Rest is Radical Two!

Remember the notion that “rest is a radical act?” Have you become more radical since we last looked at this? As Brené Brown says, rest is counter to the culture, and all the more valuable for that.

I want to return to this topic, slap bang in the middle of looking at resistance training, because, as with HIIT and SIT, it’s actually in the pausing that the magic happens.

When we lift heavy weights, and cause that micro trauma, those micro-tears, it’s the repairing that causes the increased strength, and the repair only happens when the body is given the time and the space to do so.

When we push ourselves hard with the High Intensity work, it’s in the adaptations that follow where we get the gains.

If we push ourselves too hard, do high intensity every day, or run for too long, we cause a rise in cortisol, and this essentially puts our body more into a survive mode, whereas we really want to be thriving!

But I also want to look at rest because it is super important whether we are trying to build muscle or boost our metabolism, or not. It’s important because - well, I was going to say that when we slow down and step back we gain perspective, we get some clarity, we sometimes have wonderful new ideas - but all of these are in a way justifications for rest. We can justify taking time out because by doing so we can be more productive - but that’s still just buying into the same paradigm of everything -including rest - needing to serve a purpose. What if we simply rest because it feels good, or we just want to?

We deserve better than taking rest so we can continue on the never-ending grind wheel of productivity - even if many of us are not even getting enough rest to enable that!

Having said that, prolonged inactivity is actually brutal on the body, and the amount of movement we need daily just to keep the wheels running smoothly, so to speak, is more than a lot of people get.

What athletes do as “active recovery” would be something many of us would need to recover from!

So it can be hard to judge, and of course we feel tired as a result of inactivity and lack of fitness and we feel tired as a result of too much activity and work!

This is where those apps that measure your stress, strain, recovery levels and so on can come in handy, especially if you are the sort of person apt to push yourself too hard, as well as if you’re the sort of person that tends not to push yourself at all. If you are the sort of person who is really good at judging when you need to push and when you need to rest - well done! You probably don’t need any external assistance!

Of course, sometimes it doesn’t feel at all like we have a choice around how hard we push ourselves, and the demands made on us can certainly make finding time to rest and take care of ourselves super challenging.

I have known this first hand in the past when I was insanely busy, and I find myself again at a time in my life when I have very little free time and have to be strict about getting things done even when I don’t feel like it.

So all this talk about rest is a huge Note to Self, which I am barely in a position to heed, flat out as I am right now and for the next wee while.

First of all, this whole endeavour has turned out to be a hungry beast to feed! Regular content generation requires quite a lot of time, and ironically I am exercising less since I started Thorny Rose Wellness than I was before (although that is about to change as I am devising a fairly intense 12 week plan for myself to get my fitness level up for the Final Urban Combatives Stress Test in October)! I am still eating very well, and I still get some decent exercise in with my Personal Training sessions. But training to be an Urban Combatives Instructor, is HARD, and takes a lot of mental application. I’m also mother to two teenagers, look after my elderly mum, and so on and so on and so on.

Why do I mention all that? I guess because when I’m encouraging us all to consider resting more, I’m not doing it from the position of a lady of leisure, and I know how hard it can be - especially at certain times of our lives and as women - to take some time out. But I do feel I’m getting better at it, and even though I do have a lot on my plate, it’s nothing compared to what it would be if I hadn’t worked on my ability to say no. I also gladly take time to rest whenever I get the chance, and I’m almost getting to the stage where I don’t even bother to justify it to myself.

What about you? Is rest - or leisure, down time, recreation, recuperation - something you have in your life, or a fantastical dream? Is there genuinely a time in your future when you will have more time (I definitely will when the Urban Combatives Instructor Development Program is finished, but I shouldn’t overestimate how much), or are you succumbing to the popular optimistic assumption that there will be more time in the future?

If you feel you aren’t getting enough “empty space” in your life, there’s a lot to be said for some radical overhauling of your diary and commitments. If you have too much physical clutter, getting more storage isn’t really the answer - it makes sense to have less stuff to store. If you have too much “time clutter” much the same is true: it’s not about becoming more efficient with how you manage time, so much as having fewer things to juggle into the diary. I know commitments such as caring for elderly relatives are challenging, and “pruning” what we do for others is easier said than done, but anything that someone else could do is worth considering.

Just as a side note, if you have a role on a committee of some kind and you have expressed that you would like to give up that role, it is better to set a date that you will leave, rather than say “when you find someone else” - otherwise you will be doing that role a looooooong long time!


When we last looked at this topic, we talked about the fact that even fun things take energy. This is well known to those with CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) - pacing means needing to factor in recovery time as much for “recreational” activities as “work” ones.

Or you’ve heard that old adage “make your passion your work and you’ll never have to work another day in your life” or some such, which implies heavily that work has to be something you don’t enjoy doing in order to count. I’ve known people refuse pay for something because they enjoyed doing it.

Or have you ever heard someone claim as a hobby something that you consider to be a chore? Like cooking? Or even cleaning.

In fairness, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone claim “laundry” as a hobby, but I do quite enjoy ironing and I aspire to being the sort of person with ironed tea towels. One day.

What I’m getting at, is that two different people can see the same activity very differently, and sometimes shifting our perspective can make the difference between an activity feeling restful and restorative or aggravating.

For instance, I convinced myself that I had the “day off” recently, even though I did four hours of Thorny Rose, a thousand loads of laundry, and cooked dinner. What I didn’t have is any timetabled activities, and I really enjoyed the work I was doing on Thorny. Additionally, I got to spend some time knitting a project that, for various reasons I won’t go into, felt rebellious! This gave me a disproportionate amount of joy, I would say!

(I’m happy to go into it if you ask, it’s just not central to the theme of this article!)

What changes that perspective for you? I have identified a few ideas, and I wonder if they’ll resonate with you. Have you found yourself enjoying something you didn’t expect to, or feeling put upon doing something that most people would expect you to enjoy?

I think exercise is one of those areas that widely divides people - between those sporty types who readily engage in all sorts of physical activities, and those who do it because they know it’s good for them, but see it more as a necessary evil than a thing to enjoy. A lot of this seems to be down to the individual’s physiological response (especially the release of dopamine, serotonin and cannabinoids - which have to be a bonus if you get them), but also, surely, social conditioning, and whether you grew up in an active family - especially a recreationally active family).

Much to my surprise, I did actually enjoy running this half marathon, and not just when it ended!

I think I’ll always be an advocate of uncomplicating our lives, but sometimes if you can’t change things, changing your perspective on them can make all the difference.

Here are some of the things that I have found affect my perspective on how regenerative/restful/restorative we might find an activity:

Choice - do you “have” to do it or did you choose to? Arguably we always have the choice, but it can be very much a “Hobson’s Choice” (“an apparently free choice when there is no real alternative, or the necessity of accepting one or more equally objectionable alternatives”). Yes, you can choose not to go to work but existing without any money is a difficult consequence to live with. For me, feeling like I don’t have the choice is one of my biggest stressors, so making sure certain people know what I consider to be optional can help! In terms of perspective, however, realising when you do indeed have meaningful choices can sometimes reveal that it is actually something you want to do.

It’s all relative - as in, when you’ve been flat out, having a “regrouping” day can seem very restorative, even though you might be doing seemingly very mundane things. Like making your own tea after months of being trapped under a baby, or when you get to go on a long drive on your own and listen to what you want to listen to, especially if that’s your own thoughts! Regrouping, making tea, and driving are not necessarily inherently restful activities, but they can certainly seem so under certain circumstances. Mucking out a field isn't restful, but doing it without a baby on your back feels much easier!

Slow - a sense of having enough time to do it slowly and mindfully. It’s a different activity making a spice mixture or a pesto in a pestle and mortar rather than a food processor. Cleaning a house with the luxury of time can be quite pleasant compared to the mad panic because people are coming around soon and you don’t want them to see how you really live.

Doing something to make you feel good - such as moving your body after a time of inactivity. My clients at the Studio often comment on how good they feel after a session

Focussing on the end result - how lovely it will be when the place is tidier, that sort of thing, or how nice it would be to have ironed tea towels. Sometimes noticing that what you are doing now has a direct impact on your future self can turn something that felt like drudgery into a gift to the future you.

Unallocated Time - time that you have at your disposal to do whatever regenerative, restorative, recuperative activity that feels the most nourishing to you

Balance - I’m convinced that very often the difference between things being really good or not being really good is just a question of degree, and that degree can be quite small. When you are flat out, you might dream of having a long stretch of uninterrupted time to do whatever it is you want to do with it, but sometimes when you have too much unstructured time stretching out ahead of you, it can be overwhelming. You need enough time to do what is restorative to you, but more is not necessarily better. Or, you might need someone else to do the cooking 3 times a week, when they currently do it twice. That extra day might make all the difference, but you don’t need them to do it every day.

That leads me to an exercise that you may well find useful, called The Focussed Five. I’ve attached the template and the instructions here as a .pdf. Whilst this originally came from a business perspective, it has lots of applications to all sorts of areas of our lives. Within a business setting, it is often implemented within teams, so there is scope for exchanging feedback with significant people in your life, if you are all willing and brave enough!

As ever, let me know how you get on, and do be in touch if there is something specific you would like me to cover!