Rest is incredibly important, and I, myself, struggle with taking time for rest. Just recently, me, my friends, and my family all worked together to re-do my backyard. We pulled out eight bushes and planted new grass seed. As you can imagine, that was a lot of work. In the midst of all of this gardening, I played tennis. I did not do a great job of resting when my body was telling me to take a break. This post today is a reminder to myself and you about why and how to rest.
Why Is Rest Important?
During the day, whatever the activities we perform throughout the day, we can activate our sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight mode. This is great for protecting us and keeping us safe. Sometimes though, when we are performing high-level, strenuous activities either physically or mentally, we can be in a prolonged fight or flight mode. This means, we start to see increases in cortisol levels. This is a hormone in our body produced during stressful times. It is not necessarily bad, but if it is circulating in our body more often, it increases our heart rate and our blood pressure. The long-term effects would lead to heart attack or stroke. So, it is important to get ourselves out of the fight or flight mode and create an environment where we can rest.
Another thing that could happen when we do not allow ourselves enough time to rest is that our brain might not function well. If this happens, we can get brain fog and be less motivated to do things because we are avoiding rest. So, whenever we are feeling this way, it is important to prioritize rest even if we do not feel we do not have any time for it. Ironically, when you feel like you cannot stop to rest, it is the most crucial time you need to rest.
Finally, for strenuous physical activities, if we are not giving our body enough time to rest, we can see things like our strength not increasing and our performance in sports or exercise improving. Muscles require time to repair. Whenever you are lifting heavy weights or doing strenuous activities, your body breaks down your muscle, which allows muscles to rebuild and become stronger. However, if you are not allowing enough time for rest and recovery, muscles will not be able to rebuild. If you want to see performance gains in the activities you are doing, keep in mind that rest is important. And in relation to this, if you do not give yourself enough time to rest and recover, you will likely see injuries that will take you out of your activities even longer than just taking the time to rest.
Ways To Rest
It took me a while to determine what kind of activities related to rest would work for me. I created a list to help remind me, and it was very needed when I was feeling too fatigued to even make a decision about rest.
Here are some of the activities I do when I need to rest:
1. Sleep – With sleep, you want to have a good routine to help you sleep really well at night. When you sleep well, it helps both your brain and your body to recover. Getting the full seven to eight hours of sleep is really important for rest.
2. Reading – I enjoy reading a lot. I really love self development books, however, they don’t tend to help me rest. They tend to make me want to do more work! To get the most rest out of reading, I choose books that are more fiction or comedic genre so it can help my brain relax and allow me to rest.
3. Watching Netflix – For this, if I just binge-watch and not intentionally watch what I put on Netflix, it is not restful for me. It makes me more tired and does not help to increase my energy. So generally, I have shows on queue that I want to watch and I try to be intentional for how long I watch TV because if I overdo it, I would feel more tired, too.
4. Sitting outside in the sun – This is one of the reasons why I am re-doing my backyard. I want to enjoy it a little bit more. Sitting outside in the sun, without my phone, just soaking up the rays is really restful for me. On the days that I work, if I need to rest, I go outside for 15 minutes and stay under the sun. This energizes and refreshes me to be refocused on the work activities I need to complete.
5. Connecting with friends – Ideally, I love doing this in person but because of the pandemic, I have found other ways to connect virtually. Usually, connecting with friends through Zoom is a great way and once I do that, it helps me feel rested and re-energized because I am out of my normal routine.
6. Restorative Yoga – I like to call it my “adult nap time.” It’s usually a 60- to 75-minute class. We do around four poses and it is not meant to stimulate your body like other yoga practices. It is meant to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system – the rest and digest. It allows you to really get yourself to a point where your body can relax.
7. My family (particularly my Mom) visiting me – Because she ends up taking care of everything in the house so I can fully rest and not feel so responsible for everything.
Some of these resting activities may work for you and some of them may not. I hope this begins to generate ideas for you in ways that you can take advantage of resting. It is important to explore different activities in relation to rest so you can pinpoint what helps and what does not.
How Our Culture Affects Rest
In the United States, our culture tends to be all or nothing. And if you are not doing it on the level of “all,” then you do not deserve rest. Please know that rest is not something to be deserved because it is something you can do any time. You don’t have to put in 110% to allow yourself to rest. If this belief is running your life, begin to examine and dismantle this idea because rest is just as important as working.