In November 2021, a woman experienced a flare-up of her autoimmune issues. Her doctor remains uncertain whether rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia was the cause, or if both conditions were involved. The achiness and severe fatigue signaled that something was more active than usual.
She woke up tired, needed naps, and often ran out of spoons. That phrase, familiar to many with chronic conditions, comes from an essay called “The Spoon Theory” by Christine Miserandino. While the reason was unclear, 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 toddler. Instead of having a tantrum, she tried to push through to finish typing 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.
In the Western world, especially in the United States, people are programmed to be productive. They are told what they should be doing to stay busy. Work in all forms, from job tasks to errands to chores, is what they are supposed to do. From a young age, people are conditioned to be productive and stay busy. They hear phrases like “I’ll rest when I’m dead” and “no rest for the weary.” They are told to “pay their dues” and “put in the work.”
Many people also received these messages 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 do additional work after dinner. They were asked what they were doing and made to feel wrong if the answer was “nothing.” They were told that they have to work hard to succeed, that nothing good comes easy, and that they should not stop when tired, only when done.
Sitting down and resting is not prioritized. Those who decide to rest often must justify it, as if they have to earn 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. It could mean listening to music, watching TV, meditating, working on a jigsaw puzzle, reading a book, playing solitaire, looking out the window, or journaling.
In the fall, while struggling 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 checked how her mind and body truly felt, she was shocked to find they were almost on the edge of collapse. She waited until she reached the point where she could not do many tasks in a day. A good day might have involved doing a single load of laundry or cooking dinner.
She was so fixated on staying busy that she could no longer honestly assess her need for busyness. She had lost the ability to tune into her body to find out if it needed to move and stretch, or to stretch out and sleep. If she had continued to push ahead for much longer, she believes she would have fallen ill. She was dealing with brain fog, fatigue, and joint and muscle pain, all of which made life unpleasant.
She sees now that she should never have allowed things to get to that state. But fatigue, pain, and brain fog can team up so that a person cannot clearly assess much of anything. When she hit the edge of collapse and burnout, she realized that serious rest was needed. She cleared her calendar for at least three weeks. She cleared her work calendar of appointments, scheduled 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 also discovered that she was incapable of just resting. She had to relearn how to listen to her body to discover what it needed. She had to reprogram her thoughts about rest as an inherent right that everyone holds, not a reward for productivity. She also had to learn how to actually do it.
She did all of the 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, 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 chastise her for just sitting there and urge her to be productive. When she decided that rest meant watching a movie, she sometimes sat on her hands to make sure she did not pick up her phone or a crossword puzzle. She often put her phone on silent and left it in another room to reduce temptation.
Even with taking steps to single-task, she did not always manage. But she learned that there was nothing likely to arise in an hour or two 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 time off took getting used to.
When she started to budget rest into her days, she could 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. She has never felt more integrated than she does now. 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 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 determine whether she needs a simple break, to get up and walk around, 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 to the point of collapse.
The more she leans into rest and builds it into her days, the more energy she has to accomplish the things she wants to get done in life. When she adds time off or breaks during the day, she has better focus when she needs to work on a task. When she includes rest in her days, she has the energy to exercise in the morning and make a good meal for dinner.
