How to Rest | How to Age Up

You know, Becca, so like even though I rest in the sense of going sideways and unconscious

at night, I don't feel like I rest enough or maybe that I don't rest properly.

I mean, maybe I don't even know what rest is, even.

Same for me, I feel like between sleep and work, those breaks that I need have never really been incorporated in my life.

You know, I was thinking about it Becca and rest is really a cornerstone concept in Western civilization.

Like it's in the Bible, right at the start of Genesis.

There's supposed to be a Sabbath, a day of rest, a break from making and using to doing something else.

And what is that something else? You know, in the religious sense, it's a time for worship, for God.

And in that sense, it's not like rest is a break exactly.

It's more like an organizing principle.

Like here's the thing you need in order to make the rest of your life operate.

The mainstream sort of American Protestant work ethic implies that rest needs to be more than just rest.

You know, it's working towards other must-do's.

The day of Sabbath is for rest and worship going to church, serving the community, serving your family.

And if we're literally talking about sleep as rest, that's one thing.

And many of us probably wish we could find more hours in the day for that.

And actually studies show only a third of Americans report feeling they got quality sleep.

Not surprising at all, with younger adults and women more likely than others to report trouble sleeping.

And those groups are actually more affected by their quality of sleep.

You know, giving ourselves opportunities to rest.

I'm curious about whether we have to justify it to ourselves.

When we rest, that's something we deserve.

Instead of something we need.

Welcome to How to Keep Time.

I'm Baccarousche, co-host and producer of the show.

And I'm Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

At least a space is opening up for thinking differently about the relationship between work and time and productivity and the place that rest and leisure can have in it.

So Becca, Alex, Sujan Kim, Pong is sort of rest-obsessed.

He's written a few books about the topic and one is literally called rest.

Great.

I'm Alex Pong, I run programs and consulting at 40-week global.

But of course, he himself is very productive writing all these books and talking about them and consulting.

And he's not only got experience studying this stuff but living it or trying to.

What got you interested in rest?

I had been interested in kind of the psychology of creativity and what it is that helps people have insights and sort of interesting ideas.

You know, when you do that work, you spend a lot of time talking about actually how people are working.

Right?

You get into the mechanics of their labor and read their notebooks and that sort of thing.

And there are parts of their lives that influence creativity.

And one of them is what people do with their leisure time or with that time that gives your kind of creative subconscious an opportunity to work on problems even while your conscious mind is elsewhere.

And for a long time, you know, we thought of that as unpredictable, you know, almost magical kind of stuff because very often it feels that way.

But you know, in the last 20 or so years, there's been work in neuroscience and psychology that's helped us better understand what goes on in our minds and our brains when we have those ideas and how certain kinds of rest create a fertile ground for insight and inspiration.

So you came to rest through your research on creativity, were there particular figures? Did you have like a role model for creativity and or rest that inspired you?

If I had to choose one, it would probably be Charles Darwin partly because he is a monumentally important figure in history and the history of science.

I've heard that.

You know, also because he's someone whose life is exquisitely well documented, right? The Cambridge archive has 14,000 letters to and from him.

And we can reconstruct with a pretty amazing degree of precision where he was what he was doing, his daily schedule and connect that to his creative work.

Charles Darwin would work for a couple hours and then put her around in the garden, work some more and then go on a long walk.

What's important there is that it means that you are in a sense using two sets of creative muscles.

There's your conscious mind where you're working to solve problems. But then your unconscious is able to take over and continue thinking about things often in new ways and exploring new connections or avenues.

What are some of the ways that you've seen people culturally understanding rest and how, especially how it's different from their initial conception that rest means sleeping or something along the way.

One important thing is recognizing rest as exercise and serious hobbies.

It's somewhat an unintuitive idea of rest that it's not necessarily related to idleness or laziness. What is rest actually? Maybe that's the question I want to ask you.

Yeah. So I think of rest is the time you spend recharging mental and physical batteries that you spend down working.

We often think of rest as being an entirely passive thing. It happens on a couch with a bag of snacks in one hand and a remote in the other.

One of the things that working on this taught me was that actually the most restorative kinds of rest often are more active and more physical. That exercise, that hobbies. These are things that can be a source of greater restoration and both in the immediate run in terms of recharging our batteries for the afternoon.

And maintaining creative wellsprings over the course of our entire lives.

So Alex, tell me more about what you mean here. What happens when we rest? Like what are the mechanics of rest?

Rest is where an awful lot of the bodies, maintenance work, the consolidation of memories, the literally cleaning out of bad stuff that builds up in our brain, brain plaque and that sort of thing.

Brain plaque? Yeah. So, you know, okay. So when you sleep, the brain of course has, you know, the neurons and all the cool stuff that fires up in a FMRI machine and makes those pretty colors.

But there's also a second system that does the like hard maintenance work of feeding the brain, but also taking away toxins and things that are to build up in it.

And that system is kind of dormant during the day when you're really active. But when you sleep, it lights up, activates and does its thing.

And so the theory is that, you know, one of the reasons that bad sleep is associated with things like dementia or later life cognitive issues is that that system hasn't had an opportunity over time to sort of do the kind of repair and maintenance work that it would, if you were better.

That it would if you were better rested. Brain plaque, I can't wait to tell my daughter that sleep is like going to the brain dentist.

There you go. Thank you for that gift.

You know, Becca, we tend to treat rest as an indulgence and that doesn't seem right. Like when I think about my friends or my colleagues, everyone seems to be talking all the time about they want to break.

I know if I can only get a break, but then when they get one, they use it mostly just to recuperate to like recover from all that work.

And like that kind of rest, that sort of recuperative rest, recovering from your day or your week or whatever, like that.

Okay, that finally, that seems necessary. But also that that seems like kind of bad.

Culturally, socially, morally even. I hope rest is more than that. Like, you know, good rest would let you partake of your life and to spend time in that life.

Right.

It would be like restorative rather than just recuperative.

I mean, I still have a tendency to make rest into a sort of must-do rather than something I naturally feel like I need.

And my body needs, you know, I've gone through dozens of phases with my self-care routines, but none have ever been rest for rest's sake.

This is something I know I have to do or I'm already sick, I'm already stressed out.

And especially during the work day, I mean, you know, this, and I don't drink water.

This is an ongoing problem.

Absolutely.

We're trying to get you to hydrate. We're getting better at it. Like the little things to just get up from my desk, take a break, go get some water.

Like the most basic thing. Rest at work feels so inappropriate in a way.

Interesting.

Even knowing when I need the rest or knowing how to do it in a way that feels genuinely restorative and not just to keep working.

Studies tell us that the average knowledge worker loses about two hours a day to overly long meetings to, you know, inefficiencies or distractions caused by technologies or poor processes.

I am shocked to hear this.

It totally sounds normal.

And so if you can get a handle on those three things, meetings, technology, and distractions, you can actually go a long way.

And so that means doing things like having better meeting discipline around the length of meetings, agendas, all that stuff that we all know we ought to do, but all too rarely don't.

It also means very often redesigning the work day to be more conscious about how you spend your time and having better boundaries between, say, deep focused work versus podcast recordings versus time with clients.

And then finally also thinking about how you can use your technology in two ways.

First of all, to eliminate distractions, number one.

And so that involves things like setting up particular times of day when you're checking email, but staying off of it the rest of the time.

And then second, looking for ways in which you can augment your intelligence or your capacity to do your most interesting work.

And so that's doing things like using, you know, using AI research assistants or other kinds of tools to help you be more effective at the stuff you love best.

What I take away from that Becca is the idea that we in America, the purpose of work is to be at work, not to do work.

You know, that's a reasonable criticism, right? We're kind of cost playing work rather than actually actually being effective.

Maybe we would be more effective both in our work lives and our rest lives if we took those breaks that appear naturally like that.

That time that appears when a meeting ends early, like you don't need to fill that up with, we'll just sit here in the meeting because it was scheduled or you know, I'll just do more email now.

You could just use it for nothing or for those other activities that would rejuvenate you like you can take a walk or procure your favorite diet cola like just something to give yourself a sort of sense of being in the world.

Not just to take care of yourself and your body, although that's part of it, but also to punctuate the work experience so that you can then move on to the next task.

Interesting.

I think some of that performative pressure makes it easier to feel overwork too, right? Because the labor is going beyond just doing your job and completing tasks, but also upkeeping some of that image that you're constantly occupied, you're a good working person, ideal worker as Melissa, as we told us.

And in some recent data shows that about 59% of American workers are at least moderately burnt out, which is even more than at the peak of the pandemic and employee engagement continues to decline, even though we have things like sabbaticals and things that would ideally prevent burnout, that's not available across most professions.

Most people again only take them after they've felt overworked or without rest for decades. Yeah, I mean, there's got to be some sort of white space between getting up from your desk to get some water and taking a sabbatical for a year, right?

Right, right.

Is the only or the main purpose of rest to prepare for more work? No, I mean, I think that it is one of the things that gives rest value.

And I think for lots of, you know, super busy, ambitious people, recognizing that it can help us have more productive lives and better ideas gives us permission to rest in ways that, you know, we might not otherwise.

There is a very long history across pretty much all cultures and religious traditions about things like the spiritual value of rest, right?

The idea that there are connections that we can make or things we can understand about ourselves or place in the world, the nature of our lives that only come when we're resting or, you know, when we're still.

I want to ask you now about sabbaticals and I wonder if you can start by just explaining to our listeners what a sabbatical is.

A sabbatical is a period of time, you know, with academics, you know, like a semester or a year where you take off and often go somewhere else physically.

And you are either learning some new set of skills or working on some other kind of, you know, professional development project, right? Another book or, I mean, I think that the only bad sabbatical is the one that you don't take.

So what's the difference between a sabbatical and a vacations? Like, some of what you're describing sounds like you take time off, you know, you go somewhere else or you don't.

I don't imagine that many of our listeners want to spend that time recharging for work functionally.

The first difference is that with sabbaticals, you have at least the kind of outline of a plan of something new that you want to learn or, you know, something else that that you want to do.

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