Ever since I was a kid, Saturday has been rest day. In primary school (Years Kindy to 6), this was sometimes a bummer: there were a whole range of secular activities our family didn’t engage in on a Saturday, so it felt sometimes like we were missing out on bonding with our friends.
High school was easier from this perspective, and my friends were always very respectful and supportive of what I could or couldn’t do on a Saturday – and with a growing chore-and-homework load, the ability to say (even to my parents), ‘Oh, I’m SO sorry, I can’t do that, it’s Saturday’ was actually kind of dreamy. (Though this was definitely a family-wide thing, so pretty much the only chores that were done on Saturday were the absolutely necessary daily ones.)
I’m writing about this because it came up in my Insta stories this week: the importance of rest, of how having a day designated for STOP has literally been what’s saved my sanity through the burnout of the last six years.
It’s interesting, though, because when I recommend this to people who haven’t grow up with a Designated Rest Period, the reaction is *always*, “Oh, I don’t have time for that.” Which is fundamentally missing the point. This kind of rest is, as Hilary Rushford aptly writes, ‘slowing down to speed up’. You can definitely get places and achieve things by throwing yourself headlong at the fray, never stopping to assess or reflect or adjust… But you can just as easily spend your life, your energy, your self battering at a brick wall until you’re bloody and bruised if you don’t stop to assess, or reflect, or adjust.
Likewise, even professional athletes have rest days to allow their muscles recovery time, and I don’t think anyone sensible would be accusing them of not spending their time wisely, of telling an athlete that they ‘don’t have time’ for a rest day – because we know the result of the athlete not taking that rest day is likely to be injury, not greater productivity.
And yet, over and over and over again, we force ourselves to our limits, push our brain past the point of the rest it’s truly craving, trick ourselves with the lie that more done now is more done, rather than facing the truth that more done now means less done later.
Ask me how I know.
ADHD means I’m extremely well equipped to ignore my body’s needs. It means I spent six (or maybe more??) years working long past my reserves, fooling myself into thinking that if I just hustled *now*, I’d reach a point where I could work at a sensible pace *then*.
Surprise! All I did was induce burnout that’s left me incapable of even reading a book cover to cover, because my brain is so damn tired. Increased productivity *then* has resulted in a greater need to rest *now* – and I’m so, so grateful for a job that respects my work-life balance, and so, so confronted by the fact that now, in this season, my job is doing a better job of respecting my boundaries than I am 😛 Impatience, yo.
Which is not to say I never ever ever did Working Things on a Saturday, I totally have, especially in peak periods of freneticness when I knew I’d just lie around stressing about The Deadlines anyway and not rest. I’m not sure I made the right choice; I don’t exactly *regret* those days now, but I’m not proud of them, either. They represent a fundamental breakdown of my boundaries and, if anything, strengthen my resolve to protect my Saturdays even further, because I caught glimpses of how much worse I’d be if I applied Hustle Mentality *seven* days a week instead of just six and oh boy do I not want to go there.
I don’t want to hustle anywhere, these days.
I don’t mean I don’t want to work hard and achieve things; I suspect you know me well enough to see that that will never be my style. I just mean I’m not interested in *hustle*. The 24/7 lifestyle (for which I accidentally typed 25/7 and yeah wow does it definitely feel like that when you’re riding that particular hamster wheel).
…Which, of course, it’s 9:30pm on a day off and I’ve spent it doing publishing and/or editing things from dawn to dusk (although I did play board games with the kids this morning), and I *was* going to spend some more time doing worky things but you know what? I’ve convinced/reminded myself: it’s time to rest.
These days, I’m trying to let that experience of rest, that placing of value on restoration, on strategic thinking, on essentialism – I’m aiming to let that pervade the rest of my week. May the peaceful part of my life be the part that takes over – no longer will the hustle take over the peace.
Anyway, if you don’t have set time aside in your week to rest and Avoid All Work, I definitely A++ recommend it. And I recommend having the *same* time each week, even if it’s just a couple of hours, because it’s harder to argue with yourself if it’s a set routine, and harder for values creep to let the hustle overtake the extremely necessary and highly vital for survival designated peace time.
In the meantime, I’m going to go wind down for bed and once more practice my patience 😉 <3