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Revolutionary thought for the summer break: You work best when well-rested

Brace yourselves, I have something revolutionary to say. You work the best when well-rested. When you’re well-rested, you’re not constantly running on a low battery and about to crash; you have enough energy to keep going. In that battery-always-almost-empty state, you’re irritable, make bad decisions, procrastinate more, do things that, if you had been rested, you would have realized didn’t need to be done, take longer to complete tasks, and especially, you don’t prioritize well. You do many more tasks that turn out to be irrelevant.

Do you recognize the feeling that it seems almost morally wrong to be relaxing while at the same time working in academia?

Yet, weirdly, it feels wrong, almost obscene to say this in an academic context. Still, I’ll say it again: you should be well-rested so you can be happy and make good choices, without constantly relying on psychological coping mechanisms and trauma responses that take control when you’re running on fumes. When well-rested and taking good care of yourself, you operate from a much better perspective, with clarity.

Maybe I’ve become a little woo-woo esoteric since attending this meditation retreat, but I found it eye-opening. It’s been a culmination point in a long process where I’ve reflected on how I want to work. Many personal development folks, such as Brendon Burchard in High-Performance Habits, state that once you’ve reached a certain level of success, what got you there won’t make you successful in the long run. For example, the habits that got me the postdoc won’t make me an effective and productive scholar in the long run. Initially, I was successful because I said yes to many things, networked a lot, and published quickly. Now, I should publish more high-quality work, which requires a different approach. It’s about doing less but really good work, getting it into the right journals, and persisting until it reaches publication quality so that it can actually have an impact (i.e. somebody reads and cites it, I’d already be happy with that).

My academic writing project is part of this, but it also touches on earlier encounters with Greg McKeown’s Essentialism and Effortless (which it seems I never reviewed here), which I keep revisiting over the years.

Pushing through won’t make you more productive in the long run

Cathy Mazak phrases it as a revolutionary act to prioritize writing in Making Time to Write (review to follow, it’s already prepared), to put yourself first and approach academia with an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset we are all supposed to have.

This is why it feels revolutionary to say you work best when well-rested. I’ve seen so many people throw temper tantrums and be less effective because they’re always running on low batteries. I’ve experienced this myself, especially during winter when I get way too many colds because I’m never truly well-rested. For a long time, I fooled myself into believing that working more hours would make me more productive, that I just needed to push through.

Of course, I also have to acknowledge that I’m in a privileged position to be able to even have these thoughts. Not every early career scholar has the ability to just change the way they work and depending on your employment situation, people have less freedom to make such choices. But then again, you always have control over how you view your work and your attitude towards it. Actually, I think I was inspired to think this way partly because Cal Newport brought up the idea of a form of ‘quiet quitting’ as a tool for deep work in Slow Productivity.

“Working a lot” often has nothing to do with productivity or moving forward with the important things

I used to think I should always do more, but now that I’m trying to do less, I see many opportunities to cut out even more unnecessary tasks. Actually, that’s something that Newport has criticized in our conception of productivity: it always focuses on simply doing more or seeming more busy when really, it stops people from reflecting on what really matters. Do you really need to do all those tasks? Are they even moving you toward your goal? I used to have major problems with this. Doing too many things is my special brand of self-destructive coping mechanisms. I do this because it gives me a sense of control. It’s hard to unlearn thinking that way. Just doing more actually stops me from doing what’s essential (such as working on my big projects instead of a million mini tasks and side quests).

It’s a process and I still find myself running on fumes regularly. However, since the meditation retreat, I’ve become more reflective. I’ve seen this in many situations, even in my private life, where discussions about avoiding temper tantrums during travel when everyone is tired led me to conclude that you should never let yourself get that tired. Put your own oxygen mask on first and take it seriously. This is something I theoretically knew but never emotionally understood. It seemed so foreign to academia, where you’re expected to always be doing something. You shouldn’t seem like you have it too easy, such as just having a coffee without multitasking. But since the meditation retreat, I’ve understood certain things emotionally that I only knew in theory before.

You don’t need to constantly be doing things and filling your brain with more and more stuff. In fact, that’s probably counter-productive.

I used to think that understanding moments where you’re waiting as a gift for calm and meditation was woo-woo nonsense, but the retreat changed my perspective. The teacher was excellent and made me see meditation differently. Since then, I’ve realized how different it is not to be doing things all the time, not constantly filling my brain with content. I’ve come to appreciate calm and single-tasking, and I no longer feel the need to multitask (at least for now, let’s see how long it lasts…). This has radically changed my outlook on life.

I’m not sure if it will last through the winter term when stress levels rise, but it feels like a mindset shift that I doubt I will undo any time soon. It feels weird to say publicly that my goal is to take it more easily because I used to believe things always had to be hard. Now I want to see if I operate better without constant stress. It’s revolutionary in academia to put yourself first and truly invest in self-care. Not to do yoga to be more productive, but to stay sane.

Do less. Rest more.

I invite you to reflect on this topic and maybe you, too, want to see what your life would look like if you were well-rested. I have a feeling that I have not truly been well-rested in quite some time. I had tried to improve my physical rest but since I never truly shut work out of my head, I was never letting go mentally. I feel that things are different now and currently, I’m loving it.

I hope you have a good summer and are taking a much-deserved break.
I know, summer is the time when we want to get all those things done we didn’t get done during the semester.
But you can’t run on empty batteries.
Put on your oxygen mask!

Best,

S


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Sarah Lang (August 26, 2024). Revolutionary thought for the summer break: You work best when well-rested. Epigrammetry. Retrieved February 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1275p


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