The image of a businesswoman from the movies, who does nothing but answer calls and can only be distracted by coffee, has been successfully implemented by many in real life. But not everyone is able to timely assess the consequences of working seven days a week. We learned from Tata Feodoridi, a psychologist and psychotherapist, why it is so important to take a break in the wheel of affairs and worries and how to rest correctly.
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Over the years of practice, I realized that the vast majority of people have problems with rest. They simply don’t know how to relax, how much time they need to devote to it, why it’s needed at all, and, moreover, they feel guilty when they have a free hour. But no one has canceled the simple pattern “no rest - no strength”. Without relaxation, a person faces “happy everyday life” coupled with irritability, tearfulness, breakdowns, fatigue immediately after waking up, a feeling of tension, exhaustion, decreased activity, mood swings, pickiness, grumpiness, headaches, migraines, dizziness and “hello” from the autonomic nervous system. systems: rapid heartbeat, sweating, chills, redness, nausea and other problems.
Many begin to look for complex explanations for these problems in everything around them, and while they are looking, they do not notice how anxiety, depression, insomnia and nervous breakdowns become constant companions of their lives. After all this, we wonder why alcohol addiction is common among those who plow without rest.
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Rest is a necessity
The most popular and most dangerous misconception goes like this:
❌ Rest is for weaklings and losers.
Intellectually we can understand the absurdity of this thesis, but on an emotional level we absorb it throughout our lives. For example:
- Why are you whining again, son? Tired? Oh no no no! Be a man!
-Where are you going, darling? Home? Doesn’t it bother you that all your colleagues decided to stay a little late today?
— To achieve success, I worked 20 hours a day. And you lazy $#$&, continue to relax on your couch!
Because of this “processing”, we have two directly opposite ideas in our heads. On the one hand, we firmly know that rest is necessary: doctors, psychologists, and the labor code tell us this. On the other hand, we perceive rest as something bad, shameful and unusual for “correct” people.
In fact, rest is not a whim, not some kind of “forbidden pleasure,” and certainly not a sign of weakness. It is simply one of two phases of any work activity:
The rest phase is both a “recharge” and a “repair”. It helps us restore resources expended during work (for example, the level of ATP in muscles) and normalize various indicators of the body (for example, blood circulation after sedentary work). A person who neglects rest does not become more “correct” because of this: he simply begins to work worse and undermines his health.
Of course, there are situations in life when you need to grit your teeth and act contrary to your condition. But this should be our conscious decision, and not the consequence of a stupid attitude imposed from the outside.
Listen to your body
Another one logically follows from the previous misconception:
❌ Laziness, apathy, procrastination - these are “sins” that must always be fought mercilessly.
For example, a woman complains:
— I just can’t bring myself to study English! I found a good online course, but I keep putting off studying. How can I defeat procrastination?!
This woman manages the sales department, while also doing household chores. She gets up at six in the morning and goes to bed around midnight. She carries a dozen managers, two children, three cats and one husband who plays Dota. “English procrastination” in her case speaks only of one thing: her body screams “Guard!” and asks for mercy.
The negative states that we experience do not just arise: they always indicate some kind of problem. For example, prolonged apathy may be a symptom of an endocrine disorder, and irritability may be a consequence of hypertension.
It's the same with fatigue. The body cannot directly ask us for rest and does this through a whole range of unpleasant conditions:
When faced with these phenomena, there is no need to immediately declare them “sins.” First, try to listen to your feelings and understand what your body wants from you. Is self-coercion really necessary now? Or would it be wiser to take a break from work and just relax?
How to learn to relax psychologically: let’s summarize
The ability to relax is also a separate science that every person should master. Knowing how to learn to relax psychologically, we can become happier and calmer. Listen to yourself, don’t overwork yourself and look for your favorite relaxation methods, this will save you from exhaustion and burnout. To do this, it will be very useful to introduce some new useful habits into your life: for example, meditation, properly selected sports training, as well as regular work on your psychological state.
Plan your vacation along with your business
Some people believe that rest is something that happens to us on its own. They reason something like this:
❌ The main thing is to plan your work, and you can relax in between.
The problem here is this: if we have not reserved time for rest in advance, then we may not be able to have proper rest at all.
Firstly, according to Parkinson's law, work tends to occupy all the time allotted for it. If we have not outlined its boundaries, it can easily “take away” our breaks, leisure hours, and even lunch and dinner.
Secondly, we usually perceive unplanned vacations as “illegal.” We cannot fully relax and continue to think about the current work, experiencing tension and stress.
The best solution is to firmly fix rest blocks into your daily routine. For example:
Don't forget about short breaks. It is advisable to take a 5-10 minute break every half hour or hour. Such breaks are usually not included in to-do lists: they are implied by default.
Why can't we rest?
There are many reasons for this. As a rule, most of them lie in our subconscious attitudes. I will give a few common beliefs, and you try to remember if you have ever heard them.
Limiting beliefs about rest:
- Holidays for the weak!
- We'll get some sleep in the next world.
- Laziness and idleness are a sin.
- You definitely need to fight procrastination.
- Time for business, time for fun.
- You have to do the work, and only then you can rest.
- If you are on vacation, then be sure to be active.
Many of us were taught from childhood that working is a blessing, and only parasites rest. And often even 5 minutes of doing nothing gives us a strong feeling of guilt. We scold ourselves: “Why am I lying down? I still have so many things to do!” – and we remain endlessly in tension.
Often even going on vacation turns into a lot of stress for us. “After such a rest, I need another rest!” – is this a familiar phrase?
Few of us go on a trip just to sleep off, catch the ecstasy of sea sunsets, inhale the aroma of fragrant eucalyptus trees, waddle for a walk, and laugh. If we are going to a new place, we, as a rule, have already prepared a plan for daily excursions, souvenir purchases, and running around architectural places. And all in order to squeeze out the essence of “benefit”. But what is the use for?
How is our weekend going? For many, these are days of general cleaning, shopping for groceries, preparing food for the coming week, and if there is still a little time left, you can go to some training on “success” or improve your English with a tutor. It’s strange why on Monday we don’t feel full of strength and energy.
To conclude this discussion, I would like to touch on everyday rest. In the age of gadgets and the Internet, a typical break between tasks has become being stuck on a smartphone. Perhaps I will discover America for someone now, but this is not a vacation, but an overload of the brain with information, which is accompanied by a colossal expenditure of energy. Therefore, if you are used to scrolling through your social media feed while drinking a cup of morning coffee, then don’t be surprised why you come to work already tired.
Separate work from rest
People often perceive rest periods as “spare time” to complete urgent or unfinished tasks.
❌ Didn’t write your report before lunch? Never mind, I'll write during my lunch break. Didn't finish a project at work? I’ll finish it on the weekend or in the evening when I get home, etc.
With this attitude, several problems arise at once:
- We will be left without rest regularly. It may seem to us that overwork and rush jobs are isolated phenomena, and that after them a calm period will definitely begin. Alas, most often this is not the case: people always have work.
- During rest, we cannot relax normally: we remember that at any moment some task can “attack” us
- Work becomes more unpleasant. And the point here is this: it is much easier for us to decide on “shock work” if we know for sure that rest will definitely follow. If we do not have such a guarantee, we inevitably begin to experience internal resistance.
To avoid these problems, rest should be treated as a “sacred cow” that no one has the right to encroach on, including ourselves. Think of periods of work and rest as two different times that never, under any circumstances, overlap with each other:
In order for us to fully recover, hours of rest should become for us a reliable shelter from any stress and problems.
Take advantage of all types of recreation
Another dubious statement goes like this:
❌ Why do I need a vacation? After all, I have days off!
Alternatively: why should I give myself a weekend if I already rest every evening?
People think that fatigue is something like a decrease in battery charge. Like, just charge the battery in any available way and they will be fine again.
In fact, fatigue is not just a “dead battery”, but a very complex phenomenon that has many levels and varieties. The everyday word “fatigue” can hide anything: from simple muscle fatigue to professional burnout.
We need different types of rest in order to “relieve” different levels of fatigue. For example, short breaks restore our levels of neurotransmitters, vacations relieve us of “background stress,” weekends serve to prevent chronic fatigue, etc.
When we ignore some type of rest, we risk not noticing one of the levels of fatigue, undermining our health and “earning” overwork.
Effective Relaxation Techniques
There are practical tips that will tell you how to learn to rest and relax:
- one hour rule. When you spend time with your family, allow each family member to decide how everyone will relax for an hour. For example, the son will offer to play badminton, and the wife will offer to bake cupcakes together. So everyone will relax in their favorite way and try others;
- think about childhood. Remember what you loved to do most as a child. Try to adapt these activities and repeat them as an adult. You will learn a lot of new and interesting things about yourself;
- go to nature. This is a win-win for almost anyone. Most researchers believe that such a pastime promotes relaxation;
- change your view of the world. Try to look at familiar things differently. Walk home along a different street, cook a new dish and read a book of an unusual genre!
Change activities
Everyone knows that the best rest is a change of activity. However, on “self-development sites” you can sometimes find rather strange passages about the “right” and “wrong” rest. For example:
❌ People prefer to lie down, sleep, idle, watch TV on weekends. It is not right! You need to play sports, ride a bike, walk a lot, blah blah blah.
But let’s imagine that a visitor to this site worked all week at a construction site or stood behind a counter. And then they advise him: go ahead, my friend, ride a bike and have an active rest. He wants to lie down... Look what he's up to!
All this, of course, is complete nonsense: there are no and cannot be “universal and only correct” ways of relaxation. The preferred rest option completely depends on the work being performed and, as a rule, is its complete opposite. Below are examples of successful and unsuccessful decisions:
Everything is simple here: what was tense should relax, and what was relaxed should work a little. This rule is relevant both for the micro level (breaks, leisure hours) and for the macro level (weekends, vacation).
Change the context
Context is the conditions and circumstances in which a task is performed. For example, if we are writing a report on work, the context for this task will be the office, the computer, the Word program and the colleagues sitting next to us.
In time management, contexts are usually used to schedule tasks (read more about this here). But in our case, another feature of them is more interesting, namely: the ability to tune the brain to a certain type of activity.
The contexts we deal with in everyday life give us clear associations with specific activities. For example:
The problem is that when we are in the context of work, we cannot completely relax. Our brain is already accustomed to the fact that under these conditions it has to engage in certain tasks and automatically adjusts to completing them. Even if we do nothing at such moments, we are still tense and in a state of “combat readiness.”
To fully recover, try to change your environment as much as possible during your rest period. It should not be associated with work and “stress.” For example, if you work in an office, go outside or visit the nearest cafe. If you are unable to leave your workplace, then look out the window for a few seconds or at least minimize the program in which you usually work.
Replenishment of the missing
Conventionally, we can distinguish the physical, mental and emotional (or spiritual) components of our body, which require restoration. At the same time, overload in one area will always be felt as fatigue.
After intense intellectual work or during a period of emotional burnout, physical activity will give new strength. The so-called muscle joy arises from the fact that blood flows more actively through the body, improving physical condition. And the relaxation that comes after muscle tension is what is sorely lacking at the end of the working day. You can add food to your mind by starting to study a foreign language, and films, books, trips and pleasant communication will add new feelings.
Keeping all three parts in balance will give the necessary vigor. And for this, do not forget about the following rule.
