In a culture that values productivity, perfection, and persistence, of course we find individuals experiencing a lack of self worth, and anxiety that includes negative self talk.
This week, I am responding to Glennon Doyle's podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, episode 139, "No More Grind: How to Finally Rest with Tricia Hersey"
Give it a listen, because their conversation is worth the time. Tricia Hersey recently wrote a book called, Rest is Resistance. It sounds like she is doing amazing things to change the dialogue around rest, to go against the culture of labor and productivity. I want to focus on the mental health aspect, and the impact of rest in treatment of anxiety.
Let's pause and identify the problem. Would you consider yourself an anxious person? Do you describe yourself as someone who has a difficult time resting? Are you someone who puts
other people and their needs before yours? When you think about rest do you find yourself saying, 'once I finish____then I can rest'? Do you feel guilty when resting, do you feel like you have to do something with your hands while you are resting?
Or maybe you value your busyness, and view it as social status. After all, that is the goal of our culture right now, containing messages like "Be productive, be busy, if you're not busy you are lazy," "go, go, go until you drop with exhaustion," "once you are burnt out, then you can rest." Our culture has taken a huge tole not only on what we do with our time, but our identity and our self worth.
You are not a machine, you are human, a human being, not a human doing.
My suggestion along with Tricia Hersey, is that it is necessary as a human being to rest. Prioritizing rest will not be easy because of this culture that we live in. It requires courage, and healing to retrain our brains to create space and slow down.
People often look at me funny when I tell them that one of my approaches to treating anxiety is self compassion and kindness. This comes from a DBT informed approach paired with attachment theory. Our anxiety is trying to keep us safe and help us survive, and our negative intrusive thoughts keep us in line (with the grind culture). So it takes great courage to face our anxiety and those negative thoughts, to say,
"thank you for keeping me safe" and "I am going to choose to slow down, let the chips fall where they may."
We are not made to go as fast as we are expecting ourselves to go. We have become experts at tuning things and people out so that we can become faster and more efficient.
Well, life isn't efficient, relationships aren't efficient, because we are not machines and that is wonderful.
We have senses, we can slow down and feel the breeze on our face, we can taste a crisp fresh apple, we can take 10min to close our eyes and just rest. When we close our eyes, and let our brain sleep or rest our eyes, our mind is able to process information and emotions fully. My encouragement to you today is to listen to the podcast if you can, and reflect on why rest is important for you today, and then from that perspective gently add a few minutes of rest and/or mindfulness to your day.
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