How to Relate to Your Rest

A Q&A about rest, with author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Let me start today’s newsletter by admitting I am very, very tired this week. A district-wide teacher strike began this past Friday and aside from all the politics (fascinating but stressful) and the uncertainty (which humans notoriously dislike), having a family of three kids with two working parents and no school on a non-vacation week means exhaustion.

I have been in need of reminders about how to rest wisely in the past few years, which is why I’m so grateful to have discovered Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. I picked up this book when my youngest (now seven) was a baby, desperate for a more sustainable approach my work and parenting life. This book offered exactly that.

Alex’s framework reveals that rest and work can exist in a healthy relationship with one another and it will change how you approach them both. Incidentally, this framework helped shape large sections of my book, Work, Parent, Thrive and was also my very first interview for the Psychologists Off the Clock podcast. For all these reasons, I’m delighted that a new edition of Rest is being released (and to have a reason to plague a very kind Alex with more of my questions).

For a chance to win free copies of Rest and ACT for Burnout (see last week’s newsletter for more on this book), enter the book giveaway below (or order the books, yourself, using the buttons below).

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Yael Schonbrun: Alex, I’m so excited to pick your brain about our relationship with rest. Let’s start with the basic question of how you define rest.

Alex Pang: Rest is time and activity spent recharging our mental and physical batteries. So that could be sleep, it can be going for walks, it could be working out, or taking a sabbatical. But the best kinds of rest are active and often are cognitively or physically engaging.

Yael Schonbrun: You also argue that we've fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between work and rest. The introduction to Rest starts: “This book is about work. It is also, of course, a book about rest. This sounds paradoxical, but it illustrates the book's central idea.” Can you say a bit about this?

Alex Pang: Sure. Most importantly, we think of rest as a kind of negative space defined by the absence of work, especially in today's world. Our jobs are careers are supposed to be things that we're passionate about—all consuming. They have a priority in our mental and daily lives that work did not have in the past, except for people who were in professions that they were called to, like medicine, the law, or theology. Beyond those, work was simply something you did for a fixed period of time and then you were done and you sort of got on with your life.

These days, work tends to crowd out other parts of our lives. And it makes demands on us all the time. One of the things that happens as a consequence of this is that we've come to see rest as something that is not, itself, a positive. That rest is not something to strive, to value , or to take seriously, but something that we do once we're done with work.

The problem, of course, is that we're never done with work these days. And so we suffer doubly from an impoverished vision of what rest can be and from allowing the world to deprive us of time for rest.

Yael Schonbrun: That's been such a transformative idea for me, that rest is not something that happens when we're done with work, but rather is a more active participant in helping us work better. I often think about this from a Taoist perspective. That we often think about work and rest as being in competition, but actually they're more like the two fish that we see in that Taoist symbol of yin and yang. Work and rest compliment and complete each other. What do you think about that visual?

Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay

Alex Pang: I think that's spot on. Work and rest need each other and justify each other. And both are necessary for a well-lived, satisfying life. We need work. We need its benefits in order to feel like sort of we are doing meaningful things in the world. But we also need rest in order to recharge the mental and physical batteries that we spend working in order to enjoy satisfactions that work may not deliver or only delivers episodically or incompletely. And if you're really lucky, your choice of rest and the practice of rest can also make your work better by providing a space in which your creative mind can explore new ideas or come up with sort of solutions to problems that your conscious mind or conscious attention have not been able to. So, for all of those reasons, I think that seeing work and rest as partners and as part of a continuum is really valuable.

The other metaphor I sometimes go for is Miles Davis and other jazz musicians, or Keith Jarret, the great pianist, talk about silence in their work as being as important as the notes. And if you, you know, you'll listen to the Japanese composer and pianist, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was the founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra. He helped create electronic dance music, and then he goes on to do film scores and sort of all kinds of other brilliant stuff. But he rerecorded some of his work later in life. And one of the really striking things is how as he got older and his work became more mature, he let it breathe, and how much silence he brought into those performances. He was very explicit about that as one of the great realizations of his career. It was not just about what you put down on the page and it was not just about the notes, but that learning how to use silence was just as important as the obviously active stuff.

Rest in our lives is somewhat the same. It's a silence that is not just the absence of notes, but is actually a really important thing to cultivate.

Yael Schonbrun: You’re reminding me of a book called Subtract by Leidy Klotz. In it, he talks about how when we subtract, we create empty space that can be of huge benefit. Leidy also talks about it in music too, referencing one of Bruce Springsteen's albums where it's really stripped down and that it's one of the most highly acclaimed albums of his prolific career.

It kind of brings me back to this idea of yin and yang, which is that we often think of work and rest as in competition, as if they're in a zero-sum game. But what you are saying is that when they collaborate, when we see work and rest as allies, not adversaries, we get more from each.

Alex Pang: Absolutely. One of the things that rest, when chosen well, can do is provide a reminder of what we love about work when it goes really well.

One of the things that I talk about in the book are the serious hobbies that some very busy, very ambitious people practice. For someone who is, let's say, a brain surgeon or a scientist taking a month off and going to climb Mount Everest or K2 may seem like a crazy thing, right? Number one, you could get killed. Number two, this is an enormously expensive undertaking in terms of time and money.

But over and over again, you see really creative and successful people doing this. Partly because those kinds of serious hobbies offer a clear opportunity to get away from work and to get out of the laboratory or the office. You really can't think about business strategy or a grant application when you are 200 feet up a sheer cliff, right?

But the second thing is that the people who have successful careers and these serious hobbies talk about them in the same kinds of ways, or they get the same satisfactions from them. It's just in very different kinds of places, in different ways. You know, very physical, in one case, very cerebral in another, and at different timescales. At the end of the day, you've made it to or to the top of the rock or you haven't. And that can be great for people who are doing work that normally plays out over months or years.

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

What that points to is we all have this deeper desire to have experiences that are meaningful, that are satisfying, that allow us to push ourselves to the limits of our abilities. We look for those in our work, but we can also look for those in well in well-chosen rest. And when we're able to find both, it means our lives simply get better. The total amount of hedonic reward over a given period of time goes up.

And what’s helpful to recognize is that our rest can serve as either a reminder of what we love about work when it goes well, or as a counterbalance when we struggle. For both of those reasons, having these kinds of rest that are deeply engaging and that can make our work and our working lives better.

Yael Schonbrun: I love this and want to switch to talking about our relationship with rest. We're in a really interesting moment in our culture when it comes to what we know about rest. If you read the news, follow blogs, if you are interested in science, you probably already know a bit about the value of rest. You probably know that when we don't rest, it's a major contributor to burnout, to health consequences, to relationship consequences. So, the knowledge is there through popular movements and scientific support. Yet we really continue to struggle to have a friendlier relationship with rest. Why do you think that is? Why do we continue to struggle so much to have that friendlier relationship with rest, given all the evidence and anecdotes and movements supporting it?

Alex Pang: It partly reflects the fact that finding good rest is actually a challenge. Resting well is hard. It's hard because we start with the assumption that rest is this entirely passive thing, right? We imagine that it’s just a negative space defined not only by the absence of work, but also the absence of anything. It's lying on the couch with a bag of salty snacks in one hand and a TV remote in the other. And while that has its place (as someone who just finished The Fall of the House of Usher!), there are other kinds of rest that are even more restorative and better for us in the long run.

The best kind of rest is active and is more cognitively or physically engaging. But we don't think of those as restful and consequently we tend to struggle to spend time or invest time in doing them.

The other thing is that since the Puritans, we have had messages about the necessity of working hard and the value of rest. The Puritans, of course, are famous for their work ethic. Max Weber wrote a whole book about the Protestant work ethic. But you know, the Puritans also shut down everything on Sundays. They were really strict about that. Or someone like Henry David Thoreau, who's all about the virtues of simple living and self-sufficiency and hard work also talks about the incredible value of leisure. And the industrialists in the 19th century were super busy people, but they also took pretty long vacations.

There's a wonderful New York Times article from 1910 in which the author asks a whole bunch of or bankers and industrialists: “How much vacation should you have?” And the answer was somewhere around two months a year. But you would be hard pressed to find a CEO today who would admit to taking two days a year off.

This illustrates how there was a period in which American culture in which thinking about work and rest was somewhat more balanced. But in the last 40 years, for various structural and technical reasons, it's fallen into imbalance. We have an economy that is increasingly precarious. We have a vision of successful careers that looks like 30-year-olds who become billionaires overnight because they've worked enormously hard. You have a narrow window before your technical skills become obsolete and your ability to live on Ramen and Adderall fades and you actually have to have a life and it's in that narrow space that you can become super successful.

So even while we have these messages about the value of rest, there are all kinds of structural incentives and systems that are trying to get us back to work. That want us to rise and grind and be ever-online and ever-accessible.

And the messages about the importance of leisure, the importance of rest and recovery don't come with the prospect of making partner or getting promoted. We don't have a narrative of success or of reaching the next stage in our careers or professional lives that has space for rest and self-care. These are still things that we have to do on our own as personal imperatives versus things that we need to do in order to serve our patients or be good advisors to our clients or to fulfill the professional obligations to which we are sworn as members of whatever guild we're in.

The bottom line is that rest is good and aspirational. But the harder incentives still are to get back into the office and get back to work.

Yael Schonbrun: When people read your book, they encounter numerous cases of prolific individuals who really prioritized habits of rest. I wondered if you’d be willing to inspire newsletter readers by sharing some of the ways that you foster the relationship between your productive work life and your rest life in a sustainable way?

Alex Pang: In practical terms, what this has meant for me is being thoughtful about the work that I'm doing, which means having a permission structure for saying no to some stuff. Also, I’ve learned to be much more efficient about the work that I'm doing. One of the ways that you have time for rest is to figure out how to do in two hours that thing that used to take you six hours and designing your work days so that you have more time for what Cal Newport calls “deep work” or focused work where you're getting into flow and sort of you're able to both work at a high level and also knock a bunch of things off your to-do list. Being able to work and taking rest seriously provides a really clear incentive structure for being more thoughtful about how you work and actually doing the work itself.

Another important part of it is designing working routines that layer periods of deep work and deliberate rest. So, for me, especially when I'm writing a book, what that means is working for a couple hours and then having a long break. Because frankly, while it feels like when you get in the zone that you can program all night, the reality is that our brains can only work at a high level for about two hours max. Then you’ve got to go do something else to recharge before you can come back to it and go for another round.

Another important thing is recognizing that four hours of really sustained serious effort a day is actually a great work day. That if you can do that, then you can get an awful lot done.

And then, having clear hobbies that provide a refuge/alternative to work is great, especially if you're in a profession that is really demanding, that has higher stress levels, or that you just have trouble switching off from.

Also, taking a long view of your work and your career is feels like an increasingly important thing, right? I think of it as a bit like relationships with people, right? I would make the case that being married to someone for a really long time—like being able to sort of get to your 50th anniversary—is more noble than having a really tempestuous two-year marriage with a lot of ups and downs. We romanticize the super passionate two-year version of careers where you have amazing highs and terrible lows. But they kind of blow up. The thing is, if you love what you do, you want to be able to do it for a long time. But what that requires is being thoughtful about how you spend your time and how you invest your energy and taking rest seriously.

Image by 👀 Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay

And then, finally, for people who are really passionate about their work or who might be bold enough to think that they have a touch of genius about it, that kind of thing is great. But the problem with having genius is that it will kill you if you let it. Genius doesn't care about you, it cares about doing the next piece of work. Genius doesn't care if it costs your relationships or your health. It wants the next poem, more symphony or book or scientific discovery. And so, we need to learn how to bring these passions into check. We need to turn our passions from things that consume us into practices that are sustainable.

Learning to take rest seriously, to say no, to recognize the value of four productive hours a day, can help you get an enormous amount of stuff done for 50 years versus three years. It helps you contain this thing that otherwise, if left unattended, will probably destroy you, if not permanently, then at least temporarily by burning you out.

Yael Schonbrun: Well, that's a good note to end on because I released an interview with Debbie Sorensen last week on her book about burnout (ACT for Burnout). This newsletter is doing a book giveaway of your book (Rest) and Debbie’s book, because these two books really are a perfect pairing. So, readers, enter the book giveaway below. (But whether or not you get a free copy, I really recommend getting your hands on this book. It’s one of my all-time most transformative reads).

Enter the book giveaway to get a copy of ACT for Burnout and Rest below.

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Go Deeper With Me!

If you enjoy the kind of relational science I explore in this newsletter:

1. Pick up a copy of my book, Work, Parent, Thrive. In it, I explore the relationship between roles, parents and children, and partners, and the science guiding us in how to thrive in a life full of demanding roles. (Email me if you’d like to be sent a free copy of the first chapter.)

2. Follow me on Instagram, where I attempt to regularly share science-backed ideas for relational thriving: @yaelschonbrun 

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I spend much of my professional time thinking about how science and clinical practice can foster relational thriving, including relationships between parents, children, and even between our life roles. A newsletter isn’t therapy, but it can be therapeutic. Send me your questions via comment or email if you’d like to read about how social science and clinical practice can help you navigate specific relationship challenges more skillfully.

Relationally yours,

Yael