Creating Rest

On Stillness, Defiance, and the Art of Authoring Our Own Life

Rest is one of those concepts we think we understand, until someone asks us to define it. Then we realize we've been confusing it with sleep. Or vacation. Or the absence of work. Or collapse.

None of those are quite it.

Rest Is Not One Thing

This is the first truth worth naming: rest is plural. It takes different forms for different people, in different seasons, at different hours of the day.

What restores one person depletes another.

What counts as rest on a Tuesday may feel like effort on a Saturday.

Researcher and author Saundra Dalton-Smith, in her book Sacred Rest, identifies seven distinct types of rest that human beings need:

• Physical - the obvious one. Sleep, stillness, ease in the body.

• Mental - quieting the relentless commentary. The to-do list, the planning, the problem-solving.

• Sensory - reducing input. Screens, noise, busyness of visual field.

• Creative - permission to not produce. To absorb rather than generate.

• Emotional - release from the labor of managing how others feel, and how you present yourself feeling.

• Social - solitude, or the particular relief of company that requires nothing of you.

• Spiritual - connection to something larger. Meaning. Presence. The sense that you exist beyond your function

Most of us, when we think we are resting, are only addressing one or two of these. We take a holiday but spend it managing family dynamics and scrolling our phones. We call it rest. We come back more tired than we left.

True rest requires knowing which kind you actually need. And that, as it turns out, requires self-knowledge.

The Conditions for Rest

Rest doesn't just happen. It has conditions. And this is where it gets interesting, because many of those conditions are inner ones.

Safety. 

The nervous system cannot rest in a state of threat, real or perceived. For many people, particularly those of us who have lived with chronic stress, trauma, or environments of unpredictability, the body has learned to stay alert even when nothing is wrong. Rest, can be something that requires gentle, patient cultivation.

Permission. 

Most of us never received explicit permission to rest, especially from ourselves. We were taught that rest was earned, deserved, the reward at the end of a long enough stretch of productivity. Rest as entitlement, or as a simple human right, is a genuinely radical idea for many high-performing people.

Absence of guilt. 

Even when rest is physically available, guilt pollutes it. I should be doing something. Rest contaminated by guilt is not nourishing.

Presence. 

Perhaps the most essential condition. Rest requires being here, not planning the next thing, processing the last thing, or managing an inner monologue. This is why rest is so deeply connected to mindfulness, and why it is so hard.

Can We Practice Rest Too Hard?

Yes. Absolutely. And this is one of the most tender paradoxes of our time.

We have turned rest into a performance. A wellness practice. A productivity strategy for a more optimized return to work. We schedule our rest. We track our sleep with devices. We do breathwork correctly. We meditate with effort.

And in doing so, we recreate in rest the very condition we're trying to escape from: the anxiety of doing it right.

Jenny Odell, in How to Do Nothing, one of the most important books on rest published in recent years, argues that

the problem is not that we don't rest enough. It is that we have allowed every moment, including rest, to be colonized by productivity logic.

Even our leisure is supposed to be building something, fitness, skills, a personal brand, a better self.

True rest, she suggests, requires something almost countercultural: the willingness to simply be somewhere, without producing anything from it.

This is deeply uncomfortable for high achievers. Which is exactly why it matters.

Artists, Performers, and the Rest

Some of the most interesting perspectives on rest come from artists and performers, people who understand that the quality of their output depends entirely on the quality of their inner life.

Miles Davis was famous for the space in his music, the notes he didn't play. In interviews he spoke about the discipline of not playing, of trusting silence to do work that sound could not. Rest was not absence. It was presence of a different kind.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about the importance of patient waiting, of not forcing creative work, but creating the conditions in which it could arrive. "I live my life in widening circles," he wrote. Rest was the wide circle.

Shonda Rhimes, in Year of Yes, describes the moment she realized that her relentless productivity was a form of hiding. Rest, real rest, play, presence, required her to stop hiding behind work and face herself.

Brené Brown has spoken extensively about the relationship between rest and vulnerability, how the inability to rest is often connected to an unwillingness to be unproductive, which is itself connected to a

terror of being without value.

Matthew Walker, the sleep scientist behind Why We Sleep, makes perhaps the most unambiguous case: the brain during sleep is not inactive. It is doing some of its most essential work, consolidating memory, clearing metabolic waste, regulating emotion.

We are not resting from living when we sleep. We are doing the biological work that makes living possible.

Flow — The Rest That Isn't Rest

And then there is something that complicates everything: flow.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow states, those experiences of complete absorption where time dissolves, effort becomes effortless, and the self recedes, reveals something fascinating. Flow is not rest in the conventional sense. It is often intensely active.

But it shares with deep rest one essential quality: the absence of the self-monitoring mind.

In flow, the inner critic goes quiet. The to-do list disappears. The performance anxiety lifts. There is only the doing.

And afterward? People report feeling deeply restored. As if something has been given back to them.

This suggests that what we are truly resting from is not activity itself, it is the exhausting labor of self-consciousness. The constant management of how we appear, how we're doing, whether we're enough.

Great conversation is flow. So can be hiking, or writing, or taking photos, playing music, or losing yourself in a book. These are not rest in the Dalton-Smith sense, but research shows that when we experience Flow, our brain floods with feel-good chemicals like dopamine and endorphins, enhancing creativity, motivation, and even long-term happiness.

Creating Rest - definition

If I had to gather all of this into something:

Rest is any state in which the self-monitoring, performing, managing mind goes quiet, and something more essential is allowed to simply be.

It is not always stillness. It is not always sleep. It is sometimes taking photos. Sometimes silence. Sometimes a long walk where you stop composing emails in your head and start noticing the light.

It is deeply personal. Non-transferable. Impossible to borrow someone else's version of.

And it is, for many of us, the most countercultural thing we could possibly choose.

A Few Questions Worth Sitting With

• Which of the seven types of rest am I most depleted in right now?

• Do I rest or do I collapse?

• Where in my life do I experience flow? How often do I give myself access to it?

• What would it mean to rest without earning it first?

• If rest were a form of self-respect, what would I do differently tomorrow?

  
  

If creative leadership is about bringing things into being, maybe it's time you created rest.

Rest is not the opposite of contribution. It is the source of it. And choosing it, in a world that profits from your exhaustion, might be the most quietly radical thing you do today.

If this resonates, if you recognize yourself somewhere in these pages, I'd love to think alongside you. I work with leaders and changemakers who are ready to move from exhaustion to presence, from performing to genuinely authoring their own life.

Coaching is a co-creating partnership, a space to slow down, see clearly, and find your own way forward.

Reach out {here} or share this with someone you care about who might need to read it today.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!