The human body has limits, and we break down if we push past them. This can contribute to burnout, lead to stress fractures, or cause a host of other issues. We need to give our bodies time to rest so that we can heal. This is something we often resist, but it's essential. And it's beneficial for more than just healing.

But what does it even mean to rest? It's both easy and very complicated to define "rest." At its simplest, it's just to be free from activity. But it's more complicated, because it's relative.

Resting depends on what you're resting from. If you're doing labor all day, then rest will probably involve sitting down, and it may not preclude thinking hard. If you're programming all day, then rest will probably involve stepping away from the computer and doing something physical, which might involve moving heavy things. And if you're very fatigued, resting might involve doing nothing: no thinking, no lifting, just lying in bed.

The benefits of resting

We need to rest for our bodies to heal. This is obvious from all the times when we overdo it physically. It's easy to injure yourself physically if you never let your body recover. Just ask any distance runner: they'll likely have a story of a stress fracture from overeager training, just like me.

That's the most visible way that we need rest, and it's the one we're instructed about most often. So it's the one we tend to think of for rest: physically relaxing and recuperating. That one is hard, because we still want to push through and do more.

The other reasons to rest are less visible and are far less often discussed. They're just as important. Your brain and your mind are part of you, too. When you give your brain and mind rest, you both avoid injury and receive benefits.

If you never take a mental rest, then you veer toward bad outcomes. At the extreme, you'll burn out. Even if you don't, you'll be grumpy and unpleasant. We probably all know that person who works a lot and is bristly, but is oddly pleasant the week after vacation. Looking at you, person, take more rests.

The benefits are even bigger. Resting makes your work better. When you're rested, you have better ideas and you're more creative. You find ways to simplify solutions or alternate ways of thinking about things. I'd take a rested engineer for fewer hours over a worn out engineer for more hours any day.

And rest is vital to the sustainability of any long-term pursuit. If you want to keep doing something for the long haul, you need some slack in the system. Just ask any sysadmin if they're comfortable running their systems at 99% CPU utilization constantly. Hopefully they say "no," and you shouldn't run your CPU at that load either. You need to be rested so that you can handle sudden spikes in demand on your system (emergencies), or sudden decreases in capacity (illness).

How to integrate rest

Knowing that we need rest is the first step, but then we have to do it. It's hard to integrate rest into our work and practice, because it cuts against our productivity instincts. But we can do it. Here are a few of the ways that I've found that I can integrate rest into my work and practices. I hope some of them help you.

Work less. This is one of those "well, obviously" ones, but the counterintuitive thing is by working less, you get more done¹. There are three ways that I've worked less to rest more:

• Four-day workweeks: we have four-day workweeks at my day job, and it's wonderful. We get more rest on the weekend, and we end up with better ideas as a result. Lower rates of defects and more efficient development, what's not to love?
• Part-time work: I spent a year doing part-time work, and it was wonderful. The other part of my time, I could use as I pleased. I got to try out other creative outlets and other endeavors.
• Work shorter hours: At a previous job, I was told that I'd never get out of the office before... I don't remember what time, but it was late. There was an expectation of long hours. The thing is, I just didn't do that. And I got away with it, working strictly 9-5, because that rest gave me the distance needed to get better ideas and create better systems.
• Take longer breaks: At another company, I paved the way in taking a full hour-long lunch break. (Sometimes longer, if it was particularly nice out.) I would eat my lunch away from my desk, then go for a walk along the beautiful Cuyahoga River². I went against the budding culture of eating lunch quickly then going back to work. It became clear quickly that my afternoons were much happier (and more productive) than my peers', and soon the whole office was following suit.

Get physical, get away from the keyboard. My first experience with burnout led me to start woodworking. I had this visceral need to be away from computers, and decided to make my first sawhorse. Then I made my second, then I built a workbench, and then started making picture frames.

Since then, making small things has been a nice way to get away from the keyboard and move my body instead of just my fingers. It's still creative, but hits different spots in my brain. At other times, I like to do yard work to get things out of my system—chopping wood is particularly helpful.

Any physical pursuit is a good change of pace, and a good mental rest. Swing a hammer, go for a run, take a walk.

Sit with silence. I've found a lot of rest through guided and unguided meditation. It's a practice that has been very grounding for me. But you can sit with silence in many ways! You can go sit in the woods and listen to birds. You can go sit on your porch and watch the neighborhood dogs. You can lie in bed with your eyes closed, awake but quiet.

Plan and perform reduced load. Like I said before, you can't run full tilt all the time or you have no slack in the system. I like to include down cycles in my plans, where you're just not doing as much in that cycle. This looks different for different domains or scopes.

For my running training, I have rules about how much I can increase load per week, and every 5th week has a load reduction of 50%. This ensures that I minimize my risk of injury, and it is the time when new muscle gets built and when bone strengthens.

At my day job, this looks like some months where I'm just doing less. Some of this is natural, when there are lulls in my workload, and it's something I need to do more intentionally. It's okay to do the minimum, especially if you need to.

For teams, you can plan this in your schedule. Have a few sprints where you're working at your usual rate, then have a down sprint where you just do not schedule as much work. Go as low as 50%. This will give people time to decompress and come back and look at things with fresher eyes. Your engineers and your systems will benefit from it.

Close the whole company for some time. You'll probably need a skeleton crew for keeping the lights on, but stagger this so that they take the same time later. This makes it a lot easier to take an actual rest, when you know other people aren't busy generating work for you to return to.

Breaks and breaks

There is a fun linguistic duality in the word "break." It represents both resting and it represents fracturing.

I have had the experience of going too long without a break, and inducing a real break. This has happened to me with stress fractures in my foot. And it has happened to me with stress rashes on my chest from a bad on-call environment.

If you've had those experiences, too, I hope that you've healed from it, and that you're able to rest now. And if you haven't, I hope you never learn this lesson firsthand. We all deserve rest.

Now, me? I'm going to go take a nap.