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How to Rest for the Workaholic

You can make more money, but not time

By Crystal JacksonPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
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How to Rest for the Workaholic
Photo by Jacob Townsend on Unsplash

When people tell me that they don’t take vacations or days off, I assume something is seriously wrong with them. You can always make more money. You can sell that shirt you’re wearing or set up a lemonade stand.

Money is abundant, as are the many ways to make it. But your time? We can’t make more of it or get it back when it’s gone.

Our culture has taught us that busy is better--and that idle hands are the devil’s workshop. Working more gets lauded as an accomplishment while working less gets seen as somehow being less responsible, regardless of how we’re managing our money. Perfect attendance is something that receives recognition, even if that stellar attendance means sharing sickness with the classroom or office. We worship busy, and our bodies and souls pay the price.

Most of us are tired more often than not and tired in a way that sleep doesn’t seem to cure. We go, go, go until we just can’t anymore. Our bodies break down to give us a break. We get sick so that we’ll stop. But too many of us just keep on going.

Even in our rest time, we have lists upon lists of things that need to be done. Our homes need to be cleaned, our cars cared for, and even our fun seems to pack busy into every single second. Taking a break to rest feels lazy, even when we have nothing else that urgently needs to be done.

I basically just described my 20s. I spent years worshipping busy. Perhaps I did it so that I wouldn’t have to look at the mess my life had become. If I worked full-time, earned a post-graduate degree, and kept busy even in my downtime, it was easy not to focus on the obvious problems in my life. The wrong relationship, wrong job, and wrong educational path for me. I couldn’t feel the poor fit because I was too busy cramming all the activity I could into every day.

The first time I realized that something was badly wrong with my life I was in this garbage job I took as a last resort when I was changing careers — taking photographs of people during the holidays. First of all, I’m not a professional photographer, but I could point the thing and push the button. It’s a company that has long since gone out of business — hallelujah — and their philosophy was that sick days weren’t allowed during the busy season.

So, you guessed it, I got sick. Not just a little sick--vomiting loudly in the public bathrooms between taking Christmas pictures of families sick. And still, I wasn’t allowed to go home. I got a 30-minute lunch break in a 12-hour day, and I was spending what time I wasn’t vomiting, coughing, and generally feeling miserable. It occurred to me then that I was an adult, and no other adult gets to tell me that I can’t care for myself.

Would the world fall apart because some family didn’t get their Christmas photo or had to wait hours for some other photographer? It would not. So, I went home, shut off my phone, and slept until the next morning.

I didn’t get fired, but I did get tons of messages from my angry coworkers, boss, boss’s boss, and boss’s boss’s boss at corporate headquarters in another state. I stayed at that job a little longer — mostly because of an unsupportive spouse and no idea how to just quit a job without having another one to fall back on. Eventually, I got laid off after the holiday season along with almost everyone else, and I was free. When I heard they went bankrupt, I high-fived karma.

But it was a lesson and a wake-up call. I actually get to call the shots in my life. If taking care of myself meant my boss scribbled a little note to put in a little file, I’d hand them the pen. Go ahead. It’s paper. It probably cost me a quarter raise in a garbage job I never wanted in the first place. But I had to start prioritizing my own well-being, whatever the cost.

By 30, I was already worn thin and tired of it all. But something had started shifting in me, and a couple of years later, I finally woke up to see the life I was living. I wasn’t even entirely sure how I had gotten there, but I knew I needed to make changes to make my life what I wanted.

I didn’t need to do more; I needed to do what I was meant to do. I needed to learn how to shape a life that included rest. And I needed to define that life by my own values, not anyone else’s.

And so here we are, needing rest but not getting it. Do we even know how to take a break? What does that even look like?

We can put down our phones.

We can stay engaged for hours on social media — mindlessly scrolling, posting photos, or even watching videos. Sometimes, we need to give ourselves permission to put down our phones. Don’t answer calls. Don’t reply to messages. Don’t even acknowledge or respond to notifications.

We can just put them down, put them on silent or turn them off, and take time for ourselves. Anyone who makes us feel like we’re not allowed to do this may be a toxic person to have in our lives. We get to set boundaries and take time for ourselves.

We can tune in to our bodies.

Our bodies are constantly communicating with us. Frequent headaches, shoulder pain, neck pain, or stomach aches can all be ways our bodies are trying to tell us what they need. Physical discomfort, even illness, presents us with a need, and if we only ever treat the symptoms, we’re likely to see the problems recur.

I had years of chronic stomach pain. I later found out that they were caused entirely by stress. When I addressed the stress, not the pain, the pain actually stopped. My body was trying to tell me something, but I was far too busy to stop and listen.

We can pay attention to our intuition.

If we can listen to our bodies, we may develop the ability to listen to our intuition, too. This goes beyond our thoughts and feelings, although heeding them can also be useful. Our intuition tells us what feels right and what doesn’t, and if we actually listen, we may find ourselves making choices that honor what we need rather than doing all the things we think we have to do.

We can tune in to our environment.

Anyone who has ever been in a toxic work environment knows just how much of an impact our surroundings have on our mood, health, and overall well-being. When we tune into what’s going on around us, we can start assessing the health of the relationships in our lives, too. Do our partnerships, families, or friendships qualify as toxic? Do we surround ourselves with people who elevate us to the next level or drag us down to theirs?

You may be wondering what this has to do with rest. Being around toxic people is draining. They drain our time, our energy, and even our emotional resources. These people are the energy vampires of our lives, and it’s hard to feel rested around them. Instead of continuing to allow them to occupy space in our lives, we can begin to put up healthy boundaries to protect our own well-being.

We can put down our to-do lists.

The laundry always needs to be done. We’ll never be finished with it entirely. Stressing about a single load or even five of them won’t make us feel any better. While there’s something to be said for getting it out of the way, there’s also something to be said for recognizing the times when we need to put down our to-do lists and just get some rest.

Do the dishes in the morning if you are so exhausted that you just want to watch television and then go to bed early. Skip that load of laundry to take an extra long shower instead. Every now and then, we need to skip the to-do list in favor of doing what we need at that moment, but if we’re going to do that, we need to do it without guilt or shame for taking care of ourselves instead.

Remember that rest is actually productive.

Our culture tells us that taking it easy is lazy, but resting is actually incredibly productive. When we’re rested, we can perform at optimal levels. We tend to be in better health, feel more energized, and get more done. Resting is far from lazy; it’s essential.

Since Covid came along, we've seen just how important it is to rest--particularly when we're sick. It took a global pandemic for businesses and schools to actively encourage people to stay home when they have symptoms of illness. Instead of reminding people of the risk to their perfect attendance or pressuring them to come in, we've flipped the script to tell them to stay home so that any spread of illness is contained. It shouldn't have taken a pandemic for us to realize that resting when we're sick means that we can all be more productive rather than impacting each other with illness.

We can shape lives that reflect our own values, not a societal standard.

I began to feel strongly that I wanted to work smarter, not harder. To be more precise, my value was to have more time and to do work I loved, not to work more hours or make more money. I began to learn how to manage money so well that I could do a lot with a little.

That’s important when we’re not going to keep chasing the almighty dollar. I began to shape my hours around my work and my family, not around what society says should be a full day’s work. I added fitness into my work schedule rather than trying to squeeze it around everything else because taking care of my body is as important as my mind or soul or anything else.

I stopped trying to climb other people’s ladders and started focusing on what I wanted. It’s not that I don’t have goals. Even my goals have goals. It’s that I started making those goals center on my values rather than adjusting my values to fit the life I’m living. Shaping my life around my values automatically added rest into the equation. My well-being is a priority, and I’ve created a life that allows for balance, rest, and flexibility because it’s important to me.

Self-care is a concept that’s started to trend as people recognize the need for rest in their lives. It can be a difficult concept to embrace when we feel the pressure to be more and do more. It can seem like we’re wasting time or being lazy when the reality is that we’re doing something that allows us to feel our best and be more productive and present in our lives.

These days, I take time off when I need it. It’s not that I don’t have as much to do; if anything, I’m busier now than I’ve ever been. It’s that I’ve learned the value of taking care of myself. I’m even working on the guilt that still seems second-nature when I take that time.

We aren’t here to make money, pay bills, and die. We’re here to live. And to live the best lives possible, we need rest — not just sleep.

So, let’s make time for it.

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About the Creator

Crystal Jackson

Crystal Jackson is a former therapist turned author. Her work has been featured on Medium, Elite Daily, NewsBreak, Your Tango, and The Good Men Project. She is the author of the Heart of Madison series and 3 volumes of poetry.

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