CHARACTER BUILDING: Resting

October 19, 2015 – CHARACTER BUILDING: Resting

Welcome back Viphilus*

Sorry for being a day late … but I wasn’t going to miss a moment of the 2 big games last night: the Blue Jays beat Kansas City and the Liberals beat EVERYONE ELSE! Time for Mr. Harper to take a rest from politics.

… and speaking of rest …

This week let’s look at a critical 3^rd component of character building, and that is REST. We’ve looked at breathing and feeding, both of which are pretty critical to survive-ability, let alone good health. When it comes to our physical side rest is a key recovery practice because without it we become dysfunctional … very quickly. Let’s dig a bit into the subject of rest and why it is foundational to character building.

PHYSICAL Rest
Task: Take a 5-lb weight in the hand of your non-dominant arm and hold it outstretched for 3 minutes. If your reaction is, “sure, I can do that,” then by all means, stop reading now and go and do it and then come back. How did that work for ya? If your reaction is, “that sounds hard,” then give it a try, but kudos to having some insights about the challenge you are undertaking. If your reaction is, “HA – easy peasy,” then stop, go and do it, and come back with your tail between your legs as you use your other hand to operate the computer because the one you just used will be surprisingly DEAD. If your reaction is to shake your head NO WAY then you are wise indeed.

This is a marvelous, yet simple exercise to demonstrate one thing:

Burnout, break down and impaired performance is not the result of the intensity of the exercise but of the duration of energy expenditure without recovery. (The Power of Full Engagement)

A 5-lb weight is nothing, yet it can cause our hand and arm to cramp badly and muscle fatigue will quickly result if we don’t give it a rest, even for a moment. This is why almost all exercise wisdom nowadays extols the virtue of interval training (go hard then take a small break … then go hard again followed by another small break – etc.) 

Physical rest isn’t important only when exercising or doing work … it is also critical for the body’s metabolic machine to complete the work that the exercise was intended to do, and that is to build character (in this case, physical muscles or physical tolerance or physical endurance).  I am now speaking about sleep … that period of rest each day / night when our bodies cease exercising, cease digestion of food, and can focus all available metabolic resources to body repair and improvement. Did you know that muscles aren’t built when you exercise, but rather, when you sleep!  In November we will look more closely at what the exercise actually does, but for now, the key takeaway learning is that without sleep, all the value of exercising is lost … and will actually damage the body.

Physical rest is also important to give the brain a chance to shut down intentional cognitive functions for a while. I was at a seminar one time where an expert on human performance asked the audience this question, “In a hostage situation, what is the most important thing that the police try to withhold from the captors?”  Of course, our room of non-experts said things like water and food. The answer was sleep. The trainer went on to tell us that the human body can go for weeks without food and for 3-7 days without water, but without sleep for even 36-48 hrs the brain starts to shut down and the captors begin making mistakes. By 72+ hours the brain is almost completely dysfunctional and the police simply wait for the captors to defeat themselves.So the police try to keep noise and light levels high so that sleep is difficult.

Most studies indicate that North Americans are a sleep-deprived nation. Modern technology has made possible instant and excess access to … well, everything … and most humans lack the wisdom and good judgment to unplug for a while and get some sleep. I used to suffer from insomnia; I don’t anymore, once I realized what my lack of sleep was doing to me (and my family and my job). I learned that there is a simple test to know if you are sleep deprived; if you need an alarm clock to wake up, then you are sleep deprived. Some of you just got defensive and perhaps angry because you don’t believe that. I am just the messenger … read up on this for yourself on WebMD.

Therefore, through rest, the important work of feeding and exercising is completed and the result is sustainability and increased capacity … whether it’s physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually.. Rest is grotesquely undervalued for its role in production, sustainability and growth.

MENTAL Rest
I was quite fascinated to learn that REST plays a similar role in our other three dimensions as well … analogously, for many of the same reasons. For example, if you enjoy doing crossword puzzles then you have likely witnessed yourself (countless times) get stuck after working at it a long time to the point where you are unable to fill in any words. You set it down, go and grab a coffee or talk with someone or do ANYTHING else for 10-15 minutes. You then come back, pick it up and suddenly you are able to fill in 2 or 3 words. What just happened? Did you get smarter in that 15 minute break? NO … you simply gave yourself a BREAK!  Just as physical muscles become fatigued when they have been worked without a rest (like the 5-ln weight exercise), the brain also becomes fatigued when it is given a non-stop conscious cognitive challenge. And just as muscle fatigue can be explained biochemically because of the production of lactic acid in the muscles due to oxygen starvation, so too, brain fatigue can be explained biochemically because of the depletion of chemicals that drive the receptor neurons in the brain … the parts where messages are passed from one neuron to the next.

We need to rest our minds, intentionally, to actually accomplish more in the longer run. The brain, like the rest of the physical body, works best when work is tackled in intervals. We can go hard … in fact very hard … but then we need rest, even for a few moments, to allow the biochemistry to “recover,” to its initial state so that we can do it all over again … whatever IT is.

One of the chief reasons that people struggle with sleep is because they are unable to shut down the chatter in their heads once they turn off all the other noise. They have so trained their minds to be constantly stimulated that the mental-noise has become more than just a habit, it is an addiction. And like any addiction, the body (or brain) craves more and more of it, even though it is detrimental and actually doesn’t deliver what it promises. Simple diversion exercises (like reading or counting sheep) or meditation (intentionally focusing on what YOU choose, not what your brain simply delivers up to feast on) are helpful techniques.  A word on meditation: we will look at meditation in future posts, but for now, if you are convinced that you don’t know how to meditate then you have simply been taught incorrectly. If you know how to worry then you know how to meditate.

If your mental state is such that anxiety or your stress load is more than you can handle through some simple mental exercises then you might actually need medical intervention (meds) to turn things around … but this is NOT a long-term fix … ultimately, you need to learn how to rest your mind, intentionally and not medicinally.

EMOTIONAL Rest
How do you rest emotionally? What is it that you need to rest from? What does emotional rest look like?

Emotionally, we need breaks from lengthy periods of negative emotions such as anger, disappointment, grief, and frustration, to name a very short list. The trick is to intentionally (Mentally!  Cognitively! Consciously!) choose to pursue a positive emotion, even for a short period of time. Here are some examples:

1. You have been reading some technical material for your work. You choose to set it down and read the funny pages in the newspaper for 5 minutes. Doesn’t seem like much of a change since you went from reading one thing to reading another thing. Reading is reading you might say. Not true. The concentration and learning focus needs to be broken and by switching to the comics, the mental break is given. BUT … by reading the funny pages, you’ve switched on a positive emotion which helps turn off the problem-solving focus of your mental side which gives it a complete rest. In this case, the emotional change facilitated the mental break. As they say, "a change is as good as a rest."
2. You are suffering grief for something/someone you have lost. You can’t imagine ever feeling good or whole again and your emotions are at an all-time low. This is normal and, in the long run, healthy to work through intentionally with the goal of moving forward. BUT, the grief does not have to be continuous … you can choose to take a break from the grief and do something “fun” for 15-30 minutes. You can choose, at least once a day, to NOT grieve. This sounds preposterous to people who don’t know how to shut down the chatter in their heads in general, but it is doable. The easiest technique here (and there are many) is to intentionally spend time with a friend who knows you need the diversion and who will engage you in something for 15-30 minutes that will take your focus off the grief. Make it longer if you can. (when I broke up with my first girlfriend I was crushed, so my brother and sister-in-law distracted me by taking me out to play bingo 2 nights each week for a couple months – it was in smoke-filled halls and I never won … but it was a very important diversion that really helped me a lot)
3. Going through any prolonged period of challenge requires “play time” to balance off not only the mental challenge but also the emotional side. Remember our mothers’ motto: “all work and no play makes Peter a dull boy.” Actually, following my breakdown in 2001 I learned that the motto actually should be, “all work and no play causes Peter to break down.” Intentionally building “play” into life is essential to high performance.
4. Stop taking yourself so seriously. If you can laugh at yourself and at your foibles and at your idiosyncrasies, emotional health will swell up inside you at an amazing rate … and you will feel so much better. When someone suggests that you made a silly mistake, a bonehead error, or a ridiculous judgment, chances are they want to laugh at you … so lead the way and laugh at yourself first. When someone first said that “laughter is the best medicine,” I think they were talking about laughing at ourselves. By doing this it gives us an emotional rest that carries over to all other sides of us.

SPIRITUAL Rest
One of my favourite books on “rest” is called ‘The Rest of God,” by Mark Buchanan. It is a purposefully “religious” book that speaks about developing a Sabbath orientation to our life (and not just a legal spiritual requirement about setting aside one day each week for non-work).  Mark suggests that Sabbath-keeping is a form of mending. This makes perfect sense to me because I know that physical rest (sleep) is what allows our bodies to mend.

When I teach about the importance of practicing solitude for the sake of spiritual rest I like to quote John Bradshaw who was the one who coined the phrase “human-doings,” (no, it wasn't Wayne Dwyer). He used this term to mock our tendency to always be doing something, and to mock our tendency to forget we first are human-beings. Spiritual rest is about understanding the need to cease producing and to just BE. Such times allow us to hear more clearly the quiet inner voice calling us closer to do what we do with a purpose. For me, such times are to draw closer to God and simply listen to Him and what He wants (not to tell Him to listen to me and to what I want). These are the times when a tremendous amount of life-issues can be solved because without the urgency of people/issues/tasks in our face, we can actually focus on what is important, just because it is important and not because of any urgency. It is during times of spiritual rest where we can learn to defeat the tyranny of the urgent. And just like physical rest, spiritual rest is a time when our spirits are mended and made whole again … often even stronger than before we took the rest.

My friends. Choose to include REST into your schedule … otherwise, you will have no control over the kind of character you will be.

I hope to see you back next Monday.

Blessings Viphilus,

Your friend, Omega Man

OCA Training

* Viphilus means, "lover of life"