In November 2021, a woman with autoimmune issues experienced a flare-up. Her doctor was not sure if the cause was rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia, or a combination of both. The symptoms included body aches and severe fatigue, which pointed to increased disease activity.
She woke up tired, needed naps, and often ran out of spoons. That phrase is familiar to many people with chronic conditions, based on an essay called “The Spoon Theory” by Christine Miserandino. While the exact reason was unclear, the woman knew her body was demanding rest.
Knowing that rest was needed did not make it easy to do. She would sit down to watch a show and try to multitask. She would put off taking a nap like a stubborn child. Instead of throwing a tantrum, she tried to push through to finish an email or move laundry. Even with her body and brain asking for rest, allowing herself to do it was hard. She had to reparent herself, setting stopping times and rest periods.
People in the Western world, especially in the United States, are taught to be productive. They are told what they should be doing to stay busy. Work in all forms, from job tasks to errands to chores, is seen as the right thing to do. From a young age, people are conditioned to be productive and stay busy. They hear phrases like “I’ll rest when I’m dead” and “no rest for the weary.” They are told to “pay their dues” and “put in the work.”
Even without direct messages about staying busy, many people learn this by watching others. They see parents come home from work with groceries, then cook dinner while putting food away. They are asked what they are doing and feel wrong if the answer is “nothing.” After dinner, when it is time to relax, they watch parents do more work, both paid and unpaid, or see them knitting, ironing, or puttering around the house. People are told they must work hard to succeed, that nothing good comes easy, and that they should not stop when tired, only when done.
Sitting down and resting is not a priority. Those who decide to rest often have to justify it, as if they must earn the right to rest. Rest does not only mean sleep, though sleep is a big part of it. It includes sitting comfortably doing very little, listening to music, watching TV, meditating, working on a puzzle, reading, playing solitaire, looking out the window, or journaling.
In the fall, while struggling with the autoimmune flare, the woman thought she should rest more. She was used to ignoring her body’s signals and did not realize how far she had pushed herself. When she checked how her mind and body truly felt, she was shocked to find they were close to collapse. She had waited until she could not do many tasks during the day. A good day might have involved doing one load of laundry or cooking dinner for her husband and herself. She was so focused on staying busy that she could no longer honestly assess her need for activity. She had lost the ability to tune into her body to know if it needed to move, stretch, or sleep.
If she had continued pushing, she believes she would have fallen ill. She was dealing with brain fog, fatigue, and joint and muscle pain, making life unpleasant. Looking back, she should not have let things get that bad, but fatigue, pain, and brain fog made it hard to assess anything clearly. When she hit the edge of collapse and burnout, she realized serious rest was needed.
She cleared her calendar for at least three weeks. She removed work appointments, scheduled brief blog posts and emails, and took time off. At first, it was torture. Her husband was still getting up and going out to teach tai chi and qigong classes, modeling proper work behavior. She also found she was unable to just rest. She had to relearn how to listen to her body to discover what it needed. She had to reprogram her thoughts about rest, seeing it as an inherent right, not a reward for productivity. She also had to learn how to actually do it.
She did all the forms of rest she had listed, from naps to puzzles to sitting quietly. It was very difficult. She had to force herself to limit herself to single-tasking, doing one task at a time. This was especially hard if the task was mechanically simple, like watching a TV show. Her inner voice would scold her for just sitting there, urging her to be productive. When she decided rest meant watching a movie, she sometimes sat on her hands to avoid picking up her phone or a crossword puzzle. She often put her phone on silent and left it in another room to reduce temptation.
Even with these steps, she did not always manage to single-task. But she learned through practice that nothing urgent was likely to come up in an hour or two that required her to stop resting and take action. She realized she was retraining her nervous system to relax. It was used to being alert, so resting and allowing it time off took getting used to.
When she started to budget rest into her days, she could more easily tell what signals her body was sending. It became easier to check in with her brain and body to find out how they felt and what they needed. She has never felt more integrated. At any moment, she can pause, tap into what she is feeling mentally and physically, and act on her own needs in a more nurturing way. When she loses focus on a project, she no longer pushes through. Instead, she pauses and checks in with her brain and body. With practice, she can quickly tell if she needs a simple break, to walk around, to take a walk outdoors, or to stop for the day.
She is learning to embrace the idea that rest is an inherent right, not something that needs to be earned. It is no longer something that happens only after pushing to the point of collapse. The more she leans into rest and builds it into her days, the more energy she has to accomplish the things she wants to get done. When she adds time off or breaks during the day, she has better focus when working on a task. When she includes rest in her days, she has the energy to exercise in the morning and make a good meal for dinner.
