#90: The surprising productivity of rest
Athletes know that if they want to improve their performance, they need to incorporate rest into their training. You, on the other hand, are absolutely certain that if only you could write for 25 hours a day (which you can't because you're a terrible person) you'd be at the top of your game. Luckily for you, your Imperfectionist friend is here to talk some sense into you.
References:
Ansorge, R. 2022: 'Rest and recovery are critical for an athlete's physiological and psychological well-being', UCHealth Today (https://www.uchealth.org/today/rest-and-recovery-for-athletes-physiological-psychological-well-being/)
Pang, A. S.-K. 2016: Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (London: Penguin)
Episode transcript:
Might rest be more than just a guilty pleasure?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi again, friends. Do you ever find yourself in a sort of … purgatory between work and rest? If you’ve never been there, drop me your address and I’ll send you a postcard, because that’s where I am at the moment. It took me a while to spot the pattern, but it turns out that if I’m going through a period where work or life is even more demanding than usual - maybe there’s a deadline or a few deadlines or something else time-sensitive - I’ll sort of drag myself through it, fantasising about how great it’s going to be when it finishes and I can finally relax, and then when it does all finish (or at least, when it eases off a bit, because it never really finishes, does it?) and I can exhale and look forward to plugging myself into the psychic power bank and recharging my batteries, it never quite happens. I tell myself I’m taking a break, which means I’m not working - but I’m not exactly resting either. I’m in a miserable middle zone where I’m not being productive but my energy levels are still dropping, and I’m continuing to feel more and more drained. This is a problem - and, as I say, it’s miserable. Coaching clients talk about it too. For academics and students, the structure of the academic year means that the end of term, and especially the end of the academic year, is a really popular time to feel stuck in this particular way. But it can hit at any time, for anyone who pushes themself to go hard now and relax later. Hitting the deadline doesn’t always open the stress pressure valve in the way we’d like. And I’ve been thinking about why that might be. I think a big part of this ‘getting stuck in rest purgatory’ problem has to do with the way we think about rest. We’re preoccupied with thinking about how to work as efficiently and effectively as we can - how to be more productive, more competitive, more impressive, smarter, faster, harder, blah blah blah - but we’re guilty of neglecting to think about how to do what we do when we’re not working and producing. For many of us, ‘rest’ is just whatever it is that we’re doing when we’re not being productive and useful, and we don’t think much about it at all, except maybe in so far as we think that maybe we ought to be doing less of it so that we can cram more productivity in. Sitting there staring at our phone with stinging eyes because we can’t quite muster the motivation to go to bed is just as much ‘rest’ as going out for a walk, in this book - neither of them helps us move towards our important career goals, after all. Now, I’ve talked before on this podcast, in several episodes, about the importance of rest - or at least the importance of doing things other than work - and so I thought carefully before deciding to do this episode, because I don’t want to sound like a stuck record. (If you’re not old enough to know what a stuck record is or what one sounds like, let me explain, let me explain, let me explain - that’s what it sounds like, except in the middle of your favourite song.) But I think the particular angle I want to talk about here - which has to do with what rest is and its relationship to productivity - could do with a few minutes under the Academic Imperfectionist spotlight. I started pondering about this when I learned something that sort of blew my mind, despite being, I suppose glaringly obvious and something I did actually know but hadn’t really thought much about. Brace yourself for yet another physical activity metaphor, friends. Now, you probably know that there’s such a thing as working out too much; that if you’re regularly running or weight training or whatever, you need to combine your workouts with adequate rest, and that if you overdo it with the old exercise you’ll get sore and maybe do yourself a mischief. That’s all true. But that’s not the the full story of why you need to combine your physical exertions with adequate rest. A more counterintuitive reason to rest is that it’s not the exercise itself that gives you the gains in fitness, strength, power, speed, and other adaptations that tend to be important reasons why many of us drag ourselves out of bed and out for a walk or a run or a bike ride or to the gym. Exercise - at least, the sort of exercise that produces the changes we associate with improvements in health and fitness - damages the body. As Dr Karin VanBaak of the Colorado University Sports Medicine & Performance Center puts it, ‘if you’re participating in sports, you’re breaking down your body’. It’s the repair process, which happens when we rest after exercise, that leads to the fit and healthy changes - in VanBaak’s words, ‘In order to see gains in fitness … you have to give [the body] enough rest to repair itself’. Exercise alone, then, doesn’t make you fit and strong. You need exercise combined with rest. And by ‘rest’, I don’t just mean anything that doesn’t involve exercising. Rest, in this case, needs to involve adequate sleep, proper nutrition, the right balance between gentle activity and complete inactivity - there’s a ton of science on this, so feel free to dive into all that if you feel like it. If you’re exercising in order to improve your health and/or fitness and you don’t rest properly, then you don’t improve your health and fitness. You might even become less fit and healthy than you were before you started. This means that, if you’ve been exercising, then while you’re resting - as long as you’re resting right - you’re not wasting away and turning into that terrifying slobby version of yourself that you’re constantly trying to avoid becoming (remember slobby plant rebecca from episode #62: Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!). You’re actually getting stronger, even while you’re lying there taking a nap. Don’t argue, people - it’s science. As I said, I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been asking myself: to what extent is the relationship between rest and writing - or other cognitively or creatively demanding endeavours - like the relationship between rest and working out? Another way of asking this question is: if we want to improve as writers or thinkers or creators, do we need to take our rest as seriously as we take our efforts to be productive, when we’re actually putting words on the page and actively, consciously trying to come up with good ideas? I’ve argued before on this podcast that writing isn’t all about, well, writing, in episode #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing. And in episode #20: Don’t just write it - ferment it! I argued that it makes a difference what sorts of not-writing we engage in. Some not-writing activities are more conducive than others to moving our writing projects along. But the analogy with exercise and rest makes the point more emphatically: if it is indeed an analogy, then perhaps taking breaks from writing isn’t merely helpful to our writing projects. Perhaps, instead, it’s during those breaks from writing - if we take the right sorts of breaks - that we become better writers. Just as exercise damages the body and rest repairs it so that it’s better than it was before, perhaps our efforts at writing or otherwise creating actually damage us, in some way, and it’s while we’re away from the desk that the improvements are happening, behind the scenes. I’m intrigued by this idea because this is often how it feels. That experience of sitting down to write something that seems like it ought to be relatively straightforward, and then you realise it’s actually more complicated than you thought it was going to be, and the more you work at it the more confused and uncertain you become, until you end up wondering why you ever thought it was a good idea to try to work on this particular thing at all, assuming you can still remember what it is you’re working on. When you’re just starting out as a new student or an early-career person, that can be a really unsettling experience, and you might end up panicking and wondering what the hell you’ve got yourself into. Eventually, though, we realise that this is just how the process goes sometimes. Sometimes it turns out that the project was way more complicated than we thought and maybe we need to scale it down or change tack, and sometimes it turns out that there’s a relatively painless solution. But the best way to work through it all usually doesn’t involve gritting our teeth and forcing ourselves to sit there until it’s done. Usually, when we’re really stuck, we recognise the benefit of taking a break and perhaps sleeping on it. In the best case scenario, it all magically falls into place while we’re sleeping, which is how Dmitri Mendeleev reportedly came up with the periodic table. But even if progress isn’t as dramatic as that, time away from a problem can enable us to make progress that wouldn’t have been possible if we’d just kept working at it. Since I made those episodes on writing/not-writing and fermenting, I’ve had countless conversations about all this, and plenty of coaching sessions. And a lot of the time people do accept that if you want to write, then you need to spend time not writing - but it’s kind of a grudging acceptance. There’s a sense of, ‘Oh well, I suppose I can give myself slightly less of a hard time for the time I spend not writing, even though in the ideal world I would spend all my waking time writing’. It’s more of an increased tolerance for not spending 25 hours a day writing than a full-on embracing of the importance of the moments we’re not at the desk. But, really, if rest is important to creativity, then those of us in the business of creating ought to be taking it way more seriously than this. I mean, when it comes to deciding what sort of rest is most beneficial for athletes when they’re not exercising, scientists are all over it, deciding how much sleep is optimal and what specific stages of non-REM sleep are most regenerative and how many grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight is required for developing muscle and how much active versus passive recovery will best improve future performance. But when it comes to what rest should look like for creative types, it’s more a matter of, ‘Meh, maybe go for a walk once in a while’. Someone who has thought in depth about this is Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, who has written a book called Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. He takes the view - and he has the science to back this up, as well as case studies of remarkable people who rested as seriously as they worked - that if you want to be more productive, you need to take your rest as seriously as you take your work. And you need to rest in the right sort of way - Pang advises treating resting like a skill that you have to develop. You can’t rely on the pervasive view that I mentioned earlier, that rest is just whatever happens (guiltily) in the gaps between work. You have to rest actively and thoughtfully, doing things that are rewarding and meaningful for their own sake. This isn’t just about giving yourself a break - he writes, ‘Work and rest are actually partners. They are like different parts of a wave. You can’t have the high without the low. The better you are at resting, the better you will be at working’. I will confess that when I first read Pang’s book, it didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t like the way it instrumentalised rest as something that we should take seriously because it makes us better workers. But actually, viewing Pang as advocating something analogous to what exercise scientists advocate when they warn us against the dangers of overtraining, I think he’s onto something. And, as a pedantic philosopher, I also recognise that rest being important because it makes us more productive is compatible with rest being important for other reasons too, like simply being enjoyable. More generally, though, I think we’d benefit from taking a more nuanced view of rest. Perhaps it’s useful to recognise different types of rest. There’s the sort of rest that you need to be doing in order to complement your work and help you be creative and productive, and there’s the sort of rest you do when you choose to do whatever you feel like doing in the moment, like watching crap on Netflix. Perhaps, too, we should drop the idea that rest is necessarily indulgent and fun - because quite often it’s not. We recognise that when we’re not contrasting it with work - think of the frustration of being prescribed bed rest by a doctor when you’d much rather be out doing fun things. But the idea of taking a not-necessarily-enjoyable rest from writing in order to benefit our writing is alien to many of us. And if the result is that we divide our time into ‘time spent working’ and ‘time spent having fun’, then it’s no wonder we feel guilty about resting. We view rest as - to use an expression often used by my coaching clients - letting ourselves off the hook. How dare we laze around when there’s so much to do? It’s yet another example of how our inner critic stops us from taking a clear view of things. Let me leave you with a fun little thought. From time to time, while I’ve been mulling over the fact that it’s while we’re resting between workouts that we’re actually getting fitter and stronger, I’ve occasionally lounged on the sofa with the cats and a cup of tea and thought to myself, ‘Wow, I am actually getting fucking ripped just sitting here’. And I’ve been experimenting with analogous thoughts about writing - like heading off for an afternoon nap while telling myself that behind my obliviously closed eyelids I’m going to be churning usefully through ideas and problems that help move along my writing projects. Why don’t you give it a go? Try on the idea that rest is productive. I hope it makes your next nap even sweeter. Bye for now.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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