A few years back, Alex Pang wrote a ground-breaking book about the the importance of rest, called Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, which is now in its second edition. I cited several books on rest in my new book ACT for Burnout, including this one!
I think a lot about the relationship between burnout and rest. One thing I’ve noticed is that when people are under chronic stress, they often struggle to make time for rest. They may feel as if they can’t, or shouldn’t, stop working. They worry about balls that will drop if they stop, or about the catch-up later. If they do try to rest, they may feel too preoccupied by work to enjoy it. Rest does not sound possible or even pleasant in these circumstances.
But not taking any time to rest can lead to more stress, and ultimately lead to exhaustion and burnout.
I was curious to hear Alex’s thoughts on the relationship between burnout and rest, and to “pick his brain” for some strategies to help stressed and exhausted people get some real rest. The following Q&A post is excerpted from our conversation (with some editing for brevity and clarity). If you want to watch a video of the full conversation, just scroll down to the bottom of the post!
Why is Rest Both Important and Hard When People are Stressed?
Debbie: We wanted to chat today about the relationship between burnout and rest. One thing that I've observed both in my own life and also with people I've talked to is that burnout always happens in the context of chronic stress, and one thing that I've noticed is that when people are under stress, a lot of times they don't rest. It's just very hard to slow down and take time to do that. And so I want to talk to you, Alex, about first of all, the relationship between the two, between rest and burnout, and then also why is that hard for people to rest when sometimes rest is the thing that we really need the most to sustain us?
Alex: One of the things that I observed when I was researching the book was that a lot of the people who I talk about, who include Nobel Prize winners and famous authors and some very, very smart people, an awful lot of them have to learn about rest the hard way. They work enormously long hours in their twenties or their thirties, and they are living the stereotype of the passionate artist or scientist who was fully absorbed in their work, et cetera, to the exclusion of everything else.
And then they hit a wall and there is a health crisis or some kind of breakdown that makes them realize that this worked when I was 22, but this isn't going to work any longer. And you have to figure out a different way of operating that allows you to continue to work at a high level without it burning you out.
“You have to figure out a different way of operating that allows you to continue to work at a high level without it burning you out.”
I think for some of these people, it's almost like genius is a terminal condition. For some of them, passion doesn't really care what it does to you. It just wants to do the work. And if that means ruining your health, or your relationships, it doesn't care. It just wants to produce the next book or the next discovery.
And so the challenge at a certain point in your life is figuring out how to live with it. And the thing that I see is folks taking a step back and really developing a set of routines at the daily level, but also across bigger timeframes that make that intentionally make room for rest.
If you look at their daily schedules, very often they're layering periods of deep focused work, and then taking a long break, going for a walk, or working in the garden, or doing something that's quite different than going back to work. Doing it another couple hours, taking another break. And for a lot of them that's pretty much their day.
And so, it turns out, that kind of routine where you stack those periods is both good for just giving your eyes a break, your brain a break and letting you recharge the batteries a little bit. But it's also good because it gives your creative subconscious an opportunity to turn over and work on problems that you haven't been able to solve just sitting and staring at a screen. It's an opportunity for that more unpredictable creative side of you to take up these unsolved problems and work on them, even while you are doing something else.
I think you also see things like people having better boundaries between work time and non-work time. ER nurses or people in highly stressful jobs with unpredictable hours, the ones who do this for a long time and don't burn out, they're good at turning off when they leave work, in part because they have other things, right? They've got hobbies or other kinds of activities that occupy their mind and attention and time. So it's not just you leave work and shut your brain down. It's really valuable to have some kind of other thing that you do.
And then you get to the question of why we're not very good in conditions of overwork or stress of taking those breaks. Our brains are actually really bad, when we're tired, at knowing just how much our performance has degraded and how much we need a break. In a sense, our capacity for that sort of reflection and regulation is greatly affected by the thing that we need the break from.
And so what you need to do is already have a practice in place, already have a schedule. So that either that helps you be less likely to get into that situation in the first place, or after a long shift in the hospital or wherever you’re working, having a thing that is already set up in your day, that you can then move onto that's different from work. It sounds almost comically simple to say, that making rest a part of your daily routine is one of the keys, but this is one of the really important things that incredibly smart people discover they have to do in order to make it work.
And I kind of feel like, if this is what Einstein and John von Neumann and Toni Morrison had to do in order to de-stress, or to prevent themselves from sort of burning out, okay, I can take a page from that. I'll never write Beloved, but there are other things that she did that maybe I can imitate and learn from.
Debbie: Yeah, so often we're just so in the weeds of whatever's stressing us out so much that we don't notice that we're burned out until it’s too late. And I do like to remind myself that there are people out there doing very important things — running governments, winning Nobel Prizes — who find time to rest. And if they can, surely I can find some time for that in my own life!
Burnout Can Be An Indicator That We Need Rest
Debbie: In my book, I write about how burnout can sometimes force people to take a look at their life, and their priorities. Do I need to change something? Burnout can be an indicator for people that something needs to change. Sometimes it's not until we burn out that we have that reckoning with ourselves. And people might say, wow, I'm exhausted. A big one that people might notice is, I'm just working all the time. I'm not resting. I'm constantly busy, and that's the thing that I need to change. I need to rest.
Alex: Mm-Hmm. I wouldn't say that burnout is ever good thing, but it's also not completely negative.
I had exactly the same kind of experience. I live in Silicon Valley. I was working as a technology forecaster and consultant, and it's the kind of work where you don't say no to a client. You always take on too much because it's a feast or famine business. And it's also really, really interesting. And so under those circumstances, that combination of inherent interest, client service, et cetera, all make it really easy to put yourself in a situation where you overwork. I think for me, it did both get me to do some reevaluating, to realize that the habits that I had developed when I was younger, in graduate school or early in my career, were ones that I had thought were advancing my career and professional life, but probably were things that I did despite success rather than because of it.
We are so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as always having to be more productive. The idea that we can, take some of our experience and just reclaim it for ourselves rather than give it to two more pages of a report - it requires a little bit of rethinking.
But I think also that one of the other things after burnout is recognizing that you really have to play a long game. That you can make choices in how you work that make it possible for you to continue to do this thing that you like to do for decades, rather than do it for a couple more years and then break completely.
And I think that if you think of yourself as someone who you know loves what they do, it seems to me it makes sense to want to do it for a long time rather than a short time. But in order to do that you have to be intentional about how you work. And order to put into place those structures that when you get to the point where you're having trouble making decisions or making the choice about do you go for the walk, or go to the gym, or keep working, you've already made that decision for your future fatigued self so that your future self will be able to choose the better path rather than the worst one.
Debbie: Pacing yourself, right? You can't sustain a sprint forever, so you have to look at the long term and pace yourself.
Cultural Narratives About Work and Rest
Debbie: You mentioned about how we think about work and about rest, and I like that the narrative is changing. Your book is an important voice about the importance of rest and why rest matters. Tricia Hersey's book, Rest Is Resistance. Devin Price's book Laziness Does Not Exist. I think there's some questioning of some of the narratives that many of us learned growing up. I mean, most Americans have heard narratives about work and our value being tied to productivity and not being lazy, and laziness is bad, and resting is lazy.
I think it's interesting that there is a bit of a shift in perspective on that and that people are starting to recognize rest is valuable and important. And I think these are some deeply ingrained messages that we get, culturally.
Alex: I agree completely. And I think it's also worth remembering that the Puritans had a really strong work ethic, but they also took the Sabbath really, really seriously. They had a day in the week in which they were commanded to rest, and that…
Debbie: That’s a good point! They get a bad rap about their Puritan work ethic, but they actually did rest.
Alex: Exactly. There is a strain of thinking in American culture that acknowledges the value of both hard work and of breaks from work. And that it has always been the case that some of us were better at acknowledging the first rather than the second, taking a less balanced approach to these things.
William James talked about this, you know, the Harvard philosopher in the 1890s, about this American ailment. In contrast to the Europeans, who were much more measured and balanced in how they worked. The idea that part of what makes you successful is this capacity to balance work and rest has been replaced with the vision of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who sleeps under their desk, or the hedge fund person who becomes Titan rich because they're working a hundred hours a week, whether it's at the office or on their yacht or whatever, you're always wired in the markets, making deals, et cetera.
And that is not a vision that was much in the way of models for how to balance work and rest, nor is it one that's actually sustainable.
But I think that, as you say, thanks to people like Tricia Hersey, things like the pandemic, which made all of us kind of rethink the place of work in our lives, we are at a moment where there is a crack in this edifice, through which we can envision and put into place different ways of working and re-engineer the relationship between work and rest in ways that help us better manage the stress when it does come.
Types of Rest That Can Help with Stress and Burnout
Debbie: So I want to wrap up and end by talking a little bit about how to rest and give people some inspiration for things that they can do in their lives to to rest and recharge.
And I want to tell a quick story. So last Saturday was a snowstorm here in Denver. And I had some plans actually that were going to take up a big chunk of the day, and they got canceled because of the roads and the snow. And it was really nice! I stayed in my pajamas all day. It was snowy. I read books. I watched TV with my kids. I mean, it was just so cozy and relaxing. It was like the best day. And that is one way to rest, right, to just kind of chill out and stay in pajamas or relax on the couch.
But one of the things I've gotten from your work, Alex, that has really stayed with me is around how that's not the only way to recharge. There are actually a lot of different ways to recharge and sometimes the PJs might not appeal to everyone.
I'm curious about your thoughts on that and how you like to rest in your life. What are some things people might do to incorporate more rest?
Alex: First off, there's nothing wrong with a day in the PJs when the snow is falling.
Debbie: Oh, it was amazing. I'm here to tell you I felt like a new person.
Alex: But I think that one of the things that can get in the way of taking rest seriously is the idea that it is either a negative space defined by the absence of work — that it’s simply not working — or that it is entirely passive. That it's just being on the couch with a bag of salty snacks in one hand and a TV remote in the other.
But in fact, especially for people who have challenges switching off from work, the best and the most restorative kinds of rest, often, are active rather than passive. So, walks, exercise, cognitively engaging hobbies, whether that's playing musical instruments or art or such. These are things that often provide a bigger recharge and are more attractive for people who are accustomed to having busy schedules.
Winston Churchill wrote this very nice little book called Painting as a Pastime, where he argues that very busy people can't just turn off. But instead what they need for recreation is something that is just as interesting as their day jobs. And for him, as he discovered in his forties after his disastrous management of the Gallipoli campaign, and a bit of a breakdown, he discovered was painting. And you know, painting is very different from his normal political life, but it offered for him some of the same kinds of rewards of work at its best in a very different kind of medium and very different kind of timescale. This is something you see over and over again in the hobbies of very busy people,
Debbie: That's what I'm saying. If Winston Churchill can find time to paint while he's leading Britain during World War II, surely I can find some time in my life here and there to rest myself, you know?
Alex: Dwight Eisenhower, when he was essentially running the war in Europe, had this little cottage that he would escape to on the weekends and apparently read cowboy novels and have American food. And this was for him, really, really restorative. And his boss, George Marshall, had basically ordered his staff to find this place for him because Eisenhower's best ideas were not the ones that Eisenhower had when he'd been working 70 or 80 hours. And Marshall said, look, the great challenge with Ike is getting him to ever slow down and take a break. You've got to be responsible for this or we're not going to win the war. So, again, if people like Churchill and Eisenhower, under very stressful conditions, can make time for this, then yeah, you think the rest of us can as well.
Finding those kinds of hobbies that give you some of the rewards of work when it goes really well is I think another really valuable thing. And it also points to a couple other things about rest, which is that, first of all, it's a bit of a skill, right? It’s something that we can all learn how to do better. And so, for those of us who are somewhat perfectionistic and default to liking a challenge, there is that element you can look to.
Debbie: Challenge yourself to get better at rest, right?
“Rest... is a skill... It’s something that we can all learn how to do better”
Alex: And finally, if you're really lucky, if you find things that provide the same kinds of satisfactions in both your work and in your downtime, then that will make your life nicer and more pleasant.
One of the things that we all look for in work, in addition to the satisfaction of helping others and the meaning that comes from doing the work, is the satisfaction of being able to exercise our abilities at a high level. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks a lot about this, and those often are things that we can also experience in serious hobbies. And so finding those means that you don't just experience that at work, but you also experience it in your rest time, which can also serve to remind you of what you like about work when it goes really well — which is valuable because work doesn't always go really well.
And so having, having something that reminds you how it feels when things are going well is, I think, a valuable reminder. And it can be good for boosting our resilience a little bit at work so that we can get through the difficult things and find again the stuff is really good.
Debbie: Yeah, that spark of vitality, I think about that a lot with burnout. When people are burned out, they're missing that spark. They're disengaged, detached, exhausted, and that spark of vitality can come in different areas of your life. It might be work sometimes, but if you're not getting vitality from your work, or if you're burnt out and you're going through a phase where you know your work is not fulfilling you in that way, you can get it in other areas of your life.
I like that idea that rest is not always lack of activity. There are activities that can be restful in their own way. So it's a good thing to remember and whatever works for you, you know what recharges you and what you find restful.
Well, it's been really fun talking to you today, Alex. This has inspired me. It's Friday we're having this conversation. I'm ready to get some rest over the weekend and, do a little bit of meaningful restful activity. And I hope others will feel the same!
Watch the Full Video of My Conversation with Alex Pang:
(Please pardon the less-than-perfect video and audio quality! I was having some technical issues.)