If you’re planning to recharge your batteries, resting doesn’t come naturally to most of us. In fact, in a world addicted to ‘doing’ it pays to be very deliberate in how you go about resting. If not, our time-off never converts into time-OUT……and it’s the time out that our brains and bodies really need to fully recharge. We have to ‘work’ at rest to reap the benefits.
Most of us feel guilty when we take time off. That’s because we don’t think that ‘doing very little’ is productive time. It turns out that the opposite is true. Just like when we sleep, our brains do a lot of unconscious sorting of all the stuff that’s been backing-up for weeks whilst we’ve been smashing our mental batteries at work. Our brains and bodies need downtime to catch-up and to get ready to go again when we return.
Most of us think about work whilst we’re away. That’s only natural given how much time we spend at work. But in can be helpful to ‘catch yourself in the act’ and decide whether those work-related thoughts can be put on hold OR whether you decide to move out of rest mode for a brief time to capture your thinking and ideas.
If you do move out of rest mode, be conscious that you are doing so and commit to move back into it after you’ve dealt with the work stuff. Many of us wobble constantly back and forth between work and rest modes when we’re on holiday, which means that we don’t do either mode very effectively.
The same goes for work related thoughts and worries. Don’t dwell on these, commit to work on them for a brief period, or park them until your return from holiday.
In the modern world, rest is a skillset like any other. It takes deliberate effort. And you thought it was all about laying on a beach.