What Is Rest, Anyway?
Between making time for work, family, friends, exercise, chores, shopping—the list goes on and on—it can feel like a huge accomplishment to just take a few minutes to read a book or watch TV before bed. All that busyness can lead to poor sleep quality when we finally do get to put our head down.
How does our relationship with rest affect our ability to gain real benefits from it? And how can we use our free time to rest in a culture that often moralizes rest as laziness? Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of several books on rest and director of global programs at 4 Day Week Global, explains what rest is and how anyone can start doing it more effectively.
Listen to the conversation here:
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The following transcript has been edited for clarity:
Ian Bogost: You know, Becca, even though I rest in the sense of going sideways and unconscious at night, I don’t feel like I rest enough. Or maybe that I don’t rest properly. I mean, maybe I don’t even know what rest is, even.
Becca Rashid: Same for me. I feel like between sleep and work, those breaks that I need have never really been incorporated in my life.
Bogost: You know, I was thinking about it, Becca: Rest is really a cornerstone concept in Western civilization. Like, it’s in the Bible. Right at the start of Genesis, there’s supposed to be a Sabbath—a day of rest, a break from making and using to doing something else. And what is that something else? You know, in the religious sense, it’s a time for worship, for God. And in that sense, it’s not like “rest” is a break, exactly. It’s more like a structure, like an organizing principle. Like: Here’s a thing you need in order to make the rest of your life operate.
Rashid: I mean, the mainstream sort of American Protestant work ethic implies that rest needs to be more than just rest. You know, it’s working toward other must-dos. The day of Sabbath is for rest and worship, going to church, serving the community, serving your family. Right?
And if we’re literally talking about sleep as rest, that’s one thing. And many of us probably wish we could find more hours. And studies show only a third of Americans report feeling they got quality sleep.
Bogost: Not surprising.
Rashid: Not surprising at all, with younger adults and women more likely than others to report trouble sleeping. Those groups are actually more affected by their quality of sleep, you know, giving ourselves opportunities to rest. I’m curious about whether we have to justify it to ourselves when we rest as something we deserve instead of something we need.
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Rashid: Welcome to How to Keep Time. I’m Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show.
Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.
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At least a space is opening up for thinking differently about the relationship between work and time and productivity, and
