I teach people how to rest.
It's on my website. It's most of what lands in my inbox. And as I sat down to write this, I realised I can't remember the last time I got to zero.
Not calm-ish. Not a quiet evening with the phone face down somewhere.
Zero.
My happy place is at a two out of ten. A low hum. Settled enough to function, busy enough that something's always ticking over. I've been calling that balance for years.
But I’ve had to admit to myself recently, two out of ten is the lowest setting I've ever been willing to test.
Because somewhere along the way I decided peace was boring. Which was convenient, because it meant I never had to go there and find out what was waiting on the other side of the hum.
Permission to rest
In my group last week, I put up a post asking everyone to give themselves permission to rest this weekend. That was the whole ask. Rest, then come back and tell the group you did.
A lot of replies came in.
And nearly every single one did the same thing.
They took the rest. And then they gave a reason why it was allowed.
I'd done a twelve-hour day. I'd finished the project. I'd been ill. The kids were away. I'd earned it.
Nobody just rested for the sake of it.
Including, for the record, yours truly!
After a bit of introspection, this was my conclusion: Rest is the one place where nothing gets ‘done’. No output. No result. Nothing to hold up afterwards and say, “look, here it is, this is what I did with my afternoon”.
Which should be fine… unless somewhere a long way back your brain worked out that being useful was the safest way to be. Unless life ever taught you that you were welcome when you were producing, and a bit less welcome when you weren't. If that's how your brain works… stopping doesn't feel like rest.
Stopping feels like disappearing.
So many of us build the case and provide the evidence for rest first. The reason, the justification, the little invoice we hand in before we're allowed to sit down.
And it works, in a way. It gets us the afternoon.
It just means the afternoon costs something. Every time.
So here's the question I've been putting to myself this week.
Am I stopping because I'm tired… or because I've finally built enough evidence that I’ve produced enough to stop?
If it's the first one, great. That's a body asking for something it needs, and bodies are quite good at knowing.
If it's the second, that's worth noticing. Because that isn't rest, that's a payment. And the trouble with paying for rest is that the price keeps going up, since there's always more you could have done first.
Three things that have helped me:
Rest before the work is finished. Ten minutes, in the middle of the day, with everything still open on the desk. The point isn't the ten minutes. It's letting your nervous system find out that nothing fell over while you took a break.
Catch the reason and don't say it. You'll feel the justification forming. Don't hand it over. Not to your partner, not to the room, not to yourself. Sit down without filing the paperwork, and notice how uncomfortable that is. The discomfort is the whole thing, right there.
Do nothing in front of someone. This is the really uncomfortable one for me. Most of us can rest alone, eventually. Being visibly unproductive in front of a person whose opinion we care about is a different beast entirely! It's also the one that shifts things, because this was never really about the resting.
And if you try all three and the discomfort is still sitting there, that's not the technique failing, that's the thing underneath, and a better system won't fix it. It softens slowly, over time.
This week's video is on my new ‘daytime meditations’ channel, about the list that never ends, which is the same problem wearing a different coat 👇🏾
▶ Watch: The List That Never Ends | The Mindful Striver
And if you get into bed and all the reasons why you shouldn’t be resting start queuing up, this is the one I'd put on 👇🏾
You don't need a reason.
Chibs 💙
