Mantra with Jemma Sbeg - I Make Rest a Priority in My Life

Episode Date: June 23, 2025

This week's mantra is I Make Rest a Priority in My Life. In a world that praises hustle and constant productivity, choosing rest is a radical act of self-respect. In this episode of Mantra, we explore how to redefine rest as a necessary part of growth, creativity, and emotional well-being—not something to earn or feel guilty about. Making rest a priority isn’t about doing less—it’s about restoring your energy so you can show up more fully in your life. This Mantra will help you reconnect with stillness, honor your limits, and create space for true renewal. Mantra is an OpenMind Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to OpenMind+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Mantra! Instagram: @mantraopenmind | @OpenMindStudios TikTok: @OpenMind Facebook: @0penmindstudios X: @OpenMindStudios YouTube: @OpenMind_Studios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Open Mind. Welcome to a brand new week. Here is your mantra. I make rest a priority in my life. I'm your host, Gemma Spaggag and I'm here to guide you toward a more centered and fulfilling life. Each week I'll share personal stories and insights that are focused on a specific mantra plus journal prompts and a weekly challenge for all of us to help put it into action. Think of mantra as your mental reset button, a way to stay centered as you juggle work, school,

family, whatever else life throws at you. Each mantra is a simple, powerful phrase that you can repeat to refocus your thoughts and bring a little bit of calm into your day. It's a very small tool, but with a big impact, clearing your mind, lifting your mood, and rooting you in the present. If you've listened to my other show, The Psychology of Your 20s, you know I'm all about those little nuggets of insight that make a big impact. So whether you are looking for some extra inspiration, you're just trying to ground yourself amidst the chaos, you have come to the right place. At Open Mind, we totally value your support,

so share your thoughts on social media, and remember to rate, review, and follow mantra to help others discover the show. For more exclusive content, monthly bonus episodes, early access, and ad-free listening, join our Open Mind Plus community on Apple Podcasts. This week, I will catch you up on what's been going on in my own life, and then we'll dive into today's very necessary mantra, I make rest a priority in my life.

This mantra is a reminder that rest isn't something we need to earn. It's something we need in order to show up fully, think clearly, live with intention, just be a good human. So stick around. This is a huge episode. We're going to be right back after this short pause. When planning for life's most important moments, sometimes the hardest part is simply knowing where to start. That's why we're here to help. When you pre-plan and pre-pay a celebration of life with us, every detail will be handled with simplicity and professionalism, giving you the peace of mind that you've done all you can today to remove any burden from your loved ones tomorrow. We are your local Dignity Memorial provider. Find us at DignityMemorial.ca.

The Dignity Memorial brand name is used to identify a network of licensed funeral cremation Welcome back. We are going to get into this week's mantra in just a few, but before we do, it's time for my highs, lows, and who knows. This week, we have a huge high. I just had two weeks off. Two weeks off from both of my podcasts, from any major work commitments, from writing scripts, from recording.

It was my first two weeks off in, I think, three years. I feel bad for saying that because I don't want to glorify overworking, obviously, with what today's mantra is. But when you work for yourself, there is no break. It is very hard to schedule time away because if you're not doing it, who is going to take up the mask? Who's going to do it for you? And so when you're in those early days of creating a business, it definitely feels like if I step away, everything is going to crumble and fall apart.

And so the last three years, I've been building the psychology of your 20s, I've been building mantra, I've been writing a book. And so it just felt like I was always needed. And I had this conversation with Tom the other day, my boyfriend Tom, and he was like, you know what, is the world going to fall apart if you just enjoy your life for two weeks? Not to say I don't enjoy work, but he was basically like, are you really saving lives here? Are people going to die if you just go on a holiday? And I was like, you know what? Probably not. And sometimes you need someone to give you those extremes

to just make you realize like what I'm doing is not healthy. So I took two weeks off. It was amazing. I didn't even do anything. I just bed-wrought. I just laid in bed and I watched New Girl and Sex and the City. Those are my two TV shows.

Like I have five TV shows that I always rewatch and those were the two that were on the agenda for those two weeks. I took Talu, our pup, for heaps of walks. I just ran a bunch. I honestly just ordered Uber Eats, I think, every second day. And it was firstly very, very boring and then secondly very, very healing. And I've come back with so much renewed vigor and renewed life, and I'm very, very excited to actually be able to take what I've learnt

from my past two weeks of making rest a priority and talk about it with you guys. I feel like this is the perfect segue, of course, naturally, into this week's mantra, I make rest a priority in my life. When I was thinking about doing this mantra, it was before I had taken some time off. And so it was really holding a mirror up to my own life like no other mantra has done in recent memory.

I don't want to say I felt targeted, but I really did. There's no other word for it. I want to talk about why I really felt the need to prioritize rest after this very busy period later on. But before we do that, let's actually define what rest really is. Rest and sleep are very, very different things. I think one of them is a biological need and one is a psychological need. Sleep is something that we need to do to essentially restore our bodily functions.

Sleep allows us to clean out all the junk from our bodies. It allows us space to consolidate memories. Sleep is essential for repairing muscle, repairing cells. It's very biological. There's a specific amount of hours we definitely need to sleep per day. And if you don't sleep, there's only so long you can go before your body is going to do it for you. Rest, on the other hand, we can go a lot longer without truly resting.

Resting is not to do with closing our eyes and going to bed at night. Resting is something that you need to intentionally do during your waking hours. With sleep, obviously you can be unconscious. With rest, you need to be conscious for it because I think it is a very, actually quite deliberate thing that you're opting into that you need to make sure that you are kind of doing in the correct way. And it's something that you actually need to put thought into, which if you're exhausted can sometimes feel a little bit demanding and a little bit intense.

I have to think about rest, but let me make the argument for why that is the case. Rest, in my mind, is this thing that allows our mind to reset as well as our body. Rest is something that allows our emotions and every social thought, career thought, financial thought, any thought we have in our brain, just stop buzzing and moving around in our brain, just stop buzzing and moving around in our heads. It is this unique space where I think we allow ourselves to actually relax. We allow ourselves to not do anything. And if we were to do something, we do things that we genuinely enjoy. I think the thing with rest is that because we can, again, go so long without it, sometimes

it's very easy to not make it a priority. Like I said before, if you don't sleep, like you will get to a point of really noticing that physically. You could go months, years without either resting and still find a way to put it off. We most certainly treat rest as something that is optional for that very reason, but I also think it's because we have been taught that a lot of our self-worth is tied to our productivity and tied to our ability to push ourselves beyond any other means, beyond our needs.

I always remember this quote that I had written on my wall during high school. And it was, if it was easy, everyone would do it. And what that quote really represents is this idea that working hard will make you morally a better person. It will give you access to more things. And it is something that is required of you to have a successful life. And you know what, that's true.

Working hard, if you want anything, like you do have to work hard for it. But this idea of if it was easy, everyone would do it, kind of creates this innate competition within our minds and amongst people. Well, if I want to be successful, if I want to have things that I'm proud of, if I want to be wealthy, I have to see what everyone else is doing and rise two inches above it. I have to see those times that people have decided to take a day off and I have to refuse

it. I have to see those vacation days that other people are allowing themselves and say, that's not for me. Every single thing is competitive when it comes to achieving my dreams and achieving my goals. There's also this other element in that hustle culture has our current society in a chokehold. We are not valued or measured by the quality of what we make, by the experience that we had in making it. We are not measured by how fulfilled we feel by our social connections, by how much time

we have for ourselves, by the emotional experiences we allow ourselves. We are not judged by these soft things. We are judged by primarily how much can you push yourself? How many hours can you stay behind in the office? How long can you go before needing a break? It's like this weird Olympics, this Olympics of misery associated with denying yourself rest. What this really creates is a very psychological experience in

which we associate rest with guilt. So if we have been told that in order to be a certain successful person, we need to do certain things and we need to push ourselves to a certain level, not doing those things, opting out every now and again is going to be met with this extreme shame and guilt that we should be doing more. And it's often guilt with letting ourselves down, or what we think is letting ourselves down, and letting others down, letting your bosses down, letting your family down, letting whoever it is that you think relies on your hard efforts.

I think there are a lot of internal and external messages that corroborate this and which strengthen this association between rest and guilt. The first is self-doubt. If you have, like myself, been someone who has for so long associated your self-worth with success, accolades, achievements, grades, whatever it is, and if you have found that perhaps one of your assets is how hard you can push yourself, what's going to be wrapped up in your opinion of guilt is a lot of self-doubt, specifically doubt around whether you actually have any worth if you aren't able to work hard. Is being able to work hard the only thing that has allowed you all of these successes. Furthermore, we become very reliant on specifically accolades or successes or achievements or

awards to bring us a sense of competency and a sense of value. And so allowing ourselves to rest often means opting out of that system, which means not having access or receiving as much praise or achievements as we previously did. That leads to a real deficit in our feelings of self-worth. Of course, this is also tied up in imposter syndrome. If you truly believe that you don't belong where you are now, if you are a fraud, if you got here by accident, if it was all a mistake, you are going to internally have this very unconscious thought of, well, I need to work harder than anyone else. I can't let the gig be up.

I can't let people see me for who I really am because there's a fear there that you will be found out as a fraud and that someone will unmask you and show that you don't know anything. An antidote to that and an antidote to that unfortunate circumstance that we think is going to happen is to continue working hard, which is to continue to deny ourselves rest. The final element I think and the final reason that I think we really fear rest, we associate it with guilt, we associate it with failure, is that we think that if we are not constantly working towards something big and better and some goal and giving everything to that goal and everything to that dream, what if we don't get it and we look back at this time when

we did allow ourselves rest and we realized that it all came back to that? Let me explain that a little bit more. I think what's really motivating this is a fear of regret, a fear that we will regret the moments that we didn't work hard. And so therefore make every moment a moment where we have to work hard. And every day and every weekend and every hour,

a point where we aren't allowed to rest. Let me say this loud and clear. Resting is not laziness, resting is not a lack of discipline. In fact, it is absolutely essential to your success. And you will find that actually when you allow yourself to do less, you actually end up achieving more because you're doing less more effectively and because you are allowing your brain and your mind and your body time to recuperate.

I don't think that rest should be seen as a reward for doing enough. It should be seen as a reflection of how much we value ourselves, how much we value our human experience beyond what we achieve. And it's very confronting to realize how deeply we have de-prioritized rest in our culture. But it's also empowering to know that we can really rewrite that script. So coming up, let's get personal. I want to dive into how this mantra has really shown up in my own life. Stay tuned.

We'll be right back after this brief pause. Now that we've looked at the meaning behind today's mantra, I make rest a priority in my life. It's time to get personal with you guys and really just share some of my reflections about this phrase. I'm going to be completely open and honest. I was addicted to burnout and I was addicted to the feeling of being exhausted and the feeling of pushing myself past my limits, past my human limits. And I know exactly where it came from. I know it's because when I was a kid, you know, I didn't really have many friends and I wasn't very liked.

And so the only thing I could be, if not cool or likable or sporty or musical, was to be academic and to be the one who worked really hard. And because that was so reinforced in me by the systems around me and by praise that I would receive from my family and from my parents and from my teachers, it became a real toxic cycle. And it became something that was almost impossible and is still difficult to unlearn the honor I got. I'm now at the stage, right, where I'm in my mid-20s and I realize that there is kind

of this fork in the road. I can go down the path of continuing to think that my output and how much I can push myself is all that this experience, this human experience, should be worth for me and is the thing I want to dedicate all my time to. Or I can seriously reprogram how I view my life and realize that there is nothing more valuable than just getting to sit with your experiences sometimes and just allowing yourself to have a fricking nap. Like, to have a nap, to have some downtime, to take a day off.

You know, at the end of your life. I know it sounds so cliche. Everyone says you're going to look back at your life and what are you going to remember? You're going to remember the times when you didn't take a day off, when you worked too hard, when you missed important milestones, important events, or are you going to remember the day that you played hooky and, you know, you went and got ice cream with your parents, or are you going to remember the days

when you said, I'm not going to let this stress me out anymore and went Or you're going to remember the days when you said, I'm not going to let this stress me out anymore and went to dinner with your friends, even though you didn't meet your deadline or even though you felt this urge to keep working. I was really falling into a very negative spiral recently with my book coming out where it just felt like I had to give this everything, I had to neglect rest because I didn't want to come out of this bubble or emerge from my hard work and productivity and realize that I could have done more and then regret the times when I allowed myself the day off or the afternoon off.

So I think for me, the fear of regret was a big motivator. This is the kind of person that failing to rest turned me into. Firstly, it turned me into a really bad friend. I canceled way too many plans to keep working, even when I didn't need to. It turned me into a bad partner. I remember Tom coming home and it would be 10.30 and he'd be like, ''Oh my gosh, it's so good to see you.

I'm so excited to see you. And I'd be like, I'm working. I can't talk right now. It turned me into someone who was really, really irritable. I would find that every single thing that happened to me, I could always find a way to spin it and make it negative because my failure to rest was, I think, essentially changing how my brain was interpreting problems or just interpreting neutral situations.

And it was making them appear much more negative because I don't think I had the mental resources to see things clearly. I was so exhausted that something would come across my desk or come across my plate, and it just felt like a raw nerve was being hit every single time. And I was getting into this place of just complaining constantly. my desk will come across my plate and it just felt like a raw nerve was being hit every single time. And I was getting into this place of just complaining constantly. Every single thing, even if it was minor, was the end of the world. Everything was really frustrating.

Everything was really, really annoying. And so yes, that probably impacted my relationships, but then it started to impact my own mindset where I would be walking around and I was just assuming the worst would happen. I was assuming the worst in people. I was getting frustrated by my life. And I just had this moment where I was like, Oh my God, this is gross. I don't want to feel like this. I don't want to live like this. And I'm actually making this choice to be this person. As much as I can say like, no, I have to, you know, like this is important, no, like this is essential. Someone else isn't going to be able to do it. I have to do it.

Like I was the one making that choice. Again, like what Tom said to me, no one's going to die. Nothing terrible was going to happen if I took a day off. And yet I was allowing myself to believe that. And I think part of it was a sense of self-importance that was totally unnecessary and uncalled for. Perhaps that's also where our denial of rest comes from. We think that perhaps we are more important than we are, and so we have to deny rest the way that someone important would, or the way that someone who is doing really amazing things would, because that is part of the equation, that's part of the starter pack to being someone

who was worthwhile and successful and whatnot. This is the kind of rest that I really started to prioritize when I came out of my funk and realized, hey, this is not working for me. Firstly, I got off my phone and I disconnected from social media. And I know it sounds so simple, but I don't think you can rest if you are constantly observing what others are doing and feeling like you need to be doing that.

So the biggest thing I did was actually I put all my social media on my iPad, on my work iPad. Actually this is such a strange inspiration for this, but I heard Ed Sheeran do this in an interview and he talked about how the only place he can access social media or really anything other than by email is on his iPad that he has. And it was amazing because firstly, I didn't remember to charge the thing. So I'd be like, oh, I want to check social media or I want to check LinkedIn. And it was like, well, you can't because, you know, I'm not consciously charging it.

Secondly, it meant that I just like didn't think about it as much. There was this barrier between me and accessing this platforms, these like spaces that caused me to compare and caused me to feel like I wasn't doing enough. So I disconnected. The second thing is that I gave myself permission to just have an afternoon off, and I cleared my to-do list, and I would put on my to-do list the things that I wanted to do to relax. I also find that if you go to a specific place that necessitates not being on your phone,

being in a calm state, of course, you're going to do it. So like my big thing is that I love going to like a sauna or a spa and not even getting any of the treatments, just using their bath houses. So just using like their steam room and their spa and their saunas and all that stuff. And honestly, it's great because you come into this environment and it's like, well, I can't be the only one not relaxing. And also you look at all these other people and you're like okay so they're

they're taking time off okay I can too. I also made it a priority to not do things on the weekend perhaps that's something you're already doing but for me because I worked for myself it was so easy to just be like oh I'll just do this little thing. Then there was no delineation, there was no definition between or distinction between what was a workday, what was a necessary thing to be doing on a workday, and what was a time for rest and a time for the weekend. I have a friend of mine who continues to practice the Sabbath, and I am so inspired by her because from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday, her and

her partner do not use their phone, they do not use technology, and they do not do any form of work. And she's not a deeply spiritual or religious person, but it's something that she did as a kid and she stopped doing it for a while and realized how important it was. And it's so interesting because every single religion, every single culture has some form of rest that is part of their doctrine or part of their essential equation to being human. And it was an important thing for people to do. It was something that God or Allah or whatever was asking people to do. And now we're so detached from that.

What we need to realize is that it is a very human thing to allow your mind and your body to reset. And I think also to allow enjoyment and simple pleasure into your life that sometimes there's no space for when you're just constantly pushing yourself harder and harder and harder. The other thing that I did was I really looked for examples of people for whom rest was a serious asset. And the first person who came to mind was Simone Biles.

Perhaps our fear of rest comes from this idea that people who rest give up and then they never get back to their former glory. And that's scary for us because what am I if I'm not this thing that I've worked so hard for? Simone Biles is literally the perfect example of how rest improved someone's performance and actually allowed them to come back better and stronger than ever. You know, she took two years off and she got married and she fell in love. And I'm sure she just had so many restful moments of not doing things. And everyone said to her, I remember reading news articles, like she's

going to lose her mojo, like she's going to lose her ability. She's going to lose her fire. And then she came back and proved them all wrong. We need more examples of that. We totally do because so much of our culture and our society right now just glorifies wealth and glorifies working hard and glorifies all these really rough, hard, shallow parts of existence. And then here are these people like Simone Biles, like Serena Williams was another one who are like, it's okay to be soft and it's okay to give yourself space and we need more of that.

You'll also find that there will come a point where if you don't rest, your body will do it for you. I have come to that point. You will get sick. Your immunity will be compromised, you will find yourself endlessly tired, you might even have like a nervous breakdown. You think you can avoid rest until rest comes for you. It's always going to be chasing you. It's going to find you and every moment you have to make sure you create space for it

or it will make space for itself. It's like a really nosy house guest in that way. So now I also want to share our deep thought of the day, and this comes from Anne Lamott. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you. You know why I love this metaphor? A, because it's true, but B, because it reminds us that even if we think of ourselves as machines, at some stage, machines overheat, they run out of charge, they need their battery replaced, and so on. So, you are not a machine, you are a human, but even if you were, you still need to unplug.

And unplugging might mean taking a break, disconnecting from social media, going for a walk, sitting in silence, just simply breathing, taking a week off because you deserve it, using your sick leave, even if all you need is just a nap. In doing so, I think we really do come back to ourselves. We soften, we open up, we remember that rest isn't laziness, it's a real return to clarity and it's a return to humanity in a way, who we are meant to be, how we are meant to act as humans.

I'd like us to take a few moments to pause and really sit with this really important mantra. In just a moment, you'll hear a music track to help you create space to absorb today's insights and really consider how you can bring rest and make it a priority in your week, maybe even beyond. Of course, if this practice isn't your style, if it doesn't resonate with you, that's totally okay. Just skip ahead around 30 seconds. But as you settle in, I really want you to just keep this mantra in mind. I make rest a priority in my life. Let it guide your thoughts. Let yourself think, what would my life look like?

What would need to change to make rest a priority? And I want you to seriously consider whether your life would be better for it. Just give yourself that moment to reflect and connect with this mantra. Beautiful. Now that we have explored why rest matters so deeply, I want to talk about how to actually make space for it in our lives. I'm going to share some journal prompts as well as our weekly challenge. So almost almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. See app for details. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar. I host a podcast called

A Slight Change of Plans that combines behavioral science and storytelling to help us navigate the big changes in our lives. I get so choked up because I feel like your show and the conversations are show and the conversations are what the world needs, encouraging, empowering, counter-programming that acts like a lighthouse when the world feels dark. Listen to a slight change of plans wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Let's explore how we can actually weave this week's mantra into the rhythm of our everyday lives, into the busyness of our everyday lives, into the busyness of our everyday lives, starting with our journal practice.

Journaling alone is just such a fabulous way to incorporate rest, specifically mental rest and a mental reset. These are some of the journal prompts that I swear by. And if you don't have your journal nearby, that's totally fine. You can just think about these, reflect on them as you're driving, as you're at work, wherever you are. But here are your prompts to help you gain clarity on this week's mantra. I make rest a priority in my life. First, when was the last time you felt truly rested? Not just physically, not just emotionally,

not just physically, not just emotionally, but mentally. What allowed that to happen? And how did you feel afterwards? Did your life improve? Next, how do you define rest in your life right now? What is a definition? What is this idea you have of it? And is that definition nourishing or restrictive or fear based? And finally, what would it look like to prioritize

rest in your future? Not just as an afterthought, but as a foundational part of how you live, work and care for yourself. Every week I also like to share a challenge inspired by our mantra to help you take what we discuss here and just put it into real actionable steps in your life. I'd love to hear how you're going specifically this week, specifically with this mantra. So please reach out to me at mantra open mind and each month I respond to your questions, comments, everything else in a special bonus episode that is available exclusively on Open Mind Plus. But this week, I want you to choose one hour each day to unplug completely.

Now, it's a challenge, so it's not gonna be easy, but no screens, no multitasking, no obligations. I want you to take this time and use it solely for rest, whether that means a nap, a walk, journaling, making something, cooking yourself a delightful meal. I know this one is going to be rough because I myself often find that my default is to stay busy, but I think that that's the sometimes important for us to do is to choose things that aren't easy, choose things that are hard to push ourselves into a new dimension and push ourselves into a new way of life, a new mindset, a new way of understanding.

Please reach out to me on Instagram via DM or comment on a post about this episode at mantra open mind to share your thoughts or you can leave a comment below around below around how you're going to make rest a priority and how you found this challenge, how you found this task. Alrighty, as we wrap up this week's episode, I want to share a few final thoughts about this mantra, I make rest a priority in my life. Here's the thing, your default is probably to be busy. There is a lot of guilt around rest. There is a long history of people associating it with laziness.

But people who prioritize rest, they are not just more successful, I think they are happier. They actually get more stuff done. They find more joy in life. And I think they have better relationships. And at the end of the day, yeah, maybe they do make more money or they are more accomplished or whatever it is do you think they're happier because rest is seriously a gateway and a portal to true happiness. Ultimately as well if you take one thing away from this episode let it be that rest isn't something you need to earn.

It's something that you are allowed to build your life around and prioritize as a way to take care of yourself. When you protect your rest, you protect so many other things like your mood, your creativity, your peace, your relationships. So this week and beyond hopefully, let rest be the way you come home to yourself. discover the show. For ad free listening and early access to Mantra with me, Gemma Spegg, we invite you to subscribe to Open Mind Plus on Apple Podcasts. I will share another insightful and introspective mantra with you next Monday. Until then, keep showing up for yourself and your journey. I'm Gemma Spegg. See you next week. Mantra is hosted by me, Gemma Spegg. It is an open mind original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life

by the incredible Mantra team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Stacey Warenker, Sarah Kemp, and Paul Leberskin. Thank you for listening.