The Labor of Rest
“Rest takes work, too.”
Recently, I recounted to a friend a discussion we had several months ago about our gym routines. In that conversation, he and I had identified finding time for rest days in our gym schedules as a significant challenge. The work of physically training our bodies had become a habit, a ritual, an obsession, an addiction. My friend then asked if I had taken a rest day recently. After a brief reflective pause, I told him that I practice what I call “active rest days;” days where I may not go to the gym but still engage my physical body in something active (walking, stretching, etc.).
At the start of my fitness journey, I felt that taking a day off from the gym felt like regression and deviation from my weekly routine. As a self-proclaimed gym junkie, I understood the concept and importance of taking a rest day but often found it difficult to actually do in practice. Our bodies have a way of sending us the critical messages we need, even when our minds are not entirely aligned to receive them. That is, if we don’t allow our bodies to rest, our bodies will inevitably force us to.
It was not until recently that I came to an even deeper realization of the importance of rest to one’s body and mind. As an educator, I expend tremendous amounts of physical and mental energy each and every day. Teaching is a profession that is as arduous as it is rewarding; the hours are long and the work can be consuming and exhausting without consistent routines and structured boundaries in place. As with any job, it’s important to take time away to recharge and recuperate.
The past few weeks was one of the few times in my career that I truly stepped away from work. I did not check emails, I didn’t edit any lesson plans, I didn’t grade any papers — I barely opened my laptop. Instead, I took time to prioritize sleep, spent time with loved ones, and even took several days off from the gym. Intentionally carving out time and space away from any and all things work was one of the best decisions I could have made to end the calendar year. I am entering the new year with a fresh mind and renewed energy. I don’t dread returning to work; in fact, I am eager to restart my weekly work routines. But I feel that I can do so with greater vigor and mental clarity.
Returning from this time off has also served as a moment of self-accountability. This short sabbatical period forced me to confront my own convictions about rest and discard previously held assumptions about work, labor, and rest. But further, it allowed me to realize that I had been engaging in the very restorative practice I had at one point felt was a potential hindrance to my professional success and personal progress. Resting, unsurprisingly, is what renews our energy and focus to attack the work week. Without intentionally making rest a consistent routine in our lives, we risk burning out. I had to come to a new revelation: that not only is it important to make space for rest, but rest can be a form of activity, too. Rest is its own form of labor.
We all lead busy lives. Many of us work at least 10- to 12-hour daily schedules and have many other personal and professional obligations beyond our traditional work week. We live in a world that holds an ostensibly deep devotion to work. Many of us are “grinding” to be successful at something, whether it be our main job, side hustles, raising a family, building a business, being an entrepreneur, starting a podcast, or other personal project. The familiar mantra “the grind never stops” has become a motto embedded into the cultural psyche of so many individuals and communities in the contemporary work landscape. It is a mantra that at once organizes our conceptions of work and labor and animates our approaches to success.
Conventional wisdom leads us to believe that it takes endless labor, early mornings, and late nights to become successful and achieve at a high level. It’s true — discipline and consistency are the building blocks for success at anything. It takes sacrifice and steadfast commitment to a purpose to experience growth, evolution, and transformation. And while it’s universal law that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, what is not widely acknowledged is that energy must still be restored. Sadly, rest typically does not factor into our schemas and schemes for achievement. Rest tends to be overlooked, often seen as an impediment to success rather than an ingredient for success. As writer and author Rainesford Stauffer remarks, “rest feels radical, but it shouldn’t be.”
Although I do not intend to prescribe how or when one should rest, I do believe that we should keep track of how our views and attitudes toward rest and labor are deeply socialized. Capitalism, grind culture, and the digital media landscape have instructed us to think that everything is urgent, that everything requires our immediate attention, and that we must be “on” and operating at maximum capacity at all times and maximize every moment of our lives to produce. But we are more than the productivity our labor can achieve; we are human beings, not machines. Internal medicine physician Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith posits that many of us suffer from a “rest deficit” and that our charge is to engage in multiple types of rest in order to restore our energy levels in various areas of our lives.
While I share this contention, I also believe that rest takes energy and effort. Rest involves action and intention; it is both noun and verb. Rest practices require deep labor — the labor of setting intentions, setting boundaries, setting goals for accomplishment, and setting timetables for maintenance. Since rest can be so easily neglected in a world that places a premium on urgency and speed, we must purposefully carve out time and space to engage in deep rest practices. Making time for rest is vital to allow our bodies and minds to reset, recuperate, and recharge in order to operate effectively and efficiently. Rest takes work, too — and it can serve as one of our greatest allies for productivity.
We all know sleep does wonders for helping us rest and that it is likely that we each could benefit from sleeping more on a nightly and weekly basis. But rest isn’t reducible to sleep. Other practices, such as yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and stillness are paramount to helping our minds, bodies, and spirits engage in deep rest. All of these practices are activities — they require, quite literally, activity and action. These activities engage us in a recuperative kind of labor; a labor that seeks to energize rather than deplete us; a labor from which we can leave feeling more whole, present, and full rather than fragmented, disconnected, and exhausted.
It is incumbent on all of us to interrogate our relationships to work, labor, and rest. Running on fumes is not the badge of honor we think it is. Time is one of the most sacred and valuable resources we have, largely because it is non-renewable. Many of us spend so much of our time laboring for something or someone else. But it’d help us to consider, how do we labor for ourselves? How long are we sleeping? What types of rest are we centering? What do our morning and nighttime routines look like? When do we create space for stillness? Where do we go when we need renewal?
We must come to embrace the idea that rest is productive and, as poet, artist, and Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hersey theorizes, rest is resistance. If we are truly dedicated to leading self-actualized lives, we must come to see rest as our ally. And we must be as disciplined about engaging in the work of rest as we are about engaging in work itself. We owe it to our bodies, our minds, our spirits, and our souls.