In November 2021, a woman’s autoimmune issues flared up. She and her doctor remain uncertain whether rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia was the cause, or if both conditions were acting together. The achiness and severe fatigue were clear signs that something was more active than usual.
She woke up tired, needed naps, and often ran out of spoons. That phrase is familiar to many with chronic conditions, based on an essay called “The Spoon Theory” by Christine Miserandino. While the reason was unclear, one thing was certain: her body was demanding rest.
Knowing that rest was needed did not make it easy to achieve. She would sit down to watch a show and try to multitask. She would put off a nap like a stubborn child. Instead of throwing a tantrum, she tried to push through to finish an email or move laundry into the dryer. Even with a body and brain crying out for rest, allowing herself to do it was difficult. She had to reparent herself to enforce stopping times and rest periods.
People in the Western world, especially in the United States, are programmed to be productive. They are told what they should be doing to stay busy. Work, from job tasks to errands to chores, is what they are supposed to do. They are conditioned to be productive and stay busy from a young age. People say things like “I’ll rest when I’m dead” and “no rest for the weary.” They are exhorted to “pay their dues” and “put in the work.”
Even those who avoided direct messages about staying busy received them indirectly by watching the people in their lives. They watched parents come home from work with grocery bags, fix dinner while putting groceries away, or were asked what they were doing and made to feel wrong if the answer was “nothing.” After dinner, once everything was cleaned up, they watched parents do additional work, both paid and unpaid. They watched them knitting, ironing, or puttering around the house.
They have been told they have to work hard to succeed. That nothing good comes easy. That they should not stop when tired, but only when done. Sitting down and resting is not prioritized. Those who decide to rest often must justify it. They have to have earned the right to rest.
Rest does not only mean sleep, although sleep is a large part of it. It also includes sitting comfortably doing not much of anything at all. It could mean listening to music, watching TV, meditating, working quietly on a jigsaw puzzle, reading a book, playing solitaire, looking out the window, or journaling.
In the fall, as she struggled with her autoimmune flare, she realized she should rest more. She was so used to overriding her body’s signals that she had not realized how far she had pushed herself. When she tapped into how her mind and body were truly feeling, she was shocked to find they were almost buckling, on the edge of collapse. She waited to notice what was happening until she reached the point where she was unable to do many tasks in the day at all. A good day during that time might have involved doing a single load of laundry or cooking dinner for her husband and herself.
She was so fixated on staying busy that she could no longer assess her need for busyness honestly. She had lost the ability to tune into her body to find out if it needed to move and stretch, or stretch out and sleep. Had she continued to push ahead for much longer, she is certain she would have fallen ill. She was dealing with brain fog, fatigue, and joint and muscle pain, all of which made life unpleasant. It is easy to see now that she should never have allowed things to get to that state, but fatigue, pain, and brain fog have a way of teaming up so that you cannot clearly assess much of anything. When she hit the edge of collapse and burnout, she realized that serious rest was in order.
She cleared her calendar for at least three weeks. She cleared her work calendar of appointments, scheduled some brief blog posts and emails, and took time off. It was torture at first. Her husband was still getting up and heading out to teach tai chi and qigong classes, modeling proper work behavior. She discovered that she was incapable of just resting. She had to relearn how to listen to her body to discover what it needed. She also had to reprogram her thoughts about rest as being an inherent right that everyone holds, not a reward for productivity.
She did all the things listed earlier as forms of rest, from naps to puzzles to sitting quietly. It was ridiculously difficult. She had to almost force herself to limit herself to single-tasking, which is doing one task at a time. That was especially hard if the task was mechanically simple, such as watching a television show. Her inner monologue would kick up, chastising her for just sitting there, urging her to be productive. In those moments when she decided that rest meant watching a movie on TV, she sometimes sat on her hands to make sure that she did not pick up her phone or a crossword puzzle. She often put her phone on silent and deliberately left it in another room to reduce temptation.
Even with taking steps to single-task, she did not always manage. She did learn through reinforcement that there was nothing likely to arise in an hour or two of time that required her to give up on resting and take immediate action. She realized that in many ways, she was retraining her nervous system to allow itself to relax. It was so used to being in a state of alertness that resting and allowing it to have some time off took some getting used to.
When she started to budget rest into her days, she could start to tell more easily what signals her body was sending. It became easier to converse with her brain and body to find out how they were feeling and what they needed. At any given moment, she can pause, tap into what she is feeling mentally and physically, and act on her own needs in ways that are more nurturing than before. When she realizes that she is losing focus on a project, she no longer pushes through. Instead, thanks to months of practice, she pauses and checks in with her brain and body. She can quickly ascertain whether she needs to take a simple break, to get up and walk around for a bit, to take a walk outdoors, or to stop for the day.
She is learning to embrace the idea that rest is an inherent right, not something that needs to be earned. It is no longer something that occurs only once she has pushed herself until the point of collapse. As it turns out, the more she leans into rest and builds it into her days, the more energy she has to accomplish all the things she wants to get done in life. When she adds time off or breaks during the day, she finds she has better focus when she needs to be working on a task. When she includes rest in her days, she has the energy to exercise in the morning and also make a good meal for dinner.
