The Sleep-Restfulness Conundrum

The thing that we secretly desire to do on a Sunday is ‘Not Doing Anything’ which in common parlance broadly comprises a post-lunch siesta and a good night’s sleep.

The symptom of the need for rest usually starts showing up in our minds from Wednesday. That is why Wednesday is called The Hump Day. Because if we had started our week on a Monday, we would have reached our peak by midweek and are expected to drag ourselves till Friday and take rest on the weekends and revive.

The brain has been conditioned to seek rest and feel restored if we sleep well.

The adage goes, that even God rested on the 7th day after completing all his work of creation. The humans are expected to get ready from Monday to take on the workload of the weekdays. The cycle continues routinely like a point on a Sin x curve plotted on a sheet of graph paper or it’s expected to behave in that pattern normatively.

The big questions for us to answer are.

Are we at that stage where our work and Life are well balanced?

Do we understand the message sent out by our body and mind of its requirement for rest? 

Is sleep the only circuit breaker we know of to rest and rejuvenate our body and mind to take on the next batch of workload?

Our own experience shows that many of us even after doing our Sunday rest, and sleep routine feel mentally overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and physically tired by Tuesday.

The weekend looks far away - why?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith who is known as a work-life integration researcher seems to be having the answer. She says - “Identifying your rest deficit is the first step in being your personal and professional best self”. As a busy physician, author, and mom, she understands that life's demands can leave you feeling mentally overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and physically tired. Daily she helps high-achievers deal with their work-rest imbalance and find actionable answers to the thriving lifestyle they desire.

She says sleep and rest are not the same things. We’re suffering from a rest deficit because we don’t understand the various types of rest we need and their true power. She says that there are 7 types of rest that every person needs. Rest should equal restoration in seven key areas of your life.

Seven! And we were trying to open all the locks with just one key – Sleep.

The first type of rest we need is PHYSICAL REST, which can be passive or active. Passive physical rest includes sleeping and napping, while active physical rest means restorative activities such as yoga, stretching, and massage therapy that help improve the body’s circulation and flexibility.

The second type of rest is the MENTAL REST. We all experience that when arrear work builds up on our desks. We lay down at night to sleep; we struggle to turn off our brains as conversations from the day fill our thoughts. Ideas and worries come to visit us in our sleep and keep knocking on our mental doors. Despite sleeping seven to eight hours, we wake up feeling as if we never went to bed. That is a mental rest deficit.

The third type of rest we need is SENSORY REST. Pressure to Stay alert during long commutes, reading traffic signals during driving, Bright lights, Computer screens, Background noise, and multiple conversations touching multiple issues — whether they’re in an office or on a VC — can cause our senses to feel overwhelmed throughout our active hours of the day. The effects of it can eat well into the time we dedicate to rest.

The fourth type of rest is CREATIVE REST. The pressure to come up with new ideas to solve problems at hand and to anticipate them to prevent them from happening occupies the mind of the senior management. They are also expected to brainstorm new ideas to come up with newer value propositions for the organization they lead. The pressure of this leaves them staring blankly at a wall. This type of rest is especially important for anyone who must solve problems or brainstorm new ideas. Creative rest reawakens the awe and wonder inside each of us. Allowing ourselves to take in the beauty of the outdoors — even if it’s at a local park or in your backyard — provides us with creative rest. Select companies are offering unlimited paid vacations to their C-suite executives to let their creative juices flow.

The fifth type of rest is EMOTIONAL REST, which means having the time and space to freely express your feelings and cut back on people-pleasing. Deep inside us we feel ignored, neglected, and used by our family members, relatives, friends, and colleagues at our workplace. We are conditioned to say ‘I’m Good’ with a sunny smile each time someone wishes us a ‘How are you? We are taught to rise spiritually and not to complain but to accept things as they are. This can lead us to a pressure cooker situation which can explode unless released periodically. With our ever-expanding social and professional circles, we can ask ourselves if we have that person, we can be open with our feelings be it sharing our joy, frustration, and sadness, and hope to be understood?

Unknowingly we could be suffering the sixth type of rest deficit which is SOCIAL REST. Many a time we find ourselves in situations in which have people we are inseparably intertwined with who exhaust us with their predictably frustrating behavior. Despite flagging it politely, objecting to it, and warning them not to repeat it, people who are close to us force us to bring out the worst in us. Repeated exposure to these situations exacerbates it. To experience more social rest, we need to surround ourselves with positive and supportive people who inspire us to ignore our situations and revive us.

The final type of rest is SPIRITUAL REST, which is the ability to connect beyond the physical and mental and feel a deep sense of belonging, love, acceptance, and purpose. To receive this, we must engage in something greater than ourselves and add the practice of gratitude, prayer, meditation, or community involvement to our daily routine.

The present-day society celebrates only the success of a high-achieving, high-producing performer. This puts enormous pressure on its actors. It doesn’t bother to know what the person is going through in his personal life or deep inside his brain. 

We all experience residual fatigue even after resting well the day before, we call it by so many names stress, irritable behavior, frustration, feeling used, defeated, and exhausted. As you can see, sleep alone can’t restore us to the point we feel rested. Now we know that each word above points to a completely different cause which is behind the feeling of rest deprivation. 

So, it’s time we focused on getting the right type of rest our body and mind need to function normally, or else we will be a society of high-performing, high-achieving, chronically tired, and chronically burned-out individuals who are ripe to pop anytime like a soap bubble.

The choice is ours.

That Missing Credible Voice

Two incidents and a vitriolic exchange of words between two interest groups kept the media space filled towards the second fortnight of April. The one at the national level was the high fuel price and closer home it was the Puri Heritage Corridor Project.

The fuel price kerfuffle was centred around whether the centre or the states should reign it in by reducing the percentage of taxes that they are collecting per litre of fuel. The rigmarole of Puri was around the huge opacity around what is being planned to be done to the heritage site – people demanded facts be presented. The presenters were paraded but none were believed. The HC intervened in the Puri incident and all the parties including the ASI were asked to submit their statements under affidavit for the HC to take the final call. 

The credibility of the court is also not above public suspicion.

 

Statements in dozens – each contradicting the other; political blame games, efforts to create a controversy and take political advantage, an allegation of trying to earn a political dividend by creating controversies flew around engaging the common man and leaving him more confused. It was quite like when the two local stray bulls locked horns and pushed each other. The bystanders get startled, some shout in amusement, traffic comes to a halt, dogs bark in unison, a few cyclists topple injuring themselves, women run to safety, smart bikers sneak past, and to everyone’s surprise, they suddenly choose to stop. Life settles to normalcy in just a few minutes. And those two jostling bulls stand masticating their cuds as if nothing had happened between them.

 

No one gets to know what it was about and why the fight was started in the first place.

The poor common man is destined to see such exchanges either coming from the politicians or the bulls whenever and as long as both parties choose to fight. When they stop the common man would be still groping in the dark to know what exactly the fact was.

 

The absence of a sane credible voice was never felt so much by our society.

 

Let’s go back to the recent few decades. That need was served by editors of important newspapers, columnists whose independent voices were much sought after, and academicians whose personal conduct and academic track record added credence to what they said in public space.

 

We have seen how Late Harekrushna Mahatab in the 80s wrote one editorial in The Prajatantra urging people to stop the practice of animal sacrifice in temples and that resulted in a mass movement and a hundred temples joined voluntarily. Such was his understanding of the pulse of people and his influence over the society of that time. We have seen how RK Laxman’s daily cartoon lampooned the people in power and depicted the situation of the common man of Mumbai which struck a chord across the country. People like Arun Shourie, and Ramnath Goenka not only were the voices people listened to but believed to a large extent. Such was the weight of their opinion and influence over people that the politics of that time was influenced and configured around those voices. 

They were high on credibility.

 

Similarly, we have had academicians adorning various discussion panels in the TV shows of the 90s whose voices and opinions were just not insightful but impeccably presented and were surgical in many ways. They had their decades-long research, field trips, meetings, and observations as their strengths to bolster their arguments. Their deep understanding of their subject, their neutrality, and their aloofness to the political dispensation gave them the power to call a spade a spade.

 

That brings us to my core concern, in the age of information explosion, why it’s still difficult for a common man to access facts (truths)? Why the messenger of truth is weak to stand up and speak? In other words, who now is the credible voice in our midst who is well-informed, politically neutral, selfless, and has the guts to tell the facts? 

The problem is the source of truth or the dearth of carriers of truth?

 

Institutions like newspapers and universities had nurtured free thinkers and built their talent by providing them security. If there were fearless journalists, there were strong management of the news outlets who stood strongly up to the political powers. If an academician could work on his subject freely and deeply, there was a strong leader of that organization who saw merit in such people and gave them the resources, space, and liberty to voice the facts. 

Where are we now?

 

How practical it is to expect news outlets to be free from political influences when most of them are owned by various political parties by proxy. If few traditional newspapers who haven’t sold their ownership yet, are doing their best to be in the good books by crawling when they are expected to bend to the wishes of the government to curry financial or political favours. If we believe in the adage ‘Nothing succeeds like success, then we surely have many winners and many waiting to join the game. The academic space has long ceased to be a place of intellectual pursuits. It has chosen two to play second fiddle to the coaching centres that dot the landscape for various competitive examinations. It’s now a playground of personal interest and political one-upmanship. Lustreless, faceless and anonymous leaders are not given responsibilities to build institutions on principles and values but are deputed to stand guard and carry out official instructions.

 

We are seeing an unprecedented situation in our democracy where the earlier credible voices have either fallen off their pedestal or have been effectively silenced. Now manufactured truths are presented to the homes of the hapless public through various social media channels like Twitter and WhatsApp by faceless authors who are not accountable for defending their stories. Though this strategy of silencing the sane voices of society seems to be working in favour of achieving immediate political goals, its long-term impact on our society is far deeper and much more damaging than it meets the eye.

This loss will take a few generations to regain.

 

Society and its institutions that don’t recognize talent and nurture it; silence the free-thinking and truthful voices will be desperately searching for a capable leader and a credible voice when it would one day be standing on the edge of the cliff facing dystopia and crying to be rescued.