How rest and silence can defeat burnout ~ from the Medium Blog

[Julie]

Do you know how to rest? I often worry I don’t. When I’m worn down or overstimulated, I’ll lay down on the couch, my mind too frazzled to read a book or a magazine. Like many people, I often default to looking at my phone, which always fails to relax me. True rest often feels out of reach.

In an article for Wise & Well, nurse Andrea Romeo RN, BN discusses why this is — how a few days of rest or vacation is rarely enough to combat burnout. “A common symptom of burnout,” she writes, “is feeling constantly fatigued, even after a good sleep, but burnout does not always feel like being physically tired.”

I was struck by an idea Romeo quoted from Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, author of Sacred Rest, who has written that there are “seven types of rest: physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, sensory, social, and creative.” We might be physically rested but spiritually exhausted; socially content but emotionally spent. To combat burnout, Romeo recommends forcing unscheduled days, avoiding obligations that don’t serve your interests, and prioritizing things like hobbies, loved ones, and your body. In a capitalist society, this can be difficult: we’ve been trained to prioritize productivity, wealth, and action. We are rewarded for multitasking — a clear driver of burnout.

But Romeo’s suggestions got me thinking about the importance of quiet, which Elan Kesilman-Davin, Ph.D. has written about for Pragmatic Wisdom. “We don’t just avoid silence,” she writes of the modern world, “we erase it.” To better appreciate the value of silence, she turns to Swiss philosopher Max Picard, who “describes silence as something alive […] like a presence that holds things together.” Silence, in our modern world, might not be a total absence of sound, but a rejection of the pings, dings, and notifications that are constantly vying for our attention. It might look like walking around without headphones, sitting quietly in a park, or listening to the water run instead of putting in a podcast while we do the dishes.

As Kesilman-Davin writes, “Silence hasn’t gone anywhere. It just has to be chosen.”

— Marian Bull

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