This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. This episode, from our fifth season, called How to Keep Time, features host Ian Bogost in conversation with Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of several books on rest and a director at 4 Day Week Global. The two explore how varied understandings of rest can affect our ability to gain real benefits from it. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hey, it's Megan Garber, one of the co hosts from how to Know what's Real.
We're excited to share with you a special series drawn from past seasons of the how to series.
For the next few weeks, we'll be revisiting episodes around the theme of winding down, recharging, and making space for the things we care about.
This episode is from season five, how to Keep Time, and is called how to Rest.
Co hosts Ian Bogust and Becca Rashid explore the effects that slowing down can have on our creativity and how understanding those benefits may help us learn how to rest better.
You know, Becca.
So, like, even though I rest in the sense of going sideways and unconscious at night, I don't feel like I rest enough or that maybe that I don't rest properly.
And I mean, maybe I don't even know what rest is even same for me.
I feel like between sleep and work, those breaks that I need have never really been incorporated in my life.
You know, I was thinking about it, Becca, and rest is really a cornerstone concept in Western civilization.
Like it's in the Bible.
Right at the start of Genesis, there's supposed to be a Sabbath, a day of rest, a break from making and using to doing something else.
And what is that something else?
You know, in the religious sense, it's a time for worship for God.
And in that sense, it's not like rest is a break exactly.
It's more like a structure, like an organizing principle.
Like, here's a thing you need in order to make the rest of your life operate.
The mainstream sort of American Protestant work ethic implies that rest needs to be more than just rest.
You know, it's working towards other must dos.
The day of Sabbath is for rest and worship, going to church, serving the community, serving your family.