How to rest well

Downtime allows insight to flower, but good active rest isn't channel surfing from your sofa. Here's six suggestions for getting it right...

In an era when Fear Of Missing Out has its own universally understood acronym, recuperative rest and relaxation are not always regarded as the intensely worthwhile pursuits that they are. Instead, we are harassed into believing, via our omnipresent smartphones, if not also artificial lighting (which overrides our natural body clocks), that we must be constantly available to be of value, that peak productivity and performance are directly related to presenteeism, and that to snooze is to lose.

This couldn’t be more wrong. Instead, we must recognise that to stop is to succeed; and we must arrange our homes in such a way as to make this easy for us.

And yet, perhaps ironically, it is one of the hardest states of being to achieve. Many of us have become hard-wired to oscillate between being in full-on work mode and exhausted. Hooked on constant motion and the completion of never-ending to-do lists, we grind to a halt rather than feeling buoyed up by the prospect of doing something else. This is no way to go on. Here, then, are six suggestions for starting afresh…