Resting

Something I read somewhere recently: stop asking yourself why you're so lazy, and start asking yourself why you need to rest so much. To ape Good Mythical Morning, I decided to talk about that today, because for some reason, I find myself drawn towards rest more often these days, much to my frustration - but maybe I shouldn't be frustrated about having to rest after all. 

A quick Google search of why people need rest yields the following top result:

"Rest is vital for better mental health, increased concentration and memory, a healthier immune system, reduced stress, improved mood and even a better metabolism."

    It also says:

"Just like eating, sleep is necessary for survival. Sleep gives your body a rest and allows it to prepare for the next day. It's like giving your body a mini-vacation. Sleep also gives your brain a chance to sort things out."

I remember reading somewhere that rest was a key component of healing, which is also pretty ironic because too much rest was also bad for you (our bodies have a sense of humor). Rest too much, you risk slowing down your metabolism. You also risk developing heart disease, and not moving for long periods of time can lead to blood pooling and clots forming, which can eventually lead to a stroke or an aneurysm somewhere along your circulatory system, which can also lead to death.

I'm not going to ask what the fine line is here, since it's been established that seven to nine hours of sleep is good, and if you must nap in the day, studies have shown that you can do so, so long as you don't sleep for too long later on at night. Instead, I'm going to focus on the question of why might a body need to rest more than it normally should? And as with everything in life, the answer varies.

Sometimes fatigue from overwork is the biggest reason we sleep in. We may have spent too much time burning the midnight oil just to make sure we get through our deadlines, since this fast-paced world is pretty fine running without you in the rat race, and if you want to stay relevant, you need to meet your deadlines without fail. Or maybe we're working on more than what we could handle, not that we couldn't handle this back when we were younger, but time moves a lot faster for people past a certain age (more on that some other time), and the sad truth is that the older we get, the less we can get done by virtue of this. 

So we end up vastly overestimating our capabilities, comparing ourselves with our much younger selves, using that as a baseline when it isn't even relevant at all at this point in our lives. By becoming a decade older, we've moved that baseline a ways back up the line, and we're stuck at the fifty-yard line, trying to gather as much energy as we can to get past the defender in front of us, when we're better suited to assisting the much younger folks who're at the same zone from behind. 

Or maybe we're sick. Maybe we're coming down with something that's inhibiting our ability to function throughout a full day's worth of work. Sickness - mental, physical, emotional - needs to heal through rest, and perhaps while our minds don't recognize that we need to heal, our bodies do, making us, forcing us to take the time to lie down and get some goddamned rest.

Something interesting I read, in tangent to that point: perhaps getting heart disease from sleeping too much is the wrong way of looking at it. Perhaps we already had the underlying requirements for heart disease to develop, and our bodies resting for longer is its feeble attempt to counteract these elements. Alas, for naught. 

But that's neither here nor there. The point here is - perhaps you resting for longer isn't, after all, because you were a lazy butt. There may be something more to it than you give yourself credit for. Take the time to reflect on what could be putting you to sleep. It could just be laziness, I'm not going to lie. But then again, it might not.