What Makes Rest Meaningful?

“Wisdom is knowing when to have rest, when to have activity, and how much of each to have.”

~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

One way my perfectionism shows up is, ironically, how I rest.

Maybe you recognise the expectation that rest will be meaningful, even productive. It’s something to be done in order to achieve something else.

This pressure came into sharp relief for me recently. The Balinese new year starts with Nyepi, a day of silence when everyone stays at home so that the evil spirits think the island is uninhabited and so leave. Traditionally, people fast and don't turn on the lights; in same parts of the island, even the electricity and internet are turned off.

This year, I used it as an opportunity for a 24 hour digital detox (which was so much harder than I thought it would be). It quickly became apparent that I am terrible at doing nothing. I was fidgety and restless. I knew people would ask how I had spent the day and I had a story that I had to be engaged in meaningful rest, like it was the spiritual Olympics.

It seems that even doing nothing is something I must do "right".

I know I'm not the only one who has absorbed the notions of toxic productivity so much that time away from paid work has become another area of life for achievement and the pursuit of perfection.

This story is so pernicious. As I was doing some reading around this topic, I found an article on the Seven Types of Rest and How to Achieve Them. Seriously? Not only do I have to deal with my demons around resting in the first place, but now I have to make sure I'm doing it seven different ways?! Sorry, no thanks.

I hope I don't have to tell you that rest is vital. And not because it actually makes the brain more efficient or because "the better you are at resting, the better you will be at working.” (Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, who talks more about the case for rest here). But because we're not here to be productivity machines. There is more to life than work.

When we rest, we have time to recover from the stresses of our work. It allows new experiences and learning to be processed by our brains, and gives our subconscious mind the opportunity to problem-solve in the background.

Meaningful rest doesn't just mean one thing.

It can mean taking quiet time to ourselves, having a nap or going to a restorative yoga class.

It can also look like what Alex Soojung-Kim Pang calls Deep Play.

As he puts it, “deep play provides many of the same psychological rewards and satisfactions as … work, but without the frustrations.”

Deep play offers opportunities for flow, mastery, and control. It's deeply absorbing, and challenging enough to require time to conquer. It could be painting, rock-climbing, gardening, running...my new Deep Play activity is learning to hula-hoop. My go-to is a Killer Sudoku puzzle.

This shows up most obviously to me over the course of my menstrual cycle. Just before my bleed, I am more than happy to spend the weekend in my pyjamas binge-watching The West Wing. I don't want to be around people. I don't want to move much. Yet, Ovulating Vix would go out of her mind with boredom. In that inner summer phase, I need to be active, engaged, socialising, and exploring new things.

I want to normalise both ends of the spectrum of deliberate rest and everything in between. I want to kill the idea that there is a single right way to renew and restore our bodies, minds and spirits. Rest doesn't need to be another activity for us to tick off the list and assess our achievements.

Meaningful rest gets to be whatever you want it to be. As long as you're respecting your own rhythms and honouring the winters of your different cycles, who cares what it looks like. Stop shoulding over your rest. Let go of the need for it to be meaningful and allow it to be deeply pleasurable. Let's start judging the quality of our rest by how much we enjoyed it and how restored we feel afterwards.

Let me know how this resonates for you and if you have any questions.