Rest is important. Sleep is amazing. There are so many benefits of getting a good night’s sleep. It’s also kinda crazy how detrimental not getting enough sleep is to both your mental and physical health. Rest, sleep and peaceful downtime, is so important, but it’s easy to overlook it. Let this be your reminder to guard your rest.
I consider rest to be the state of relaxing. You aren’t pushing yourself to learn or improve or be efficient. You are letting yourself pause, slow down, and recover. Rest looks different for different people. For me, it looks like lounging about on the couch with my puppy or sleeping. For you, it might look like knitting while watching a movie or going for an evening stroll. Whichever way you prefer to rest, it’s important to make time to do it.
Work, social commitments, or any other thing we view as something to get done are often scheduled, planned, and prioritized. Rest on the other hand, is easily overlooked and forgotten because it’s not something we view as “needing to be done”. However, rest is just as important as all those “to be done” events. It’s easy to forget to take time to rest and relax when everything around us is making beeps, sending us notifications, and noisily demanding our attention. But if we don’t rest, our health starts to decline, and we begin to burnout.
It’s important to guard our rest and create quiet space in the noisy world where distractions are now available at all times in our hands. A simple way to ensure that we get rest regularly is to schedule it. It might sound silly to put a calendar block titled “rest” or “tv time do not disturb”, but if your calendar is full, that time will likely be consumed by something else if it’s not intentionally set aside for rest. Aside from blocking out time to rest, we can also turn off our phones or put it in do not disturb mode to prevent ourselves from getting distracted by notifications or other things we feel need to get done.
There will always be something to do. We must guard our rest, our do-nothing time. Without rest, we won’t be able to get as much done and our productivity will go down until we’re forced to rest as nothing is getting done anyway. One of the best ways to stay productive and efficient is to rest intentionally and regularly.
Don’t get swept away by all the noise. Guard your rest.
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