On rest

With all the negative news recently I've been thinking more and more about how the news cycle has been purposefully designed to overwhelm us—to make us feel disconnected and powerless. Finding ways to rest during this turmoil feels like an act of resistance, taking back the concept of self-care from the grips of another cycle, consumerism, which has reduced it to face masks or bag charms or whatever other little treat is trending. As always, consumerism has promised us shortcuts to an ideal future, but rest isn't something that can be bottled and sold. Sorry to every coffee company/bottled energy drink/adaptogenic tonic out there.

When exploring the nature of true rest, Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's framework gives us a valuable starting point. A physician and author, she suggests that we have energy stores for seven areas of life, and different types of rest are needed for each area: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, sensory, and creative. Its a good breakdown that acknowledges that we need a more holistic and varied approach to rest than simply sleeping. There’s a multidimensional nature to rest, reminding us that depletion—and therefor restoration—happens across various areas of our lives at the same time.

While Dalton-Smith offers one perspective, others have approached rest in different ways. Jenny Odell's idea of "doing nothing" in her book How to Do Nothing sees rest as taking back our attention. She suggests we need to step away from the constant demands on our focus to reconnect with our surroundings and our communities. This political framing presents rest as a way to resist the pressure to always be productive in the capitalist sense. Same same but different is the Dutch concept of niksen, which literally means means “doing nothing”. It encourages us to purposefully do nothing and let our minds wander freely. This treats rest as valuable on its own and not just as a way to be more productive later—the end itself rather than the means to an end. Alex Soojung-Kim Pang offers a middle ground with his concept of "active rest" from his book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. He suggests that activities like walking, reading, or hobbies can be a form of rest that actually boosts creativity. These different frameworks for understanding rest show that it isn't just about being active or passive as a rule of thumb, its actually about how our minds, bodies, and surroundings are constantly working together and influencing each other. They reinforce that we need to take these connections into account when we are figuring out what kind of activities feels restful.

When I took Dalton-Smith's free quiz to see which areas of my life needed rest, I was surprised by the results. The quiz said I needed physical, emotional, and sensory rest, but I felt strongly that I actually needed creative and social rest. Curious about this gap, I did what I do best: some good old-fashioned journaling. As I wrote my thoughts with my favourite fountain pen ink (Pilot's To-ro if anyone is curious), I had a realisation. This quiz, like every other framework and piece of advice on the internet, needs to be adapted to each person to be truly useful.

Through journaling, I realised that I use up my creative energy all day every day, which is why I need the most rest in this area. I also discovered that for me, creative and social energy are closely linked. At the end of every creative project is a social element. This happens when I discuss design work with colleagues, talk about design theory with friends, or share my thoughts online. Community is always part of my creative process.

I was also mixing up creative activities with creative rest. After trying different approaches, I realised many of my "creative" activities were actually productive. I was still making something with a specific goal and with the intention of sharing it publicly in one way or another. True creative rest for myself, I found, comes from enjoying other people's creative work without any agenda. While watching a film or reading a book might sometimes give me new ideas, it still feels refreshing because that wasn’t the point of the activity in the first place. The ideas just popped up naturally, like my own version of Bob Ross’ happy little accidents I guess. This insight has been helping me change how I think about rest—I don’t see it as trying to balance separate categories, like balancing a budget. Instead it’s about acknowledging that rest and how I rest is something that’s going to be a constantly evolving and personal practice, something that will continuously shift and change as daily life and my needs do.

So in my day-to-day life, I focus on how I structure—or deliberately don’t structure—my time. By refusing to make every moment of my life planned and productive, I practice rest as resistance. In recent years, I've noticed more content reinforcing the idea that we should be optimising our 5-9 PM to build side hustles or show up as a ‘better you’ the next day. It’s the inverse of the productivity-focused morning routine content, repackaged for night owls instead of early birds. I’m not going to turn my evenings into another chunk of time that can be harnessed for productivity, instead I’m going full hedonist in that time. My only goal is to eat before bed. Everything else is flexible, leaving room for the spontaneity that makes life truly worth living: playing backgammon, going for a walk, hanging out with friends at the bar, reading, watching hours of YouTube. Whatever feels right in the moment.

In a world deliberately designed to overwhelm us through constant news cycles, that sell us solutions to problems real and invented, true rest requires understanding what actually refreshes us. This becomes both a way to know ourselves better and to resist systems that want us to stay disconnected, depleted, and dependent on the products they sell and the ideas they push. Frameworks give us good starting points, but the best insights come when we adapt these ideas to our own lives and needs. By recognising how we use our energy and what truly restores us, we take back control of our wellbeing. This personal approach to rest does more than just reject the standardised, commercialised versions of self-care being sold to us. It actively challenges the systems that are benefited when we stay exhausted. When we look inward to understand our unique rest needs, we also look outward to resist forces that drain our ability to reflect, create, and connect - the very things we need to imagine and build a better, more humane world.

xx Alex