There is a question I keep returning to, and I suspect some of you do too: what does it actually mean to rest?
Not sleep, though that is part of it. Not a holiday, though those help. I mean the everyday relationship with stillness, with the pause between things. Whether we permit it, whether we trust it, whether, when we do finally stop, we know how to be still, or whether we simply reach for the phone and fill the gap before it can offer us anything.
I’ve been sitting with this question for a long time, in part because of my own experience with caring, a context in which rest is both most necessary and most difficult to obtain. Caring teaches you very quickly that the world does not reliably stop when you need it to, and that guilt has a way of colonising every moment of stillness before it can become genuinely restorative. I suspect many of you will recognise this from your own lives, whether or not you identify as a carer. The guilt of stopping is not exclusive to any one situation. It is, I think, one of the most common forms of suffering in a culture that has made productivity its primary moral category.
The Science Bit
What I didn’t expect to find, when I began reading the neuroscience of rest, was that science had arrived at the same conclusion of the importance of rest through a completely different door. The discovery is called the default network. It is a constellation of brain regions that activate specifically when we stop, when we daydream, when we let the mind wander, when we sit without agenda and allow thought to move where it will.
For decades, scientists assumed this state was neurological idling. It was thought the brain at rest was simply the brain doing nothing useful, waiting to be called back to work. The default network was named almost dismissively: a default state, a fallback, a gap between ‘real’ cognitive events.
The default network, it emerged, is not a resting state at all. It is a different kind of active state, one in which the brain consolidates memories, processes unresolved emotion, makes the lateral associative connections that underlie creativity and insight, buildsthe capacity for empathy and ethical reasoning, and integrates experience into meaning. It is, in the assessment of neuroscientist Dr Joseph Jebelli, the brain's most sophisticated cognitive system.
We have been taught, most of us, that a wandering mind is a failing mind.The teacher who catches you staring out of the window and admonishes you. The productivity advice that speaks of focus as virtue and distraction as its enemy. The meditation instructor who frames every drifting thought as something to return from, as though the wandering itself were a mistake. The entire architecture of modern working life is built on the assumption that the occupied mind is the productive mind, and that the mind left to its own devices will only waste what it has been given.
This assumption is wrong. Not slightly wrong, but profoundly, demonstrably, consequentially wrong. And the neuroscience that overturns it is, I think, one of the most quietly radical findings of the last thirty years.
Rest is not the absence of work. It is where a different and arguably deeper work happens. Stopping is the condition everything else depends on.
This post continues below for members of the Wabi Sabi Inner Circle — full essays, guided meditations, and the reading group, for £5 a month.This little income is important to me as a part time worker and carer and I appreciate each and every paid subscription. 🌸
For paid subscribers, here’s a particular practice and the science behind it to help you pause, taken from Jebelli’s book, The Brain at Rest
