Why Can’t We Rest?
Let's start with an important disclaimer: This text is intended for IT professionals fortunate to enjoy good salaries and favorable working conditions. Despite having the means, many themselves struggle to find balance and prioritize self-care. We acknowledge the privilege of having such opportunities and the awareness that not everyone shares these advantages.
We have all heard multiple times that we need to rest and take care of ourselves promptly and sufficiently to maintain our capabilities. So why don’t we follow this advice despite being aware of its importance?
In my opinion, four main reasons are contributing to this grapple:
1. Cultural Imperative
Some of us belong to the first generation that affords the luxury of living well without working ourselves to the bone. However, there are no examples or well-trodden paths to follow. There is also a cultural myth that perpetuates the idea that work should be a duty and must be hard, even sacrificial.
2. Family Patterns
Family patterns always influence children. In environments where adults don’t respect a child’s need for freedom, lightness, dreams, and energy due to their own unresolved traumas, the child learns to get attention and approval by suppressing these needs. Consequently, as a child grows up the habit of perpetual fatigue persists.
3. Running Away from Problems
What would we have to deal with if we refused to be constantly active? An empty space starts to fill itself with something we didn’t have room for before. It can be something that has been suppressed for a long time: anxiety, guilt, shame, fear, traumatic experiences, unwanted self-image, etc. If you work a lot, you have a socially approved reason not to be in a relationship and ignore family conflicts. Sometimes, the empty space gets filled with boredom. Usually, it’s a masked feeling that hides deeper, more challenging emotions.
4. Not Knowing What Rest Means for You
Sometimes, we confuse rest with familiar activities that we’ve always considered restful. Some can consider a change of scenery as rest; others think it means socializing and friendly gatherings. But it doesn't necessarily mean these ways of spending time work for you.
Removing or Adding?
I ask my clients who complain about chronic exhaustion and inability to rest to listen to themselves and try to understand: does the rest right now mean removing something from your life or adding something to it?
Removing something means lowering the level of pressure. Cognitive, sensory, physical, and social pressure. Adding something is about variety in life, an opportunity to switch over and engage in activities that bring joy and fulfillment to neglected parts of oneself.
If the situation and possibilities don’t allow for significant changes right now, you could try to imagine a hypothetical “condition thermometer” assessing your current state; you have “zero,” “plus,” and “minus”—where are you now? It’s important to understand that going from “minus” straight to “plus” is unlikely, so “zero” would be a reasonable goal to achieve in given circumstances. Sometimes, transitioning from a negative to a less harmful state signifies significant progress.
Doctor Saundra Dalton-Smith suggests we need seven types of rest for a full recovery and comfortable life:
- Physical rest: Prioritazing activities that help the organism to recover, such as sleep, and pleasant physical activities like massage and sauna.
- Mental rest: Switching from intellectual activity to others like walking, sports, writing a diary, or meditating.
- Emotional rest: Creating space to process and navigate intense emotions through sincere conversations.
- Social rest: Resting from social engagements.
- Sensory rest: Reducing exposure to overwhelming sensory stimuli.
- Creative rest: Engaging in a creative activity for pleasure rather than focusing on the result.
- Spiritual rest: Cultivating a sense of connection with something bigger (the world, God, nature, etc.) – from a prayer to a hike in nature.
I also would like to add the eighth one to these types, the most crucial, in my opinion: rest from decision-making.
Our brain is technically a supercomputer that evolved with one goal only: perfecting the decision-making process. The power of this computer is great but is depletable (bad news) and renewable (good news) simultaneously.
Fatigue from decision-making is often not recognized, and then a person decides to relax on vacation and has a nervous breakdown right on the seashore instead. It turns out that vacation comes with its own set of new decisions: where to go exactly, what hotel to choose, what to order for lunch from an unfamiliar menu… Our brain doesn’t care what decisions are being made; the energy is spent regardless. The more decisions we make, the more tired we get.
A way out of this is to lower the amount of decision-making involved. That’s why it’s important to remember and pay attention to this hidden pressure.
By paying attention to signals from our bodies and minds we pave the way to understand what type of rest we need at any given moment. So, go for it!
