S3 E13: Why We Resist Rest + How It Helps Our Creativity
Even though resting and replenishing is a core part of my message, and what I work on with clients, I still sometimes find myself resisting it - maybe you do, too? Most of us intellectually understand why we need rest, and putting that into practice can be more difficult amongst our many projects, goals, and responsibilities, but it is absolutely an essential part of the creative process and being human!
RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Mara Glatzel’s courses (the course I took on rest is no longer available but her offerings are wonderful!)
Episodes on compassionate productivity reframes: S3E8 + S3E9
MORE FROM REBECCA
Eliminate the Overwhelm free call
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 13 of Being A Whole Person. Today is all about rest, and why we resist it, even though we need it. Does that sound familiar to you? Even though resting and replenishing are a core part of my message and what I work on with clients, I still find myself resisting it sometimes. There are a lot of reasons for that, which I'll get into, but it's a weird paradox that we might need rest more, and resist it more at the same time.
So, how do you even know you need rest? The obvious answer would be: you're tired. But you don't have to wait till you're tired to rest, which has been a mind blowing revelation for me as a person who has resisted rest long enough to plunge myself into burnout.
So you know you need rest because you're tired, maybe, but maybe your body is also giving you some messages. Sometimes it's whispering. Like you just have that tense feeling at the back of your neck, kind of that little scratch in your throat that you know happens when you feel like you're on the verge of getting sick. Sometimes it's that you find yourself holding your breath a lot while you're working or whatever your little pink flags are.
If you're not familiar with me saying pink flags, those are the little tiny signs that come before the red flags, like the bad stuff that's like, “Hello, you need to rest. You need to stop doing what you're doing.” The pink flags are just like the little whispers. And the more that you listen to your body, the more that you'll realize what your pink flags are, but your body will tell you. Noticing is one part, but then actually doing it is another, and feeling like you have permission to actually rest.
I know that when you have a lot of commitments, it's not always possible to just clear your calendar and rest for a day. I get that that's not always possible, but some amount is possible. If you don't have the luxury of canceling a whole bunch of things, there's probably still a way you can release some expectations. Maybe you do a smaller version of something, maybe you just put in 80% effort instead of 100, and if you are an ambitious overworker-type person, I bet your 80% is better than most people's 100%, like, if you're aware enough to be worried about it, it's probably okay.
Even when you're in the belief that rest is good for you. It is harder than it seems to actually put it into practice, I reached some of the worst burnout of my life while taking a class about rest, because I was just learning what I should do and not actually doing it. That class was with Mara Glatzel, by the way, who I talk about all the time, because she's amazing, and the class was amazing. But, I was continuing to plow forward, even when I was getting more signs than those pink flags.
It's really hard to slow down, also, when you're a person who's interested in a lot of things. And as a person who does creative work, you probably have a lot of different hats that you have to wear, with a creative business, because that's just how it goes. When you work for yourself, you're probably doing the work of like 10 different people, and maybe there's a way to avoid some of that, maybe there isn't. That's just inherently a challenge, and I'm guessing that if you're interested in a lot of things, you're excited about learning, you're excited about doing a lot of different things, you always have more ideas, and maybe you find it hard to slow down because there's just all this stuff you're excited about. And that's tough too because you don't really want to slow down, but perhaps your energy level is telling you to slow down. Or even if it's not, we still need downtime.
That can be overwhelming to have all those things on your plate and all those things, all those ideas that keep coming. But it's also pretty awesome if you don't view it as a source of pressure and stress, and give it a little less urgency than it might have had otherwise. Of course, this is a practice.
But really, no matter how excited we are about anything, it might feel like we can work forever on it, but we just can't work constantly and never stop. That's an unpopular truth. And I don't want to be a downer by saying that to you, because if you embrace that as true, that your energy is going to move in cycles, and you can then choose to work with those cycles, instead of resisting them.
It's very freeing to change your expectations about your energy, because then you don't see it as a failure, when you don't have enough energy to do something at night. When you're a morning person, you're like, “No, I just don't have a lot of energy at night. And maybe I'll just stop trying to start projects at night, because it doesn't work for me.” You can shift your perspective from, “why would I stop working” to “why would I keep going.” It doesn't even mean that you need to make that change immediately, or that you need to completely change your behavior, because that's not going to be sustainable either.
If this idea is new to you just thinking about it differently, is planting a seed and starting that shift for you - just believing that it's true that you can stop, and then it's okay. Give yourself that permission. It's easy to get in this ingrained habit of inertia, of always doing things the same way. We get so used to this idea that we have to keep going, that we always need to be doing something.
Maybe we're afraid that if we stop, we won't be able to restart again. I know I've had that feeling before. Like, if I start resting more, I'm just going to want to do that all the time, and I'm never going to want to do anything again, which of course, that didn't happen. But these fears are real. They don't have to be rational, but they are real.
And of course, we get so many external messages that we need to keep doing, doing, doing - that our worth comes from doing. Our worth comes from our work. That could be a whole other podcast too, and kind of has been - in my compassionate productivity reframes, I talk more about that.
But it's also tough, because continuing to do makes us feel like we're in control, and you could argue that we're never really in control - that's a philosophical debate that I'm not going to go fully down the rabbit hole of - but we want to control things because it makes us feel safer, continuing to push and strive and hustle. We like that, because it makes us feel like we're in control of our own destiny. And I'm not saying that we're not in control of our actions, or that our actions are not meaningful, because they absolutely are.
But when we overdo it, we have that control feeling, and that makes us feel like we can fully control the outcome. Of course, we can never fully control the outcome, and we know that intellectually, but, like I was saying earlier with my class on rest, intellectually, knowing something is really different from actually committing to changing a behavior and really making that ingrained. It takes practice, like everything.
So I get why we continue to work if we want to feel in control, that makes us feel safer, especially right now, during a pandemic, when so many things feel out of control. It can be a coping mechanism to stay constantly busy, too.
Susan Shehata, who I mentioned last week, and who will be a future guest on the podcast, wrote a great newsletter about this recently, that she was avoiding gardening, which is something she really, really loves, and is a leisure activity for her. She was avoiding it because she was in a trauma response of avoiding something that made her be very present. So that was the flight response. Or, she just felt too exhausted to do it at all, which is the freeze response. She talks a lot about trauma and the different responses that we have to it. I will link to her work in the show notes because she has so many useful things to say about trauma and about life in general.
But maybe this is familiar to you that you're constantly busy because you don't really like what you hear in your head when you calm down. It gives your brain a chance to realize that you're not satisfied with something in your life, that you're not feeling good enough, any number of negative feelings. It can be way easier to just stay busy, so you don't have to deal with any of that stuff. And of course, it always catches up to you. I'm not saying that's a good strategy, just that it's a really understandable one. Distraction is more appealing as a coping strategy, sometimes.
I don't want to vilify distracting yourself, either, because we can't be fully engaged all the time. It's okay if you feel like you want to numb out or distract yourself. It's just that when there's too much of one thing, it can be too much. Having compassion in all of that is really important.
But it's interesting because this constant doing and constant hustle does make us feel discomfort, because it's making us exhausted. That's probably a really familiar discomfort if you're accustomed to overworking, and you're a really ambitious person. So oftentimes, what we would choose is the familiar discomfort over the unfamiliar, like doing something that feels less safe, and working less can feel unsafe, if we think that the amount of work we put in is just proportional to what we're going to get out.
I know there are very real concerns with working less, if that causes you to make less money, that is a very valid and practical financial concern. But then, it's also easy to just go down the rabbit hole mentally with that and think, “Okay, well, if I work less, I'm definitely not going to make enough money, and then I'm going to lose my house, and then I'm going to be living on the street, etc.” You know, the stories that your brain tells you about dire situations, they can seem very real, even though they're not real. But like I was saying earlier, it often just feels unsafe, because we're feeling less in control, even though it might be uncomfortable.
If you're less used to taking more breaks and resting more, we really need that time to pause, in order to get the mental space ,to know what the next best thing is to do, or the next project that you want to do, or like the next note that you're writing in this composition, the next color you're putting on the paper. If you can't pause enough to have that mental space, then you can’t even access your creative power. I know I've been in states of exhaustion like this state of burnout, where I didn't really feel like I had much space in my head for anything, and I didn't like that, I didn't feel like myself.
I'm sure you know, when it comes to the creative process, there's a certain amount of surrender to the process. We're not always in control of the process, which, if you do creative work, you've probably made peace with that, at least partially. It's not always easy, of course, but I think the same kind of surrender can be applied to how much you want to work, and how much you feel comfortable with resting. You're doing the same kind of inward listening, it's just related to a different activity.
Can you think of a time when you tried to force the creative process and it just kept not working and not working, and then you took a break - maybe you showed up the next day, or you just went and did something else for a little while, and all of a sudden, oh, you see exactly what you're supposed to do next, and it totally makes sense. That is because our brains need those breaks. It's not just about coming back to try again. It's about starting fresh, and what you're doing to replenish your energy.
In the meantime, not only does that rest fuel your energy, so you have more available for that creative work, but you just have more energy so that you can do the things that are important in your life, and enjoy your life. That is really important, too, not just your work.
I know as a fellow type A, ambitious person, it has been very much a process for me to allow rest into my life, but it is a critical part of being a human, and especially being a human who does creative work.
It's so easy to compare ourselves to what you see, from what other people post on social media about what they're accomplishing, and all of the victories, because people post the shiny stuff, and people don't usually post the “I was depressed and I was in bed for a week” or the “I spent my whole day on the couch,” because that doesn't seem as shiny, but it is still real, and rest is still very much a part of what we need to do to replenish ourselves as humans with energy cycles.
So, I post a lot about resting, because I want to strengthen the idea that it's not only okay, it is preferable to have more rest in our lives. That is why I often post pictures of my cat sleeping, because he is my relaxation mentor, he leads by example. He supports my relaxation. Sometimes he physically gets in the way of me working. I think these are all great things that temper that tendency to overwork.
I hope that you feel empowered to take some more time for yourself to rest, whatever that means to you. It doesn't have to mean lying on the couch, it could just mean taking a few deep breaths. Whatever makes you feel replenished counts as rest. It could be something more active that gives you a mental break. There are many types of rest.
You deserve to feel replenished. We all deserve that, and it helps us help each other. On that note, go take a nap or whatever feels good to you. I'm going to go lie down with my relaxation mentor just for a few minutes, and I know that will help replenish me. So I hope that you all have a great week. Until next time, be well.