Exploring the Art of Rest, a human superpower.
August is a great month to unplug, relax and rest – for me it’s a time to spend quality, undistracted moments with my children and my family, to unplug from work mode, to start tapping into my creative intuition, and find more time to manifest calm and stillness in my mind. Rest isn’t sleep – much of it is about getting a reprieve from the logical, analytical, linear thinking that’s the bread and butter of the left brain, what the majority of us are rewarded for in the modern world.
Rest doesn't just enhance well-being, it prevents burnout – a condition that’s reached almost pandemic levels.
I wrote about how an avoidance of rest connects to burnout in a post published at Thrive Global. The gist of the article is that burnout doesn’t come only from external forces like long hours mandated by office culture or work duties or little to no vacation hours, but also from an internal belief about our self-worth that we harbor deep within our psyche – the belief that we’re not enough. Not high enough on the totem pole of social hierarchy, not wealthy enough, not influential enough, not handsome enough, not promoted enough or any one of numerous "not enoughs".
When the media is obsessed with promoting extremes as the economic divide increases, when technology enables an always on mentality, and when social media is driven by AI algorithms that want to spotlight mainly highlight reels, its no wonder why so many of us feel like we’re never enough.
And when we feel like we’ve got an uphill battle in the race to find enough external validation to fill up our empty enough-ness bucket, we do only what we’ve been almost puritanically conditioned to do: keep struggling and work even harder. And of course, the harder we work, the closer we get to the teetering edge of burnout.
And this idea of enough-ness has reached seemingly pandemic levels which leads to a drop in happiness and anxiety and even more stress.
In this episode we'll look into the many antidotes for enough-ness.
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For more from Host Pooja Mottl: www.PoojaMottl.com
Podcast Producer: www.Go-ToProductions.com
Twitter: @PoojaMottl
Instagram: @TheCalmandFreePodcast and @PoojaMottl
LinkedIn: @PoojaMottl
Special Thanks to Kris Kosach of the TPR Podcast for lending her VO for our Podcast Intro!