The Other Side Of Rest: Taking Time Off In An Age Of Anxiety

Mohit Satyanand turned to his wife on his honeymoon and asked: “do we need to go back?”

They decided to take a leap and live in a small stone cottage in the forest and spent the next six years “in our garden in the forest, watching the peaches grow, and our son toddle, rocking him to sleep with Dave Matthews or vintage Stones, serenading the moonlight with candles and home-made peach wine.”

When their family returned to the city to send their son to school, Mohit knew he could never return to full-time employment. He had a taste of rest and liked the person he was able to be. He got by on part-time assignments that “paid a fraction of a full-time wage for someone of my age and training” but it was enough. His years living among nature cured him of a constant yearning for more.

Mohit’s story seems radical, but it shouldn’t be. When people take a break for rest, they often discover that they awaken a different side of themselves. A side that had been dying a slow and steady death.

Stepping off the hustle train

What happens when you step off the daily grind? You find a life filled with leisure and the energy to write a book about what you experienced.

Alex Pang was burned out after 15 years in silicon valley when he ended up taking a sabbatical. In his “time-off” he found a curious mix of action and leisure:

But when I was on sabbatical at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, I found that in three months I got an enormous amount of stuff done and did an awful lot of really serious thinking, which was a great luxury, but I also had what felt like an amazingly leisurely life.

While this might not match our current conception of leisure, for most of history it did. Rest was typically seen as something that was both active and passive, often a mix of contemplation, mindfulness and active creation or participation in the world.

The modern worker exists in a state devoid of leisure. Busy “hustling” fails to meet the bar for leisure and the break from work rarely attains the depths of true leisure or rest and merely serves the purpose of re-charging.

His experience and mindset shift on the sabbatical led him to write Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, which helped him explore why his beliefs had flipped.

Pang feels we need to take rest much more seriously than we do:

“If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.”

Mindset shift from a planned sabbatical

Jacqueline Jensen embraced that mindset. She had founded a tech company, but felt something was off. She planned her own sabbatical to teach herself to code, write a book and focus on her mental and physical health.

She framed the sabbatical around a tough question that challenged her own identity,

“What if I took work…working for a paycheck, what if I took that out of the center of my life, what would my life look like?”

As someone that had defined herself by work and her accomplishments, this was no easy task. In fact, she said it took about two and a half months to realize a shift to where work was not the center of her life.

Much like Pang, she found a renewed and different type of energy in that time off that helped her focus on projects that mattered to her. However, it took her several weeks until she could embrace the type of mindset shift needed to

While people are taking more vacation days from work, it is likely not enough. It took Jensen “two and a half to three months” to wake up and not worry about work not being central to her life. However, what she found on the other side of rest inspired her to think about how she the lessons she learned back to the workplace as she is currently COO of a company that she is building as a “calm company.”

Leaving a path that makes sense

I first connected with Taryn when she was at a near breaking point, contemplating quitting her job. She had been very successful by business world standards working for prestigious companies, working globally and attending a top 10 business school.

While stressed by the uncertainty of quitting her job not having a plan, she ended taking the leap. While the corporate world she left demands a narrative around one’s path and what’s next, she didn’t have one. She just needed to heal or as she told me “take time and space for self-care and introspection.”

While she took the first few weeks to recover from burnout, she eventually started to fill her time reading, training for a marathon, volunteering with local organizations, meeting people she “wouldn’t otherwise meet” and prioritizing her mental health.

She has also found herself drawn to her local community in a way that she wasn’t when she was just trying to keep herself sane while working:

“this period has been great in giving me the push to re-establish myself here. I’m finding great activities in my neighborhood and meeting lots of people, which has been the balance I need while I’m reflecting on what to do next”

Our communities are not as strong as they once were, yet many people wish they could engage with them in a deeper way, much like Taryn.

Yet people are struck with fear. I’ve worked with many people over the past few years who are taking leaps. The questions are always the same. What will people say? What if I can’t get another job?

Shouldn’t the question be “What will be left of me if I continue down this path?”

Start Your “Eff You Fund”

Although people pushed Mohit to rejoin the workforce and “occupy a desk,” he resisted. Part of his reluctance came from his secret weapon, his “fu** you fund,” which he religiously filled early in his career when he realized he was never meant to be a company man.

Although he never used it to fund his now frugal day-to-day life, it was literal and figurative “eff you” to the business world that would have been so easy to run back to. Perhaps he had a hunch that one day nature would be calling or perhaps he was good at planning.

Early in my career, I knew I wasn’t a company man, yet I played the part for more than a decade. Many of the people I talk to share that same indifference and an inner pull to do something else.

Even after Mohit returned to city life, he found himself doing the things that mattered to him:

“I ran in the park, lounged in my couch, hugged my son as he told me of his day at school, and drove him to birthday parties in a car bashed into dis-reputability by years of mountain driving.”

We all have this inner yearning for a more simple life — a call to rest. As Emerson said, “The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.”

No matter what you do to ignore it, its always going to be there. Perhaps its time we start to listen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Want to subscribe to the Boundless e-mail? Click Here

Have questions about work, organizations or career? E-mail Paul and he'll write about it.

Originally published at think-boundless.com on January 23, 2019.