Atomic Habits: Rest
Rest does not come easily to me. It takes real effort for me to secure rest of body, mind, and spirit. Here's what's working for me.
One of the atomic habits I’ve prioritized as part of my recovery from burnout is rest. Rest does not come easily to me. It takes real effort to secure rest of body, mind, and spirit. I derive a lot of meaning from accomplishment and achievement, values which energize activity. And that drive to accomplish and achieve spills over into every area of my life. “Downtime” does not come naturally to me.
Heading into my sabbatical last summer, I knew that figuring out how to reclaim rest would be one of the vital tasks for the second-half of my life. But I also knew it would be tremendously challenging. Not only am I temperamentally predisposed to avoid or minimize rest, my personal and professional lives showed no signs of easing up and accommodating my desire for increased margins.
Until recently, my approach to managing the escalating demands of my life had been to increase my capacity and efficiency. This strategy worked through most of my 20’s and 30’s, but it also created habits of overwork that eventually caught up with me. Capacities can be expanded, but they still have their limits. Somewhere in the preceding two years I reached those limits, and found myself stretched to the breaking point—mentally, spiritually, and physically. I was barely keeping my head above the water, and some days it felt like I was drowning.
After my sabbatical, I realized I needed to reclaim rest as a foundational practice in my life. But in order to reclaim rest, I knew I’d have to start small. Here’s what I’ve been focusing on over since the summer to cultivate rest of body, mind, and spirit.
Physically, I’ve been focusing on prioritizing quality sleep. My sleep cycle got messed up pretty bad after moving my mother and her husband in with our family after her cancer diagnosis. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up 4-6 times in the night from anxiety which developed into a pattern of broken sleep and sleep debt. I’ve learned a lot regarding the foundational role sleeps plays for our overall health, which has led me to invest a lot of time in rebuilding healthy sleep patterns.
Mentally, I’ve been prioritizing play. I’ve been leaning into activities that help me disengage from the all-consuming nature of my job as a pastor. It’s incredibly difficult for me to disengage from work. Burnout among pastors is very high, and a big part of that is the mental and emotional bandwidth that the job requires. For me, cultivating a hobby has been one of the few ways I can consistently find a release valve for my mind. I’ve found gaming (board games and tabletop roleplaying games) with my kids and my friends to be one of the few reliable ways I can experience a mental break from the cognitive load that builds up within me over a given week. I’m growing in my appreciate for just how critical regular times of fun and play are in supporting my mental health.
Spiritually, I’ve been prioritizing receiving God’s deep rest. I’ve been learning—maybe for the first time in an experiential way—that God is the only source of Rest. I capitalize Rest here because, while rest at the emotional, physical, and mental levels are important, there is a soul rest that undergirds them all. If we don’t regularly receive rest at that level, weariness and despondency will still overtake us.
The other day this point came into clarity as I was reading through this devotional based on the book Soul Rest: Reclaim Your Life. Return to Sabbath by author Curtis Zackery. As part of that day’s meditation, Zachery wrote the following:
“When unrest is at the soul level, it’s untouchable by traditional means. We need an ‘other than’ kind of power to remedy it.”
He continued:
“We may be tempted to believe that there are multiple ways that we can attain soul rest. Although there are many ways for us to assume a restful posture and experience temporary rest, the true source of the rest we long for comes from God, alone.”
This truth wasn’t something I had abandoned intellectually or theologically, but I had abandoned it practically. I had neglected the spiritual postures and practices that kept me receiving this truth in fullness. As a result, a deep unrest at the soul level pervaded my life despite moments of temporary respite.
Over the last number of months I’ve been learning how to restructure my life so that I can enter into this soul rest. I’m learning to receive it through unhurried times of prayer, meditation on Scripture, and private worship. In the process, I’m (re)discovering the power of Jesus’ invitation in Matthew 11:28:
““Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”
I’m learning to embrace and experience rest as a gift of God. And I’m learning that to neglect the gift is to neglect the Giver.