How to Rest at Work: 4 Practices for a More Human Workspace
If you were raised in America on the 8-hour workday, you might have tripped over my title. After all, what business does anybody have resting at work?
You don’t rest at work. You work at work and you rest after work, right? That’s the general idea.
And yet this conceptualization of things has always been oversimplified. The most productive people rest at work. And we should rest at work not merely because it’s productive but because it’s human.
It is healthy to take breaks often, to alternate between tasks of different types and intensities, and even to have fun while we get things done. At the end of the day, your health is more important than your productivity.
Or as Andrew Yang put it,
“We (human beings) are the bottom line.”
That is to say, profit is not. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Rest as Protest
I used to be on a social work team that served over 100 dual-diagnosed clients— folks who struggle with both severe mental illness and substance abuse disorders — and supported them on the…
