On Rest
springing forward to a more restful state of being
Felix Vallotton, Femme couchee, dormant 1899
Last year, a publication reached out to me saying they wanted to do a package on disability & illness. They wondered if I would be up for writing a reported piece/essay on “rest.” I was immediately in as the topic has always interested me. Ultimately the package never ran, and they let us set our pieces free. Here is the result of some months of investigation, plus some interviews on “rest experts.”
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For as long as I can recall, rest has been an abstract concept to me.
For one thing, I could never separate states of sleep and rest. I’ve never been a napper, always been type A, and struggled with pretty serious insomnia since I was a child. I’ve been to numerous sleep specialists since I was in my 20s and have taken half a dozen sleep medications. To get me to sleep still takes me a cocktail of 3-4 supplements and pills a night. But to get me to rest might be an even bigger challenge, as I’ve rarely ever grasped what that truly means.
The only two times in my life I experienced any real rest were when my body forced me—chronic illness—and then when the world did—the pandemic.
Part of it for me feels like I am overstimulated at all times. I’ve suspected ADHD but it doesn’t seem to me be that either. The only time I felt rested was in the worst apartment I’ve ever lived in—a dump in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village, where someone got murdered year before, that had no windows. I was a young journalist on my own with an elderly greyhound and sometimes I’d get 12+ hours of sleep there after a life of sleeping only 4-6 hours. When I was not sleeping, I was just “zoning out” on my bed, or doing what I imagine many would call rest. The apartment failed me entirely for those seven or so months I lived there, and yet I never felt more rested.
Now 18 years later, I decided to embark on a little journey with this topic of rest to see where it would take me.
As a former yoga practitioner and instructor (I finished a teacher’s training course just about 20 years ago), the yogic/meditation definitions felt most familiar to me which is how I got to Andrew Huberman’s teachings. His associate and yoga nidra trainer and wellness instructor Kelly Boys agreed to speak to me about their concept of NSDR or “non-sleep deep rest.”
“I teach people to be able to down-regulate their nervous systems in a methodic way so that they can consistently return back to a practice of deep rest,” Boys says simply. “It's a process where you use breathing techniques and body-scan techniques to be able to regulate your nervous system back to a baseline level of ease and wellbeing quickly. Yoga nidra is also much more than that. You can inquire into core beliefs that you've held or difficult emotions. It's the full practice of meditation but typically, as it's taught in the non-sleep deep rest form, it's really there to be able to kind of reset your dopamine levels and bring you back to a sense of ease and rest in your body so that you can then go back into the moment, back into your day.” Boys describes it as a “liminal state” between “waking and sleeping. And so when you're in the yoga nidra practice, your body actually goes into light forms of sleep but your mind remains more awake and aware than it would when you just simply go to bed and fall asleep.”
Why is this so hard for so many of us? Boys, who is actually in the process of writing a book called Deep Rest right now, thinks our problem is a cultural one. “We don't give ourselves permission to rest. In Western society there is this feeling of hustle, a feeling of go, go, go and performance motivated by all sorts of things, including inner feelings of lack and deficiency and lack of connection with self. And so I think that other cultures have it built in. You know, there are afternoon siestas. They know that there are rest periods and then there are work periods.”
Boys also brings her practice to the incarcerated and one of the surprising elements there has been how good they are at tapping into a deep rest mode. “It was interesting because when I taught there they didn't have cell phones, and so this was quite a unique audience because it was lifers with the possibility of parole—people that had been there for 20-30 years. They had missed the whole technological revolution of smartphones and so the attention span of the incarcerated veterans that I was teaching was profoundly different than what I saw on the outside and experienced myself. It’s people who are really listening and know that there is something important and useful happening—it's not just a sound bite of information coming to them. They’re taking it in with a more whole mind in a way, and then able to practice it because it's water in the desert in some ways. And I had guy tell me after the class, you know, this is the one moment where I don't feel like I'm in prison.”
For Boys, this can be within anyone’s reach—but the key seems to be balance. “I feel like people can go too far with the rest and just become these blobs that are sort of navel gazing, and that's not ideal either. I feel like it's so good to have periods of stress and then rest—ideally if you can have that throughout the day. You know, the kind of thing where you're stressing your body but you're choosing to stress it, and then you're resting your body and mind. There's that alternation between those two states which is really important for building resilience over time.”
But in a society that encourages one to go to extremes rather than balance any scales, this middle road seems impossible to me to even consider. I’ve lived and been rewarded for living in the burnout zone, something physician Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, author of Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, and originator of the Rest Quiz, definitely related to.
“I think that’s where my journey started personally—I burned out. About eight years into practice, my husband and I decided we were going to have kids, and that was the straw that was too much. So, I burned out and my first thought was I just need more sleep. Got seven, eight, nine hours of sleep and I was still exhausted.” Dr. Dalton-Smith had to examine her own attitudes on rest and sleep. “The reason I burned out is because I hate rest. I thought rest was for people who couldn’t keep up with the rest of us who could get stuff done. So, I fought rest most of my adult life until I learned better. I think some of us, our entire personality is such that we like to check things off our to-do list. We like to get stuff done and so you have to kind of evaluate all of those components for yourself personally. There’s a self-awareness component so what are your barriers to rest? What resistance internally or externally do you put up when you start thinking about rest? Because some of that will result in whether or not you’re a person who is at higher risk for burnout versus someone else who’s very self-aware and doesn’t have the cultural hang-ups and can very easily say I need to rest.”
Once again, culture. Dr. Dalton-Smith agrees that Western culture is certainly a culprit. “There are some cultures that have a great respect for rest, and they understand what a healthy work/rest ratio looks like. There are other cultures that put more emphasis on the work, which then makes rest almost seem shameful at times. So, there is definitely some cultural nuances there.”
So why can’t sleep be the medicine for the burned-out type-A westerner? For Dr. Dalton-Smith’s just not getting to the root of the problem. “It’s just that sleep doesn’t encompass all of the different types of rest. So, when we look at rest kind of more holistically, it allows us to look at everything from our environment to our relationships to how we use our energy. To me, rest is really about restoration. It’s not just about cessation. Primarily, sleep is a cessation type of process where parts of us get restored. Parts of us get restored, but there’s a greater part of our life that doesn’t get restored unless we’re intentional.”
It's no surprise that Dr. Dalton-Smith sees these problems most pronounced in women and POC who are often rewarded for overextending themselves. “I feel like a big part of that has to do with just the lack of work/life integration. I don’t use work/life balance. I don’t even think that exists. But we can have work/life harmony. It just requires effective work/life integration.” Dr. Dalton-Smith uses a honeybee analogy. “High producers can be like honeybees. They’re producing goodness for the world. Everybody’s praising them and saying how fantastic they are, but they are so busy they actually haven’t stopped to sample the honey they’re producing for themselves. I feel like we see a lot of people in high-ranking positions, a lot of CEOs and doctors and attorneys and judges and people who are doing all this good for the world but they’re that honeybee and they’re not tasting any of the sweetness they’re producing in their life. So then we have to help them to be able to see to keep kind of blessing the world. We now have to teach you how to actually sample the goodness for yourself or what that pause looks like for you. It may not be a full-blown sabbatical or major vacation, all these things that we’ve been told in the past. It may be small, restorative practices you build into your life so that you can keep doing the things you love to do, but you’re also pouring into yourself as you’re doing them.”
Dr. Dalton-Smith also warns against a one-size-fits-all approach—which may be why meditation has lost a segment of the population. Rest may not be what people think it is at first. “For example, take somebody who has a lot of nervous energy, but maybe their job’s a desk job and so they spend most of their time seated but they have a lot of thoughts. So when they go to bed at night their mind’s racing. One thing that we find that really helps with that is just doing some type of physical activity that requires you to use your physical body in a way that almost takes it to its limits, like jogging or lifting heavy weights. Because to do those activities, it requires you to focus your attention on your breathing. And if you’re jogging you’re focusing your attention on your breathing and your cadence. So, a meditative practice is simply that. As you know, most meditative practice includes breathing exercises. They’re not even thinking about their breathing but in order to jog effectively or in order to lift a heavy weight you must think about your breathing or you’re going to pass out.”
One of the aspects of Dr. Dalton-Smith’s philosophy that I find so appealing, is her ability to break it all down in compartments and categories. When patients come to Dr. Dalton-Smith she has them try her quiz and then she goes through the whole seven types of rest framework to identify where the problem points are.
The quiz evaluates the seven types of rest she “found lacking in many patients and how rest impacts every part of our lives:”
Physical: The chance to use the body in restorative ways to decrease muscle tension, reduce headaches, and promote higher quality sleep.
Mental: The ability to quiet cerebral chatter and focus on things that matter.
Spiritual: The capacity to experience God in all things and recline in the knowledge of the Holy.
Emotional: The freedom to authentically express feelings and eliminate people-pleasing behaviors.
Social: The wisdom to recognize relationships that revive from ones that exhaust and how to limit exposure to toxic people.
Sensory: The opportunity to downgrade the endless onslaught of sensory input received from electronics, fragrances, and background noise.
Creative: The experience of allowing beauty to inspire awe and liberate wonder. Below are your personal rest deficit assessment results. Use these results to help you see which types of rest you already excel at and which ones you need to focus on improving.
The higher you score the worst your issue is with that area of rest. My results were no surprise: I was pretty unrested in every area with emotional, physical, and mental being my worst areas. Spiritual was my best. But having this clearly spelled out for me was helpful—I tend to like quantitative methodologies and trust in numbers, whereas someone else might find the more abstract ethereal yoga nidra an easier way in.
I decided to follow the path of doctors for a bit. Next I turned to Dr Matthew Edlund, a psychiatrist in Florida who is known as “The Rest Doctor.” He points out that our cultural understanding of the body has been an issue for ages and that’s where the first problem lies.
“Most of the time people view machines historically as their body metaphor. So it was the steam engine in the 19th century, now it’s the computer, and people see themselves mechanically, which is really, really wrong. You want to see it as a continuously updated, rebuilt information system. I can talk to my hard drive all I want, but it's not going to rebuild itself. So if you see the body as an information system that's constantly reembodied, rebuilding everything, then you get the idea that rest is by no means a passive principle and you are not lumps of coal. We are not machines. We are constantly rebuilt and we need certain parameters for that rebuilding to occur optimally.”
Like Dr. Dalton-Smith, he also approaches the topic in distinct parts. “I parse health in four different categories. It's physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being. Spiritual doesn't mean God, it means connecting with something larger than yourself. And if you look at how people live and who lives longest, those principles tend to come into play. For example, let's say I go out and I walk in the sun in the morning. What am I doing? I'm resetting my body clocks. I'm going to use up some muscle tissue. I'm going to actually end up killing some muscle cells, they're just going to be overused, but they will be rebuilt and generally rebuilt to different parameters, some of which may even be stronger, even in people who are centenarians. So physically I'm resetting body clocks, I'm getting light, I'm getting physical activity which is going to grow more brain cells. I'm also in many cases going to end up with more deep sleep. I'll rebuild immune system because natural killer cells will go crazy as a result of getting sunlight, et cetera. Then there's the mental piece. How do you actually adapt? How does your brain adjust and adapt to changing environments? Then the social piece which really gets neglected. I mean, the data is that cardiovascular disease in this country would go down dramatically—I mean, in the British studies it does when people just have a lot of people to talk to and a lot of social support.”
I think about Dr. Dalton-Smith saying for her rest is really about restoration whereas for Dr. Edlund, rest has everything to do with regeneration. “To me rest is regeneration. Rest is recovery. There's passive rest like sleep and then there's active rest, physical activity to regrow not just muscles but literally to regrow brain tissue. I mean, you want to grow new brain cells? Go walk for 20 or 30 minutes. You're building more information. If you walk for 20 or 30 minutes just moving in three-dimensional space causes such an enormous task for the brain that it needs more memory storage for that which it will grow in deep sleep. You won't get that from reading. You're going to get it from actually walking through the neighborhood because there is a much larger information load attached to that.”
In a way Dr. Edlund’s definition and application feels the most Western to me—and most familiar and therefore doable. After all, Dr. Edlund emphasizes “ rest is a very active principle. Sleep is one part of it and sleep has its own special peculiarities in terms of what it regrows and what it rebuilds.” There’s something about Dr. Edlund’s colorful, almost neon, view of rest that appeals to me. It’s not a time-out or absence at all, but a proactive necessity. I don’t know if he’s gathered it from talking to me, but his way of considering this appeals to me the way I see my writing as an art not a job.
Lastly, I went to Chris Winter, who is a neurologist, sleep specialist, and host of The Sleep Unplugged Podcast. Dr. Winter tends to a lot of professional athletes and he also sees the lack of rest as a chronic issue, far deeper than the lack of sleep.
“Resting I think becomes a really positive thing in the sense that you can control it. It can be done at any point. So, the resting is nice in that you’re going to go to bed at your given time, whatever you decided you want that to be, and if you fall asleep relatively quickly, great. But if you don’t, getting up and getting out of bed and going to do something because you haven’t fallen asleep in 10 minutes—I think that’s absurd.” He already has my attention as this take is very different from sleep specialists I used to speak to who encouraged me not to stay in bed with my thoughts. “It undervalues the idea that lying in the dark with your eyes closed resting is a very valuable process, and if done correctly can be nearly as restorative as sleep.” Dr. Winter points out a study done on Tibetan monk where they put EEGs on his head while he sat and prayed and meditated. “If you showed me the EEG as a neurologist I’d be like this is a 40-year-old guy that looks like he’s asleep. But actually it’s a 70-year-old monk who’s awake and chanting some sort of prayer . . .So, just being in bed quietly thinking about, reflecting on your day, praying, going through some sort of progressive relaxation thing. There’s all kinds of interesting techniques—putting things that you’re worried about on a leaf, setting the leaf on a river in your mind and watching it float away. Reciting state capitals, planning out your dream vacation, what are you going to give mom for Mother’s Day. These are all wonderful things to sit about and sort of reflect on. To me, if you’re getting upset by it or you’re frustrated by it then, sure, you can get up and go do something if you want to. But we sort of vilify being in bed awake. It’s all about how you feel about it.”
Dr. Winter thinks “ nobody ever teaches the value of deceleration, because sleep to some degree is a skill.” He remembers talking to a WNBA player who had exceptionally low brain activity on a meditation app. “I was like, ‘Wow, you’re so good at this. What did you do?’ She said ‘I just imagine myself in an empty gymnasium and somebody that I couldn’t see kept throwing me a basketball and I’d just make a free throw. I’d just do that over and over again.’ She has this kind of basketball mantra of just shooting free throws quietly in her mind. There’s really interesting research that says imagining yourself in great detail doing some sort of task or skill can actually make you better at it. . .It was just amazing how quiet her mind was when she got in that activity without having been told. So, that’s really the goal I think for everyone, whether you’re an athlete or not.”
This feels radical to me already as I’ve had so many sleep experts talk me out of this. I realize even though the benefits of sleep aren’t there, I could use the insomnia time to tap into another state of repair—or restoration or regeneration as the other doctors suggested.
But what if the world makes these conditions especially impossible? For all our practitioners, the past three years have provided substantial challenges in their fields. A pandemic while initially—once past the initial horror—might provide an ideal occasion for practicing rest and good sleep hygiene, actually can have the opposite effect on a global population.
Dr Dalton-Smith had had her quiz out since 2017 but when the pandemic hit news outlets began to take notice. “There was this huge flux of people that started to take the quiz, and all of the years before it had always shown mental rest is the number one rest deficit of the seven that people were dealing with. However, that time period between April of 2020 until about June 2020 there was a direct increase of sensory rest deficits. So, you could see just even the side effects of everybody going virtual and how all of a sudden people were like why am I exhausted? I’m literally in my pajamas 24/7 working from my couch and I’m exhausted. I think a part of it is that with the pandemic people lost their normal barriers that helped actually protect them, their boundaries from work and life that protected them a little bit from being able to actually make sure they spent time doing things that were not work. Then once the pandemic hit and life and home and office and school and everything kind of jammed in and all the boundaries got lost and people didn’t protect work/life integration anymore. It actually tore the boundaries down and made it very clear that most of us did not have healthy work/life integration system in place. We had a lot of people, although they were in a comfortable location in their pajamas burning out. Literally while working at home. If you think about it, before that, the dream for most people was if I could only work from home with this job. Then they got the dream and they were more tired and exhausted and burned out than they were when they were going into work every day.”
Boys also saw a change. “I started to notice that people around me and myself were needing more yoga nidra and needing more deep rest because there's some way that we're carrying the collective stress that we've all faced together over the past years, whether we're working from home or not.”
Dr Edlund’s patients were also suddenly a different demographic.
“I started seeing all these kinds of people who had always been well and then they're coming in with these weird symptoms that don't go away. They could just look at me and say, ‘my brain is in a constant fog. I can't get up. I don't want to do anything.’ And you know, you say, you're depressed. They say, ‘no. I don't feel depressed. I just don't have any energy.’ And then you would see weird psychoses. I mean, you would see people who would think that the FBI was after them. They've never had any diagnosis before. So the most impressive part was people who were basically healthy come in with undiagnosed ennui, mood changes, energy changes. In other words, they looked like people who had some version of a chronic infection. And then after that is a very large layer—I mean, a lot of young people—who just felt there's no future. and then there were a lot of people who lost jobs or felt they were going to lose jobs and didn't know how to adapt. You know, seeing your normal forms of social and biological networks blown up and not being able to be reestablished for months to years is not easy for people. The National Center of Health Statistics, basically at one point we put out monthly questionnaires over the net and they found at one point 30 to 35 percent of the adult population was complaining of relatively severe depression or anxiety. And the numbers before COVID were running like 5 to 8.”
I could relate to this. I went from enjoying the lack of structure and filling my days with walks, movies, baking, etc. to being in an absolute hopelessness about the endlessness of the pandemic and overwhelmed with my seemingly bottomless numbness and depression over it all.
I couldn’t access the rest that seemed in limitless supply all around me. I began to research things I could buy or sign up for to get me to use this time productively for rest: When I look at devices or tools to help with rest it’s a potpourri of semi-appealing leisure lexicon: Sunbeam Sunbeam Heated Throw Blanket, Pretty Simple Press Good Days Start With Gratitude Journal, The Casper Glow Light, Lord Jones Lord Jones High CBD Formula Bath Salts, truMedic Shiatsu Heated Foot Massager, Sierra Modern Home Smart Essential Oil Aromatherapy Diffuser, Sensate 2, Muse 2, Embr Wave 2, Pure Energy Yoke Mat Eco Acupressure Mat And Pillow Set, Komuso Classic Shift, Beurer Stress ReleaZer, the Kasina DeepVision Bundle.
Most of them got returned, stayed in their boxes, gathered dust. When insomnia hit me again as it often did, I began to really panic because there was this feeling now that I’d be in it alone. Also, who has insomnia when the entire world is out from work? What could possibly be stopping me from sleeping? I never had anywhere to go.
I felt like I had tried everything by that point, but my mind wandered to the weirdest outs. I landed on Michael Jackson at one point, whose end came through a miscalculated dose of propofol. There was something I had to admit that was appealing in how he called his IV “milk.” Jackson, who struggled with insomnia, enlisted doctor Dr. Conrad Murray in giving him this milk that ultimately killed him and result in Dr. Murray in being convicted of involuntary manslaughter. But even without considering it as a sleep, aid propofol had long been known as “milk of amnesia” as people often don’t remember what got them to waking from it—it seem very much tied to getting the brain to quiet down, which seemed like heaven to me. University of Utah psychiatrist Dr. Brian Mickey has studied the drug for treatment-resistant depression, in the same way that electroconvulsive therapy can help. In a preliminary study, after being administered high does, half improved and maintained better moods for three months. Last month, one of the first three patients involved in a clinical study, the popular blogger Heather “Dooce” Armstrong died by suicide—she had undergone the treatment five years ago and for a while apparently it had worked. For a while, that is.
Then there was a whole other part of non-sleep rest that I had to face. I realized during the pandemic, as hours and days melted into each other, I was becoming something I feared greatly my whole life, especially as an immigrant: lazy. I started reading about this and again I got to cultural component. This concept preceded the pandemic: according to Pew Research Center survey data, about half of Americans in 2015 (and 63 percent of millennials!) believed that the typical U.S. citizen is lazy. Another 2019 Pew survey found that “a majority of Americans think people are lazier now than they used to be.” This made sense to me, but adding the pandemic to it put me in a cold sweat. It lead me to author Devon Price, who has studied the “Laziness Lie” at the heart of American culture has linked our dysfunctional attitudes with rest to the Puritans. “The Puritans had long believed that if a person was a hard worker, it was a sign that God had chosen them for salvation. Hard work was believed to improve who you were as a person. Conversely, if a person couldn’t focus on the task at hand or couldn’t self-motivate, that was a sign that they had already been damned. This meant, of course, that there was no need to feel sympathy for people who struggled or failed to meet their responsibilities. By lacking the drive to succeed, they were displaying to the world that God hadn’t chosen them for Heaven.” There was that cultural aspect several of our experts warned about—it was hard to ignore something that had become a part of the fabric of this country.
It seemed as a writer I should have found this less troublesome than my friends who worked on Wall Street or in labs or store floors. Writers seemed full of self-care wisdom through the ages. There was Maya Angelou speaking beautifully of the necessity of the day of rest: “Every person needs to take one day away. A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence. Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.” Thomas Carlyle famously called rest “a fine medicine. Let your stomachs rest, ye dyspeptics; let your brain rest, you wearied and worried people of business; let your limbs rest, ye children of toil!” John Keats, of course, in his letters took the break to an extreme and spoke of it like a perverse suicidal yearning: “The world is too brutal for me—I am glad there is such a thing as the grave—I am sure I shall never have any rest till I get there.” Most recent of all—and perhaps most thorough of all—was Ottessa Moshfegh’s exploration in her hit novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a book that irked me to no end possibly because it hit home. Her protagonist opts out of action in the end of the pre 9/11 era. The book is full of these kinds of musings: “Initially, I just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world around me.” In its nihilism, the book also contained a tinge of hope at times: “Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.” But ultimately soon we see all the investment to nothingness encourages the addiction: ‘Napping’ is such a childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable, generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. If I had a distinct thought, I would hear it, and the sound of it would echo and echo until it got absorbed by the darkness and disappeared. There was no response necessary. No inane conversation with myself. It was peaceful A vent in the closet released a steady flow of fresh air that picked up the scent of laundry from the hotel next door. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period.”
And there one had it: the nothingness that seems to define both sleep and rest, that horrified me so much as a child. Still, I can’t say in exploring rest I’ve conquered old traumas, bad habits, and cultural crutches. But there are some bottom lines: there are many roads and no one way to do it; this is a product of our Americanness and not our fault; whether it is restoration or regeneration seeing this as something rather than an absence of something—that Mosfeghian nothingness—may be key in reaping its ultimate benefits. You don’t have to buy expensive lamps or hi-tech mats, you don’t have to put yourself into a coma or hire doctors to inject you with soporific “milk”—you just have to do what for many of us, and certainly me, has been hardest of all: you have to let go.