When you hear the word rest, what comes to mind?
Is rest a source of tension for you and your organisation?
Is rest a source of inspiration for you and your organisation?
While rest takes on many forms for us, the tension between work (what our systems reward and value) and rest (what our systems depend on and are nourished by) is what we will be diving into in this month’s edition of Work Awake.
My challenge for you: sit with this tension until it dissipates.
What is Rest, Really?
Rest is defined in the English language in a few ways. 1. The remaining part, people or things (leftover) and 2. A period of relaxing, sleeping or doing nothing after a period of activity.
Do you feel that tightness and restriction creeping in? It’s understandable when rest is something that only gets activated after we have produced, and rest is all that is left over. This is a low-functioning expression of rest that is:
Consequential (comes after)
Compensatory (recovery from something else)
Defined by what it’s not (“doing nothing”)
Earned (“well-earned rest” in the example)
We as humans, leaders, and organisations are REALLY good at following this mechanistic example. Some examples I’ve gathered from these professionals include:
- “First one in, last one out” as leadership credibility signal
- Leaders who never take vacation, implicitly communicating that rest is for the uncommitted
- Vacation time that accrues at rates, earning rest through labor
- Scheduling maintenance only when humans/machines/systems break, not preventatively
- Back-to-back calendars with no transition time treated as efficient utilization
- Working lunches as standard rather than exception
- “Utilisation rates” in professional services where 100% is the goal
- Email response time as informal performance metric
- Promotion criteria that reward “above and beyond” (code for: sacrificing rest)
This system optimises for continuous extraction until failure, then treats the failure as an individual problem (burnout, turnover, “not resilient enough”) rather than a systems design flaw.
But does this practice REALLY serve us?
Let’s look at rest through nature’s lens. Perhaps you feel the expansion already occurring in your mind and body? Here in nature, rest is activated before and while we produce, and rest is how we start over. This is the high-functioning expression of rest that is:
Preparatory (before activity to enable it)
Foundational (the substrate that makes activity possible)
Generative (creating capacity, insight, or quality)
Valuable in itself (not just as recovery)
What if leaders and organisations took the cues from nature and wove these practices into their existing systems. Here are some examples that I have co-created with courageous teams:
- Built-in periods where projects pause for deep critique and reflection (retrospective). Preventing problems just like muscle growth that rebuilds stronger tissues in rest periods.
- Regularly occurring and tailored team off-sites for downtime and maintenance. These cycles repopulate the people and rebuild relationships as we see in crop rotation where rest is the production system.
- Meetings incorporating an elimination round for systems and behaviours. This ‘dead space’ unleashes ideas that reach the people and are generated much like forest canopy gaps.
- Company-wide, living calendar that outlines organisational rhythm allowing for expectation, production and rest times, and feedback just like the seasonal calendar does.
- Distributed feedback loops where teams bring data in from the field (practice and relationships) to inform, adapt, and stabilise organisational systems as seen in mammals, flora, and fauna.
“Work and rest aren’t opposites. They’re partners.”
— Soojung-Kim Pang, Alex. The Way We Work.
This whole-systems approach where we build rest into the foundation, may mean accepting that a well-rested organisation might produce less volume but higher quality, with longer sustainability. But our metrics don’t capture quality-adjusted-for-longevity, only output-per-period. With the climate crisis well underway, perhaps they should.
What do you think?
“Pseudo-Rest” at Today’s Workplace
Mirroring what we are seeing globally, and with other Australian industries, a survey of architecture and engineering professionals revealed that 58% experience stress affecting their mental health, with 49% reporting impacts on personal relationships. Additionally, 71% of leaders acknowledge that stress and burnout hinder company growth.
The instinct? Work harder. Bill more hours. Chase the next project to fill the uncertain pipeline. And don’t forget to also look after yourself while you take on more.
It helps to remember that rest is not:
Unfortunately, these activities often drain our energy while feeling (to our brains) productive or restful in the moment. Our bodies however are exhausted, sluggish, and tapped out. This has been referred to in popular psychology, as ‘pseudo-rest’ and ‘fake downtime’, a concept explored by writers such as Cal Newport and Saundra Dalton-Smith, capturing the illusion of rest created by passive digital consumption or low-effort busyness. It reinforces the chasing of those gold stars that have trained us to be good students. While this behavior may be useful for measurement and control, Sonnentag and Fritz’s research found it prevents psychological detachment and parasympathetic nervous system activation that requires full rest to restore.
The problem isn’t that people aren’t working hard enough. It’s that they’re burning out.
What if the solution to this mental health crisis isn’t more productivity, but intentional rest?
Here’s the thing, we know we need rest. Our thinking brains know how beneficial rest is. It knows how our minds and bodies thrive when we rest, but also how social, innovation, and economic capacities increase in our organisations when rest is integral.
We humans also create solutions for rest. We are really effective at making plans for taking action, yet studies by Gollwitzer show that only 20-30% of us actually integrate our well laid plans. Meaning 70-80% of the time we do not follow through.
So, why do we fail to practice rest?
Skills, Safety & Systems
Perhaps it’s because we’ve forgotten that like leadership, rest is a skill. It’s something that we must prioritise, practice, cultivate, and protect. This is harder than it sounds in a world constantly competing for our attention and a recent history that’s taught us to fit as much as we can in.
I think of one client’s experience in work and life, that rest has (and still does) feel incredibly uncomfortable. Partly because they didn’t practice it for over 20 years (external), they have technology shouting at them to engage with it and ‘make their life easier’ (external), and also because they felt unworthy of rest (internal). My own experience is not too different. Maybe this strikes a chord for you too?
We’re navigating rest challenges our parents never faced. Constant connectivity, blurred boundaries, and a culture that treats rest as indulgent. But understanding why we struggle isn’t enough. We need new skills. Skills that puncture both external and internal paradigms.
We understand safety and security are fundamental human needs. However, as Amy Edmondson reminds us, psychological safety, “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking”, is essential for learning and performance.
Yet, in many organisations, this safety doesn’t extend to rest. Taking a break still feels like a risk. A moment where our value, visibility, or productivity might be questioned. As we evolve our systems and skills, perhaps we must also expand our definition of safety to include courage to rest.
Think of all the people you know who pride themselves on not taking holiday or organisations that say ‘we can rest after we…’ achieve this milestone, or push through this moment of disruption, etc. I grew up learning what work was is the US where ‘work is life’. I’ve seen this at it’s absolute worst and even (shamefully) practiced what I learned.
We have built the skill of pushing through challenges, but often at the sacrifice of our own health and wellbeing. We can no longer treat rest as a reward because disruption is now a constant, not a moment. The outdated mechanic response is to squeeze more from fewer people.
The emerging regenerative response is to create sustainable capacity so people actually want to stay and cultivate the environment with rich knowledge, skills, mindsets, tools and systems. This requires us to develop skills to look inward and establish ways that work and rest can co-exist.
It’s not that we’re incapable.
Quite the contrary.
It’s because we’re incredibly capable.
It’s the tension of change that’s uncomfortable.
This is the dynamic conversation at play weaving our external and internal factors together as a system. It’s strong, but systems rely on the inputs we give them. They require us to engage. The same way you exercise your muscles to get fit, feed your body to healthy function, and practice new skills to become an expert.
The power to choose rest lies in our hands.
Leadership’s Role in Rest
The most courageous leaders see rest’s role beyond the visible outcomes of exhaustion, poor performance, distraction, and uncertainty. This is the tipping point for most leaders. The definition of Leadership ‘to step forth from one territory into another; or the courage to step into the unknown’ is whats required to change the status quo. The decision to trade comfort, knowing, and ego for discomfort, sensing, and connection will promote rest to its rightful place.
Perhaps this means evolving our relationship with rest by taking small, courageous steps towards restorative rest as shown in the image below.
Take this example of traditional, reactive leadership in action where a client informs the team their project timeline is shifting into the future, again. The reactive leader will scramble by increasing their business development relationships, adjust their pricing and services, over-populate projects with available team members, and seek external opportunities to keep the system floating.
Another approach is the responsive leader. They don’t move their attention off the source of the change. Instead, they draw close to the client to better understand their situation, their needs, and discuss options for getting both stakeholders closer to a mutually beneficial outcome for all before assessing their internal systems rather than external solutions.
The responsive leader’s role is to be well rested so that they are focused, sharp, and see through the noise. This isn’t a super power, it’s a skill, that when practiced enables you to sense things others miss and build connections not easily seen, and cultivate relationships that see you through the challenging times.
Finding Our Rhythm of Rest
In the end, it’s not about choosing one or the other, it’s about finding our own rhythm of rest somewhere in between that adapts with us and our situations as individuals and as organisations. When we do this, we give ourselves permission to be. A stillness, a pause, an intentional breath. We don’t only need this to do more, but we need this to discover what enough looks like for us. Perhaps that we are enough.
Last month I facilitated the September 2025 Reset where I was fortunate enough to hold space for architects, engineers, planners, ESD consultants, and other technical and creative brains. Together, we unpacked their relationship with rest and integrated micro-practices into their days to establish a new rhythm, practices that restore. One engineer stopped scrolling her phone for 30 minutes a day. Within 2 weeks, she had used this time to rest and reflect, and her energy levels rose significantly.
The graphic below speaks to my expansion of Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s ‘7 Types of Rest’ work. Dr Dalton-Smith speaks of physical, mental, emotional, social, creative, sensory, and spiritual rest. Her work is powerful because it brings awareness to the diversity of rest which gives us the tools to understand when something is missing. For example, that we might be getting heaps of energy from physical rest but be struggling to uphold emotional rest. It helps to think of it like a network, rather than a graph.
In this version, I changed ‘Spiritual Rest’ to ‘Purposeful Rest’ to enhance it’s comprehension and I added ‘Consumption Rest’ to reinforce our responsibility and relationship with the earth. Consumption rest is necessary now more than ever to combat our over-use and extraction of the earth and it’s resources while building community and interdependence.
In the Reset we learned that the most important leadership skill to create and lead consistently is resourcing yourself.
Like nature, individual’s and organisation’s energy levels fluctuate. By having micro (daily), meso (weekly/monthly), and macro (seasonally/annually) practices available, we are able to rest intentionally without extra effort. This will support us in improving our relationship with rest and to build the reps that show us it’s safe and serving us.
Just as Noonuccal mourns what’s been lost, I mourn our diminishing capacity for rest. Perhaps also like Noonuccal, I fear that without rest, this will not be cyclical, but lasting.
Are we brave enough to listen?
“The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter. The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone from this place. The bora ring is gone. The corroboree is gone. And we are going.”
— Oodgeroo Noonuccal, We Are Going (1964).
Reflections
(Reflections & Observations)
- Rest is scheduled proactively, not taken reactively.
- Rest enables function, not just recovers from it.
- Rest is when invisible essential work happens – consolidation, integration, strengthening.
- Skipping rest doesn’t save time, it creates debt that comes due with interest.
- The system performs better with built-in rest than without it, even accounting for “lost” active time.
- Rest is non-negotiable infrastructure, not optional optimisation.
- When in doubt… look to nature.
Practices of the Month
(Explore, Reflect, Experiment)
For Organisations:
- Start here…Celebrate a team member for honoring their rest. Notice what changes.
For Individuals:
- Start here…Block 30 minutes tomorrow for a walking meeting. Just one. Notice what changes.
Did you give them a go? Tell me or a colleague about it. Sharing our experiences helps reinforce our learnings and might even inspire someone else to give it a nudge.
Resources
- Atherton, P. C. (2023). Present and future of work in engineering and architecture: 2023 survey report. ActionsProve.
- Dalton-Smith, S. (2017). Sacred rest: Recover your life, renew your energy, restore your sanity. FaithWords.
- Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
- Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493-503.
- Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Penguin Random House.
- Noonuccal, O. (1964). We are going: Poems. Jacaranda Press.
- Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72–S103.
- Soojung-Kim Pang, A. (2023). The Way We Work. https://www.ted.com/talks/alex_soojung_kim_pang_how_rest_can_make_you_better_at_your_job/transcript
