“It takes courage to rest and play in a culture where exhaustion is seen as a status symbol.”~Brene Brown
I was chatting to a friend last week about his recovery progress from an injury. He jokingly said that everyone — doctors, chiropractors, physical therapists — kept telling him to relax. He said it was his biggest problem. He never stops moving, is always restless, and never fully lets himself relax. He is fighting therapeutic intervention, and frustrating his therapists in the process.
In the workplace, I talk to clients about this issue a lot. Physical tension can often be linked to mental and emotional tension and stress, which effects performance and leads people to seek help. Here’s what I tell them. The way we experience stress is a result of how high or low we are in a personality trait called Need for Stability. Your need for stability informs how much concern you express, how angry you get, and how optimistic or pessimistic you tend to be. But my favorite piece of the need for stability is called Rebound Time. Rebound time is the amount of time you require to get over stress — to stop feeling the physical and psychological effects of stress. Thankfully, Rebound Time is pretty consistent, with one small catch. It takes about the same amount of time for you to rebound from stress in any situation, as soon as the stress stops. This means resting. Hitting the off switch on your mind, body, and spirit. Without rest, there is no reset. Without rest, there is no recovery.
Roadblock to Rest
Yes, there are a couple of problems with getting rest we need. Culturally, we’re not good at relaxing. When I was in business school, professors still joked about countries that worked few hours than America. When I consult, just about every workplace I visit around the globe tells me they are workaholics, but in a good way. It still took me 33 years to finally turn off the notifications on my phone. And I continue to see ripples of what I think has been an unsustainable push towards more productivity for longer and longer periods of time. Many organizations, even innovative organizations, don’t have good policies in place to support rest, and it’s worse for small business owners. Though technology has given us super-productivity, we seem to fill the spare time with more productivity, not rest. The Economic Policy Institute reports that American workers have become 68% more productive over the last four decades, but HRExecutive reports that 44% of employees say they are burnt out.
Despite the evidence, we are still very judgemental about rest. I meet plenty of people who feel like rest is weak or lazy, that they can catch up on their rest at another time, or that it is some kind of luxury that they can’t afford or don’t deserve. Even if we want to unwind ourselves, it takes real work to relax! Irony of ironies, learning the skill of rest requires attention and practice. Speaking for myself, I don’t always want to do that work when I’m already stressed out. It can become another thing on the long list of things I should have gotten done yesterday, and that’s not helpful.
Recognizing when you need rest and following through with rest can seem daunting. Finding rest can seem complex. Work pressure, relationship stress, trauma, financial problems, and external events that are out of our control can hinder our ability to calm ourselves. To make the process easier, I pay attention to three areas: mental, emotional, and physical responses.
Responding for Rest
Mentally resting is the first step in the process. Because we move from mental to emotional to physical responses, start by looking at signs that you might be experiencing mental pressure. Do you find it challenging to concentrate on tasks? Do your thoughts race? Are you constantly asking “what if”? Do you jump immediately to thoughts that are untrue or unkind? Do your thoughts keep you up at night? These kinds of expressions of mental stress can be relieved through the consistent use of a few simple practices.
First, an oldie but goodie, writing/journaling/list making. It has been prescribed by everyone forever because it works. Thoughts just look bigger in our head. When they are put on paper, they immediately become concrete and more easily scrutinized. An alternative to writing is speaking thoughts out loud, for anyone who objects to the writing process for any reason. However, if you think your thoughts might be useful for something, which I find they often are, it’s good to collect them in some way.
Another activity is building time in your day for an activity that makes use of your body, but not your brain. I have heard of plenty of tasks that clients have used, including cleaning, running, woodworking, and I personally trim a giant rosebush. Do whatever you want. It doesn’t even have to be productive. Fidget spin if you want. The important part is physically soothing your mind into opening up.
The last, and probably most advanced, set of mental relaxation tasks is learning the skill of controlling your thoughts. This is mental exercise, so you’ll need to maintain this routine just like a physical exercise routine. To begin, set a space and an amount of time aside to listen to your thoughts. In the development of self-actualization, this is known as Solitude. A place to listen to the voices in your head. Meditation is a great process for this, but if you are new to giving yourself this space, try putting a pot of water on the stove and watching it boil in silence. If there’s another process you would rather try, use it. The important piece is the silence to hear your thoughts. Once you have the space to hear your thoughts, get in the habit of questioning each one, for at least the amount of time you are listening intently. Interrogate them. Ask if they’re true. Ask if they’re relevant or helpful. Use the quiet to challenge your own assumptions. As you use this process more regularly, you’ll find that the distracting thoughts that make your life harder are saved for this time, and the questions you ask about those thoughts determine more productive outcomes.
Emotional rest requires us to understand our emotions in while we’re feeling them, which can be the challenge of a lifetime. If you have done this work before, feel free to use more complex emotions, but I start with happy, mad, and sad as the three most basic. Signs of emotional stress can be experiences like feeling sudden rushes of any of these emotions for no seemingly good reason, or over-reactions and inability to control these emotions. Do you feel suddenly saddened or angry, maybe during a commercial on TV, or in traffic?
First, give yourself a safe place to experience these emotions. The Jungian approach to emotional development tells us that works of fiction, like fairy tales for instance, give us a safe place to live and process our emotions internally, so arching and sweeping epic stories can help us to feel and process our emotions. Take time with a Tolkien book or a Star Wars movie. Notice how your emotions perform as you experience the story. Use this information to inform your understanding of how your emotions work in real life.
If working through your emotions internally isn’t enough, find activities that allow you to express your emotions, happy, mad, and sad. If you draw, draw them. If you sing, sing them. If you feel too much frustration, Rage Rooms exist for this purpose. Allowing yourself to express your emotions in a productive way gives you the flexibility to control them.
Physical relaxation is the last piece of finding peace for yourself. Do you find that you carry your stress in your muscles, or you experience pain or discomfort when you’re stressed? Are your shoulders bunched up around your ears? Does your back hurt without injury? Do you hold yourself differently, or walk differently? Do you bounce, tap, or fidget at certain times? Does your breathing change? These are some physical manifestations of stress.
The first, and again very common, suggestion toward addressing physical tension is to give yourself physical ways to release it. A Jungian analyst I worked with suggested pushing on a wall during stressful moments. You can walk the dog, or run a circuit, play a sport, or sit on a yoga ball at work. Whatever your preference or level, it’s important to give your body a productive physical avenue to express stress.
Once you’ve found a physical way to work it out, it’s time to develop the skill of turning off. Again, much of this should be routinely practiced, but every little bit helps. If you are able, try a progressive relaxation meditation to walk you through actively relaxing your muscles. If you are like me, and you leave this out for too long, you can find a massage therapist, physical therapist, acupuncturist, chiropractor, whatever, to actively relax your muscles for you. The purpose here is to develop ways to actively control your physical tension.
Remember that the mental, emotional, and physical expressions of and solutions to stress are linked, so relaxing means you might have to address more than one, and impacting one will effect the others.
The last thing I’ll say on this subject is take your breaks. Go on vacation, take the mental health day, nap in the afternoon. Rest isn’t something you can catch up on, and it’s easier to maintain the skill than relearn it. It’s not selfish, or even self-care. Resting is healthcare. You need to be able to stop the stress if you want to recover. Learn the skills, practice the skills, and get the rest you need.
**Erika Weed is a doctoral candidate at The George Washington University, studying leadership and trying to reconcile the seemingly competing goals of happiness and success, for herself and others. She has a B.S. in Communications from Winthrop University, and MBA from Queens University of Charlotte, and has been an Executive Coach and Organizational Development Consultant for over 10 years. Erika founded Ascendry in 2015.
