Let’s Talk About What It Means to Rest for the Sake of Rest

In May of 2020, two months into the COVID-19 shutdown in the United States, I woke up one morning and realized I was completely, utterly, undeniably exhausted. It was a level of fatigue I had not yet encountered at that point in my life, and it surprised me. Unlike most people I knew, the COVID shutdown had not required a significant reorganization of my life. I was extremely lucky in that way. The year prior, I had left my full-time job as a mindfulness teacher after having received a substantial grant from a literary arts organization to support the completion of a novel. I was in my third year of working on that novel, and I had managed to stretch the grant money much further than should have been possible by augmenting my income with a handful of freelance editorial gigs, group workshops, and coaching clients. I had also defrayed the costs of permanent residence for nearly two years via fellowships to writing residency programs, short-term rentals, and crashing at the homes of friends and family while they were away—a house in the foothills of Tucson, Arizona; a lake house in Danbury, Connecticut; a condo on the beach in Siesta Key.

At the time of the shutdown, I was housesitting for my parents in my hometown in upstate New York while they were marooned in Florida, unable to travel home safely, so my housing situation, like my financial situation, was comparatively secure by the time the pandemic was in full swing. Even the stay-at-home order had left me relatively unaffected. I am by nature predisposed to a solitary life, and my life very much reflected that predisposition in those years. I had no partner, no children. I was, for all intents and purposes, unencumbered. Responsible only for myself and my tiny dog.

The biggest disruption to my daily routine was that I could no longer attend twelve-step recovery meetings in person. Thankfully, the recovery community rallied in the immediate wake of the shutdown. Within days, twelve-step meetings across the country, all over the world, had moved online with impressive speed. Suddenly, I could attend meetings any time of day, any day of the week. I often say that recovery never felt as democratic as it did in those early pandemic days.

This is all to say that my life during the COVID shutdown looked remarkably similar to the life I had grown accustomed to before it.

So why was I so exhausted? I wondered.

The answer came to me one afternoon during my daily walk, a habit I had established in January of that year to help mitigate the sedentary posture of writing at the computer all day, and one I had carried over into the pandemic. It was so helpful just to get out of the house, to move my body, to be out in the world and among nature. Later, my friend JoAnn would tell me that due to the near-complete cessation of road and air traffic during the shutdown, birds no longer had to pitch their songs in a higher and more rigorous register as they strained to be heard by their mates. I don’t know if that’s true, but I believe it. During my walks, the birdsong sounded lower and fuller. More relaxed, more melodious. I stopped to observe the Northern flickers that had returned with the spring weather. I watched the cowbirds roost in other birds’ nests. And during the rich slowness of one of those afternoon walks, the cause of my exhaustion became apparent. Unlike the birds, I had not relaxed. Even in the quiet solitude of the shutdown, I had continued to overfunction.

And, I realized, I had been overfunctioning for years.

I was first introduced to the concepts of overfunctioning and underfunctioning through the work of clinical psychologist Harriet Lerner and her book The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships. Like family systems therapist Murray Bowen, from whom Lerner adopted the terms, Lerner uses overfunctioning and underfunctioning to describe the division of emotional labor and relationship responsibilities within families of origin and intimate partnerships. That said, it’s been helpful for me to remember that overfunctioning and underfunctioning are at their core stress responses. That is, they are attempts to regulate the uncomfortable physiological reaction that arises in the body during anxiety-producing situations.

Simply put, in moments of high stress, overfunctioners compensate: They do more, work harder, and take on additional responsibilities. Underfunctioners decompensate: They do less, disengage, and yield responsibilities to others. Socially, both overfunctioning and underfunctioning have their advantages and disadvantages. Overfunctioners receive a good deal of praise for being ambitious, hardworking, and born leaders, while at the same time they are criticized as controlling, domineering, and micromanaging. Underfunctioners are praised as flexible, easygoing, and laid-back, while they are simultaneously criticized for being lazy, procrastinating, indecisive, and avoidant.

Hello. My name is Benjamin, and I am an overfunctioner.

And, if I’m being completely honest, there is a part of me—the egoic part—that has enjoyed the benefits of overfunctioning. I am a fairly achievement-oriented person, and in that regard overfunctioning has served me well, socially and professionally. But regardless of their respective advantages and disadvantages, the important thing to remember is that both of these stress responses are maladaptive. They are maladaptive because they are unsustainable. Both overfunctioning and underfunctioning keep us stuck in a state of perpetual nervous-system arousal, which leads us to the precipice of exhaustion and eventually to complete nervous-system collapse. Overfunctioners burn out from taking on more responsibilities than they can reasonably handle themselves, while underfunctioners experience a kind of emotional and behavioral paralysis as they continue to fail to attend to responsibilities successfully, which in turn only increases their anxiety.

The unexpected byproduct of the COVID shutdown was that, at least within my own sphere of influence and personal experience, the world had slowed down. The world had slowed down, but I had not. The contrast between the two had thrown the latter into stark relief. Once I saw what I was doing, I could not unsee it, and I knew that if I did not address the root cause of my exhaustion, the root cause of my exhaustion was going to address me.

I was going to have to stop overfunctioning.

I was going to have to practice intentional rest.

When I work with students, coaching clients, and sponsees around their tendencies to overfunction or underfunction, I ask them to write down a list of everything they think they can reasonably accomplish in one day. (I emphasize the word reasonably.) Then I tell them, “If you identify as an overfunctioner, take the number of items on your list and cut it in half. And if you identify as an underfunctioner, take the number of items on your list and cut it in half.” I deliver these instructions as if they were a joke: the punchline is that the instructions are exactly the same. I do this to demonstrate specifically to underfunctioners how thoroughly they have been conditioned to believe they should be able to do more than they actually can as the result of a lot of cultural expectations. When underfunctioners realize I’m not going to suggest they increase the number of items on their list, they typically respond with visible relief.

With these instructions in mind, I decided to follow my own advice. 

I returned home from my afternoon walk that day, opened my computer, and pulled up the daily to-do list I write every Sunday for the upcoming week. I started using this to-do list twelve years ago when I was applying to graduate school because it helped me stay organized throughout the process, and it has helped me stay organized ever since. But in all likelihood, it has also contributed to my inclination to overfunction. There is never a shortage of things to do, and I can accomplish a lot in a day. But when I looked at my to-do list in May of 2020, I was horrified by what I saw. Even during the shutdown, when I was barely leaving the house, I had still written down eight to ten things to do each day—and I was actually doing them. This is what overfunctioning looks like.

No wonder I was exhausted.

So I moved the cursor over my list and began cutting that list in half.

I am sure it will surprise no one when I say I am not a person for whom rest comes naturally. As an overfunctioner, rest has never been high on my list of priorities, which is why I qualify my pursuit of rest as both intentional and a practice. For me, developing an intentional resting practice began with implementing the tool I called “The Four Things.” The premise was simple: For the next thirty days, I would limit myself to four daily tasks and once I had met my quota of four things that day, the remainder of the day I would commit to rest. Why four things? Because that is the number I arrived at when I cut my to-do list in half. For an underfunctioner, this number may be lower. For another overfunctioner, it may be higher. But if someone’s number is higher than five things, I usually recommend they reevaluate their understanding of the word reasonably.

When I made my list of “Four Things,” I did not include in that number my morning practice, the hour I devote every morning to passive and active reflection: fifteen minutes of seated meditation and forty-five minutes of journaling. Morning practice is foundational to my spiritual health and therefore is a nonnegotiable. I will prioritize it over everything else. If I have a 6:30 AM flight, I will wake up at 4:00 AM just to do it. On the rare occasion that I am unable to attend to morning practice, I feel it. I am a less patient and compassionate person out in the world. I become that asshole in the grocery aisle.

So my “Four Things” did not include morning practice—but it included everything else. It included writing; it included attending a twelve-step meeting; it included any labor-for-money; and it included exercise (my daily walk or yoga or a workout). On any given day, I did three of these four things, which meant I could really only do one additional thing each day. One thing. Not the five or six additional things I had grown accustomed to doing. This felt extreme, but so did my exhaustion. It became clear that if I was going to make space in my life to rest by limiting myself to “The Four Things,” I was going to need to become unsparing in my commitment to my values.

I have come to believe that value-aligned living is at the heart of all recovery work. This process has required me to identify the values that are most important to me and to learn to live my life in agreement with them. This is how I define integrity. And the great thing about value-aligned living is that my values cannot be determined by anyone or anything outside of myself. My values are specific to me, and only I can define them. And while I did the majority of my own values work in the early years of my sobriety through the twelve steps and a modality of secular mindfulness practice known as acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), the values exercise I most frequently recommend to others comes from qualitative researcher Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversation. Whole Hearts.

In Dare to Lead, Brown provides a list of a hundred or so values and asks readers to narrow the list down to the two values that are most important to them. Brown suggests this approach for two reasons: “First, I see it the same way that I see Jim Collins’s mandate ‘If you have more than three priorities, you have no priorities.’ At some point, if everything on the list is important, then nothing is truly a driver for you. It’s just a gauzy list of feel-good words. Second, I’ve taken more than ten thousand people through this work, and when people are willing to stay with the process long enough to whittle their big list down to two, they always come to the same conclusion that I did with my values process: My two core values are where all of the ‘second tiered’ circled values are tested.”

Identifying our values is a key part of value-aligned living because, as Brown points out, “We can’t live into values that we can’t name.” But if narrowing down the list to two core values proves too difficult or overwhelming for people, the other values exercise I regularly suggest is a weekly inventory. Every day for one week, I ask people to write a bullet-point list of everything they’ve done each day, from the time they wake up until they go to bed. Then, at the end of the week, I ask them to review the inventory and ask themselves what their daily activities have in common.

Like Brown’s approach, the benefits of a weekly inventory are twofold. First, a weekly inventory reveals where we are currently allotting what I have referred to as our two most valuable resources: our time and attention. In other words, a weekly inventory demonstrates the values we are already (and often unconsciously) prioritizing. Second, at the very least, a weekly inventory has the potential to expose what I call “integrity breaches”—places in our lives where our actions, behaviors, and priorities are not in alignment with our values—especially if we discover that the things we devote the majority of our time and attention to are, in fact, not the things that are most important to us. Upon reviewing the inventory, we might say to ourselves, “I still don’t know what my core values are, but whatever they are, they are not this.” In my experience, identifying our values is as much a process of elimination as anything else

My own core values are spirituality and creativity. When I look at my life, I can see that the majority of my time and attention goes to my spiritual development and my creative work. Prioritizing these values is how I have cultivated a sense of purpose and meaning, and because I make a habit of prioritizing them, I am able to show up fully and presently in every other area of my life, including my relationships with other people. So as I pared my to-do list down to “The Four Things,” I prioritized the items that were in service of those values, and wherever possible, I deprioritized everything else.

Every time I describe “The Four Things,” people invariably ask me the same two questions. Most recently, it was my friend, the writer Cat Powell, who asked me: “How do you know if something counts as a thing?” I wish I had a better answer to this question, some universal standard, but the truth is I don’t. Instead, I offer people the criteria I use, which is the criteria I’ve found most helpful: “If it goes on my to-do list, it counts as a thing.”

Which is to say: If it’s scheduled.

For example, if I decide to swing by the bank to deposit money at the ATM on my way to do something else, that doesn’t count as a thing because it’s something I could do anytime that is convenient. But if I have to go into the bank—or worse, call customer service—to speak with someone about my account, that counts as a thing. Similarly, habitual daily tasks like brushing my teeth, showering, and eating meals don’t count, but if I’ve scheduled time to meal prep for the week, that does. Cleaning the house counts as a thing. Laundry counts as a thing. Going out to dinner or a movie with friends, as pleasurable as it may be, counts as a thing. So does a scheduled phone date. Doctor and therapy appointments count. So does an appointment to get a haircut or a massage. The task itself is not what matters. Nor does it matter how much time and attention the task will require. If I write something down on my to-do list, I have committed to completing that task on that day, and it counts as one of my four things.

The other question I’m most frequently asked, usually by parents and primary caregivers and people with high-demanding careers, is whether their familial and work responsibilities count toward “The Four Things.” As someone without children or a traditional work situation, I always want to honor this question with the respect and consideration it deserves—and yet my answer remains firm: Yes. For many people, their commitments to their families and their careers will be in service to their core values, but regardless of whether or not that is the case, these commitments will most certainly limit the amount of time and attention they have available to allocate elsewhere. 

For this reason, it is imperative to keep in mind that “The Four Things” is not a tool to help us attend to everything we deem worthy of our time and attention. And it certainly isn’t a tool to help us attend to everything we want or think we need to get done, or what other people want or think we need to get done, or what society tells us we should want or need to get done. “The Four Things” is a tool to help us make space in our lives to rest. If we are going to do this, we will have to get honest about the limitations of our capacity. Pretending those limitations do not exist is how many of us exhausted ourselves in the first place. Following through on this admission—which requires us to acknowledge and honor our limitations—is what makes intentional rest such a difficult and, I would argue, countercultural practice.

When I first embarked on this intentional resting practice, I thought (perhaps foolishly) that after a week or two, I would emerge from my exhaustion feeling, if not fully rested, at least significantly more so. And certainly after thirty days of resting, I expected my exhaustion would be cured. Spoiler alert: This was not my experience at all. In fact, shortly after I commenced resting in earnest, I found I felt more exhausted than I previously had. What I know now is that this phenomenon was not specific to me and was actually a fairly predictable physiological response as my parasympathetic nervous system began to regulate my biochemistry.

In Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, Amelia and Emily Nagoski explain the effects of exhaustion on the body and the biochemical changes that occur when we first begin to experience adequate rest. They write, “When we’re sleep deprived, our bodies try to compensate by activating the stress response—doses of adrenaline and cortisol to help us survive the temporary stressor of too little sleep—which masks the fatigue and impairment . . . The counterintuitive result is that when we eventually sleep, the stress response reduces, so when we’re actually better rested, we may feel less rested. Adrenaline is no longer masking our fatigue.”

Though the research the Nagoski sisters cite specifically addresses sleep deprivation and the importance of adequate sleep, the same physiological changes occur when we practice active rest, and it didn’t take long for me to determine that my plan to rest for thirty days would not be enough. Ultimately, I engaged in this intentional resting practice for a total of nine months, and it took about three months just for me to begin to feel well-rested, and another six months for my nervous system to fully regulate. During that time I could almost feel my nervous system slowly unwinding incrementally each day. I liken the experience to trying to open a fist you’ve been clenching for too long. The muscles in the hand don’t immediately relax. Instead, they loosen by a measure of degrees until at last the hand opens freely.

Once I had recovered from the initial wave of intensified exhaustion, I was surprised to discover exactly how resistant I was to rest. Because, as it turns out, resting is uncomfortable. By 2020, I had done enough embodiment work that I had learned how to sit with the uncomfortable physiological experience that accompanies difficult emotions, but as an overfunctioner and someone with a history of trauma, my nervous system had grown accustomed to operating at a certain level of hypervigilance. This meant that, neurobiologically, resting felt almost unsafe. Most days, I met my quota of four things sometime in the late afternoon, and I began preparing dinner around 4:30 PM simply because I didn’t know what else to do. Then, having eaten by five, I regarded the evening hours with something like terror. Suddenly I had all this time, and I didn’t know how to fill it without doing more. In fact, my nervous system was practically shouting: You must do more. Surely, I could draft a response to that email I hadn’t gotten to earlier in the day. Surely, I could submit a short story to that literary journal or update my resume for that teaching application. But no, I had committed to “The Four Things.” I had committed to intentional rest. It was at this juncture that I had to admit to myself I really didn’t know how to rest at all. What I knew was distraction. What I knew was “shadow rest.”

I define shadow rest as any form of “rest” that is not actually restful. In my experience, the most common forms of shadow rest are media, social media, and online devices. Sitting down at the end of the day to watch an episode of television, or better yet, a movie—something with a clearly defined beginning and end—may function as a form of rest as long as I am present and engaged with whatever I’m watching. But staying up until 2:00 AM binging an entire Netflix series is not rest. Neither is losing three hours passively scrolling on my phone.

My thinking about smartphones and social media as forms of shadow rest has largely been informed by Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life, specifically Price’s research demonstrating the similarities between the algorithms that run social media and smartphones and those that are used for slot machines. Like slot machines, social media and smartphones have been designed to trigger the release of dopamine in the brain through the use of intermittent reinforcements in the form of notifications, likes, and comments. But in addition to dopamine, social media and smartphones also trigger the release of the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which encourages a state of nervous-system agitation and hypervigilance in human beings. These neurobiological responses are what have changed our relationship with these platforms and devices from a form of social interaction to one of compulsive engagement.

I had mostly cleaned up my social-media and phone hygiene by the end of 2018, two years into the first Trump presidency, after having read Price’s book. By then I had learned enough about the human nervous system to know that our brains were not designed to accommodate the near-constant exposure to a twenty-four-hour news cycle and the endless scroll of social media where daily we were bombarded with some new political scandal, ethics violation, or humanitarian crisis—which is to say nothing of the stress that comes from living under an administration perpetrating these things. But during the shutdown, when my face-to-face human interactions had been greatly curtailed, I found myself slipping into my old habits of shadow rest. I told myself I just needed to check out for an hour. I told myself I just needed to connect. Then two or four or six hours later, I’d find myself more amped up than when I had logged on.

So as part of my commitment to intentional rest, I began reimplementing Catherine Price’s suggestions. I turned off pop-up notifications and removed all social media apps from my phone, including email and dating apps. If I wanted to log on to Twitter or check my email, I could access them through my phone’s web browser or my computer, but when I finished, I made myself log out of my accounts. I also turned off my phone when I wasn’t actively using it, and at night I charged it in my office. My phone was not allowed near my bedroom any time after 11:00 PM.

These measures did not prevent me from engaging with social media and my phone altogether, but they did present obstacles to accessing them easily and provided a momentary pause in which I had to consciously choose to use them, rather than engage with them compulsively. I would be lying on the sofa, reading a novel, and three pages in, I would watch as my hand reached for my phone, seemingly without my permission. Then, when I picked up my phone, I was met with a dark screen because I had turned my phone off. Thanks to that interruption in what had become a compulsive habit, I could ask myself, “Do I really need to look up which Fleetwood Mac album Stevie Nicks’s song ‘Gypsy’ appeared on or how many people died from COVID today right this minute?”

The answer was always, No, I did not.

My brain had simply been rewired for distraction.

And distraction is not rest.

If limiting my daily activities to “The Four Things” and disengaging with my favored forms of shadow rest helped me define what didn’t constitute as rest, I still had not defined what did. Ironically, the definition I found most useful in determining the parameters of rest was actually not a definition of rest at all. Instead, it came from Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, and his definition of play. Brown defines play as “time spent without purpose,” and the benefit of repurposing Brown’s definition of play for rest was the implication that rest was both active (time spent) and a means to its own end (without purpose). For an overfunctioner, this concept was something of a paradox. What was the purpose of doing anything if not to accomplish something else? The purpose was rest. That said, learning what Brown’s definition looked like in practice required some experimentation.

Reading, I discovered, could be restful, but only if I was reading for pleasure. If I was reading for novel research, that wasn’t rest. That was work. And if I was persisting through a book I didn’t care for but felt compelled to finish simply because I had started it, that wasn’t rest either. Reading for rest had to be enjoyable and a means to its own end. Likewise, a second, long, leisurely walk in the evening could count as rest, but only if I had included an earlier walk or another form of exercise in my four things for the day, because though rest is absolutely an act of self-care, not all acts of self-care are restful.

And so I began painting. I had not painted since the early years of my sobriety, and I was pleasantly surprised by how restful it felt. I am by no means a visual artist, and because I know this about myself, I had no expectations of producing anything of value. I simply delighted in the process, which made painting a restful experience. I also listened to music. I recovered my record player from the basement and began listening to albums on vinyl, which prevented me from repeating a song or skipping ahead. Many evenings during the pandemic, I sat on my sofa and looked out the window as I listened to Mother Earth’s album Bring Me Home all the way through: first one side, then the other. And finally, I danced. After dinner, I would put in my AirPods and dance around my kitchen to the Wild Strawberries or Sarah McLachlan. You might think a person cannot dance to Sarah McLachlan, but as a gay man who grew up in the nineties, let me tell you: A person absolutely can.

Painting, music, and dance. These became my rituals of rest.

Three months into my commitment to rest, I finally felt like I was getting the hang of it. My exhaustion was still present, but it had improved. This improvement, however, coincided with the loosening of COVID restrictions in my home state, and with the looser restrictions came renewed pressures to reengage socially that summer. Committing to rest in isolation was one thing, but now I had to carry this practice into my relationships, which required me to address my tendency to overcommit myself to others, as well as my tendency to people-please, both of which are common pitfalls for overfunctioners and underfunctioners alike.

I sometimes joke that as a society we would be much less eager to cop to the behaviors we call “people-pleasing” if we called “people-pleasing” what it actually is: manipulation. The truth is, my inclination to people-please has very little to do with my desire to please other people and much more to do with my desire to control their perception of me. This is one of the tradeoffs of value-aligned living. Getting clear on my values and maintaining firm but healthy boundaries around them is not always comfortable or easy. It means telling the truth when a lie would be more convenient. It means saying no and allowing other people to experience their disappointment, because I’ve learned that saying yes and secretly hating people for it is not generosity. The tradeoff is that I can sleep at night, both figuratively and literally. So as my family members and friends and colleagues began to reengage that summer, I said no, and I said it frequently.

I said no to invitations to socially-distanced barbecues and bonfires and coffee dates at outdoor cafes. I said no to more lucrative work opportunities. I said no when someone called to ask for a favor, or advice, or just to chat. I changed the outgoing voicemail message on my phone to inform people that I would be resting for the remainder of August and would be slow to respond, but if they left me a message, I would get back to them after the first of September. If it was an emergency, or something that required my immediate attention, I told people they could text or email me and I would do my best to get back to them within twenty-four hours. For the next six months, I re-recorded this message on the first of every month and changed the dates for another month out. It amazed me how few people left me voicemails when they knew I would not be immediately available to them, and how few situations (and by few, I mean none) people considered urgent.

I was grateful to the people in my life who respected my decision to prioritize rest, who trusted that my no was not personal to them. And I understood when some people expressed frustration with my decision, but I did not feel compelled to explain or justify my boundaries to them. I simply knew I wouldn’t be of use to anyone—to other people or myself—if I tried to power through my exhaustion in order to satisfy them or control their perception of me. What’s more, I discovered that as I said no to other people, not once did I have to say no to my values, and I was able to live with that because my values were enough.

By the end of my nine-month commitment to intentional rest, what I learned about rest could probably be boiled down to one thing: Rest is really fucking hard. But for me, the hardest part of this practice was that it forced me to confront my motivations for resting in the first place. This confrontation is something Tricia Hersey, a rest activist whose work centers on Black liberation, womanism, and anticapitalism, discusses at length in Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. Throughout Rest Is Resistance, Hersey frequently reminds her readers, “Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of ‘productivity’ leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so.”

We are not resting to be productive.

But the truth is, I was.

Looking back, I could see that my primary motivation for resting was the exact reason Hersey warns against: I was resting now so that I could be more productive later. Which is to say, I was resting because I thought rest would help me resume overfunctioning. And the reason I was overfunctioning to begin with was simple: I was overfunctioning out of fear. I was afraid if I stopped overfunctioning, I would fail to achieve the success I hoped to achieve as a writer. I was afraid I wouldn’t get what I wanted, or that I would lose what I had. I was afraid if I didn’t do it all, no one else would do it, and it wouldn’t get done. And I was afraid of disappointing other people because I was afraid of what other people thought about me.

This was an unpalatable truth, and one that was particularly difficult for me to swallow because at that point in my recovery I had learned that fear is the number one motivator of integrity breaches. Fear is the number one motivator of integrity breaches because my fear and my values are nearly always at cross-purposes.

While I was writing this essay, I stumbled across a photograph from my time at an artist residency in Amherst, Virginia, in the spring of 2018. The photograph depicted my writing desk below a sun-filled window. Attached to the window ledge above my computer I had posted a series of pink sticky notes on which I’d written a number of mantras I’ve found useful to keep in mind while writing: mostly reminders to stay in the process and out of the result. But the last sticky note I read brought me up short. On it, I had written: Be afraid of NOT getting your writing done.

Seven years later, five years after I had learned to practice intentional rest, I experienced a kind of cognitive vertigo from encountering this younger version of myself—this younger writer—who would have written such a thing. I wanted to tell him, “Oh, sweetheart, you do not need your fear to write.” But at that juncture of my life I had already adopted the false belief that I needed my fear to guide my life toward more labor. What I didn’t realize at the time was that doing so would eventually require me to trade off on my values.

This is the part of the story I glossed over. When I said I woke up one morning in May of 2020 and realized I was completely, utterly, undeniably exhausted, my exhaustion was undeniable because it had begun to impede my ability to show up for my values. I was so tired I couldn’t listen during meetings. I was so tired I slept through phone calls with sponsees. And when I opened the Word doc to work on my novel, I was so tired I couldn’t concentrate on the words on the screen. My exhaustion, fueled by my fear, had become a barrier to the things that were most important to me, regardless of how much exhausting myself had helped me achieve. Had that not been the case, I don’t know that I would have ever addressed my exhaustion or my proclivity for overfunctioning.

The appeals of fear are seductive. This is true for most people, I think, but certainly for creatives operating in a world in which our personal, social, artistic, and professional lives increasingly overlap. Steeped in a culture of industry devoted to the hustle and the grind, a culture that would prefer that people function more like machines than human beings, it is easy to mistake our self-worth for our level of productivity. We begin to think we are only as good as what (and how much) we do, as what (and how much) we manufacture for ourselves, as what (and how much) recognition we receive. Within that paradigm it is natural to deem our fear “useful”: the powerful and profound engine that keeps the machine running.

But there is a cost to that kind of living.

It is a cost I am no longer willing to expend.

In the end, I had to learn to practice intentional rest because rest is necessary to my physical, emotional, and psychological well-being, and because, as Hersey suggests, I am worthy of rest because I am a human being. But I also had to learn to practice intentional rest because rest supports my ability to invest in the life I want to live: a life that is aligned with my values.

What I might call a life of integrity.