Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And the a number one reason why you can't relax is because you've never learned to relax. We all think that naturally, out of the box, we should know how to do all these human things, and we don't. And no one's taught us. Humans have to learn everything.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast with Dr. Kevin Payne, a better way of seeing the life that you want to live.
[00:00:34] Speaker C: Welcome. I'm so glad you're with me. Today. We're going to talk about rest and relaxation. Not just sleep. Not zoning out in front of a screen, not collapsing at the end of the day because you're too exhausted to function. Real rest, the kind your body actually needs. And let's be honest, we're terrible at it. We suck at it. You might think, rest, what's there to be bad at? You just stop doing things right. But if that were true, we wouldn't be walking around exhausted, overwhelmed, and constantly teetering on the edge of burnout. We live in a world where busyness is a badge of honor, stress is a status symbol, and truly unwinding feels like a guilty indulgence instead of a basic human need. But here's the thing. Your body doesn't care about productivity, culture. It cares about survival. And if you don't give it real rest, it will find a way to take it, whether you like it or not. You've heard of the fight or flight response, that sympathetic nervous system activation that ramps you up for action. If you've listened to Our recent episode 305 the Truth About Fear, then you already know there's far more to it than just a simple choice between fighting or fleeing. It's a really useful system in the right time, place, and context. But when that system never really turns off, when chronic stress, illness, work pressure, and a world full of constant demands keeps us stuck in high gear, that's when things start breaking down. It's not just that we feel tired. It's that our bodies stop repairing themselves properly. Our cognition gets cloudy, our emotions get brittle, our immune system weakens. And here's the kicker. Rest isn't just about comfort. It's a biological necessity. Your parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest system. And yes, there's also more to this. One exists to counterbalance all the physiological arousal. It's supposed to be your default mode, the state your body returns to when you're not actively fighting for survival. But if you never activate it, you're running a system that's slowly grinding itself into the ground. It is a cycle. We must perform complete tasks, rise to challenges, and then get things done. But we can't always live that way. We must also rest, relax, recuperate, rebuild and restore. The world we've made disrupts this fundamental cycle. It keeps us always obsessed with getting something done. And it devalues the fine art of doing nothing, which is essential as its own experience and for its part in this crucial living cycle. But let's be clear. Most of what we call relaxation isn't actually rest. We think we're unwinding when we're really just distracting ourselves, scrolling endlessly, watching tv, playing games on our phones, obsessing over social media, even reading the news. Some of us do that to relax, which is ridiculous if you think about it. All of those things, they're just more input, more stimulation, more noise, more emotional arousal. They're actually hindering your body and brain in their attempts to recover. And this is a problem because you can't force relaxation. You can't grind your way into it like a to do list task. That's just not how it works. Relaxation is something you have to invite. It's something you must make space for. It won't come if you're tense, frustrated or demanding. You have to create the right conditions and let it settle in. So today we're going to break it all down. Why real rest is so hard to achieve and how to make space for it. The difference between relaxation and more distraction. What actually activates your relaxation response? How chronic stress and illness keep us stuck in overdrive. Practical science backed ways to help your body and mind actually relax. Because rest isn't about doing nothing. It's about restoring your capacity to do everything else. One quick caveat. In this episode, I am somewhat simplifying the neurological underpinnings of these processes. And while there are some exceptions, what I say here is mostly true. Most of the time. I'll say something more about this toward the end. So let's get into getting into rest right after a quick break.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: I'm Dr. Kevin Payne. Just jump with me into your life Lived well.
Half of us now live with chronic illness.
Mine is multiple sclerosis.
It's your life, live it well. A chronic diagnosis doesn't mean goodbye to the good life you wanted. You don't have to feel overwhelmed or hopeless. I'll show you how to save yourself. Take your first step at justjump Life.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: Relaxing is especially difficult when we're living with a system that is already always distressed and threatened by a chronic health condition. We just have this great big ginormous source of threat plunked right down in the middle of our system with us. So why do we have such a difficult time doing something as simple as relaxing? Relaxation is in how we you experience it. Different people are going to find different things relaxing, and that's okay. In this episode, we want to talk about how you can recognize the things that are going to be relaxing to you and put them in their places in your life. Our sympathetic nervous system and sympathetic, you know, in sympathetic nervous system from the Greek, is literally with feeling, bringing up a lot of heightened, strong emotions that are motivating you and urging you to do something. Now, that's a really important system, and it's ramping us up with strong motivation for action. And it's our body's natural reaction to a perceived stressor or challenge or threat. But we can't live like that all the time. If we're trying to work and accomplish and achieve and do stuff and just get stuff done all the time, then we're defeating ourselves when we do that, because we kind of relax sometimes. And relaxation is doing some really important things in our system. We can't live this way all the time. Especially.
Especially we live that way too much with the ongoing distress and threat of a chronic health condition. So you have all of the other stresses and all of the other threats that everybody else has in your life. And you've got this other big thing that is increasing your baseline of distress. But we have to counterbalance that fight or flight sympathetic nervous system. And to do that, we've each got a rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system. And the para in Ancient Greek has a lot of different relational meanings. They're all about how you relate to one thing or another, like around or alongside, or in this case, against. Because the whole point of the parasympathetic nervous system is to undo everything that the sympathetic nervous system just did. It's to ratchet you back to a relaxed, aware, alert baseline. And then depending on your circumstances, you can either go down into rest and then sleep, or you can go back up into another challenge. This parasympathetic nervous system is supposed to get us in the state that we're supposed to be in most of the time. So it's undoing everything that the sympathetic nervous system did by ramping us up. And if we focus all the time on getting things done, we deny this other essential Half of that cycle. And it is a cycle. It's like a sine wave. We're going up and then we're coming back down and up and back down and relaxing. Resting and sleeping are essential. They're things we need. They're where our bodies, brains and minds recuperate, consolidate and grow. And that's really crucial because if we don't spend that time, we don't have a chance to recover from all of the wear and tear of the day. And we don't have an opportunity to reflect and consolidate in our brain the things that we've learned from that day. We don't have an opportunity to slip down into good sleep. Relaxation, disengaging our parasympathetic nervous system is crucial as a gateway to all those other things. And it's a valuable life experience in itself. You can't force relaxation. Say that one more time. You can't force relaxation. Now let's unpack. Why? Even though you can't force it, what you have to do is open the door, make it feel welcome, and allow it to come in. Think of it as a cute, skittish little puppy. Okay? You can't force it to do anything, but you can make it welcome. And if I can engage in a little further bit of personification. Relaxation is shy. Really shy. Relaxation is a little self conscious because it knows it's not about getting anything done. But paradoxically, it also knows that it allows you to get out of your own way. It allows you to get out of the way of yourself so that your body and your brain and your mind can do what they need to do to look after you. And that's really crucial. As I said before, relaxing, resting and sleeping are essential. They're where our bodies, brains and minds recuperate, consolidate and grow. I'll give you the first reason here why you can't relax. And that is you're not doing relaxing things. How do we not relax? Any screen time, screen time, tv, video games, you, your phone, any app. These are purposefully designed to be exciting and addicting, to keep your eyes glued on whatever it is you're doing. They're trying to dominate your attention economy. That's how they make money. And bless their hearts, that's great, that's what they do. And I wouldn't begrudge anyone a good living. But if you want to relax, get your nose out of a screen. And this is especially true about watching the and here my air quote fingers again, the news. News in pretty much any form. Unless you're Actually reading like the raw AP feed, where it really is just the facts, then the news is designed, just like any other TV video game screen experience to be engaging and exciting and addicting. So anytime you spend in front of this artificial heightened reality, that's not relaxing. Why else are you not able to relax? Well, another unrelaxing thing that you're doing is you're ruminating. You're engaging in social isolation, you are being avoidant. So you are worrying about all the stuff that you're not doing by yourself. There are three things there that you need to do. Then instead, spend some time with other people. Not with the drama factory people, but with people who are manufacturing something that is not so exciting. Avoid the drama factories, but don't be socially isolated. Don't be avoidant. If you are ruminating on these negative things, then you need to put something else in your field of attention that is positive, that is creative, that is generative. There's a whole other category of things that we do that doesn't relax us. Sleeping too much, Sleeping too much. Now remember, we all have our own amount of sleep that we need. And some people naturally need eight, ten hours of sleep. That's fine. But for everybody, when you go too far over the amount of sleep that you're actually needing in the moment, you can wake up groggy and distressed and feel guilty because now you're anxious that there are all these other things that you need to do and you can't relax. Eating comfort food. Another thing that we do to try to comfort ourselves. But then with every spoon of ice cream, you're berating yourself for what you're eating, eating, and you're not even having a good experience with it. By all means, food is a wonderful, joyful thing that we can experience and that we can experience together. If we're just mindlessly eating the comfort food, we're not even really fully engaging in the experience that we're having. Another reason that we are not relaxing is you're engaging in task oriented behaviors and you are dissatisfied or frustrated by definition when we are trying to get something done. And really this goes to the we can't spend all of our time on task oriented behaviors. We all have tasks that we need to accomplish. That's fine. When you're doing it, do it. When you're not doing it, don't do it. See what I mean? We don't want to do the halfway job by not focusing on the task to begin with. And then it takes five times as long and you don't do it as well. And then if we didn't do it well, the time after it's done, now we're reflecting on how we could have done it. Well, my point here is when you're doing something, even if that something is nothing, do what you're doing. By definition, if you are engaged in a task oriented behavior, you're wanting to change the world, you're wanting to change something about the world, you are dissatisfied, you are frustrated. By definition, this is not a relaxed state of mind or emotion. If you're trying to multitask, if you are living to work, not working to live, you're not making space in your life for relaxation. If you're equating work with self worth, that way lies madness. Because we can't allow ourselves to be defined only by what we produce. You will never be satisfied with yourself if that's the way you define it. Now, I'm not saying don't take some pride in your accomplishments, that's important too. But don't make your work, your soul, or even primary source of your self worth. You are worth so much more than that. In fact, try a little experiment here. If this is one way that gets in the way of your relaxation, let something slide. No, really, don't do it. You're going to find out that probably 95% of the imperative deadlines that you must face or the world is going to end are not in fact world ending. And everything's still going to keep going. And the a number one reason why you can't relax is because you've never learned to relax. We all think that naturally out of the box, we should know how to do all these human things and we don't. And no one's taught us. And most of what we've been exposed to in our lives is are other people doing a half assed job at their human tasks. And we think, okay, that's what it's supposed to be like. And it's like, no, that's not what it's supposed to be like. You've never learned to relax. Humans have to learn everything. And then once we've learned it, we have to practice it to keep our skill level full. Stop everything. If you want to be in a good relationship, you have to learn how to be in a good relationship. And you have to keep practicing being in a good relationship. And if you don't, entropy takes over. So remember, beyond all of this, the a number one reason why you can't relax is because the acute stress response generated by our Sympathetic nervous system and our fear responses and our sense of threat takes precedence over all of this warm, comforting, relaxing stuff that the parasympathetic nervous system is trying to do. It takes precedence because the sympathetic nervous system is about saving you, and it will hijack your system at the slightest sense of challenge or threat. The parasympathetic nervous system cannot engage until the sympathetic nervous system feels like its work has been done. For now, they can't both operate together. And when you put them in conflict with one another, the parasympathetic nervous system, you'll rest and digest. Response. Your relaxation response will lose every time because it doesn't have the imperative of survival in big flaming capital letters behind it. Relaxation is really simple, but that's why it's so difficult. We can get caught up in what's called metacognition, thinking about our thinking, right? And so we get caught up in the metacognition about how we're failing to relax. And the more we do that, the more we feel threat and the less likely your sympathetic nervous system is to allow itself to disengage. If we want to truly relax, we have to open up and allow it to take the space that we offer of its own accord. It's that little skittish puppy, soft and cuddly, but it's wiggly and it's shy and it's a little uncertain, and it's not going to go in and take that place unless its big, scary, spiky older sibling, the sympathetic nervous system, gets out of the way. If we want to relax, we have to do relaxing things first and become patient and allow the relaxation to appear. We can't force it. Sometimes you'll do the relaxing thing and you won't have the relaxation response. That's okay. You didn't open that space up enough for it to step in. That's all that happened. Go off and do something else and then try it again later. If you are always stressed, even with good stress, even with eustress, right. Then it takes time to make the space for that switchover to occur. But if we want to relax first, we can't let our anxiety get in the way. And one of the ways that we can practice that, because many, many, many of us have real challenges in our lives with anxiety, which is that future directed fear, right? And it's engaging that acute stress response. It's engaging that sympathetic nervous system. You're teaching yourself that it's okay to make a space in your life for nothing. And we've got to learn that once we're committed to making these spaces in our life, for the relaxation response to show up and engage with us, there are a few things that we can do. So the very first thing is to just breathe. People think that the suggestion to breathe is just stupid because it's something that you're doing all the time and you're still not relaxed. So how on earth can it help? You've got to breathe the right way. Breath is our foundational rhythm as living creatures. Breath is our foundational rhythm. And so what we're talking about here is what's sometimes called diaphragmatic breathing from the diaphragm belly breathing. Right? You can just pause and place your hand on your belly and close your eyes and just breathe in deeply, hold slightly, and then let it out. Take about five or six breaths. Just a minute of breathing. And it really is a great thing to do because the parasympathetic nervous system is directly engaged by diaphragmatic breathing. So it's one way to kind of shortcut making that space available. There's another set of things that you might want to do. We'll call these getting into your body progressive relaxation. So you're say, starting out at your extremities, maybe with your toes and, or your feet, and you tense and relax one muscle group, and then maybe your calves and then your legs and so forth. And you can, you can go through your whole body in, you know, a minute or two and just tense and relax. Once you practice this sometimes, then it's another good way, backed by a lot of research, to induce opening that space for the relaxation response to enter another way you can get into your body. Visualize calm. And I know it sounds silly again, but close your eyes and visualize your happy place, whatever it is. It's called guided imagery. And you're just going to take yourself on a little tour of it. And you're not just going to see it, you're going to try to hear it and you're going to try to feel it, smell all those things. You want to engage all of your senses as you're doing this. Why? Because you're filling all your senses with the happy, calm feedback that's replacing whatever it is that's being stressful and engaging your sympathetic nervous system. So visualize calm. Immerse yourself into it. The first few times you do this, it's not going to be real effective because again, humans have to learn stuff and we got to practice it. Many of us have not visualized a lot Other ways to do this are something like yoga or Tai Chi or stretching. Any kind of slow, ritual, rhythmic movements. Listen to music. That slow, ritual, rhythmic. It's got that relaxing healing. Do it. You can massage even yourself. You can massage your hands. Take some hand lotion and just systematically massage the lotion into your hands. Or take off your shoes and a tennis ball. Run the tennis ball kind of firmly, slowly, rhythmically along the bottom of your feet. Take a warm bath. The similarity here is you're filling your senses with things that are calming, things that are soothing, things that are natural, things that are rhythmic, things that are slower. That's what you're doing. And of course, brings us to a next category. Get into nature. There are a lot of reasons why most of us find nature relaxing. There's the sunlight, the wind, the microbes. I mean, people give all kinds of reasons for it. I'll give you one you've probably never heard before, and I think this is true. I do not have a study to back this up. One of these days, I may do this to see if I'm full of it or not. I think we can take a cue from Charles Sanders peirce in semiotics. C.S. peirce, an important American philosopher, developed this thing called semiotics. Why are natural surroundings more calming than our artificially created world? And here's what Peirce would probably say about it if he were around and asked this question. At least I'd like to think so. Everything in our. In our environment is not just the thing, but they are signs that are carrying messages. Some of them are really obvious, like advertisements and things like that, but there are messages and associations with everything. There are multiple kinds of these signs, but I'll give you two. One is called an icon, and the other is called a symbol. So an icon is a direct representation of the thing. So if you see a fire, there's no added cognitive level of work or interpretation that's necessary. You don't have to process it in the same level as words. Manufactured human environments tend to be full of symbols which have arbitrary meanings that we have to look up and we have to process. Nature doesn't. So when we are out in nature, we are removing this massive layer of extra cognitive burden when we experience it. And that's really cool. So get out into nature. Get into something creative, whatever it is, something that is not competitive. It's not about doing something perfect. It's not about producing something great. It's just about expressing yourself that is so crucial. And we can feel relaxed as we're doing that as we have the product of our expression in front of us. Get the stressful things out. Writing, journaling, exercise, some kind of physical work, a hobby, or decluttering. It just can't be complex, it can't be complicated. It can't be something that we're requiring to think a lot. Because what we're trying to do fundamentally is slow ritual, rhythmic. Right. Something that is rather mindless. And of course, one of the best expressions of that dance. We're getting into our body, we're getting into movement.
[00:28:27] Speaker C: Or close your eye.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: You know, start with what do you see? And just observe what you see. Then close your eyes and what do you feel? What do you hear? You're allowing your senses to take over and disconnect. Short circuit some of the negative cognition that's going on. Say your ABC is backward. There are all kinds of alternatives here. Another thing you can do is break your routine in a safe way. So if your routines are the things that are getting you down, then divorce yourself from your existing demands, rituals and patterns. If they are becoming onerous or controlling, just go out and do something else. Eat at a different place for lunch, something little, and observe. Enjoy the experience. Fundamentally, what we're getting at here is do quiet, soothing things. These enhance the feelings of safety and control and familiarity and being close to positive things with positive valuations in your life and exposing you to low but not no demand activities, because no demand. Then you become bored and, you know, don't feel guilty about relaxing. We start out trying to relax with the best of intentions and then we feel guilty. When we feel guilty, that's going to re engage our sympathetic nervous system and it's going to spiral out of control and we're not going to get it done, okay?
[00:29:55] Speaker C: So we're not going to allow ourselves to get swept up in an unrelenting doom spiral today. Instead, we'll take a deep breath, a quick break, and come back in a moment with some final practical tips to try in our own lives.
[00:30:12] Speaker A: We all have challenges.
Mine is multiple sclerosis.
We each have this one life, and we didn't choose to be saddled with chronic illness. But there's a better way.
So I choose to just jump.
And you can, too. It's your life. Live it well.
Justjump life.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: It's the youe Life Lived well podcast.
Don't forget to like and subscribe.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Welcome back.
[00:30:57] Speaker C: Let's tie this up in a nice pretty bow with some bits you can use today. We live in a world that runs on Exhaustion, stress is constant and worse, much of it is distressing. Burnout is common and we've been trained to think that pushing through is the only way to keep up. But here's the problem. Your body doesn't care about your to do list. It's going to demand rest one way or another. Either you give it what it needs or it's going to take it from you. Through brain fog, through chronic fatigue, through illness, through complete systemic shutdowns. And that's why real rest is not optional. It's not about luxury. It's about function. So here's what we've learned today. 1. Most of what we call relaxation isn't rest. Scrolling your phone, binge watching TV or zoning out does not actually recharge your body or brain. Those things distract us, but they don't restore us. 2. Your body has a built in system for deep relaxation and restoration, but you have to leave a place open for it. The parasympathetic nervous system is adapted to unwind stress, restore homeostasis, that stability or balance, repair wear, waste and damage. But if you don't afford it, the inviting signals it never gets the opportunity. 3. Chronic stress, especially distress, keeps us stuck in high gear. If you're always on edge, always on, always carrying that low level tension in your body, your system forgets how to relax. You get caught in a loop where rest feels impossible. Even when you have time for it, even when you desperately need it. 4. You can't force relaxation, but you can invite it in. You don't will yourself into relaxing. You create conditions where it happens naturally. Things like deep breathing, sensory relaxation, movement, nature, serene visualizations and mindful transitions tell your nervous system, hey, it's safe to calm down now. Number five. You must learn to distinguish between superficial self soothing or self care and the things that really matter. Much of what passes for self care advice is just wrong. Some of it may be well meaning, but good intentions do not make it correct or useful when you try it and it doesn't work. Over time, you tend to give up on the whole idea of of real rest. So please don't confuse a temporary, superficial, hedonic bump in pleasure or satisfaction with real restoration. 6. Rest is how you restore your capacity for everything else. It's not about being lazy, it's not about opting out. It's about giving your brain and body the recovery time they need so you can actually function at your best. And number seven, to reiterate once more, the most important point you must understand about rest, relaxation and sleep. If you make them a task to accomplish. You have already lost. The sympathetic nervous system is task oriented. It's about getting things done. It's about saving you. It's about marshaling all your resources in urgent, emergent, existential, do or die crises. Any challenge, threat, fear, disgust, pain or imperative is the province of the sns. So activating your PNS is never a thing to do. It is an experience you invite. Rest is the purview of your parasympathetic nervous system. Pns. When the two are in conflict, the SNS will always win. Why? The SNS is built to save you. The PNS is adapted to help you rest and recover when you feel safe. In evolutionary terms, this isn't a contest. Now is a good place for me to reiterate. I've been a bit fast and loose with the biology of these things. For rhetorical purposes, yes, there are occasionally phenomena called reciprocal coupling, coactivation and CO inhibition where the SNS and PNS work together in more sophisticated ways. But what I've shared in this episode is the overwhelmingly most common relation between them. It's especially useful as a shorthand way to think about the practical consequences. You can't force rest. You must train yourself to become open to rest, inviting to rest, welcoming to rest. So what do you do with this? Because knowing isn't enough. You have to actually change something. Start by noticing where your rest isn't actually restful. Pay attention to the things you do when you're unwinding my infamous air quote fingers here. Are they giving your system what it needs, or are they just keeping your brain busy and distracted? Give yourself permission to rest. If you spent years believing you have to earn your rest, this will feel uncomfortable at first. That's fine. Do it anyway. Our cultural legacy of the Protestant work ethic is not our friend. Treat rest like fuel, because that's exactly what it is. You wouldn't expect a car to run without gas or a battery. You can't expect your body to keep going without rest and recovery. It's never a luxury. It is a necessity. Find at least one real relaxation practice that works for you. Maybe it's a breathing exercise. Maybe it's getting outside for 10 minutes. Maybe it's sensory relaxation, soft lighting, music, a warm bath. Whatever it is, start practicing it and understand it is a practice. So you must do it again and again, repeatedly, ritually, with awareness and intention, and with humility and forgiveness. Because this simple thing is hard to do well and consistently.
Because at the end of the day, rest is how you keep going. It's how you protect your body, your brain, your emotions, your ability to engage with life and to meaningfully deliver. And if you don't protect it, no one else will do it for you. Even more than that, rest is how you grow, develop and consolidate your gains. If you work out your body and your mind, if you put all that effort into somehow developing your capacities, you must also make the space for restorative rest, relaxation and sleep or all that work will be lost. So start today. One small shift, one real moment of rest. Your body and your future self will thank you and I thank you so much for spending this valuable moment of your life with me. Until next time, go forth, be well, do well and do good.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: If you've enjoyed today's topic and want to join the conversation with Dr. Kevin Payne, find you'd life lived well on all of your favorite social media sites, Patreon and of course yourlifelivedwell co.
