A couple of weeks ago, I was lying on the floor of my local yoga studio, easing into savasana, the final resting pose of the practice, when the teacher said, “Rest is inherently a productive act.”
Something in my mind went “click.” You’ve probably experienced those “click” moments, too. Those moments when someone articulates a familiar concept in a way that allows you to see it in a whole new light. My yoga teacher’s statement offered me a new lens through which to view rest.
For the first fifty years of my life, I resisted rest. Steeped in our culture’s obsession with productivity and achievement, I pushed myself to the point of exhaustion again and again. In one of his podcast episodes, leadership coach Jerry Colonna notes, “There is a work ethos that says, ‘I’m not really working unless I’m panting.’” And yet, as Colonna notes, this mistaken notion leads to burnout, exhaustion, and sometimes complete collapse.
In mid-life, I’ve learned the hard way to value rest. Nonetheless, I thought of rest as a tool for recharging my batteries and recovering from my labors. The message I absorbed from all my reading about rest focused on rest as restoration. Rest could restore my body and mind so that I could be more productive again at a future point. Rest could reduce my stress levels so that my brain could again function at full capacity, no longer short-circuited by my body and mind’s response to anxiety.
But that night in yoga, my thinking about rest underwent a subtle shift. Rest is productive in and of itself. Resting does not simply boost my productivity, it is inherently productive in and of itself. Productivity—the act of creating some kind of output—continues even when we are not actively engaged in that creation.
I did a little more reading, and it turns out that recent findings in neuroscience support the idea that something productive is happening when we rest. I won’t get too deep into the scientific weeds, but it turns out that when we are resting—when we are not consciously engaged in productive activity—our brains are still active. It’s just that when we are resting, a different part of our brains is activated, the Default Mode Network (DMN). Our DMN is the part of the brain that consolidates memories, makes connections, and solves problems. (I’m oversimplifying here, of course, but you get the idea.)
I used to joke that I got my best ideas and solved my writing problems in the shower or just before I fell asleep at night. My assessment of my own mental activity was spot on. In those moments when I was not distracted by other things and I was not consciously focused on producing work, my brain was able to make the kinds of associations and connections that helped me solve whatever problem I had been fretting over. As researcher Max Frenzel put it, “In a moment that feels restful to you, your DMN is quietly seeking out big-picture strategies for the problems you’re trying to solve or the big-picture strategies you may be seeking.”
I know that my epiphany moment may seem like a subtle shift, and it is. Yet it has helped me to embrace rest as a positive action instead of seeing rest as a necessary task—something I have do for my own good like eating green vegetables. Rest is not separate from productivity; it IS productivity.
How about you? How do you think about rest? Does reframing rest as an inherently productive act help you see rest in a new light?