Rest - both sleep and non-sleep - is essential to help our overstressed bodies and minds repair themselves, but many of us remain in a constant state of ‘flight, fight or freeze’. In part I of the Listener’s Work out or wind down? series, Niki Bezzant explores why we need to rest and the best ways to do so.
In the 1870s, American doctor Silas Weir Mitchell came up with a new cure for a condition known as neurasthenia. This was a catch-all term for a range of mental and “nervous” symptoms, including fatigue, depression, anxiety, insomnia, migraines and “hysteria”.
Mitchell’s cure was gender dependent. His male patients were sent into the countryside for long stretches of vigorous exercise. Often, they were literally sent west, where they spent time horse riding, cattle roping, hunting and bonding with other men in the open air. Famous recipients of this cure included the poet Walt Whitman and future president Theodore Roosevelt.
Mitchell wrote that men with neurasthenia could benefit from “a sturdy contest with Nature”. Nervous illness, he claimed, was feminising and therefore detrimental to men, making a strong man “like the average woman”.
The cure for “nervous” women could not have been more different: total and complete rest. The “rest cure” involved a strict regimen of months of enforced bed rest, seclusion and a fatty, meat-based diet. The writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman described her experience of the cure in her 1892 story The Yellow Wallpaper, in which she documents in harrowing detail her worsening mental health and the hallucinations caused by her enforced time alone. Mitchell advised her, post-treatment (for what to modern eyes looks like postnatal depression), to “live as domestic a life as possible” and “never to touch pen, brush or pencil again”. Virginia Woolf was forced to endure rest cures several times during her life.
Horrific medical misogyny aside, elements of Mitchell’s cures may have some appeal in our fast-paced world 150 years later. There are plenty of stressed-out folk who happily pay to spend time at wilderness retreats or in cellphone-free isolation, meditating and being coached on how to clear their never-quiet minds.
It could be argued that we have lost our ability to rest. “It’s an incredibly stimulating world that we live in, with lots of data coming in and no real barriers to that,” says Dougal Sutherland, clinical psychologist at Wellington-based Umbrella Wellbeing, which specialises in workplace mental health. “Back in the day, if you didn’t catch the six o’clock news, then that was it. Whereas now, you can watch any time. I think that constant ‘on-ness’ can be a real barrier to resting.”
Sutherland thinks we’re under constant pressure to busy ourselves, some of it self-generated. “It feels like there’s always something to do with our phones and devices, which may have replaced what I grew up with – and still battle with a bit – that Scots Presbyterian [attitude] that you can’t really do anything enjoyable until all the work’s done. And when’s the work done? Well, the work’s never finished. There’s always more work to do.”
Sutherland stresses both sleep and non-sleep rest are parts of feeling rested overall, and both are crucial for wellbeing. “Both help us recharge and recover on a physiological and mental basis, and without that, we simply don’t function as well as we could.”
What Rest Does
Lots of important things happen in our bodies when we engage in restful activities. Physically, we need rest to allow the body to repair and regenerate. This is especially important when we exercise.
Physiotherapist and health coach Kirsten Rose, of Auckland Physiotherapy & Health Collective, says exercise is a stressor to the body. It’s good for us to load our muscles, bones and joints, she says, “but if we did that without appropriate rest or recovery, they’re not going to have capacity to do that in the long term”.
She says some of the inflammation exercise generates “is actually a little bit negative [though] we know that in the long term, it actually makes us better. But the stressor of exercise is only fully of benefit if recovery comes with it.”
Rose has observed that when people’s training loads start to exceed their body’s capacity, it can be a case of needing to up the rest and recovery, rather than simply training less. “We talk to athletes about resting as hard as you train.”
People who are just starting exercising, or coming back from injury, need to know that more is not always better. “There’s a narrative out there that we have to push harder to get more gains, and that’s not entirely true … We need to gradually build our exercise, not with a ‘more is better’ mindset always. We often need to periodise – making sure we’re allowing ample time for recovery.”
She stresses sleep is an essential part of physical recovery. “I’ll say to some of my patients, ‘I would rather you went to bed half an hour earlier than spend half an hour doing your physio exercises.’ As much as I don’t like to admit it, I think the sleep might give them more bang for their buck.”
Resting can also combat chronic stress, a state where the nervous system is working in ways it’s not designed to. Our sympathetic nervous system – designed for “fight, flight or freeze” – is meant to protect us from acute stressors. But for many of us, modern life sees us constantly in this state, meaning our parasympathetic “rest and digest” state can’t take over.
“Humans are designed to be stress resilient,” says Rose. “Before modern-day food abundance and houses and whatever, our body and brain were designed to withstand a whole bunch of stress. We have the capacity to be very stress resilient in short bursts. But we have less capacity to be stress resilient over long periods of time.
“And that’s where we have issues now: persistent absorption of multiple stresses without an outlet, and then a mismatch to that rest and recovery. It’s just not sustainable.”
Close those windows
Resting is important for our minds, too. Sutherland says many things happen psychologically when we rest. “It’s a bit like your computer doing a defragmentation – as if you’ve got lots of windows open. It uses up lots of energy just keeping those windows open. And so being able to deliberately rest – it’s almost like you shut those windows down. And then a few things can happen in the background for processing.”
He describes a common experience: the “Aha!” moment when we’re not looking for it, or the solution to a problem suddenly pops up. “It’s because your brain’s been able to go into that defragmentation mode and has space to mull over things you may not have had the mental space for previously.”
Sutherland says tiredness and fatigue also sap our energy for “controlling lots of parts of us – our emotions, where our attention goes, our self-control over our thoughts and our behaviours. We just perform better if we’ve been able to rest.”
Defining rest
So, what does rest – especially the non-sleep kind – look like? It seems it’s different for everyone. In 2016, UK researchers did the “Rest Test” – a large international survey on rest. Its authors found the experience of rest highly subjective. They reported, “For some, the mind can’t rest until the body is fully rested. For others, it is the opposite: tiring out the body through vigorous exercise allows the mind to rest.”
Study respondents’ top-10 restful activities were reading, sleeping or napping, looking at or being in a natural environment, spending time on their own, listening to music, doing nothing in particular, walking, taking a bath or shower, daydreaming and watching TV.
The survey also found people can have conflicted feelings about rest, with some describing rest as difficult to experience without feelings of guilt. They used words such as “worrying”, “challenging”, and “annoying” to describe rest [see Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts below].
Sutherland thinks people probably find the idea of physical rest easier to grasp than mental, emotional or sensory rest. But, he says, these other forms are about “being free from demands on your attention. There is a time when people need to be able to mentally rest, just unhook … I guess you could sum it up as being rather than doing.”
We seldom have the traditional day of rest these days, but he reckons having one isn’t a bad idea. “There is a usefulness in … deliberately investing in and prioritising that time and scheduling it in, not going, ‘Oh, I’ll rest when I get a chance.’”
Rose says rest can involve physical activity for some. “Whether we are using our energy physically or mentally, it’s still draining from one place. Some people may have sat at their desk or been stuck in Zoom meetings all day. So, recovery for them is exercise because they just haven’t moved enough in the day and they’ve had a really heavy cognitive or mental demand. They need to move – that is a recovery strategy for their body.”
In contrast, someone who’s getting up early, going for a run or training and working hard all day, “then we would say, okay, your job is actually to find a space to do nothing”.
That space may be only a few moments in a day, but that’s okay, Rose says. “Most people don’t stop at all. If you said to them, ‘Do you ever just take five minutes to sit and … not do anything else at the same time?’ they would say, ‘No, never.’
“So, find moments of stillness that are associated with nothing else other than being in the moment. Can you take your coffee outside and sit on a bench and see if you can sit there until the coffee’s finished – no scrolling, no checking your notifications? Just observe the world around you.”
Rest takes practice
Taking time to observe means we’re more likely to notice if we’re feeling emotionally or cognitively overloaded, Rose says. Formal mindfulness practices like meditation can also be beneficial, though both Sutherland and Rose acknowledge they can be difficult.
“It takes a lot of practice,” Sutherland says. “And often people will go, ‘Oh, I wasn’t very good. I just noticed my brain firing off every two seconds; I was thinking about something else.’ So, there’s a practice component … but I think even the act of noticing that’s what your brain was doing is a pathway towards resting and pausing.”
There’s research to suggest mindful breathing and meditation practices such as yoga nidra (also known as yogic or psychic slumber) inducing a state between sleep and wakefulness have potential to lower stress and reduce anxiety and depression.
This practice has recently been rebranded as “Non-Sleep Deep Rest” by neuroscientist and podcaster Dr Andrew Huberman, who promotes it as a “protocol” that mimics the benefits of deep sleep without having to actually fall asleep. Although that claim is yet to be proven, it’s one way to disconnect and recharge.
So is being in nature. “It’s a universal thing,” Rose says. “And you don’t necessarily have to do much when you are there. People who sit inside bombarded by artificial light or sit too much during the day – they might find more bang for their buck by doing some form of exercise in a natural environment.
“But for other people, actually just going out into a green or blue space, seeing the water … any kind of natural environment is often more restful than our modern-day bombardment of all the things.”
Don’t leave me alone with my thoughts
Though mindfulness and disconnecting from stimulus are undeniably good for us, a study published in the journal Science in 2014 gave insight into something many of us might secretly feel: we hate being alone with nothing but our thoughts.
The researchers found participants typically did not enjoy spending 6-15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think.
They enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and in one experiment, many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left on their own.
“People prefer doing to thinking,” the researchers noted, “even if what they are doing is so unpleasant that they would normally pay to avoid it. The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.”
Psychologist Dougal Sutherland says part of that reluctance is “the potential to come up against emotions or thoughts we’d prefer not to have. I’ve done quite a bit of mindfulness training and practice during my time, and it’s certainly a process when you are alone with yourself – it’s not always the most pleasant time as you come across emotions or thoughts that you don’t really like having.”
In part II of the Listener’s Work out or wind down? series, Louise Chunn talks to clinical fatigue specialist Vincent Deary about the need to stop being blind to signs we are pushing ourselves. You can read it here.