Energy management for people who don't rest "naturally”

The one who can’t rest - can’t work. During different period of my lives I was on both side: strongly disagreeing on this. And when burn out came - I thought I understood what it means. And the reality was more surprising, comparing to other areas of live. Turned out it is not understanding issue. It’s skill issue and I had to figure that out the hard way and find what works for me.

Lets start with the understanding of what rest is. In general - it is lack of responsibilities other than for your own survival and enjoying the current activity. Can any activity can be qualified as rest? Not at all! As we may find enjoying many activities, that actually requires taking accountability and responsibility. And people, who can’t rest are used to operate in those states, therefore natural resting feels bad. Usually - it’s an urge to start doing something. If anxiety is not knocking at your door yet - it is rather just around the corner.

Endless stress, tichg scheduling and overwhelming challenges are great components to drop everything the other way and hide in your bad under the blanket. Really, it might be months or even years. But our built in fuses will cause a shut down. How do we avoid that and keep ourselves moving efficiently.

First of all - acceptance of imperfection. Some things might be good. When this truth becomes part of the life - there is a space to breathe. And breathing, like meditation, is a good start here. Odd and awkward in the beginning. Calming and enjoyable after a while. But who wants to sit in one place for hours and breathe? That’s boring! So what shall we do?

Turns on meditative state of mind can be achieve with rytmic repetition. Keep the tempo and focus. What could it be? Obviously it’s walking. Picking a tempo, picking a topic to focus on and you’re good to go. The pictures are changing and creating calming effect of moving. At the same time our own steps create a rhythm and gets into that focused state. And the focus - it works best when there are specific questions. Main question and additional ones. Sometimes we learn more when we share our perspective. More often - when asking questions. Even there are nobody else except us to address these.

Creating a rhythm for the day that consists of intense brain effort and moderate physical activity following each other are game changing. As combining discovery or summary phase with moderate physical activity increases productive time per day at least twice, without fatigue and overwork. Thoughts flows, answers can be found and ideas discovered. It all happens while making steps after step. All of these come from the real movement, not stress and pressure we used to surrender ourselves.

In 21st century we have forgotten how important physical activity is. We must move. Not climbing corpo-ladder, not moving up in the rank of rich or not-so-rich people. Simply making a step and then another one. And another one. Getting to a more silent place: park, seaside, forest. Once body is full of energy - we can grab all that and define as abstractions: text, code, images, sounds. Do that in the morning to get energized for the day. In the evening - to close the day. Your steps will set the rhythm for your days. Rhythmic days and weeks - sets your life.