Working on Rest: A Paradox?

Someone once told me that the popular conception of self-care ends up as "working yourself to death, but sometimes you drink a seltzer water in the bathtub."

Don't get me wrong: after some strenuous task or milestone, there are few things I love more than working up a good sweat before a long soak. Add in a bath bomb, a lemon-lime sparkling water, and a good book? Yeah, I'm having a lovely afternoon, and I will emerge feeling great. It's cliche and oh, so basic, but you know what? It's a cliche for a reason. That's a great way to relax.

And I will stand by this: sparkling-bath-tub-book-time is not bad. That's not the problem. It's just insufficient. True rest has to go beyond just spending a half hour in warm water once a week. If that's the extent of your rest habits, in the modern economy that can be a bit like trying to fix a broken femur with a bandaid. The bandaid isn't going to make things worse, and there are plenty of good uses for the bandaid, but we also have to appreciate its limitations.

Take it from me, a person who hasn't slept well for most of my life.

I don't know when I started to sleep poorly. I know I was having issues with it in my early teens, but it might just be something that I've endured for my entire life. I can't remember a time when deep, restful sleep came naturally to me, and that was especially frustrating when several members of my family seemed to be able to flip a switch and go out like a light.

Even now, after years of developing habits in order to improve my sleep habits, I still struggle to get a full night of restful sleep every single night. However, that's taught me tricks that I use to radically increase my odds of success with sleeping. At the heart of that is one revelation:

Rest Isn't About Not Doing Anything

In Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's brilliant book Rest he neatly introduces the problem:

Many of us are interested in how to work better, but we don't think very much about how to rest better. (...) [Productivity books] say almost nothing about the role of rest in the lives or careers of creative, productive people. When they do mention rest, they tend to treat it as nothing more than a physical necessity or inconvenience.

This conception, which is shared by a truly tragic amount of the population, pictures productivity and rest as a pure dichotomy. Work is the time when you are being productive and rest is the time when you're not doing those things. Work is accomplishment, and rest is the time when you're accomplishing nothing.

As Soojung-Kim Pang writes:

We think of rest as simply the absence of work, not as something that stands on its own or has its own qualities.

If you operate under this mindset, the idea of working to improve your rest sounds almost paradoxical. After all, rest is supposed to be defined by a lack of work. Therefore, adding effort to your rest should make it less restful, right?

Well, a lifetime of bad sleep has taught me that working to improve rest is actually critical. If I hope to just tumble into bed and fall asleep easily at night, I need to do a lot of work to build towards that outcome while I am awake. And, wouldn't you know it, sleeping well at night makes it easier to do that work. It's symbiotic. The more I improve my rest habits, the more energy I have to pour into continuing towards other goals.

You Don't Stumble Into Perfect Rest

My goal with rest is always the same: when I go to bed, I want to fall asleep. I don't want to toss and turn for three hours, and I don't want to get up nine times during the night because sleep just won't come. I want to fall asleep on time so I can wake up on time.

That doesn't come naturally to me. If it does come naturally to you, please, for my sake, appreciate that experience. Savour it. We are not all so blessed.

If I spend a day watching TV on the couch, chances are I will get to bed and struggle to sleep. Of course, sometimes I do still watch TV on the couch all day anyways. I'm not a robot, and there are always days where my performance reflects that. The objective isn't perfection. The objective is improvement. I know that I will probably sleep badly for the rest of my life, but if I approach it strategically, I can radically reduce the number sleepless nights I have.

So how do I improve my odds of sleeping at night?

Well, here I find help in an unusual place. Stephen King and his spooky novels might be responsible for more sleepless nights than just about any author who has ever lived, but when he talks about his own habits, this is what he has to say:

When I'm not working, I'm not working at all, although during those periods of full stop I usually feel at loose ends with myself and have trouble sleeping.

I added the emphasis to this quote from On Writing because his experience matches my own.

So is that the trick, then? To rest better, we need to work harder?

That sounds overly simplistic to me, and here's why:

The Complex Reality of Effort

There's something very strange in the world of exercise and diet. If you mention that you're going on a diet or trying a new workout routine, many people will assume that you're pursuing a very specific image of success. You're looking to lose weight, or you're looking to get your beach bod. Right?

Isn't that strange?

This focus gives the concept of diet and exercise a bad name. People will say that dieting is fatphobic, forgetting that people might be trying a new diet because they hope it will help with a variety of health issues. Many people have to specifically tailor their diet to any number of health concerns, from food intolerances and allergies to diabetes. Yet, if you mention a diet, people assume that you mean dieting in order to lose weight so that you can conform to restrictive modern beauty standards.

I see this in my own life. I'm a runner. I doubt you would know that from looking at me. I like to run for long periods of time. I don't sprint, and I've got pretty decent endurance. I've been running for a few years, but I still don't have that Marvel bod. I don't even have the standard runner's physique (you know, long limbs, lean body, 0.0 percent body fat). And you know what? I'm okay with that. I run because it helps me think, and I run because it helps me sleep.

The standard by which I measure my success as a runner is not a weight-loss goal or a beach-body. The standard by which I measure my success as a runner is internal. It belongs to me.

Sleep doesn't come easily to me under any circumstances, but I know from experience that if I don't exercise, I won't sleep well. It's just that simple. And like Stephen King wrote in the quote above, if I don't write regularly, I don't tend to sleep well either.

However, those are specific to me. I don't think that writing or running are the secret to a restful night's sleep.

How Do Goals Work Anyways?

That question is at the heart of James Clear's book Atomic Habits, and I promise it's actually extremely relevant to the topic of making resolutions to improve your rest. Early in Atomic Habits, James Clear writes:

Behavior that is incongruent with the self will not last. (...) You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven't changed who you are.

Do you write because you have a goal to create a certain number of projects? Or do you see yourself as a writer? This can be a really powerful tool to employ in your goals. It's easier to prioritise behaviour if that behaviour is aligned with your self-conception.

If I write to hit goals, all of the time before I hit those goals is frustrating. It is the struggle of climbing a mountain. If I write because I am a writer, I am simply performing part of my identity.

James Clear goes on to write:

True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you'll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.

What is your identity? And does your identity prioritise rest?

The Power of Context

This is the context that makes sense of Stephen King's sleeping habits. If you listen to King talk in interviews, or read what he has written about writing, it's clear that he writes because he sees himself as a writer. It's part of who he is. Without that crucial element of his own identity, he becomes restless.

This allows writing to be something he enjoys rather than an obligation. Writing every day doesn't add stress to his life. It allows him to be himself.

But that's easier said than done. It's easy to get swept up in the stream measurable productivity, and it's easy to let someone else apply their vision of your identity onto you.

This is why sparkling-bath-tub-book-time is insufficient.

Sparkling-bath-tub-book-time is relaxing, but it doesn't change identity. So when you make goals for yourself this year, ask yourself this: what identity does this goal assume?

Is exercise important because you want to conform to modern beauty standards, or is exercise important because it fits into your identity of someone who values rest? Is writing just a way to achieve some concept of productivity, or is it just aligning your actions with your identity? Do you feel like you're fighting against your identity when you try to relax? And if so, where did that identity come from? Is that really who you want to be?

Expect Push Back

If you read about so-called great people in the world, you'll often hear about how hard they work. How many hours they spend at the office, how little they sleep, and so on. Those details are repeated in breathless awe, as if this reinforces just how great these people are.

Unsurprisingly, the opposite is true. If you tell people, "I am not a busy person," they might assume that this means laziness.

Modern society is structured to prioritise what it can measure. How many words did you write? How many hits did you get? How many widgets did you make? How many hours did you spend at the office? Choosing to be a rested person might mean letting go of some of those things. The internet is full of ways to measure you as a person. How many likes did you get on Twitter, how many views did you get on TikTok, how many followers do you have on Instagram. Choosing a rested identity can mean choosing not to look at those things because they don't actually mesh with your identity. After all, that will contort your identity until you value those things over your rest. You can't rest now, because if you do, your new YouTube channel might not get off the ground.

This means that we can end up denigrating important things that are harder to measure. Can you put a number on rest? What's the unit of measurement for satisfaction?

However, if we don't value those hard-to-measure things, we end up with an epidemic of burnout and dissatisfaction. And because this is happening at a societal level, much of this is out of your control. If you say that your goal for 2022 is to get better at resting, you can't control that other people might assume this is connected to laziness. All you can do is continue to focus on your own identity.

Who are you? Who do you want to be?

As for me, I'll be running this year, and I'll be writing this year, and all the time I will try to remind myself why I am doing it. And I hope that on most nights, when I head to bed, I will be able to sleep restfully.

And on the days when that doesn't pan out? Well, there's always sparkling-bath-tub-book-time.

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