You have all of the permission you need right now to rest.

You have permission to rest, even if that feels impossible. You have permission to rest even if you don’t, yet, know how to rest. You only need to peek outside of your door to see that rest is a necessary part of the cycle of life taking place in the natural world around you. You have permission to rest the same way morning glories close at dusk. The same way the tide ebbs and flows. The same way bears hibernate in winter. Tending to your need for rest is not a sign of weakness. It is how you lovingly care for your own weariness, patching yourself up where you have worn thin. You have permission to care for yourself in this way. You have permission to slow down and proceed in your own right timing. This rest is yours for the taking.

Rest is any activity that fills your cup or restores your energy. Protecting and maintaining your energy is necessary because it determines your internal capacity for everything that you want to make happen in your life  -- including tending to yourself, your work, relationships, taking care of your children, working on that project you’ve been wanting to start. It is seductive to put off meeting your need for rest until you’ve worked your way to the very bottom of your constantly regenerating to-do list, but it is necessary to begin prioritizing rest before you can begin tending to yourself in other, more delicious, and dynamic ways. Caring for yourself requires energy, which, no doubt, is one of the reasons you have resisted it for so long. You might ache for care because you are exhausted but you don’t have the energy to care for yourself, and that cycle keeps repeating as you fall deeper into a state of burnout. Paradoxically, front-loading rest will grant you more energy to use each day.

Merriam-Webster defines rest as “to stop doing work or an activity: to spend time relaxing, sleeping, or doing nothing after you have been active or doing work.” This definition is problematic in that it specifically marries deserving rest with completing hard work, further compounding our belief that we do not deserve the rest we ache for unless we earn it. 

For our purposes, I will expand on this definition of rest to include: “Participating in activities that give you more energy than they require to accomplish, including but not limited to sleep.” All non-sleep rest activities will require energy to accomplish, but this expanded definition takes into account these activities that give you more energy than the energetic expenditure that the activity requires. Taking this equation into account, all of us will have different restful activities because as unique individuals with unique capacities, our personal equation of energy used versus energy gained will differ.

Restful activities might be something as simple as taking a couple of deep breaths while you wash your hands in the bathroom multiple times a day. That kind of habit is particularly effective because it enables you to attach a restful activity (breathing) to something that you already do (washing your hands). You could choose to commute to work in silence or listen to something nourishing. You might read a book for 10 minutes instead of scrolling on your phone in the morning. Or spend time at the beginning and end of the day watering your garden. 

These activities incorporate moments of reprieve into your daily life instead of pushing rest to the bottom of your list after everything is done, which is to say, never.  If you’re not being attentive to your needs as you move throughout the day, you are setting yourself up to be overwhelmed by them when you finish work. It is no surprise that you feel like an overflowing bucket of neediness after you’ve gone through your day without thinking about your body or taking time for yourself. Trying to avoid this messy bucket of needs is one of the many reasons we over-work ourselves. We don’t want to stop because we are afraid of what will happen when we do.