes Calendar.