Rest Is Rebellion - Undividing #33

It doesn't just refuel you, it reveals you. And everything that's possible.

Welcome to Undividing where we are reconnecting a divided world

Hello Everyone,

Well the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about rest. And my relationship with it. Which honestly is a patchy, troubled one these days. But it wasn’t always that way.

And in conversations, I can’t remember the last time someone said they have no trouble resting; that they get enough sleep, they have time to ponder during their days, that they are at peace with their waking and sleeping selves.

Right up to when I was in my early thirties, I could go to bed, fall asleep in ten minutes, sleep eight hours, and never raise a sweat doing it.

Rest has obsessed me so much lately that I made it the topic of the Undividing Live last Wednesday. I had a lively discussion with the group that, with their permission, I’m going to include some of the points that came out of that Live in this week’s Undividing.

Rest has been wrestled away from us over the years. What should be a normal function has been reduced, stolen, and rebranded as reward. Then repackaged back as a multi-million dollar industry to help us do something that used to come quite naturally to us.

This week, I want to dive into it. Because in the engine of undividing, rest is the fuel. Stealing back our sleep and rest from a system that’s desperately trying to take it away for their profits, well that is an act of revolution in itself.

When we aren’t rested enough we’re easier to manipulate, slower to think, quicker to argue, and often just want to be left alone - all of which contributes to a more divided world.

I’m going to tell you a story of how I rebelled and took my rest back, then lost it, and am in the process of getting it back again.

Let’s look at where we’re at with rest, where we were, how we got here, and what we can do take rest back out of the hands of the forces of the world and into our own.

If you know a friend who would love to get in on this conversation, forward this week’s newsletter on to them.

Let’s get undividing…

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Where we started out with rest

There was a time when the sun was the only clock we needed.

Back in pre-industrial times we rose at sunrise and went to bed at sunset. Usually because our jobs and livelihoods were tied to the land. Bigger than that though, and something we’ve only begun to understand in times since then, it meant that our circadian rhythms were in tune with nature and the seasons.

We worked hard on the land and in villages all over the world, but we were in a balance with ourselves, our bodies, and nature.

Cue Industrial Revolution, city life, clocks, factories, shifts etc and suddenly we created the greatest shift in our sleep and rest patterns in the modern age.

The largest shift though, I believe, is that this is when our waking hours first began to be tied to our productivity on mass. Technological advancements meant divisions of labour, taking on specialised jobs often in factories, and our value being tied to the hours we worked in a day.

We worked longer hours to make wages in industries where we didn’t share in the profits, all under the glow of electric bulbs.

This is a somewhat simplified version of history, but my point is that this is the first time we started trading off rest for survival on mass.

The trend was set. And exploited. Not just by capitalism but also by the lives we started to live; more things, more responsibilities, and in these social media days by algorithms that need our attention to make money and survive.

We live in a chronically exhausted world.

The World Health Organization classifies sleep loss as a global public health epidemic, with more than a third of adults worldwide not getting the recommended seven hours per night.

In the U.S. alone, the CDC reports that 1 in 3 adults sleeps less than six hours a night, contributing to long-term health issues like depression, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.

It seems like these days, very few people I know can get to sleep straight away without some combination of sleeping aids, weighted blankets, white noise machines, or sleep apps like Calm. Other apps measure our sleep deficits which I’m not sure if it’s helping or making us even more obsessed with how much we’re not sleeping.

That’s when we’re not scrolling till 3am.

Why aren’t we resting?

Rest isn’t just about sleep. We’re actually supposed to be idle sometimes in our waking hours. There’s a ton of reasons we’re not though and in just researching this part, I see myself in almost all of them.

Rising working hours - it was common in my old industry of advertising to work 60+ hour weeks and get paid for 40.

Combine this with blurred work-life boundaries where that always-on mindset means we’re never really truly off. While Covid finally made hybrid work and WFH normal, it also meant that those hard clock-on clock-off lines disappeared.

And email on our phones meant our last excuse went out the window.

The glorification of hustle where everyone with a successful side hustle was crushing it. But this was usually born out of needing another stream of income to just pay for the things that a wage used to cover.

Fomo means we’re often out at things and recording it for social media, even if we don’t want to be there, just to show the world the fabulous life we are living. Or else we’re home scrolling through other’s posts and thinking we should be out there more.

The badge of burnout. As my mom once said to me when I was bragging about my overtime to impress her, she simply noted, “All you’re doing is bragging about how well you’ve been exploited.”

At some point right before VHS’s, the TV eventually ran out of things to play, and even went off air every night at some point. Now streaming platforms pump out ever-decreasingly quality products that we somehow need just one more episode of. The CEO of Netflix once said that their biggest competition was sleep.

Plus there’s a pressure to be constantly productive in our waking hours - multitasking, performance, over-scheduling. I plead guilty, guilty, and guilty.

And then there’s just plain old distraction. Our phones have shortened our attention spans to the point that it’s hard to focus on single tasks. While writing this article I’ve been noting the number of times I’ve wanted to pick up my phone. Six. And that’s just to get this far. Which of course stretches out the time to get anything done, which in turn steals more time away.

But you know all of this. And I do too. So why are we doing it?

Why I avoided rest. And what happened when I stopped.

In the Undividing Live last week we were discussing why we are always keeping ourselves so busy and distracted in the days. Clint had a great point that it’s because, “we’re avoiding each other.” We all agreed on that.

Then Tracey dropped the mic, “actually, we’re avoiding ourselves.” When she said it, the conversation stopped and we all let that truth of that one ring in our souls.

I originally wrote this section with a lot of studies and links. Then I thought, my own personal story might explain it all better.

Tiredness and busyness were self-created kryptonite to my stillness. Which allowed me to avoid myself, while at the same time constantly try to prove myself to everyone around me through all my achievements. We all have our reasons. Mine I’m sure are tied to being gay and made to feel lesser than my whole life for it.

Then I started getting divorced, got fired, lost all my money and possessions, and that whole methodology got set on fire.

I can tell you in the first years of my divorce that I wrote about in my book How To Burn A Rainbow I was on a quest to get to the bottom of why I had dated the same guy six times in a row and married the last one. I had to dig through grief, rage, desire, mortality, and a huge chasm of despair over believing that I was never enough.

And that right there, is the dark heart of it. I think we’re constantly conditioned these days to believe that we aren’t enough. Then that same system serves us up a constant barrage of messages that reinforce this for us. Then tries to sell us the cure.

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

My quest was done by deliberately holding my stillness as sacred. No course, no apps, no outside interference. I actively dwelled in stillness. It was extreme, but what I needed at the time. I’ve had a job since I was 12 years old. Then for 18 months, I didn’t work. I didn’t run from any feelings. I learned to sit with them. For me at the time it was an act of survival. I hope you never get to the point where it is for you.

It was also an act of vulnerability. Like in this article from Psychology Today, I found when I rested, I felt everything I’d been running from. And I’ve been running since way before I got my first Walkman, TV, VHS, laptop, or smart phone.

Silence felt unnatural. But I found that when I sat still, I began to befriend my emotions. Especially the hard ones. Here’s what I discovered—all that noise I’d cultivated my whole life had kept me from hearing who I truly was, and what I truly wanted.

The sustained act of dwelling in rest reconnected me to my body, desires, boundaries, and truth. A large part of it was thanks to The Emotions Diary. When I started Undividing, the first thought was T.E.D. had to be part of it, even before I knew what I was going to write about. That’s how important it is to me, that other’s could discover it as well.

And through The Emotions Diary, I got to know myself, and eventually, like myself.

But rest doesn’t just heal you—it reveals you.

It was here in this stillness that I first heard myself say to me the idea, “you need to do the most amount of good for the most amount of people.” And after a few different avenues, I finally found Substack.

Rest has allowed me to trust. Trust in my body. Trust in the future. Trust that the world won’t fall apart without me. Trust that I’m still valuable even when I’m doing nothing. And to trust in us all to figure out the future of this planet together.

I had to unlearn that rest was laziness. And see that rest was in fact, faith.

But I’m a human, and once I found my calling, I started over-working to figure out what it was, where to put it, and how to get it going. So, I‘ve had to relearn a lot of lessons again the last six months.

It starts with undoing.

Undoing the worship of productivity

Productivity is sometimes an idea foisted upon us; the Protestant work ethic, a work ethic created from cultural reasons such as I witnessed living in Japan, and in the case for many women the double burden of emotional labour and “invisible work.”

But also our ideas of self-worth all of which require vast inputs of time to get our scores back; content, followers, likes, deliverables. Even here on Substack, how easy it is to fall into a pursuit of subscriber numbers, comparisons, and rating our work’s worth by that.

And of course there’s capitalism’s greatest income stream which is our attention. Apps, media, and channels constantly competing for our eyeballs to monetise every second of our viewership.

It’s effort to constantly set all these things aside. It doesn’t happen overnight, in fact it took me years to unlearn and I’m in the process of doing a “refresher course” in unlearning them again.

There’s a lot of smart folks working hard to keep us out of stillness. But remember, there’s nothing in that for us collectively.

Stillness and rest helped me figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my time on earth. And once you know that, anything that doesn’t line up with it has a habit of falling away.

Start small, make some wins, dwell on how strange but then good those feel, and repeat.

Here’s a few that I’ve developed that really help grab sleep and rest back from the empty well of modern life. Pick any one, and try it this week.

Rest

• The Emotions Diary - every Thursday with you all, and another couple of times a week for myself. Try your first one this week. I’m going to do a special one this Thursday that is a video of how-to.

• Micro-rests: walking without headphones is one of the simplest things. I walk to the gym every time I go. It gives my thoughts a landing pad.

• Doing nothing on purpose: No meditations. No goal. No productivity. Literally just sit still for 10 minutes and do nothing on purpose. It’s wild how uncomfortable this feels at first. But watch your thoughts land.

• Digital sabbaths: I’m all for the Screenless Sundays. This travel schedule I’ve been keeping has kicked it out me. I’m getting back to it again next week.

• Waking meditations: I’ve started washing dishes instead of loading up the dishwasher. But like really, really washing and focusing.

• Phone free socials: dinner, coffees, or any other gathering with friends and family with all phones off, and out of sight.

• Ridding myself of wellness rituals: I bought the apps, candles and bath things. These days I’m trying to not make it ceremony, just normal.

Sleep

• Tech-free bedrooms: I have no phones or laptops in my room at night. I bought a sunrise alarm clock.

• Screens off thirty minutes before sleep. Reading a book in bed works for me.

• I never tell myself I earned this sleep. It’s my right, not a reward. I’m shifting to this mindset.

• Water and bathroom breaks: If I wake up, I rarely return to sleep. So I make sure I drink enough in the day. But not so much that I need to pee in the night. Found a good balance. But a friend of mine if he wakes immediately gets up, drinks a glass of water, goes to the bathroom, and then back to bed. For him that works.

• Sleep aids: I’ve been taking pills intermittently to combat my insomnia which has crept back the last 6 months. But the more I do the above, the less I find I need them. And again, a lot of this is mental for me.

Rest is not a reward, it’s a right. A right to yourself.

Photo by Rasmus Smedstrup Mortensen on Unsplash

Rest is not weakness. It’s not laziness. It’s a reclamation. A rebellion.

And I truly believe that it’s the first real step toward undividing—from the noise, the system, the self we perform, the unrealistic goals we’re told we have to hit, and the world we’re too tired to imagine differently.

Rest gives us back not just us, but who we really are, and what we’re meant to do.

Rest in its most natural form is terrifying for capitalism. There’s no way to monetise it. And rest is terrifying to the systems we live in because the better we know ourselves, the less governable we are by ideas we know aren’t fair.

Rest is radical, punk, and rebellious. Yet is the single most natural thing in the world for us.

So protesting everything we don’t agree with in this life can start by watching clouds, staring into space, and leaving tech in another room. And then lead to what we’re able to do for our own selves, each other, and this world because of that.

Because while I think the solution to all our problems is simply to be in conversation with each other, the most important conversation we can ever have is with ourselves, in a space we create out of rest.

Please let me know in the comments your thoughts, ideas, and methods for rest and sleep.

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And that brings us to the end of Undividing #33.

Till Thursday when we do the next Emotions Diary, let’s move through this world undividing, and see what this planet can do.

Karl

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