Rest up—it adds years to your life
The time when we heal, rebuild, and retool ourselves is what we used to call rest.
MATHEW EDLUND
Contributing Columnist
health@lbknews.com
Remember coffee breaks? When was the last one you had at work? Rest is disappearing as an element of American life, particularly on the job. Sleep may have been reduced by 90 minutes per person on average over the last 40 years, if University of Chicago researchers are correct, yet rest may be declining faster.
Michael Pollan, in “The Botany of Desire” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” elegantly describes how we have industrialized both food production and dining. Yet such technological “progress” is deeper — we’ve industrialized ourselves, particularly how we conceptualize work and time. Cars don’t care if it’s 4 a.m. or 4 p.m. Computers keep going as long as the electricity keeps on. With new forms of information processing, very few of today’s machines need to “rest” at all.
Lots of people think of themselves similarly. Sleep is a waste of time, which can be decreased to the point of people falling asleep when they drive.
Why sit down to a long, conservational meal with your parents when you can be instant messaging or playing a video game? Why not eat anything you want, knowing that drugs will control your cholesterol level (like Zetia), or that new joints can be placed when your knees and hips wear out — soon they’ll be using stem cells to make replacement hearts, right?
No. Humans and other animals are not organic machines. We break down all the time and constantly repair ourselves. Virtually nothing outside of some snippets of DNA will not be replaced in your lifetime. We endlessly rebuild, renew, and recreate our tissues, based on how we use them.
The time when we heal, rebuild, and retool ourselves is what we used to call rest. There are larger economic and social reasons to lessen rest’s role in our daily lives. Corporate profits rule global Wall Streets, and have little attachment to human values about rest. Only recently have companies realized that people possess biological clocks, that there are basic downtimes and “up” times for human beings which strongly affect work performance.
Socially, rest has now changed ideologically from a time of renewal to something closer to laziness. Why have a coffee break, finding out what’s going on in the office, when so much “real” work could be done? Rest happens when people have no choice, when they are sick.
Here are beginnings of different terms and ideas:
1. Sleep is an important, though not sufficient, part of rest. Without sleep, animals die. Poor sleep of the sort now generally seen in Western societies helps lead to obesity, diabetes, depression, and much of the crankiness, nervousness, tension, anxiety and “stress” ascribed to feeling “tired” or “fatigued.”
2. Physical rest. Most scientific studies study subjects “at rest,” meaning they’re not physically moving. Physical rest must be balanced by activity if we are to feel healthy, improve national health and use less fossil fuels. The question of physical rest versus activity bedevils daily life, with exercise defined as what’s done in a gym or in running gear. Ordinary activities, like walking, gardening, and housework, are greatly underestimated as ways to obtain individual and population health.
3. Mental rest. Since the brain never quits, people often have trouble understanding mental rest. Much as a marathon runner feels she’s “resting” when she walks after a race, mental rest involves different levels of arousal and alertness as well as pacing, though techniques like meditation and relaxation techniques can be used to mentally rest anywhere.
4. Social rest. Though we are profoundly social animals, social rest is less and less appreciated at the workplace, where many a “friend” is someone we’ve “met” through email. Social support has a large role to play in personal health and corporate productivity, as people who mesh, cooperate and work together get far more done.
It won’t be easy, getting people to accept the power and necessity of rest, but it may become easier once they understand the different kinds. Then they may warm to the extraordinary uses of rest, which include body and brain renewal — along with survival itself.
Dr. Edlund practices sleep medicine and psychiatry in Sarasota. He can be reached at 365-4308, and by his Web site, www.doctoredlund.com.
Click here for more Staying Alive columns by Dr. Matthew Edlund.
