Why Must We Embrace Rest In A Productivity Obsessed Culture?
The benefit of Vitamin R- Rest, Relax, Reset, Rejuvenate, Replenish, Refresh and Reflect
If I were a doctor (which I am not), one of my diagnoses would be that we, as a culture, sometimes tend to be deficient in Vitamin R.
I would say that because we are part of the productivity and doing culture (bigger, better, more), which has ensured we’re deficient in this vitamin. We have gone a step further and labelled anything that is not productive as useless or lazy.
Vitamin R is:Rest, relax, rejuvenate, replenish, refresh, reflect and unwind) I sometimes call it Vitamin N (doing nothing or taking it easy).
Without these vitamins, we are running on empty. We use our resources on other things and have nothing for ourselves—it’s like trying to drive a car without fuel.
All machines need resources to be refilled, recharged, or maintained efficiently. If they don’t, they will stop abruptly or have problems along the way, especially when we need them the most. What makes us think that the most sophisticated machine of all–the human body can survive only with wear and tear?
Why do we need these Vitamins?
Without sufficient Vitamin R, we become like Robots or machines.
Let’s look at the life of my Roomba. The Roomba is a sophisticated robot that leaves my floors immaculate. I press the start button in the morning, and it goes on like a headless chicken with some marginal amount of intelligence. But boy, does it keep my floors sparkling!
The life we live today is similar to Roomba. We get up in the morning, press the start button, and go on non-stop with life.
We don’t ask questions. We execute without reflection. We do not ask if there are other options. We crunch the damn numbers and live like zombies, with mental lists galore. We are continuously on the checklist and go tick, tick, tick without pausing to stop and ask pertinent questions.
When I ask Roomba to do something from outside the manual, it says, ‘’It’s not my job! My job is to give you a squeaky clean house. Don’t ask me for anything not mentioned in my instruction manual!’ Like Roomba, we, too, expect an instruction manual to guide us. We don’t believe in ourselves; instead, we look up to others to guide us or seek their approval.
Human beings are more sophisticated than machines. We can think, reflect, and feel. We have inner guidance, intuition, and gut instincts but do not use all our gifts because we continuously look outside for guidance.
We are continuously in survival mode, and it wreaks the body
When anything happens too soon, fast, or too much for our body to process, digest, and integrate, we become hypervigilant and enter a survival state, and our fight-and-flight response kicks in. Constant over-productivity leads to this kind of dysfunction.
Even though our mind has probably understood and made sense of the situation, our body hasn’t. Sufficient Vitamin R can help us press the pause button in our lives, take a step back, and reassess situations better.
To understand this better, we need to understand our human nervous system. The Sympathetic Nervous system handles survival — fight or flight — to initiate action, and the Parasympathetic nervous system initiates rest. The body needs to be in harmony, doing both functions. It is like inhaling and exhaling. No one is better than the other. Both are essential and have their uses.
We cannot be in either action or rest. We need both. When we do not rest sufficiently, we swing on the extreme end of the pendulum, focused on action and productivity all day. This wreaks havoc on our nervous system. Vitamin R activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
Fear takes charge of our lives.
When we live in such a state, we stop believing in ourselves and live in fear. We don’t take risks nor do things that we love. We don’t have time to love others. We compensate it with money, status, job security, perfectionism, overwork, etc. We numb ourselves with distractions like excessive amounts of alcohol, drugs, shopping, Netflix, or social media. We continue till the day ends like zombies, and like my Roomba, we robots go back to our dock, only to start all over again tomorrow. All things on the list are done. We expect a pat on our back for a job well done.
We are constantly unhappy or feel lacklustre.
We may have it all — the friends, family, beautiful everything. But we won’t have the time to appreciate the beauty of it all because we are constantly distracted. We are so wrapped up in delivering, acquiring, safety, stability, and fear that we miss life’s simple and beautiful things.
How can we get started on taking Vitamin R?
Journaling is a good way to start on this journey. It is a method of getting in touch with yourself and getting acquainted with your thoughts, feelings, and desires. It is a method of slowing down and pressing the pause button on our lives. It allows the body to catch up, digest, process, and integrate. Journaling is meant to give you the space, reminder, and permission to take in some of those vitamins that are so needed today.
Some of my Vitamin R’s are reading, writing, going out for walks, spending time with the family, not carrying forward work on weekends, spending time in nature, exercising, etc.
Some Prompts to get started :
Do you consider taking Vitamin R irrelevant or a waste of time? What labels do you have for them?
How often in a day do you take it?
List all the ways you would like to take Vitamin R.
Do you have sufficient time to ensure that you take these?
Can you at least commit to taking a small amount of them?
We need our Vitamin R because when we have enough of it, our survival and rational brains can collaborate–instead of just one being in the driver’s seat. We operate our best when we have all our resources on the table. Will you start taking your Vitamin R
Want to learn how to make mindful decisions? Click here for Journaling with Intention — an online course or E-book that teaches Journaling Practices to clarify your desires and vision, navigate your stuck areas, and create the life you want.