Can we be chill about our tiredness?
On our collective relationship to rest, the 7 types of rest, & why vibrational breathing is the tits.
You know what I’ve been wondering lately?
Can we not have it in us & be chill about it?
“It” being the energy we need to do the things and the stuff?
Can we be tired and need rest and not also need to tell ourselves that even rest has a purpose and that its purpose is to recharge our body battery for more productivity?
What if we felt tired and then we just… rested?
I am so fascinated by how we have to contort our relationship with rest to identify it as somehow still a means to a productive end rather than an end in and of itself. We love rest not because rest feels super awesome and nourishing but because we need it in order to get back to the productive shit.
Culturally it appears that it went something like this:
Rest is for the weak // Rest when we’re dead
To
I’ll rest when I earn rest // forced rest through burnout
To
Rest is a necessary part of productivity // if we want to do good work, we need to rest occasionally.
Now I wait patiently to be joined in a different club.
The one where you feel your body’s signal & then you listen to it… without having to explain yourself & find some back alley permission slip that reads “I am permitted to rest because it will serve my production better so in essence I am resting for you, thing-that-needs-my-energy” in order to rest peacefully.
I wait patiently in the “I feel tired, therefore I rest” club.
Who’s in?
Get in losers, we’re gonna go lay out a blanket in that field over there and lounge in silence.
Here's something else i’ve noticed:
We crave rest but lack full permission, so we have a funny way of meeting that need without it fully looking like or feeling like we are. We want rest, we want to not be doing what we’re doing, we want to zone out and be empty minded, but instead of sitting somewhere and closing our eyes or staring off into the middle space of nothingness, we pick up our phones and we do the worst thing possible…
THE DEATH SCROLL.
We doom scroll the endless void of consumption that doesn’t meet any need but in fact actually turns off our ability to feel our needs in the first place. This practice disguises itself as rest, but it in fact just makes it so that we can’t feel our tiredness, or boredom, or pain, grief, sadness, anger, or dissatisfaction with our life. This practice disconnects us from ourselves. Which does solve the problem of feeling these things, but by making it so that we feel nothing at all instead. Going back to what I wrote about last week, we kill the messenger rather than heeding it’s message and looking the messenger in the eye, shaking it’s hand, & letting it know we’ve got it from here so that it doesn’t have to keep knocking on our door trying to get the point across.
We close the app and at best feel the same amount of tired, bored, or dissatisfied as before, or at worst, worse! Classic coping strategy.
We might want to take a nap, stare off into the distance, create art, lay in the sun, do a little mindless hobby, or read a book… but we don’t yet have permission from the internalized productivity gods so we do something else instead… we opt for dissociated “rest”. And honestly I won't do the word rest such an injustice as to use it to describe what that is. We opt for the space between death and life. Neither dead, nor alive, we leave the space behind our eyes rather than fully leaning into the signals. We leave the rich and wise ground of our bodies, opting for disembodiment instead.
The annoying thing about this kind of rest is that leaving our bodies is actually not restful without awareness. It’s more of a pause on the stress that we feel. And oftentimes when we press play or come out of the dissociative fugue, we land right back (best case scenario) where we were when we pressed pause. Worst case scenario we’re even more emotionally charged than we were when we went into it (because you can’t fuckin’ open any app without also noticing that the world is on fire and it seems like everyone is at war with everyone everywhere).
In this way, I find that full allowance of rest is an act of rebellion against those forces that continuously ask us to leave our bodies for the betterment of “the machine” (whatever that means to you). It is a rebellion against the socially set standards of whatever role you happen to be in, in your life. But I digress before I make rest become another thing it was never meant to be. Into something more than that sacred thing that it already is, one of our most basic biological needs. Another biological need that has been under attack for generations, alongside emotional expression, interdependence, & our relationship to food.
FUN FACT:
There are 7 kinds of rest.
Physical: passive (sleep) or active (massage, yoga, stretching)
Mental: a break from problem solving (meditation, walks, soft tasks that allow the mind to wander)
Sensory: removing stimulation (dimming lights, turning off screens, driving in silence)
Creative: Engaging with the beauty in the world, whether it's art, nature, or music
Emotional: allowing yourself to feel and express emotions in a healthy way.
Social: embrace solitude & surround yourself with supportive people.
Spiritual: connect beyond the physical and mental and feel a deep sense of belonging, love, acceptance and purpose.
When you read through these, which ones do you feel are calling to you right now? Which one does your body long for now? For me in this small window in my life, it’s Creative & Spiritual rest & nourishment. I’m meeting these needs by studying Tantric Philosophy, doing morning pages every day, and spending extra time gardening! Especially at this sweet Beltane time!
It appears that a specific type of belief lives in me in small doses & is something I see a lot in my clients:
If I stop, it will be harder to start up again OR If I rest I am being lazy & wasting time.
It appears that something lives underneath these thoughts. It appears that the root belief might be that we must force movement, progress, or forward motion in order to be productive. As if being in the mode of creativity, work, focus, or productivity of some kind, is not just as natural a state for us to be in as is a rest state. That without force, pushing through, or hustling, we wouldn’t accomplish anything noteworthy.
Myth.
We are actually really high functioning creatures. So high functioning that we like to bypass rest! No other animal does that… pretty sure… although I didn’t google it. Can you name one animal that attempts to bypass its need for rest regularly? Didn’t think so (although if you did please write it in the comments because I want to study). Also look at this guy… He gets it.
We have a bunch of molecules, proteins, cells, and circuits, that work in tandom with our entire organism to motivate us through our lives! These things work to help us move towards & away from everything we do & don’t want.
It’s not that if we stop we won’t ever want to start again. It’s that we just don’t wanna right now. Can we not wanna and be chill about it? Can we not wanna & then… not gonna & then be chill about it? Can we not & then also not shame ourselves, feel guilty, give ourselves labels (like lazy or procrastinaty?). I was listening to this wonderful podcast on We Can Do Hard Things with Devon Price (SO GOOD)!
Something Devon said really stuck with me; that feeling like we don’t want to do something is not laziness, its resistance or a block against the thing. What a beautiful moment for self inquiry. “What am I resisting here? What thoughts or ideas are keeping me from moving forward?”
It appears that we fear rest. That to want, crave, or need rest means something about us beyond just that we are human living creatures. It means we are malfunctioning, it means we can’t keep up, it means that we are not as good as other people who seem to need way less rest than we do and seem to be much more higher functioning than we are. It means something’s off; “I’m tired, I must be missing something in my diet, I must be stressed, I must be getting sick, Something must be wrong.”
Baby, you’re tired. Rest.
And if you nap or go to sleep early & you’re still tired, rest more. Do less. Expect less of yourself. This isn’t a forever thing. It’s a for-now thing. If you keep resting and doing less & expecting less and you still feel tired, it might be that your body is in a prolonged period of Dorsal innervation. It might mean your body is needing nourishment in different forms. It might mean you’re burnt out. This happens too. I spent a year in this state. And although I didn’t hibernate fully like a bear in the winter like I envisioned sometimes during meditation, I came out of the cave. And even while I was in it, I still got shit done. Just with a lot less force & pressure & expectation & maybe a lot slower than my inner critic wanted me to.
There's a really simple way to play around with this to test what your relationship to rest is like:
Sit in silence for a few minutes; when you do, notice how your body & mind respond
Do you feel at ease? Anxious? Annoyed? Is your mind racing? Are you tending to to-do lists in your head?
What do you do once the to-do lists are done for the day?
Do you opt for embodied rest (like one of the forms of rest listed above) or do you tend towards dissociative disembodied things like TV or social media? Find more to do?
When you feel tiredness in your day how do you respond to that signal?
Go to sleep early? Take a nap? Reduce your workload? Drink more coffee or energy drinks? Plow through without any adjustments? Run through an analysis of why you might be tired & then judge yourself for not having done anything worthy of being as tired as you are? (that one is specific because… it me).
I am not an anti capitalist individual. There are things I love about capitalism, I am an entrepreneur, and have the freedom I have in my life because of the culture of our society. I also am not blind to the absolute sickness of this culture as well. Including the nature of the relationship between productivity, self worth, & access to necessary resources. I am not marxist, and yet Karl Marx was on to something very important when he expressed his concerns regarding Alienation from self.
We have become alienated from ourselves in this world. Alienated from our bodies. Alienated from our beautiful human nature. We have gotten to this really weird point where we attempt to overcome our human-ness with all these absolutely debilitating “bio-hacks” that typically end up dysregulating us in varying degrees in ever deeper ways & removing us even more from feeling connected to & in partnership with our biology & physiology. All in an attempt to increase productivity ever more so as not to become irrelevant in whatever ways we fear most.
Beloved.
May you return to your Self.
May you return in love to your organism.
May you see the absolute beauty & intelligence of your organism.
May you rest.
May you rest.
May you rest.
May you Re-Wild.
This week I want to introduce a new little bonus segment for my paid subby’s where I answer a question posed by a client or student & share the answer from a neuropsychological perspective using knowledge from Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal work, Attachment Theory, & Tantric Philosophy.
This week a student asked me during a Somatic Experiencing Class what was so special about vibrational breathing. “It feels really good. Why?” (vibrational breathing is when we hum, voo, ohm, or haaaaa, audibly on the exhale creating a vibration in the face, chest, throat, & belly.) The two main reasons why this is so beneficial for our body & mind is: