#26 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Finding Rest At Work

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU HEAR

• “I can’t take a break, are you kidding me? EVERYTHING WILL FALL APART IF I DON’T WORK.”
• “I am the only one who knows how to get s*** done around here so I can’t afford to fall sick.”
• “Ooh lucky you going off to New Zealand….I haven’t taken a vacation in years - or sick leave for that matter. I really should….”
• “I love my family but I really love my work. So what’s a few missed dinners here and there…”
• “I put on so much weight since I started work here…I really need to get back into regular gym sessions again but work keeps piling up.”

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of Finding Rest At Work

THINK // 3 insights from the field

?? THE GOOD THING about finding rest at work is that it’s really about finding our own Rhythm of Life: a sustainable pattern of habits that allow us to thrive in our personal, professional and civic lives.

Another good thing is that post-pandemic, there are actually more enlightened workplaces, supportive teams and progressive bosses than you think out there who would like you to help you find it - because they too are looking for that holy grail of “work-life balance” for themselves.

There has been much debate about whether there is such a thing as work-life balance. Some say we should strive to find an ‘ikigai’ kind of work that gives us joy, achievement, money and rest. Some say we should just seek work-rest integration.

Whatever are your beliefs on work-life balance, I hope we can all agree on this: the way we work must not kill, damage or ruin our chances of living a life worthy of living.

What does it mean though to work in a way that supports a life most worthy of living?

If we use Seligman’s PERMA+ model of well-being, this can look like us working in a way that:

• inspires Positive emotions,
• keeps us Engaged ‘in the flow’ of things,
• nurtures positive Relationships,
• provides us purposeful Meaning,
• fuels us with a sense of Accomplishment
• + allows us to take care of our physical well-being.

So a Rhythm of Life based on the PERMA+ model can look like daily, weekly or monthly practices that allow us to experience:

• Positive emotions: gratitude journalling; listening to uplifting music
• Engagement: working on interesting tasks that absorb you; setting aside breathing breaks for mindfulness
• Relationships: setting aside time to care for others at work/outside work; setting aside time to experience care from others
• Meaning: writing and sharing reflections on core values; working/volunteering on projects that are aligned to values
• Accomplishment: clarifying goals, up-skilling, celebrating wins
• + Health: getting sufficient sleep, exercise, nutrition, leisure

Another popular way of looking at habits that can help us create a more sustainable Rhythm of Life is to build it around 7 types of rest :

1. Physical rest: Passive physical breaks can come in passive forms like sleeping and napping or active forms like gentle and slower forms of exercise like walking, yoga, stretching.
2. Mental rest: mental breaks to quieten our thoughts and turn off the threadmill of on-going thoughts that exhaust our minds.
3. Sensory rest: sensory breaks to allow our sense of sight, hearing, touch, smell etc. to power down. Modern work overwhelms our senses: bright lights, multiple screens, multiple voices, constant chatter, incoming pings, hustle and bustle.
4. Creative rest: creative breaks is about giving ourself permission to stop creating, solving, deciding, brainstorming, ideating, strategising, designing - even if you enjoy that process. Creative rest is about appreciating, enjoying and delighting in the joy, beauty, wonder and awe of other people’s creations or of natural Creation itself.
5. Social rest: social breaks is about giving yourself sufficient time away from people and freedom from social obligations especially to needier, more exhausting people. It can also look like spending time with socially restful and revitalising people: those who are positive, supportive, well-boundaried, empowering and kind.
6. Emotional rest: emotional breaks is about giving yourself time and space away from heavier emotions - yours and others. It is also about giving time and space for lightening yourself emotionally through expressing your feelings authentically in psychologically safe, validating spaces.
7. Spiritual rest: spiritual breaks is about making time and space to realign, reconnect and reintegrate with deeper values larger purposes, a bigger moral universe beyond you. This is to help you feel a sense of belonging to something greater than yourself - a beonging that you don’t have to strive for.

So a Rhythm of Life based on the 7 types of Rest can look like daily, weekly or monthly practices that allow us to experience:

1. Physical rest examples:winding down 1 hour before bed to get 7 hours sleep10 min walking stretch breaks
2. Mental rest examples:daily listing of nagging thoughts preoccupying your mindscheduling “brain breaks” every 2 hours to slow down.
3. Sensory rest examples:turning off your incoming messages or your phoneworking in a peaceful location away from office chatterusing aromatherapy for a breathing break
4. Creative rest examples:displaying on your desk beautiful images of places you love or art pieces that speak to you.going out to see nature or bringing nature into your workspace with small plants or small water features.taking a day-off or lunch break-off to visit a gallery
5. Social rest examples:Saying “No” to unimportant social eventsSolitude time for one’s own interests.Connecting with revitalising relationships and putting boundaries on exhausting relationships.
6. Emotional rest examples:Making time to unpack your feelings with a safe and validating therapist, counsellor, friend or spiritual support.Allowing yourself time and space to be temporarily indifferent to heavy emotions - your own or others.
7. Spiritual rest examples:Prayer, meditations and contemplationsHaving fasting days coupled with reflective prayer

Those are just two frameworks you can choose from. But basically they tell you a similar message:

• you need rest to work and live well.
• you need to diversify your range of habits that allow you to work at a more restful and rested pace.
• the habits can be small but added up they really do generate a wealth of personal and professional well-being.

?? THE BAD THING is even when rest is given to us, some of us don’t know what to do with it. We may even find ourselves secretly working even during our rest time.

The call to rest can really confront and challenge our beliefs about ourselves, our work and whether we give ourselves permission to rest.

7 COMMON BELIEFS THAT KEEP US WORKING VS. RESTING

1. “Only I can do this work. Nobody else is as good as me.”
2. “I’ve no choice but to work. If I rest, things will stop happening. I’ve to keep things going otherwise things will go under.”
3. “If I rest too much, I’ll lose my edge. Others will get ahead of me. Everyone’s working all the time. How can I rest?”
4. “I don’t want people to think I’m lazy or not hard-working.”
5. “I feel guilty resting. I don’t want to be lazy and complacent.”
6. “Rest feels so unproductive. I might as well work.”
7. “But I enjoy my work more than I enjoy resting. Rest is boring.”

Try writing along these 3 prompts to further investigate what could be your beliefs around working and resting:

• If I stop working and start resting more, the worst thing that can happen to me/others/my organisation is……..
• When I am lazing around on a sofa at home and (my spouse/parent) comes home, do I continue to laze around or do I act like I’m busy? Why do I do so? What do I believe they will think of me?
• When I was growing up, what beliefs did grown-ups impart to me about work and rest? What desirable or undesirable behaviours did I observe among grown-ups in the way they worked and rested? How might that have influenced the way I work and rest today?

In general, the obsession to keep working vs. resting can come from an unhealthy, unhelpful and perhaps untrue belief that:

• I am not X enough.I am not smart, hard-working, skilled, educated, privileged etc enough to stop working.I work to earn my self-worth, value and significance in the world. To rest is to become someone worthless, devalued and insignificant.
• (Other person/people) are not X enough. General people in society or specific people like my family / my spouse / my friends etc. are just not understanding, compassionate, generous, accepting enough for me to stop working.I work to earn my worth, value, significance and status in their eyes. To rest is to become someone worthless, devalued, insignificant and lower in status in their eyes.
• Life/The world/universe/God is not X enough. Life/the world, the universe, God is not safe, comfortable, merciful, serendipitous, just, fair, kind, generous, providential, certain etc. enough for me to stop working.I work to earn an existential sense of safety, comfort, serendipity, opportunity, mercy in this life. To rest is to be at the mercy of a unsafe, uncomfortable, unwelcome, cruel life/world/universe/God.

These beliefs can lead us down an exhausting path of trying to validate, prove and rescue ourselves through work.

?? THE UGLY THING about our obsession with over-working and under-resting is it can reveal an ugly belief that our self-worth and existential safety in the world is totally dependent on our productivity.

This is what some people call “Internalised capitalism”: the dread and guilt we feel when we are even vaguely unproductive. It is a belief system built upon an assumption that being unproductive is ”wrong” and to being productive, hard-working (and hopefully, stinking rich in the process) is “right”.

This deep-rooted belief is what keeps people addicted to work even though it damages them 7 ways: physically, sensorially, creatively, emotionally, socially, emotionally, spiritually.

Nobody can live for long with a Rhythm of Life that is out of whack.

Rest is not a vacation you take every time a long weekend rolls. Rest is found in a sustainable Rhythm of Life: a daily, weekly, monthly pace you put yourself through.

Consider where your current Rhythm of work-life habits puts you on the mental well-being continuum:

• If your rhythm of life is healthy, you would have most of the behavioural markers seen in the green “thriving” zone.
• You know your rhythm of life is “off” when you find yourself slipping more often than not every week or month into the yellow “surviving” zone of the mental health continuum below.
• If you consistently don’t find daily, weekly or monthly time to restas you work, you will easily slip into the orange “struggling” zone and red “crisis” zone.

Every truly great working professional and leader in their field knows that their best work comes from the green zone.

They also know that their people’s best work comes from the green zone.

They also know that anyone who works in the yellow, orange and red zone for too long is heading for personal and professional disaster.

Every truly great and ethical working professional and leader in their field will thus try their best to design a workplace with cultural behaviours and processes that support themselves and others to find a healthy Rhythm of Life that lets people thrive.

As a working professional or leader, we can also consider challenging our beliefs on work and rest with 3 provocations:

Are we really not X enough?

• What are the skills, talents, experiences and strengths you already have that are a gift and grace to you and cannot be taken away from you?
• WHAT IF you worked at the pace of grace? Accepting that you don’t have to work for your inherent self-worth, value and significance in the world? Understanding that rest can actually allow you to better nurture your skills, sharpen your talents, expand your experiences and develop your strengths - as well as for others?

Are (Other person/people) really not X enough?

• Who are the people in your life that you are thankful for because they are understanding, compassionate, generous, accepting enough to desire the best for you? Would they think the best for you includes rest for you?
• WHAT IF you worked with an attitude of gratitude - for those who also share that attitude of gratitude? Accepting that you only really need to work for those who are already grateful for who you are as you are - who don’t need you to earn any extra worth, value, significance and status in their eyes? Understanding that you don’t have to work at a punishing pace for anyone who does not appreciate or acknowledge your inherent worth, value, significance.

Is the world/universe/God really not X enough?

• When and where have you experienced life/the world/universe/God offering some level of serendipity, opportunity or blessing in your life that you didn’t really work to earn?
• WHAT IF you worked with a curiosity in generosity? Accepting that it is possible that life/the world/universe/God might have been more generous to you before than you recall and might want to be more generous towards you than you imagine. Understanding that perhaps if you took a more curious and generous approach to existence via those 7 ways of resting, you might find generous gifts of safety, comfort, serendipity, opportunity, mercy etc. bestowed upon you in surprising ways you never expected.

FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone

WATCH physician Saundra Dalton-Smith’s TED talk on the real reason why we are chronically tired despite getting the requisite amount of sleep .

READ the accompanying essay by Dalton-Smith on the 7 types of rest everybody should be making room in their life for:

DO // 1 strategy to try this week

Don’t “do” this week.

Just find a way to rest in those 7 ways above.

If you want to rest by learning, come for our upcoming training sessions on

If you want strategising, training, coaching, facilitation help to sort out what's working/not working in your organisational culture, you can:

• Email us at [email protected]
• Fill in this enquiry form on our website here.

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