How to Talk to People - Best of “How To”: Rest

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. This episode, from our fifth season, called How to Keep Time, features host Ian Bogost in conversation with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of several books on rest and a director at 4 Day Week Global. The two explore how varied understandings of rest can affect our ability to gain real benefits from it. Write to us at [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by PepsiCo. From the fields to your table, PepsiCo strives to provide food that is grown well, made well, and creates more smiles. To get a behind the scenes look at the journey from seed to smile, visit PepsiCo.com and search fans of food. Hey, it's Megan Garber,

one of the co-hosts from How to Know What's Real. We're excited to share with you a special series drawn from past seasons of the How To series. For the next few weeks, we'll be revisiting episodes around the theme of winding down, recharging, and making space for the things we care about. This episode is from season five, How to Keep Time, and is called How to Rest. Co-hosts Ian Bogast and Becca Rashid explore the effects that slowing down can have on our creativity,

and how understanding those benefits may help us learn how to rest better. You know, Becca, so even though I rest in the sense of going sideways and unconscious at night, I don't feel like I rest enough or maybe that I don't rest properly. And I mean, maybe I don't even know what rest is even. Same for me. I feel like between sleep and work, those breaks that I need have never really been incorporated

in my life. You know, I was thinking about it, Becca, and rest is really a cornerstone concept in Western civilization. Like it's in the Bible, right at the start of Genesis. There's supposed to be a Sabbath, a day of rest, a break from making and using to doing something else. And what is that something else?

In the religious sense, it's a time for worship, for God. And in that sense, it's not like rest is a break exactly. It's more like a structure, like an organizing principle. Like here's a thing you need in order to make the rest of your life operate. The mainstream sort of American Protestant work ethic implies that rest needs to be more than just rest, you know, it's working towards other must-dos. The day of Sabbath is for rest and worship,

going to church, serving the community, serving your family. And if we're literally talking about sleep as rest, that's one thing. And many of us probably wish we could find more hours in the day for that. And actually studies show only a third of Americans report feeling they got quality sleep. Sure, not surprising. Not surprising at all with younger adults and women more likely than others to report trouble sleeping and those groups are actually more affected by their quality of sleep. Giving ourselves opportunities to rest. I'm curious about whether we have to justify it to ourselves

when we rest as something we deserve instead of something we need. Welcome to How to Keep Time. I'm Becca Rashid, co-host and producer of the show. And I'm Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic. At least a space is opening up for thinking differently about the relationship between work and time and productivity and the place that rest and leisure can have in it. So Becca, Alex Sujong Kim Pong is sort of rest obsessed.

He's written a few books about the topic and one is literally called Rest. Great. I'm Alex Pong. I run programs and consulting at 40 Week Global. But of course, he himself is very productive writing all these books and talking about them and consulting. And he's not only got experience studying this stuff, but living it or trying to. What got you interested in rest?

I had been interested in kind of the psychology of creativity and what it is that helps people have insights and sort of interesting ideas. You know, when you do that work, you spend a lot of time talking about actually how people are working, right? You get into the mechanics of their labor and read their notebooks and that sort of thing and there are parts of their lives that influence creativity, and one of them is what people do with their leisure time or with that time that gives your kind of creative subconscious an opportunity to work on problems even while your conscious mind is elsewhere.

And for a long time, we thought of that as unpredictable, almost magical kind of stuff, because very often it feels that way But you know in the last 20 or so years There's been work in neuroscience and psychology that's helped us better understand What goes on in our minds and our brains when we have those ideas and how? certain kinds of rest create a fertile ground for insight and inspiration.

So you came to rest through your research on creativity. Were there particular figures? Did you have like a role model for creativity and or rest that inspired you? If I had to choose one, it would probably be Charles Darwin, partly because he is a monumentally important figure in history and the history of science.

I've heard that. You know, also because he's someone whose life is exquisitely well documented. The Cambridge Archive has 14,000 letters to and from him, and we can reconstruct with a pretty amazing degree of precision where he was, what he was doing, his daily schedule, and connect that to his creative work. Charles Darwin would work for a couple hours and then putter around in the garden, work some more, and then go on a long walk. What's important there is that it means that you are, in a sense, using two sets of creative muscles. There's your conscious mind where you're working to solve problems,

but then your unconscious is able to take over and continue thinking about things often in new ways and exploring new connections or avenues. What are some of the ways that you've seen people culturally understanding rest and how it works, especially how it's different from their initial conception that rest means sleeping or something along those lines. One important thing is recognizing rest as exercise and serious hobbies. It's somewhat an unintuitive idea of rest

that it's not necessarily related to idleness or laziness. Like what is rest actually? Maybe that's the question I wanna ask you. Yeah, so I think of rest as the time you spend recharging mental and physical batteries that you spend down working. And we often think of rest as being an entirely kind of passive thing, right? It happens on a couch with a bag of snacks in one hand, you know, and a remote in the other.

But one of the things that the working on this taught me was that actually the most restorative kinds of rest often are more active and more physical that exercise that hobbies, um, these are things that can be a source of greater restoration and both in the immediate run in terms of recharging our batteries for the afternoon and maintaining creative wellsprings over the course of our entire lives. So Alex, tell me more about what you mean here. What happens when we rest?

What are the mechanics of rest? Rest is where an awful lot of the body's maintenance work, the consolidation of memories, the literally cleaning out of bad stuff that builds up in our brain, brain plaque and that sort of thing. Brain plaque? Yeah, so, okay, so when you sleep, the brain of course has the neurons and all the cool stuff that fires up

in a FMRI machine and makes those pretty colors. But there's also a second system that does the hard maintenance work of feeding the brain, but also taking away toxins and things that build up in it. And that system is kind of dormant during the day when you're really active. But when you sleep, it lights up, activates, and does its thing. And so the theory is that one of the reasons that bad sleep is associated with things like dementia or later life cognitive issues is that that system hasn't had an opportunity

over time to sort of do the kind of repair and maintenance work that it would if you were better rested. Brain plaque. I can't wait to tell my daughter that sleep is like going to the brain dentist. There you go. Thank you for that gift. You know, Becca, we tend to treat rest as an indulgence and that that doesn't seem right. Like when I think about my friends or my colleagues, everyone seems to be talking all the time about they want a break. Oh, you know, if I can only get a break. But then when they get one, they they use it mostly just to recuperate, to like recover from all that work.

And like that kind of rest, that sort of recuperative rest, recovering from your day or your week or whatever, okay, fine, that seems necessary. But also that seems kind of bad, culturally, socially, morally even. I hope rest is more than that. Good rest would let you partake of your life and to spend time in that life. It would be like restorative rather than just recuperative.

But I mean, I still have a tendency to make rest into a sort of must do, rather than something I naturally feel like I need and my body needs. You know, I've gone through dozens of phases with my self care routines, but none have ever been rest for rest's sake. It's, this is something I know I have to do, or I'm already sick, I'm already stressed out. And especially during the work day, I mean, you know this, Ian, I don't drink water.

I struggle. This is an ongoing known problem. This is an ongoing problem, absolutely. Yes, we're trying to get you to hydrate. We're getting better at it. Like the little things to just get up from my desk, take a break. And go get some water. Go get some water, like the most basic thing. Rest at work feels so inappropriate in a way. Interesting. Even knowing when I need the rest or knowing how to do it in a way that feels genuinely

restorative and not just to keep working. Studies tell us that the average knowledge worker loses about two hours a day to overly long meetings to inefficiencies or distractions caused by technologies or poor processes. I am shocked to hear this. It totally sounds normal. And so if you can get a handle on those three things, meetings, technology and distractions,

you can actually go a long way. And so that means doing things like having better meeting discipline around the length of meetings agendas All that stuff that we all know we ought to do but but all too rarely don't it also means very often redesigning the workday to be more conscious about how you spend your time and having better boundaries between say deep focused work versus podcast recordings versus time with clients. And then finally also thinking about how you can use your technology in two ways.

First of all, to eliminate distractions, number one. And so that involves things like setting up particular times of day when you're checking email, but staying off of it the rest of the time. And then second, looking for ways in which you can augment your intelligence or your capacity to do your most interesting work. And so that's doing things like using AI research assistants or other kinds of tools

to help you be more effective at the stuff you love best. What I take away from that, Becca, is the idea that in America, the purpose of work is to be at work, not to do work. That's a reasonable criticism, right? That we're kind of cosplaying work rather than actually being effective. Maybe we would be more effective,

both in our work lives and our rest lives, if we took those breaks that appear naturally, like that time that appears when a meeting ends early. Like, you don't need to fill that up with, we'll just sit here in the meeting because it was scheduled, or, you know, I'll just do more email now.

You could just use it for nothing, or for those other activities that would rejuvenate you. Like, you could take a walk, or procure your favorite diet cola. Like, just something to give yourself a sort of sense of being in the world, not just to take care of yourself and your body, although that's part of it,

but also to punctuate the work experience so that you can then move on to the next task. Interesting. Yeah. I think some of that performative pressure makes it easier to feel overworked too, right? Because the labor is going beyond just doing your job and completing tasks, but also upkeeping some of that image

that you're constantly occupied, you're a good working person, ideal worker, as Melissa Mazmanian told us. And Ian, some recent data shows that about 59% of American workers are at least moderately burnt out, which is even more than at the peak of the pandemic. And employee engagement continues to decline. Even though we have things like sabbaticals

and things that would ideally prevent burnout, that's not available across most professions. Yeah, hardly. And most people, again, only take them after they've felt overworked or without rest for decades. Yeah, I mean, there's got to be some sort of white space between getting up from your desk to get some water and taking a sabbatical for a year, right?

Right, right. This episode is brought to you by PepsiCo. From Quaker Oats to Lay's potato chips, PepsiCo strives to provide food that is grown well, made well, and creates more smiles. Visit PepsiCo.com and search fans of food to learn more about the Seed to Smile journey. Is the only or the main purpose of rest to prepare for more work? No. I mean, I think that it is one of the things that gives rest value. And I think for lots of, you know, super busy, ambitious people, recognizing that it can help us have more productive lives and better ideas gives us permission to rest

in ways that, you know, we might not otherwise. There is a very long history across pretty much all cultures and religious traditions about things like the spiritual value of rest, right? The idea that there are connections that we can make or things we can understand about ourselves, our place in the world, the nature of our lives that only come when we're resting or, you know, when we're still. Alex, I want to ask you now about sabbaticals. And I wonder if you can start by just explaining to our listeners what a sabbatical is. A sabbatical is a period of time,

with academics, like a semester or a year, where you take off and often go somewhere else physically, and you are either learning some new set of skills or working on some other kind of you know professional development project right another book or I mean I think that the only bad sabbatical is the one that you don't take So what's the difference between a sabbatical and a and a vacation say because some of what you're describing sounds like You take time off, you know, you go somewhere else or you don't. And I don't imagine that many of our listeners

want to spend that time recharging for work. Mm-hmm, functionally, the first difference is that with sabbaticals, you have at least the kind of outline of a plan of something new that you want to learn or something else that you want to do. Vacations, you don't go into it with the assumption that you will master some new lab procedure or finish that big book that's been on your desk. But I think that in both cases, that there can be both a recharge, but also great unexpected insights or new ideas that you can have because you give yourself the time to get away and

to have a break. What's an example of one of those discoveries or new ideas that you've seen sabbaticals inspire? My favorite one is Lin-Manuel Miranda, who, you know, he talks about how he had worked on In the Heights for, you know, seven or eight years or so, pretty much nonstop. And he was finally convinced to take a vacation, and that's when he took along a copy

of the Alexander Hamilton biography. And he said, as soon as I gave my mind a break from In the Heights, Hamilton jumped into it. People who do better jobs are folks who have better boundaries around not working nights and weekends and also have other things in their lives, whether it's hobbies or families that can occupy them. You know, Ian, I wonder if what's made it hard to make rest a habit in my life is the fact that

those self-care rituals I mentioned feel so separate from anything I would naturally do to rest. Like, because there are all these images of what rest should look like, at least for women my age, it's like makeup, putting on a face mask and reading a book or taking a bubble bath or whatever sort of social media induced like ritual I'm participating in that week.

But it never becomes a habit in the way that I want. Sometimes I'll just sit down at my piano when I'm not even thinking about it and maybe an hour or two goes by and it's a sort of effortless rest because I'm both engaged and relaxed and it just requires less cognitive effort to sort of plan for my rest, you know? Yeah, that's interesting, Becca. I mean, the habit changing is a big part of this, right? Do you know this guy, James Clear? The guy who wrote Atomic Habits, yes.

Atomic Habits, sort of the king of habit building, you know, millions and millions of copies of this book sold. So certainly there's something that people find useful in it. Right. And he's got a lot of tips, but one of them that I find really interesting is that for habits to take, they have to reflect your identity more than your goals. Huh, yeah, and I think because I have this tendency

to sort of moralize rest, at least in my own life, as good or bad or productive or unproductive, I'm normally sort of averse to being told how to rest in the right way. I've noticed certain trends online, especially among teenagers, there's a certain type of rebellion against all of these self-care rules of how to rest right, you know? There's this thing called bed rotting, which has fascinated me, where teens are, yes. Bed rotting? Bed rotting.

That doesn't sound good, Becca. It's fine. The teenagers are fine. But they're just doing, maybe, they're doing nothing in bed, you know, scrolling on their phones all weekend. And that's sort of the activity. Right, right. But it's a revolt against the productive rest time where they're supposed to be doing something else, having a hobby or a side hustle or a skincare routine. Right. It fascinates me. I mean, I see it as a sort of reclaiming of rest for truly purposeless, indulgent leisure.

Well, it gets back to these ideas of like, what are the conditions under which rest is even possible? Good rest, restorative rest, like the kind that we're after. So, like, for teenagers, they generally don't get enough sleep. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been calling for later start times for school, especially for high school, for years now, at least since 2014 and long before that, I think. Because teenagers are chronically sleep deprived. If they have to wake up at six to get to school by 7.30,

partly because they go to bed late, hormonal change, and other sorts of things. But that's just a minimum requirement to operate, just getting enough sleep. It's not the end of the line when it comes to rest. So just finding the time for restorative rest, let alone knowing what that looks like for you, requires a lot of deprogramming of things that we've learned from as early as our teen years.

I mean, moving towards a place where rest is something that we know how to do, we don't feel guilty about and and we can actually enjoy, is kind of the goal for me at least. One of the cases for focus work that you make is early rising, getting up early. And I'm going to tell you, Alex, I do not like getting up in the morning. So you're going to have to sell me on this one.

What's the case for early rising? First of all, at a practical basis, nobody else is up early. If you don't like getting up, you're not going to waste that time. I am less likely to self-distract at 5 a.m. There's a lovely study that found night owls doing things in the early morning or early birds working on problems late at night tend to come up with slightly more creative solutions in those periods. So Alex are you saying that this is almost like muscle confusion or something that mixing it up with your

default chronotype the way that you would typically spend your time can lead you to use that time more restfully or more effectively? That's a great way to put it. I think that the, you know, the one other thing I would add is that this is something that really only works if you practice it and if you prepare. So, you know, prepare in the sense that one of the things that successful early risers will often do is set up everything they're gonna do the night before.

Like, you know, write down the couple of things that they're gonna do the night before. Like, you know, write down the couple things that they're gonna work on, the questions that they're gonna answer. When you are up at, you know, what, a 5 a.m., you don't have to make choices about what you're gonna work on, right? That's already been decided in advance.

That makes sense, but do people sometimes take changes in their habits with time too far? Like I saw this video of a young woman who wakes up at 3.50 in the morning to go to the gym. And it feels kind of like a competition for effectiveness. Look how much of the day and I'm squeezing activity into. Right. You know, I think that we all have to experiment

and figure out what works best for us. I'm someone who can write well in the early morning, but those times when I have gone to the gym or worked out with my kids who were both athletes in the early morning, I've slept the whole rest of the day. So it just completely wipes me out. And I think that some people see it merely as a way of stretching out the number of hours that you're going to work, rather than appreciating, you know, that there really is something about the very early hours of the day that feels different. I think there's a real reason why in monasteries, whether Catholic or Buddhist or what have you, that some of the services are held at 4 or 5 a.m., that there is a quality to that time that if you respect and work with, can deliver great benefits to you.

So Ian, I'm sure you've heard of flow state. Oh, yes. Or that, you know, that feeling of deep concentration that momentarily allows you to feel almost without a sense of time. It's characterized by the sense of like an alignment of your abilities and the challenges that are presented to you and that produces this sense of self an alignment of your abilities and the challenges that are presented to you and that produces this sense of self-confidence and you operate in this almost virtuosic automated way,

like an athlete in competition. I'm no athlete, but I am interested in how just being in that mindset makes us feel confident. I mean, are you an athlete? Do you have any favorite flow state type activities? just being in that mindset makes us feel confident. I mean, are you an athlete? Do you have any favorite flow state type activities? I'm a couch athlete, napping athlete. No, I mean, to be honest, Becca,

I have always been a little suspicious of flow. Oh, interesting. I'm not sure that people should expect to have the ability and the opportunity to like operate their lives among clear goals and direct feedback where their capacities perfectly match the circumstances of their tasks and all of that. Like I'm not sure that that should happen. They should expect that to happen very often. Interesting.

It's like complete absorption is amazing and delightful when it happens. And I don't feel it very often, you know, like I feel it when I'm doing woodworking or Atari programming. But I don't feel that way when I'm doing the things at which I'm supposedly expert. You know, like when I'm writing or mowing the lawn or something, the time that I spend mowing lawns or hanging out with friends, I don't really see those.

I don't want to see them as opportunities to maximize performance. Like, you know, like... Or maximize your mindset in your free time. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, it seems like a surefire way to set myself up for disappointment and to experience less restful time than I would have otherwise.

Like, am I getting better at happy hour? You know, like, that's just kind of weird. Something that felt very akin to flow state, but I would never think about it in those terms is growing up, you know, I drank a lot of tea with my family. Tea drinking rituals are sort of a big thing in Bangladeshi culture. Tea time was the one focus time in the day now that I look back on it, but it wasn't with the intention to focus. So even though the only task in those few hours was to make the tea or what we call in Bangla, my language, cha, and the break was really just

for conversation or in Bengali, what we call adda, and nothing else. And, you know, the whole afternoon would go by. There wasn't even this framing. There wasn't even the mindset to get anything out of it. I think the good news about flow is that it's not something that you've got to travel to a mountaintop in order to find that it is something that we can achieve through activities closer to home that require less investment and less time. So this is why gardening is one terrific, highly localized example of something that is often deeply engaging. I guess, unless you're a

gardener, it's probably pretty different from your day job, and which offers opportunities for that sort of, that sort of, you know, immersion in another kind of way of being that can be deeply satisfying. Whether it is rock climbing or gardening or playing chess or being musicians or any number of other things. That makes a lot of sense Alex. The idea that doing something different from your day job or your normal practice.

I want to ask you, Alex, about social perception as it relates to the topics that we've been discussing around rest and time use, because it just strikes me that there is this aversion that we have, as Americans in particular, of laziness, and the person who isn't working hard. It certainly has made it harder to take rest seriously and to carve out a space for it,

both as individuals or within organizations. We are at a point, I think, where after the pandemic, you know, with people both having to reinvent how they work and having time to rethink the place of work in their lives, at least a space is opening up for thinking differently about the relationship between work and time and productivity and the place that rest and leisure can have in it. The question is how effectively or successfully we're going to be at bringing more rest in there.

But these days, it is common knowledge that some of the most important muscle building, the consolidation of memories, muscle memory, that doesn't happen while you're practicing, it happens while you're resting. And sports teams now hire sleep psychologists and experts to figure out when you should have downtime. And I think that if people for whom being able to be just a little bit more accurate in their three-pointers or to be a hundredth of a second faster recognize the value of rest, then I think that serves as a really good model, an inspiration for all the rest of us.

Alex, how do you rest? So I've become a big fan of naps in the afternoon rather than, you know, one more cup of coffee. When I'm working on a book, we'll get up super early and write for a couple hours really before I take the dogs out for a walk. And the other thing is that in terms of other serious hobbies, I inherited a camera from my dad. And for me, going out and taking pictures, doing photography, it's an opportunity to observe the world in a more thoughtful, mindful way,

to really very consciously slow down, to pay attention to what I'm doing, and to try and literally see the world a little bit more clearly. So Ian, I am realizing from everything that Alex taught us that that time for rest doesn't mean that we're immediately going to know how to do it. It's going to require a new kind of habit formation, right? Like we have to learn how to relax, how to restore ourselves in a way that

does feel active and isn't just in this habitual cycle of, I'm gonna spend my whole day at work, maybe I go to the gym before and after that, I need to eat to survive. There's sort of a way that we have to be conscious about when relaxation starts to feel truly like you're not engaged with your life in the way that you want to be. Just because it's off time doesn't mean that you're not in your life anymore.

You're not spending your time the way you actually want. It doesn't mean you have to lay, what did you say, sideways and be unconscious. There's a different kind of restorative rest when I go over to a friend's house and play with her kids and I see her journey as a parent. I'm like building Legos with a three-year-old and you know chasing them around the house as a dragon like things I normally don't get to do. Yeah if your rest time is time that you invest in actively doing something different than

your usual fare then that's a sign that you're on the right track. That's all for this episode of How to Keep Time. This episode was hosted by me, Ian Bogust, and Becca Rashid. Becca also produces the show. Our editors are Cladina Bade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smirciak. Rob also composed some of our music.

The executive producer of audio is Cladina Bade, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez. The only time I really reach flow state though is like when I'm eating. That's perfect, yeah. Noodles, noodles. It's all about the noodles. The only time I really reach flow state though is like when I'm eating. That's perfect. Yeah, noodles. It's all about the noodles. Oh, I'm a big noodle person as well. So I like flow when it applies to ramen.

If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to season five, How to Keep Time. You can find all six episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Next up in our special best of collection, we'll look at how to build connections with other people and the importance of the spaces we share. Public spaces and social infrastructure, they're a necessary condition for having some sense that we're in it together and we have some kind of common purpose, but they're by no means sufficient. That has to do with programming, that has to do with design, that has to do with this feeling of being part of a shared project.

And some public spaces give us that feeling and others really don't. This episode is brought to you by PepsiCo. From the fields to your table, PepsiCo strives to provide food that is grown well, made well, and creates more smiles. To follow the journey from seed to smile, visit PepsiCo.com and search fans over on PepsiCo strives to provide food that is grown well, made well, and creates more smiles. To follow the journey from seed to smile, visit PepsiCo.com and search fans of food.