When you’re busy all the time, it’s hard to pause, slow down and rest. But the busier you are, the more you need to recover and recharge. Wanting to rest is not a sign of weakness or laziness. It’s not just a reward for hard work or a job well done.

Rest helps you avoid exhaustion, overwhelm and burnout. Although it helps you to do more and make more, it’s vital for its own sake. When you’re well rested, you make better choices and prioritize what matters. You do fewer things in the short term, but accomplish more in the long run.

Visible activity is often mistaken for real productivity. You could be going fast and spinning your wheels, but not making real progress or heading in the right direction. When you’re too tired and stressed, you can’t produce output and generate ideas that are truly valuable and useful.

So, what is rest?

Rest is an intentional practice that leaves you feeling relaxed or reenergized. It’s any activity, ritual or habit that restores your energy, calms your mind, allows you to go inward, and gain a big-picture perspective.

You surrender into this state of being, rather than force yourself into it. In rest, you’re not obligated to do anything, but you’re not necessarily idling or stopping all activity.

Rest can be passive, like taking a nap, lying in a hammock, reading a novel, or listening to music.

Niksen is a Dutch term that means to do nothing. You’re not optimizing your time or doing activities to serve a purpose or achieve a goal. Examples are bird watching, cloud gazing, or day dreaming while looking out the window.

In her book, Niksen: The Dutch Art of Doing Nothing, Annette Lavrijsen (lavisen) writes that this gets you out of productive overdrive – no matter how busy you are.

But in our always-on, work-focused culture, it’s not easy to do nothing. There’s a natural tendency to fill up our free time with scrolling social media, binge watching videos and shows, and jumping from one digital app to another. Such mental stimuli can give you an adrenaline rush or dopamine hit. But too much makes you confused, distracted and exhausted. Don’t mistake these pseudo breaks for real breaks. Just because you’re not working doesn’t mean you’re resting.

If you’re too restless for passive rest, you could try active rest like going on a hike or a run, doing jumping jacks or dancing. Or indulge in tactile hobbies or meditative activities that relax and recharge you.
Examples are baking bread, doing jigsaw puzzles, sketching, water color painting, gardening, woodworking, and knitting.

Rest can be mentally restorative, physically recharging, or spiritually renewing, or a combination of all three.

Mental rest like mind-wandering and enjoying art allow your brain to go into default mode. This is key to memory consolidation, idea generation, and tackling problems that cannot be solved by working longer or thinking more.

Physical Rest like deep breathing or going on a nature walk helps you to recover from high stress. It is different from sleep, which is an unconscious, involuntary process that involves hormonal changes, cell renewal, and making neural connections. If you rest when you’re awake and able to engage in voluntary activity, you train yourself to sleep better.

Spiritual Rest comes from religious rituals, interacting with nature, or other spiritual experience that allow you to just be. Sitting in silence and breathing techniques can help you let go, relax, and stop ruminating and worrying over things you can’t control.

The most restorative activities are often solo. When you’re with someone else, your self-care and me time might get the backseat. So, don’t feel guilty about taking a break from others to get some alone time, even if it’s just for 15 minutes.

Whether your rest is passive or active, mental, physical or spiritual, or solo or social, it protects the nervous system from chronic stress.

Hello and welcome to The Incrementalist. My name is Dyan Williams and I’m your productivity coach who will help you make big changes in small steps.

The sympathetic nervous system is our fight-or-flight response to move toward or move away from stressors or danger cues. With the fight response, you can give a toast at your best friend’s wedding, despite your fear of public speaking. In the flight response, you can switch to an open lane to avoid an oncoming car.

The parasympathetic nervous system is your rest and digest response. This helps you restore energy and calm down when the stressful situation is over. It allows the body to maintain homeostasis, or a stable internal state, instead of being in constant fight or flight response.

A certain level of stress is needed to activate the sympathetic nervous system. Stress is good when it helps you rise to challenges, take necessary action, and move out of your comfort zone. But when you’re overworked and busy all the time, you can become addicted to stress, where you rely on cortisol, dopamine and adrenaline to keep you going. Left unchecked, chronic stress wears you down and leads to burnout.

In the 1990s, behavioral scientist Dr. Stephen Porges introduced the Polyvagal Theory. He explained that we don’t just go back and forth between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous states. Our body can also be in a hybrid state, where we use both branches.

This is linked to our vagus nerve, which stretches from the brainstem to the abdomen. It’s the main nerve in the parasympathetic nervous system, which regulates involuntary functions like our heart rate, blood pressure, digestion and immune system. The vagus nerve serves a dual function.

In the Parasympathetic Ventral Vagal state, we feel safe, calm, present, grounded curious, and open. This social engagement state facilitates social interaction and connection.

Meanwhile, in the Parasympathetic Dorsal Vagal state, we feel unsafe. And instead of the sympathetic fight or flight response, we get the parasympathetic freeze response. We shut down when we face extreme stress. This is like when an animal plays dead to survive.

Because the nervous system is not built to stay on, we need periods of rest. If we rely too much on stress to trigger action through fight or flight, we can stay stuck in the sympathetic state. We get hyperarousal, where we feel angry, irritated, frustrated, anxious, worried, and fearful.

Or we can enter the parasympathetic state. But instead of activating the rest and digest response, we freeze and become immobile. We face hypoarousal, where we feel numb, depressed, helpless, hopeless, withdrawn and trapped.

To move from a freeze response to a social engagement state, we must pass back through a sympathetic (stress) state. In short, we move from the I can’t state to the I can state to complete the stress response cycle.

Without rest, you’re more prone to hyperarousal in the sympathetic state or hypoarousal in the parasympathetic state. Rest stimulates the vagus nerve: This is why we can’t meet life’s demands and appreciate life’s gifts without a restorative practice.

When you tap into the ventral vagal state and complete the stress response cycle, you avoid getting stuck in fight, flight or freeze mode.

A fourth response to stress or danger cues is fawning, according to psychotherapist Pete Walker. In his book, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, he explains that a fawn response appeases the threat. It includes people-pleasing, failing to set boundaries, saying yes when we should say no, and holding back on strong opinions to avoid conflict. It’s not the same as being kind, compassionate or altruistic. Rather, it’s ignoring your own needs, desires and feelings to respond to a threat.

In short, the four responses to stress are:
Fight – move toward to confront the threat;
Flight – move away to escape the threat;
Freeze – shut down to block the threat; and
Fawn – submit to appease the threat.

Rest allows you to use your nervous system more effectively and activate the Ventral Vagal state to destress. You trigger oxytocin release, improve digestion, optimize your breathing, and connect better with others when you’re in parasympathetic, social engagement state.

When you’re on the hamster wheel, powering through is sometimes the worst thing to do. You need to rest to sharpen your focus, create more flow, and decide what to take on, start, continue, defer, delegate or drop. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you have to say yes to it.

Without rest, you lose focus, block flow, and make bad choices. You become more easily distracted and less productive. You might load up on caffeine and sugar or rely on stress hormones to keep you going.

Rest allows you to pause, recalibrate, reset, and recommit or change plans and rethink your priorities. By resting, you can you tap into your ventral vagal system and tune in to your own rhythm. You don’t have to rush all the time to keep up; instead, you can move at a slower and steadier pace.

Rest is not a one-off thing you do to get back to being busy. Use it to downshift and take deliberate action in ways that don’t burn you out.

Take regular breaks daily, rather than press on and wait until the weekend to rest. Don’t wait until your annual vacation to reset. Morning walks, getting up from your desk to stretch, or eating lunch mindfully are simple activities to restore your energy and lighten the mental load.

For more insights on how to rest, check out my book The Incrementalist. You can find it on amazon and leanpub. The links are in the show notes. Rest is one of the core principles for creating big results in small steps.

I’m also making an online course currently titled The Busyness Trap: How to Escape Overload and Focus on What Matters. For updates on the course, subscribe to my enewsletter at dyanwilliams.com or The Incrementalist YouTube channel or podcast.

Despite the many benefits of rest, we often come up with excuses and reasons to avoid it. Dr. Christopher Hsee and his research team found that people have an “idleness aversion”: they dread being idle and will find justification to keep themselves busy. They set goals to perform activities, rather than perform activities to pursue goals.

But engaging in rest or restorative practice is not the same as idleness. And if you’re always busy, you will not get the opportunity to learn the difference.

To dive deeper on the incrementalist approach to productive living, you may reach out to me for coaching or speaking events.

If you have feedback or topic ideas, drop them in the comments section of the YouTube channel, post a podcast review, or send me an email at dyan@dyanwilliams.com.

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