Five (Really Good) Reasons to Prioritize Rest Over Work
TLDR: Prioritizing rest and setting boundaries around it for yourself makes for a better experience of life. It allows you to develop the habits needed for a long, healthy career that includes interchanging periods of hard work and recovery.
Choosing to slow down, take a break, or just rest for a minute is hard at any stage of your career. But it feels especially precarious at the beginning. Which is why a recent HBR article encouraging young professionals to prioritize rest gave me pause. I agree, because I’ve done all the research and read all the books and know how essential rest is for success in your career AND a fulfilling life. But I also know how hard it can feel, really at any age, to prioritize rest much less when you’re at the bottom of the seniority totem pole.
But they aren’t wrong and not just for early career folks. Rest can be a career super power when you prioritize it effectively. Here are five reasons to start prioritizing it today at any stage in your career.
A rested mind is more effective, creative, and impactful
This is one of the number one lessons we teach in our workshops. Rest makes you better at your job. All those people bragging about work late nights and weekends are actually just showing you how inefficient they are as workers and wasting their one wild and precious life burning the midnight oil instead of touching grass from time to time. Stepping away from work can stimulate creative thinking, it can lead to new ideas and innovative solutions. Our favourite writer on the topic, Tricia Hersey, says a portal opens when you slow down. It gives you so much access to a deeper experience of life and work.
Prioritizing rest forces you to practice boundaries
And a boundaried person is a person who is living more honestly and fully in themselves. It allows you to work a muscle that is valuable to have across all elements of your life. According to researchers Ioana Lupu and Marcello Russo, setting boundaries around rest allows you to take back control of your time—it forces you to practice communicating with your colleagues, and learning to say no. All so valuable across the lifespan of a career
Helps you avoid burnout
This one speaks for itself, but just to reinforce, you’re less likely to burnout and experience the financial and emotional setbacks that come with it if you give yourself time to rest and restore. Because true rest isn’t just about getting enough sleep, it’s engaging with the seven types of rest to plug the hole on your energy usage and then doing activities that fill you back up. There are two parts of rest and both are essential.
Improves cognitive funtion
Your brain works better when it’s rested. Yes, it’s more creative as we mentioned above, but it also just functions more efficiently. Rest is efficient. Getting good rest sharpens your cognitive abilities including memory retention, concentration, and problem-solving. It also improves your mental clarity, and perform better in both professional and personal tasks.
Reduces stress and anxiety and improves your mood
Three for the price of just making space to breathe or stretch or nap each day. Finding time to rest helps lower levels of the stress hormones, cortisol. When you are well-rested, you are more likely to experience positive emotions and a greater sense of well-being combatting anxiety and the stress that causes it. This is life enhancing in profound ways.
We were made for rest. It makes our lives better and contributes to a better life. But it is a countercultural habit, which means you have to work to integrate it into your working life at any stage of your career. And the sooner you do, the sooner you get to reap these essential benefits. Get a Re-Work Equation workbook for more guidance on integrating rest into your work life.
