My new hack for productivity is rest.
After spending my Reading Week flopping from bed to couch and back again while my peers jet-setted across the country and around the world, I had plenty of time to reflect on the importance of rest. In between naps, mindless TV, and trashy novels, I realized how rare rest is, and how much I needed it.
In the constant rat-race of university life, true rest time can be hard to find. One of the joys of university is a somewhat flexible, varied schedule, but it can be difficult to draw the line between being “on,” and “off.” It’s common for myself and my classmates to pull all-nighters to get an assignment in on time or juggling intense extracurriculars which seem to bleed into every hour of the day.
Sometimes during the school year, I catch myself longing for a structured 9 to five, where work stays at work, and rest time means actual rest—not fitful afternoon naps riddled with guilt. During the school year, it’s a good night if I get five to six hours of sleep, and that’s on the higher end.
Juggling work, school, extracurriculars, social life, and some wellbeing in there for good measure isn’t easy, but it’s been a formative part of my university experience. However, it’s just not sustainable for more than six weeks at a time.
So, I decided to take my rest this Reading Week seriously—it became my full-time job.
It’s a huge privilege to have the time, space and freedom to rest, and it’s one I was immensely grateful for. I put all guilt around assignments and future worries aside and made absolute laziness my mission for the week. It changed me in more ways than one.
When I started school again on Monday, after a week of absolute zombification, I felt like a whole new person. My friends commented on it right away, saying even my skin looked different—makeup-free—my eyes more alive, and I just seemed like a person ready to tackle whatever challenge came my way.
And it wasn’t just on the outside, I felt different too. I was more confident, capable, happier and healthier. It was remarkable. I’d always known that more sleep and less stress were supposedly positive things, but figured I was too busy to make them a priority. Now, I know better.
And I’m not the only one who thinks so. I’d had the skewed perception that resting was a hindrance to my productivity, and that wasted time spent sleeping more, or relaxing for longer would eat into the hours of the day I needed for work. But resting more and reducing stress have proven to be beneficial to your brain, body, creativity, decision-making, and most surprisingly to me, productivity.
The fact I had to experience it to believe it aside—that’s a conversation between my ego and myself —I’ve now decided to start taking rest more seriously.
As fourth year draws its curtains, I’ve realized I’ll no longer be able to take six weeks on, one week off for the entirety of my adult life. So, it’s time to implement the things I learned into my day to day.
The lessons taken from burning myself out and re-charging myself up again have proven valuable. It’s transforming the very activity I saw as prohibiting my productivity into one that can enable it.
Spending an extra hour a day on rest could save me weeks down the line. I’m no mathematician, but that’s an equation I can get behind.
Tags
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be ed, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to [email protected].