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Author: Jessica Ruprecht

When the most productive thing you can do is rest

I have a troubled relationship with rest.

I’m not sure when the trouble first crept in — perhaps when I was a child and staying up too late would cause sharp agonies to ache in my legs, or perhaps it was later, in high school, when not-resting was its own kind of numbing that left me less capable of feeling the sharp ache of my own loneliness.

And if it wasn’t any of those things, then my troubled relationship with rest began at MIT, when my physical body became nothing more than a burden that stood between me and the monumental workload I struggled to manage each semester.

As a student at MIT, I often worked until the point when I was no longer capable of coherent thought. Only then collapsing into my bed to snatch 30 minutes or an hour of desperately needed rest only to wake, sleep-logged and disoriented, to crawl back out of my bed and work another hour or two until coherent thought once more deserted me.

I passed whole nights, sometimes many consecutive nights, in this fragmented and sleep-fogged state.

The ultimate consequence of this was that much of my time at MIT has vanished from the grip of memory — the human brain writes experience to long-term memory during sleep — and without sleep those experiences slip from short-term memory and are often gone forever.

At MIT it seemed to me that my need to rest stood directly between me and my own survival. My body seemed a burden that limited rather than supported the performance of my mind.

But ultimately, this was always an illusion.

The research is clear that people who are chronically sleep deprived underperform those who are well rested (even though the chronically sleep deprived start to feel they are “adequately rested” — the body normalizes the experience of chronic sleep deprivation after a week or two, but performance is still affected).

All of which means that, even if you don’t feel like you need it, often the most productive thing you can do is rest.

I know this, and I still struggle with rest.

I feel like I have too much going on and not enough hours and so I shave off 15 minutes here or 30 minutes there and pretty soon it’s 11 pm and I still haven’t crawled into my bed even though I know the my alarm clock will go off at 6:30 and (for me at least) 6.5 hours (though sadly almost-average) is not even close to being enough rest.

And still I comfort myself with the knowledge that 6.5 hours “isn’t too bad” because my standards were set at MIT where I went whole semesters without sleeping more than 4-5 hours a night.

I struggle because it’s hard for me to believe that if I really rested I would still get things done.

But I’m so, so tired of coping with inadequate rest (pun intended, of course).

I’m tired of the cult of “hardcore” people who seem to run on redbull and fumes and are lauded for their super-human efforts.

Maybe there are people out there for whom this actually works, but I am not one of them.

And yet I feel held to this unattainable standard, like everyone will judge me if I’m not sleep-resistant and bulletproof.

But what I’ve learned this year is that when we fear judgement from others it’s usually because we’re secretly busy judging ourselves.

I’m not entirely sure what my judgement is — likely it’s some variation on “sleep is for the weak” or “i’m too cool to rest” or “I shouldn’t need more rest than other people”.

I expect my judgement is wound up in a panic that I’ll never get far enough, fast enough if I choose to let myself rest.

But the real truth, the one that resonates in my body when I sit with it, is that I create only my own misery when I sacrifice my rest.

Which is why I’m choosing to forge a new relationship to rest.

I’m reclaiming my right to “tread gently” on my physical body and see my needs met.

Or, at least, I’m declaring my intention to start working on it.

Because it’s been years now since I graduated from MIT and more days than not I still feel like I’m carrying around the burden of those unslept hours and some days those hours feel heavier than anything I know.

Which is why today I’m choosing to rest.

 

What about you? How do you relate to rest? If you’re the average American it’s likely that you, too, have a troubled relationship with rest. Let me know in the comments below!

 

I forgot I needed a plan

It’s been a while (months, I’m afraid) since I’ve mentioned the book I’m writing. Or rather, I suppose I should say “the book I was writing” because if we’re being honest I haven’t worked on it much since July.

There’s plenty of excuses for why I haven’t been writing — my book notes and thoughts were never properly unpacked after I moved in early July, I became busy with another major project at the end of July that’s been eating up a lot of my free time, etc.

Excuses are cheap and easy to come by.

But the truth is that all of those pretty excuses are just excuses.

It’s not that I don’t have the time to work on my book.

In fact, I’ve had “spend 20 mins writing” on my To Do list every week since July and there’s only been a handful of times I’ve actually crossed that item off.

For weeks now I’ve been trying to figure out why I wasn’t writing.

I tried most of the tricks I know — I used to set the goal of writing for an hour but when that didn’t work I made the goal smaller, just 20 minutes. Surely I could find 20 minutes?

But no.

I started to work on other intangibles, trying to sleep more and working to tidy up my physical space — both of which are important but neither of which helped me.

And then I started to toy with the idea of doing just five measly minutes minutes of writing.

If I didn’t have 20 minutes then I absolutely had five. I’ve had great luck in using five minutes to re-build flagging habits (an idea I heard first from the lovely Anna Kunnecke).

What if I wrote for just five minutes?

It was a question that haunted me for weeks. Surely 5 minutes wasn’t enough to produce anything meaningful?

Usually when I write I need at least 20 minutes to get into the swing of things, remember what I was doing, and produce something useful.

But 20 minutes wasn’t working and I kept wondering about the tantalizing possibility of five.

Which was, naturally, when I figured the whole thing out.

Because five minutes might totally be enough time to write something useful — but only if you sit down at the beginning of those five minutes knowing exactly what it is you plan to write.

Five minutes wasn’t working for me because I didn’t have a plan.

[Photo of index cards on wall]
The “Wall of Book” that now exists in my bedroom.
This not-having-a-plan thing is the problem I’ve run into every time I’ve declared I was writing a book — from my first attempt at age 11 to my most recent failure during NaNoWriMo 2012. And it nearly got me again, this time around.

Every time I have a book idea, I jump right into the writing. I draft pages and pages of story (sometimes as much as 100) and inevitably, eventually I get stuck.

I get stuck because the story grows so large that I can’t keep it all in my head.

I get stuck because I have a million and one good ideas and none of them quite seem to fit.

I get stuck because I only kinda-sorta-maybe know where I’m going.

I get stuck because I don’t have a plan.

So this time I’ve brushed off my index cards and painter’s tape and I’m putting together my plan.

One scene, one idea, one paragraph at a time.

And you can bet that once I’ve got the plan worked out I’m going to write my way to the finish line — even if I have to do it five fucking minutes at a time.

 

What about you — do you have a big project you’ve been stalled out on? If so, what’s been holding you back? Let me know in the comments!

 

Making the shift from consumer to producer

I want to talk about a pattern in my life that’s been unfolding over the past several years — a pattern I’ve only recently become aware of. Slowly (so slowly I didn’t notice!) I’ve been making the shift from consumer to producer.

I started this blog more than a year ago and, at the time, I thought I would start writing again. I thought I would start writing regularly (I imagined myself writing poetry and stories, not essays) and publishing those stories and poems on my blog.

But it didn’t work out that way.

I do write regularly these days, but the blog post I publish each week are nothing like the creative pieces I had initially imagined.

Instead, my blog drifted from poetry and stories to essays and my creative writing practice (although it has experienced periods of productivity) has, more often than not, floundered.

Creativity and building a creative writing practice is a subject I’ve devoted any number of blog posts to, and yet it’s still not a code I feel I’ve cracked.

I feel like I know all the things to do creatively and yet I never actually do them.

In other words, I often feel like a creative failure.

And yet, there’s a thought that’s been percolating in the back of my head for the past couple of weeks — a thought about making the shift from consumer to producer.

What exactly do I mean when I say “the shift from consumer to producer”?

Increasingly I am convinced that creativity happens in the margins, in the pauses and the white space we build into our lives. And in today’s hyper-connected, always “on” culture — consciously cultivating white space is getting harder and harder.

And I’m not just talking about the seven TV shows you follow religiously (my number back in the day).

There’s actually two different kinds of consumption:

  1. There’s the physical, tangible stuff we consume — the news articles, the blog posts, the podcasts, the TV shows, the books, etc.
  2. But there’s also the intangible stuff — the stuff we don’t so much buy as buy in to. These things are the stories we tell about what people are supposed to do, who a person is supposed to be, what daily practices and habits a person is supposed to cultivate.

In my experience, it’s this second kind of consumption that’s most toxic to creativity.

For every bad habit of tangible consumption I’ve cut out (the food blogs with recipes I never cooked, the health blogs that left me feeling more anxious than I started, the writing blogs that reminded me daily that I wasn’t writing enough, the hours of TV I used to numb myself on weekends so that I didn’t have to feel my own discontent), I’ve bought into a half-dozen new stories about how TV is a waste of my time and how my writing practice should be a perfect expression of my creative soul and how my cooking is too utilitarian and my recipes should always be effortlessly delicious and look like art.

My inner perfectionist dive bombs into these stories about the perfect person I’m supposed to be — and the subsequent guilt of not living up to my own expectations entirely zaps my creative energy.

My white space is still filled… just not with physical clutter so much as clutter of a different, more poisonous kind.

And I believe that in order to develop a sustainable creative practice you have to throw out *all* the clutter, in all of it’s various forms.

Creative brilliance begins in the blank moments and the empty spaces when you’re caught adrift somewhere between existence and boredom.

Whether your clutter is physical or mental, the end result is always the same: you’re busy filling in the blank stretches of your mental space.

And without that empty space there’s never going to be room for something new and beautiful to grow.

 

I’d love for this to be a conversation and not a monologue! Are you interested in making the shift from consumer to producer? Which kind of consumption do you struggle with more, the tangible or the intangible? Let me know in the comments below.

 

Is your “bubble” big enough?

Remember how when you were a kid and you had a “bubble” of personal space around you that the other kids were supposed to stay out of?

I remember fighting with my sister in the backseat of the car, scraping lines down the fabric with our fingernails, dividing the car solidly into “my side” and “her side”.

(Much, I am sure, to my parents’ dismay.)

I haven’t thought about my “bubble” in more than a decade at this point, but I’ve been reading Karla McLaren’s fascinating book The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You and suddenly I find my “bubble” is all I’ve been thinking about.

McLaren’s book is about bringing your emotions into flow and about the helpful messages your emotions are trying to bring to the surface (for example, anger is the emotion that helps you set healthy boundaries).

She suggests that part of setting healthy boundaries is about maintaining energetic and emotional protection and definition between ourselves and the world around us.

She writes, “Luckily, this boundary already exists. In the metaphysical community, it’s called the aura, and while it has had a lot of wacky metaphysical connotations attached to it, your aura is simply your personal space. In the neurological community, this personal space is now understood to be your proprioceptive territory, and it is created by specific neural and muscular networks throughout your brain and body. Your proprioceptive system maps your body and your position in relation to everything around you; it helps you stand, balance, move, and understand your body’s relationship with its environment.”

McLaren goes on to suggest than in most people the proprioceptive space your brain lays claim to is roughly the area that exists within the reach of your arms — i.e. your “bubble”.

But here’s what blew my mind.

As I was trying out McLaren’s boundary-setting, proprioceptive-space-claiming exercise I suddenly found myself feeling much larger in the world than I usually do. My breathing deepened. My stomach unclenched. I felt my internal self unwinding to expand out into the world around me.

I realized in that moment that at some point growing up I stopped getting bigger and instead started to become very small.

I don’t know when it started — maybe when I was in first grade and my space was defined by the small carpet square I sat on or in high school when the boundaries of my bubble could extended no further than the borders of my desk and my limbs were expected to remain neatly confined in close proximity to my body, not spread helter skelter to hither and yon.

Regardless of how or when it happened, at some point my bubble seems to have shrunk so small it no longer takes up even the space occupied by my physical body. At some point my bubble shrank until it was nothing more than a leaden knot that sits in my stomach and makes me feel anxious and sick.

And so here’s the question that just about broke my brain.

Is this how big I’m supposed to be?

I’ve thought a lot in the last year or two about what it means to be “playing small”. In many ways I’m playing small with this blog — I’m not doing the outreach I should be if I wanted to grow my small community of readers into something “big”.

But what if it’s not just about “playing” small? What if I’ve been being small, instead?

And what about the corollary: What if I’m allowed to be as big as I am? What if I’m really as big as my proprioceptive space?

Because what I know is that when I imagine my edges expanding out to fill the inside of a big oval-shaped shell arms-width out from my body, I *feel* bigger. I feel more allowed to take up space in the world, more allowed to be who I am, more allowed to want what I want and need what I need.

I feel like, just maybe, I’m allowed to become as big as I can reach.

And after so many years of shrinking, it’s a very odd thing to be so large.

I’m still not sure yet what, exactly, this means which is why I’d love for you to try it out and let me know your experience.

Here’s what you do (adapted from The Language of Emotions):

  1. Ground yourself before beginning. Focus your attention on your feet. Feel them growing heavy as if your shoes had turned to concrete and feel your energy settling low in your body and then sinking down into the very center of the earth.
  2. Stand up and reach your arms out to either side of you. Move them front and back and over your head. Get a feel for the space your body occupies.
  3. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a bubble extending out to the edges of your reach and flowing down under the ground to close beneath your feet. Imagine the boundary of this space in a way that is natural to you — you can imagine a color, a sound, a texture. I personally like to imagine mine as a shimmering, like heat.
  4. With your boundary clear around you ask yourself the question, “Do I claim this much room in the world?”

I’d love to know what you find — how much room do you claim in the world? Is your “bubble” teeny tiny and neglected like mine? Who would you be if you took up as much space as you could reach? How might you behave differently if you claimed all that space as your own? Let me know in the comments below!

Please note: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. This means that I make a (very) small referral commission from purchases made using my links. This commission does not affect your price.

How do you feel about saying no?

It occurs to me, perhaps belatedly, that I may have a dysfunctional relationship with the word “no”.

The topic came up this week as I was tasked to some new projects at work and while, on the one hand, I don’t mind (I like it when other people ask me to help and the tasks are useful, just not interesting), on the other hand, some of the tasks that I was asked to do aren’t things that make me feel zippy inside. Some of them feel more like a weighty ton of bricks.

There’s a part of me that wonders if perhaps I shouldn’t have said no.

This state of self-inquiry is particularly acute because I have been reading Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, and it’s been really useful for crystallizing a lot of the ideas about priorities that I’ve been toying with for a while.

The basic tenant of his book is that we should do “less, but better” — i.e. say “no” to more things in order to focus on that which is essential. It’s a great idea, a great theory; I found myself nodding along with something on nearly every page as I read.

And yet this week I didn’t think to say no when asked to do things that I already know will not be my highest contribution.

There’s a lot packed up in this idea. On the one hand, I think saying no is just hard: it is an act of rebellion, a distancing of oneself from the rest of the tribe.

On the other hand, I think there’s a lot of my personal baggage wrapped up in it, too.

I wouldn’t bother to share my baggage, except that I’m beginning to learn that it’s all the same baggage — we use different words and have different reasons, but our issues are usually the same: at the end of the day we’re generally insecure, worried that there’s something wrong with us, and that the rest of the world might find out. We therefore conclude that our wrongness means we’re not worthy of whatever good the universe offers to us.

For me personally, this means I’m often overly-eager to play the drudge. I operate from a place of “it’s dirty work but someone’s got to do it” and because of my feelings of unspecialness (my own particular flavor of unworthiness), I feel like that person might as well be me.

The consequence of which is that I wind up working on projects I don’t love and feeling like everyone else gets to solve problems that are cooler than mine.

My rational brain knows that to some extent “the grass is always greener”, and other people’s problems probably aren’t any more exciting than mine. But then I wonder — is that true? Or do I just think that’s true because I believe that important work is often unpleasant and has to be done anyways?

Our thoughts get slippery when we try to work our way around them.

I don’t know my answers yet. I know that it’s easier to agree than to say no when I’m at work. And I know that it’s easier to say no than to agree when someone invites me to a social outing (even if there is a part of me that wants to go).

And I know that, as Greg McKeown writes in Essentialism, “When we surrender our ability to choose, something or someone else will step in to choose for us… We often think of a choice as a thing. But a choice is not a thing. Our options may be things, but a choice — a choice is an action. It is not just something we have but something we do.”

This week I felt myself not-choosing, rather than sincerely saying yes.

The point of this blog is not for me to whinge on about my inability to set boundaries around my time at work. The point of this blog is to perhaps help you think a little more critically about what it is you are or aren’t saying “no” to in your life.

My hope is that by shining a small light into my dark and nebulous corners, you might find the shadows a shade lighter in yours.

Where could you do “less, but better” in your life right now? What would you need to say “no” to to make your highest contribution — whether at work or at home? Let me know in the comments below!