Overcoming the anxiety of rest
It is a Saturday and you are at home, with your appointments for the day all cancelled at the last minute. How would you react?
Every single time I found myself in such a situation, I would go into panic mode. Anxiety would kick in. What do I do with my free time?! This is unusual. Is there something wrong with me? Why did my appointments have to get cancelled? Am I boring, why can’t I think of anything interesting to do?
The most philosophical question in the midst of my anxiety: am I living my life well?
In this fast-paced world that has only sped up in the age of digitalisation, being busy is synonymous with being alive. Slow down or rest too much and we seem to be underachieving, getting left behind, not doing enough. It doesn’t matter what we are busy with — social life, family life, work, volunteering, hobbies, religious activities — at least we are not squandering the moments that we have. We are not left to our own devices, the most terrifying of all being the mind and its cacophony of inner voices that we are forced to listen when we are resting (or not being busy).
Yet so many of us get through each day with great struggle, lamenting about the lack of work-life balance, and anything else we can think of that brings us great stress and confusion. Being busy has become a burden, yet also the high we get in order to numb and silence overwhelming emotions, to distance ourselves from our inner self.
During my growing years, resting meant more time for me to indulge in self-pity by replaying the past, asking questions about life that did not have straightforward answers, allowing my traumas and negative emotions to fester. I grew to hate such pockets of free time, for it gave my mind the freedom to wander to the darkest of places.
With that said, I never knew how to really rest. With all the anxiety that it has brought, I would much rather prefer to busy myself with one thing after another, until unexpected situations such as illnesses or sheer physical exhaustion forced me to lie in bed for longer than usual.
On a recent Saturday like this, learning to enjoy rest was an adventure on its own. It took hard work, such as falling into deep sleep for 2 hours after my mind raced to draw up a mental to-do list that only intensified my level of panic. I stayed away from excessive scrolling on social media feeds, listened to a podcast, made myself tea, started reading an e-book, watched a video or two, and began writing. Most importantly, I found the space and time to listen to myself once more, processing all that were challenging and mind boggling over the last few weeks. With rest, the fleeting moments of anxiety gave way to clarity about my own life, where I am, and who I am at this point in time.
Rest is perhaps not always a state of inactivity, of nothingness and emptiness with time being the only thing that is in motion. Rest can be more productive than being busy all the time as we take stock of our own lives, short stops that we take before we carry on with our journey ahead.
To my anxious side that has probed me incessantly with the question, am I living my life well? I can only say that having these moments of rest made me realise that I need not always be running, and that alone is enough to remind me that life is well.
