What does Rest Actually Look Like?

I realised this week that I have clearly forgotten how to rest. I know the answer to the question posed will be very different for us all but I have been thinking a lot about rest this week, partly because I am really struggling to rest constructively. I am on annual leave so that might be why it has come into focus now but actually, I have been thinking about rest and what that actually means for a while. I have been thinking about rest and recovery in running (for how that is or isn’t going, pop over to my running blog), about rest during busy work days and weeks and rest during periods of annual leave or even just weekends. The thing is, I am incredibly good at doing nothing but awful at resting. I sleep a lot, that’s probably a good thing for rest but that’s where the positives end really. I am trying to remember when I last felt properly rested and I can’t really remember. I am as prone to doom scrolling as the best of us and I can loose hours doing absolutely nothing in a pretty mindless way. I can be a bit all or nothing with pretty much everything. Running is a good example lately – back to back days, going all in for a few days or weeks and then nothing for a while. Same with yoga, the gym, strength training. It’s also the same with writing for example – lots all at once with focus that makes time vanish and then nothing…I can work long hours and then crash out. And some of this is just how I work. I like intensity and then down time, I work better in bursts, I feel sharper, more focused and frankly just better at what I do when I do it in intense bursts. The problem isn’t intensity, or the peaks and troughs. The problem is that in an academic role, in the current state of the sector, that intensity never gives. My nervous system has learned to stay at the intensity, the bursts aren’t bursts, they’re constant and the peaks aren’t followed by troughs, there’s just another peak. Downtime has all but vanished. I have forgotten how to properly rest. Maybe we all have collectively. And by rest I absolutely do not mean crashing out in front of the TV or scrolling through endless reels that tell us how to get our life back on track after a workday filled with adding more things to the to do list than you ticked off it.

So what does rest actually look like for me? Can I remember? Let’s start with running and the physical rest needed to run well. The all or nothing approach to exercise obviously doesn’t work. I used to not only know this but also understand it in a way that allowed me to listen to my body much more than I do now. Through marathon training, and particularly through the 2019 Dopey Challenge training, I really understood the difference between good tired and dangerous tired. I knew when to rest and the rest was intentional, mindful and constructive. It was build into the plan so my initial cues came from the plan but I also quickly adapted to being ok with extra rest days, shortening distances or splitting them over two runs, adjusting weights if I didn’t feel strong or doing some additional yoga if it felt good, adding some time on feet if I felt fresh. In addition, the training, even the really long miles, felt like a rest from work. The physical effort provided the counterbalance to the brain effort of work, the movement the anti-dote to sitting most of the day. I appreciate that as I am getting older and now that I am far less fit, I need to adjust the training, I need longer to recover in-between workouts, I can’t run hard on back to back days and expect to feel great. But I am struggling to settle into a rhythm that works because nothing feels quite balanced and because I don’t, on any level, feel rested. Physical rest and mental rest are so linked for me (and probably all of us) that when I am not mentally rested, I can be as physically rested as is possible but I will still feel tired, grumpy and unable to commit to the exercise. Tired for me is rarely physical – but when it is regularly, everything is better. So I think the first thing to note about rest, is that I feel most rested when I am settled into a rhythm that somehow balances work, exercise, the outdoors, whimsical play and silliness and some sort of creative outlet which could be writing or could be reading or listening to music or whatever. That balance is hard to achieve and sometimes achieving that balance feels like another thing to do which then makes it not a balance at all but a chore.

During this week off, we have been trying to sort some photos so that we might eventually catch up a bit with photo books. We have mainly been looking at the Disney photos from 2023 and 2025. What strikes me looking back at those pictures is how tired we look in both sets. In 2023 we were so tired that we didn’t start the marathon. We were dangerous tired. In 2025 we didn’t start the marathon either but we had completed the first 3 days of the Dopey Challenge. Of course for both we were under-trained but that wasn’t the main reason for not starting those races. We were not properly rested. We were dangerous tired and most of that tiredness was mental. As it happens I did injure my knee during the half in 2025. Probably not a coincidence. Anyway, on both occasions, we came back a little more rested but not re-set. On both occasions we didn’t really break the intensity cycle. I contrast that with earlier trips and maybe particularly the 2019 trip. Physically I am not sure I have ever been as tired as I was during serious Dopey training. But it was good tired. It was tired that could be slept away. It was the sort of tired that was directly linked to physical activity, not the sort of tired that just is. Of course we were physically tired after running 48.6 miles in 4 days but at the end of the trip, I also felt more rested than I probably have since then. Mentally we went into the trip far less tired and we came back rested. I think even further back to our Australia trip in 2018. We took all of July and we saw lots, experienced lots, did lots, and came home glowing and rested and happy.

Today, Friday and the last day of my week off (I am working an applicant visit day tomorrow) and I finally feel like my mind is not constantly being pulled back to work related things. Given the state of my un-rest (deliberate choice of the word here), I don’t think a week at home is enough to re-set and actually get to rest. I am still in the shutting down apps phase before you even get to full log off never mind re-start. Things that have helped me this week have been LEGO builds, focusing on being present with the cats, morning coffee outside breathing in the cool spring air and some gentle exercise. I thought I would write and read a lot more but I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel like I had the concentration. I also thought I would scroll less and play more, be more whimsical but somehow, I don’t feel like I really got there, like I really came down from the intensity of the world for that to happen. I stayed, mostly, in serious mode. A week is not enough for a system re-set. But a week is what I have had. So I do need to think about what rest looks like in the day to day. Of course that includes longer periods of not working but if I go into those, like I have into this week and so many trips over the last few years, on high alert, exhausted and stuck in intensity mode, they are not going to be enough to establish and keep a balance. It can’t be all or nothing because that’s not rest, that’s a crash. And we’ve done the burn out and crash thing a couple of times now – not fun, not something I want to repeat.

So what might rest actually look like day to day. My job is not going to get any less intense. I could of course just leave the job – and actually, I really could but bizarrely, despite everything, I don’t actually want to. I actually like quite a big proportion of my job. So if the job won’t get less intense, I need to learn to rest within that intensity. I need to look back at the things that used to work for me and re-learn them. The first is maybe to limit work to it’s place. It’s just a job. I can both care deeply about it and still see it as just a job. I am an academic. It’s part of my identity and who I am but it is not everything. I am really good at my job, sometimes maybe it’s ok to say no, to not people please and to let opportunities whoosh past in the way that generally declines do now. I think I will put a new post-it note on my computer to remind me that it is just a job. If I can contain work better, I create space for the other restful things: Having an exercise plan that is built around constructive rest (yes I know how that sounds but it works) and not giving work my best time are two obvious ones. I like early mornings, I want to spend them sipping coffee in the sun with the cats roaming around. I do not need to be at my computer at 7am. Other things I sort of reserve for days off when there really is no need. I like the play and type of concentration required by building LEGO sets. I like the whimsy of arranging the built sets in our house. We have so many large scale sets, why not have one on the go and do a little bit each day (again, it does not have to be all or nothing, I don’t have to build everything in a day!). I love how regular yoga makes me feel, so why not get on the mat every day instead of scrolling. I miss reading for pleasure. Maybe I need to buy more trashy novels to just get lost in terrible stories and accept that not every book I read has to do anything intellectual. Maybe sometimes my brain needs flawed story telling that is easy to read and requires no thought. All easily said and easily written down. Not always easy to do. A tired mind full of un-rest easily lies to us, I am easily convinced that the best place is the sofa – it probably rarely is.

To answer the question I started with, I don’t think I know what rest looks like for me at the moment. I don’t really understand the whims of this perimenopausal body, it’s energy fluctuations, random aches and pains and non existent temperature regulation. So figuring out physical rest around exercise is going to take a little time. As for mental rest and feeling rested, I need to unlearn some bad habits and re-learn some good ones. I was better at the ebbs and flows of academic life – I think maybe partly because there were ebbs and flows in the job where there are none now. But I was good at taking time back, thriving in intense periods and slowing down, being more playful in others and I did that in much shorter and sustainable cycles. Maybe it was easier in more junior and teaching focused roles than it is now, maybe the sector has got worse but the basics should still work. The intensity of the job hasn’t dropped at all since last summer, and it won’t. But mine has to. Maybe saying that out loud, putting it down here is step one to taking one little step at a time to real constructive rest that involves far less doing nothing and much more mindful and deliberate being in the doing of whimsical, playful and ultimately restful activities. The pictures dotted throughout this blog, show some of the things that made me smile and pause this week. They are the things that matter.

How do you rest? Help me learn again.