Episode 57: What if I don't know how to rest?

Episode Description

In this episode of What If? For Authors, Claire explores the question, “What if I don’t know how to rest?”

Many writers live with a constant sense of being behind. Claire unpacks why this feeling persists even when we work harder, and how fear-based productivity patterns can make genuine rest feel unsafe.

Using the Enneagram, Claire examines the beliefs that keep each type pushing past their limits, and offers practical ways to identify what kind of rest you actually need. If you’ve been struggling with chronic exhaustion, this episode provides a framework for building a healthier relationship with rest.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

  • Why feeling perpetually behind is often a mindset problem, not a productivity problem

  • How unrealistic expectations create chronic stress and burnout

  • The fear-based beliefs that keep each Enneagram type overworking

  • How to identify whether your head, heart, body, or soul is exhausted

  • How five-minute breaks can become the foundation for deeper, more sustainable rest

Resources Mentioned

Support the Show

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  • Leave a review on your favorite platform - it helps other authors find the show.

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  • Subscribe to Claire’s Substack for deeper insights on writing, the industry, and the author life.

Happy writing!

TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of "What If for Authors?" I'm glad you're here. My name's Claire Taylor, and I'm an Enneagram certified coach for authors, as well as a humor and mystery writer. Go poke around with all the services I offer at liberatedwriter.com if you're curious about how you can build a more sustainable author career in uncertain times.

I have books, courses, individual coaching, all kinds of free and paid resources for you to dig into there Today's episode is going to ask the question: What if I don't know how to rest? Thanks to Dave for the topic suggestion. It may be no surprise that Dave is an eight, because eights do usually look at me a little cross-eyed when I ask them how much rest they're building into their life.

There's this narrative that cycles through the writing community like a [00:01:00] never-ending flu virus that says writers must write every day. So a lot of folks hear this and they freak out. They have a little mini spiral, right? They wonder if they're not real writers since they don't write every day or even every weekday.

And then they ask me sometimes if they are real writers, as if I give a shit about any of that. I'm obviously being flippant here, but truly, I think it, I don't know, benefits all of us to move past the label. If thinking of yourself as a writer increases your quality of life, then by all means do it. But if it doesn't increase your quality of life to think of yourself that way, then you're free from having to keep asking the question of if you are a writer if you don't write every day, blah, blah, blah.

So this thing about consistency not only makes people spiral, but it makes people feel [00:02:00] behind, perpetually behind. "I didn't get my words done today. I didn't write enough this week." That is just a common refrain in our industry. Feeling perpetually behind is a big, big problem, and you probably already know that my offered solution is not going to be, well, be more productive. Because the problem isn't that you are actually behind, right? Behind what? The problem is that you feel behind, and that can be a product of patterns of thinking that were maybe helpful at some point in some way, but now those patterns need to absolutely kick rocks.

They gotta go. They're not helping anything

If you feel perpetually behind, this episode is for you. Because the solution to feeling behind isn't doing more or doing things more efficiently. And if you never tackle the actual problem, [00:03:00] which is, you know, you need rest, uh, which we all must do, we all must rest, then without tackling that problem, it will not feel safe or restful to rest.

In other words, that feeling that you're perpetually behind is a wall keeping you from the kind of rest that you need. But never fear, because we're going to tear down this wall, and, uh, don't worry, that is the only time you'll hear me quote Reagan on this podcast. So there are two main questions that help us get past that wall and into rest.

The first is, why do I feel perpetually behind? We have to answer that question and look into it. And the second question is, what does rest look like for me? Now, the Enneagram gives us some big old clues here because we're talking about motivation, we're talking about fear. So [00:04:00] let's start by asking why you feel perpetually behind, if that is the case for you.

And I do wanna specify that you might be actually behind on something, like you owed your editor your manuscript two weeks ago, but that's more a situational kind of thing than what I'm talking about. It might also be a result of your core fear, but that's a discussion for a different episode. So we're looking at perpetually behind, not just this one time you're behind There are a few overarching reasons why people feel perpetually behind.

One can be their expectation of what they should be able to accomplish in a given timeframe. The solution to this is usually simple but not easy. Get so fucking for real with yourself and adjust the expectation. So let's spend a little time on this. Where did your [00:05:00] expectation for how much you can accomplish or should be able to accomplish in a day, a week, a year, where did that develop?

Was it in school when you had fewer other responsibilities? Was it early on in your writing career?

Because one pattern that a lot of authors follow is that they write slowly here and there for a while because they think writing is a slow process. That's the expectation. And then they smash through maybe a limiting narrative about how many words they can write in a day, and they realize they can write a ton, and so they do that for a while, and it feels good.

They may even keep this up for a year or more, but over time, friction sneaks in. This may look like financial pressure, absorbing too many rigid rules of writing, feeling the weight of reader expectations once you have an audience, and so on. The friction can come from a lot of places. And then suddenly the words are harder to come by, but you keep planning your production schedule based on that old version of [00:06:00] you who could write a lot faster, and now you feel constantly behind.

In this case, the solution might be to expect fewer words from yourself each day or to give yourself a couple months where you rely on time spent with the document open versus words written to know when it's time to move on to the next thing

It's really important to figure out who decided you should be able to do more in your day, week, or month than you are able to do right now. You might have internalized a belief from someone you don't actually like or respect that much. Maybe that's how you got here. Or maybe it's coming from a younger version of yourself who had more energy, fewer responsibilities, or simply lived in a very different world than what you are encountering today.

So ask yourself if you want those people, whoever they are, to [00:07:00] determine how you experience your life now, or if you are willing to let that calcified expectation go to be able to end more days feeling like you accomplished enough or, hey, are even ending the day ahead. Wouldn't that be nice?

So it's not enough to drop the expectation you already have of how much you should be able to get done. You also need to figure out what a reasonable expectation would look like. So the way to do that is to track more and judge less. So this part can be tricky because it requires you to manage your impulse to say, "No, this isn't enough, and I'll starve to death if this is all I can accomplish in a day."

So that's obviously fear talking. But take a couple weeks, if you can stand it, to work through the tasks you have set out for yourself, right? Make the list and just work through them. Then write [00:08:00] down what you completed each day, ignoring what you didn't complete. We're not having the discussion on what we didn't complete, we're just looking at what we did complete.

So for instance, if you sat down to write for two hours and your goal was to write 3,000 words, forget the goal. Forget the goal. We're not talking about that. How many words did you write in that two hours? And that's what you log, that's what you keep track of. So you're trying to find out what a reasonable expectation is for two hours of writing today.

That's what you water with your attention, not what you didn't do, but what you did. If your brain starts spinning into the future to calculate how long it takes you to write a book at whatever your new recorded pace is, gently guide your mind back to the present.

We're not going into the future yet. We'll plan a strategy around what is real and realistic, but we don't know what that [00:09:00] is. We don't know what is real and realistic yet, so the time for strategy is not yet here, and any strategy you might plan at this point without enough data about what is real and realistic will be out of touch with reality, and it'll likely keep you in that state of feeling perpetually behind.

That is a familiar state, but we wanna move out of it

So there's another important question to ask ourselves here. Do I trust myself to do what I need to do if I don't feel behind? Many people don't trust themselves to do things for any reason beside avoiding negative consequences. We can go a long, long time functioning solely off fear motivation and forget what it feels like to do something willingly and passionately.

Doing something because we want to do it, not because something unpleasant [00:10:00] may happen if we don't. We'll go broke, be fired, lose friends, fall into obscurity. We have to relearn to do something because we want to do it. We have to relearn what that feels like. It's actually pretty common to fall into this pattern with things, where we start doing something with passion because we wanna do it, right?

Writing comes to mind for those of you listening, yeah? So you became a writer because presumably you had a passion for it. You wanted to do it. No one was forcing you to do it. That doesn't mean that writing won't slip into being something you sit down to do solely because you're afraid of what will happen if you don't.

The same activity can change over time. So when we don't trust ourselves to complete projects or stick to responsibilities, we'll often build little fear catapults to keep us moving forward. When we feel tired and could probably use some rest, we'll [00:11:00] load ourselves into the catapult of, "If you don't keep pushing, this bad thing will happen," and then we pull that release lever and launch ourselves onward when we probably need to be resting instead So here's what that may look like more specifically for each of the nine Enneagram types.

See if anything resonates with you. For ones, the reformers, if I don't keep pushing, everything will fall apart. For twos, the helpers, if I don't keep pushing, people will leave me. For threes, the achievers, if I don't keep pushing, I'll miss my chance for success. For fours, the individualists, if I don't keep pushing, my life will have no meaning.

For fives, the investigators, if I don't keep pushing, I won't have what I need when the time comes. For sixes, the loyalists, if I don't keep [00:12:00] pushing, I won't be ready when the worst happens. For sevens, the enthusiasts, if I don't keep pushing, I'll miss out on satisfaction. For eights, the challengers, if I don't keep pushing, I'll be blindsided later on.

For nines, the peacemakers, if I don't keep pushing, everyone will be mad at me. We have to challenge these beliefs and call them on their bluff. The place to start looking is backward for evidence that these beliefs are not true. The evidence is there, but you likely didn't see it in the moment, and it may take a little bit of effort to search for it.

For instance, if you're a six, look back at a time when you didn't or couldn't push through, and the worst case scenario didn't happen as a result of that. I can almost [00:13:00] guarantee that your attention is completely skipping over the instances of when this was the case, when you didn't push and things were fine.

Now, it was probably super early on in life when you were resting or playing without a care in the world, and then something terrible happened that was unrelated or just not your fault, and your brain tied those two things together, right? Relaxing and bad things happening. Those are now forever tied together until we untie them.

So it's important to gather evidence to the contrary of that story and really shove it at your brain. Like, "See? Look, this was untrue. You were telling me this thing and it was untrue." Maybe write it all down, right? Write down all the situations where that fear belief was untrue. And if you're like, "I can't find examples, Claire," I'll say, "Try harder.

They're [00:14:00] there." You may be lacking this particular muscle, so start building it. And that's not just for the sixes. This is for everyone. Find evidence that your fear is wrong more than it's right, which it is

Until you start building that muscle, you will feel perpetually behind Okay, on to the second big important question that I mentioned at the start. What does rest look like for me? It doesn't always look like lounging. It certainly doesn't always look like vacationing. We've all come back from a vacation more exhausted than we left. It can be helpful to write down what you believe rest looks like and then ask if that's true for you. If it's not true for you, don't worry, nothing's broken.

Either that's not what rest looks like for you or you haven't broken through the fear wall where anything could feel restful to you right now because you're still stuck in feeling like you're perpetually behind

[00:15:00] So when I feel tired or even exhausted, I make a point of asking myself, "What part of me is tired or exhausted?" I run through the three centers individually to parse it out. So is my head exhausted? Is my heart exhausted? Is my body exhausted? And then I like to add an extra one 'cause of the times we live in, is my soul exhausted?

So you can see how different approaches to rest will be called for depending on what part of you is exhausted. Sometimes our head is exhausted and we think lying around will rest it, but that doesn't actually work. Well, no shit, it's not your body that's exhausted, it's your head, and lying around only creates more space for your mind to run in circles.

Often when this is the situation, the best way to rest is to move your body. Activate another of your three centers so your brain gets a break. Get that blood pumping and you may feel more [00:16:00] energetic on the other side of it because it wasn't your body that was tired The same approach can be taken for any of the three centers.

Figure out where you're tired, then work from there. So how do you activate the center or centers where you're not exhausted? That's the question. Do you need to write some poetry? Listen to some music? Solve a crossword? Go for a walk with a friend When our soul is exhausted, that's a trickier solve.

Usually though, if we create more interior space for ourselves, the solution comes to us. This doesn't mean isolation, fives. I, I know you were thinking it. Um, because you can totally isolate while also pumping information into yourself, and that is not creating more interior space. So when my soul is tired, which it frequently is, there are a few steps I take to create more interior space.

Less screen time is the first step. I'll turn my phone off completely. [00:17:00] I usually give people who might need to reach me in like an emergency or who I chat with daily, I'll give them a heads-up so they don't worry. Then I give myself a day without my phone on. And I know that this is not possible for everyone, but it may be more possible for you than you think, right?

Or you can come up with contingency plans if you have, you know, a kid away at college or something like that. Get a landline. Only give them the number, or have them call your spouse, whatever it is. So when I give myself a day without my phone on, this creates interior space. I usually don't watch TV on these days either, and instead I'll just read, work in the g- garden, , chat with John.

In this space, in this roominess, what I need emerges. Sometimes it's in my dreams, in weird ways of course. Sometimes it's in strange ideas that pop into my head. Often the answer is in [00:18:00] whatever book I picked up to read, as if it was just meant to be. Uh, maybe the book is, you know, sort of pulling out something from my subconscious.

That's probably the case. But, um, I do think that the books we're meant to read find us when we're meant to read them So what helps you create interior space may vary, and this is probably more of a conversation for a one-on-one with me. But if you already know a few things that work, just do those, right?

When your soul feels tired and you're not sure it's your head or your heart or your mind, create interior space. The subconscious abhors a vacuum. It'll show up and give you some sometimes heavy-handed clues

You'll be surprised how much more rested you feel on a regular basis just by breaking down the feeling of I'm tired by centers. It's super easy to assume that all of yourself is tired when that might not be the case. The point, of [00:19:00] course, mm, this is very important, especially for threes. The point isn't to attempt to wring out every drop of energy from each of your three centers.

Rather, I wanna point out that by activating other centers, that can be the most effective approach to resting what is actually tired or exhausted. Let's zoom way in on your author career here. Let's say you're writing and you start to feel tired, but you haven't hit your goal. First, poke around at why you set that goal. Are you trying to motivate yourself by feeling behind? Who set that goal for you? Apply a little bit of skepticism toward the goal itself.

Then maybe it is a realistic goal for you on most days. Maybe that's what you conclude. So you decide that the goal isn't really the main issue here. The issue is that you are more tired than usual. So what center specifically is [00:20:00] tired? Is it one center? Is it two centers? Is it all three? If it's all three, you're probably a mother of young children.

But let's say it's one or two. What center isn't tired? How can you activate that one, call it forward? So activating the head center might look like revisiting your plot and adding a new layer of complexity, or it may look like taking a quick break to read some nonfiction or go write some code, if that's something you do.

But give those other centers a break. Activating the heart center might look like tuning into your character's feelings or listening to some moving music, maybe journaling about your feelings, or reaching out to some friends to emotionally connect. Activating the body center, well, that might look like getting up from the computer to stretch, maybe, uh, grabbing a glass of water and putting all your attention into the sensations of drinking that water.

It could look like [00:21:00] five minutes of deep breathing or just good old-fashioned exercise. So none of these things needs to take longer than five minutes. The options are pretend you're not tired and push through, building up a deficit that will at some point be called in, or rest in a way that works for you.

If you haven't dealt with your block around slowing down, only the first option is gonna feel like an option

I'll throw this out there too. Do you really want to live a life that can't accommodate five-minute breaks throughout your day? What kind of a life is that? If you can harness some stubbornness to say no to a life like that and demand your breaks when you need them, you will be better off. And guess what?

People will survive if you take five-minute breaks. Everything you love will not leave you. You will not be cast out from society for taking meaningful five-minute breaks. And if you are cast out for that, it's probably time to [00:22:00] join a different society

Checking in with the centers like this when you're tired, it can also be crucial to pursuing important diagnoses. For instance, you may isolate that it's always your body center that's tired, but your head and your heart, they're okay. See a doctor about that shit. Uh, they may say, "Well, it's probably depression."

Say, "No, it's not my head or my heart, it's my body." , or maybe you realize that you have plenty of physical energy once you break through some inertia. So in that case, maybe it's emotional exhaustion you're facing. See a therapist about that shit, you know, or go talk to a friend. Mental exhaustion a problem?

There are doctors for that too. And now I know if you're in the US, , medical care is not always affordable enough to be accessible. So do what you can, , but most of the time people who don't go to the doctor aren't going because they [00:23:00] just don't have the money. , that's, you know, they'll treat you no matter what.

So go get the treatment, figure the rest out later. I guess we have GoFundMe for that. Uh, we could have other systems that support us, but we have GoFundMe. Um, yeah, but go, go check it out. Don't let other fears keep you from going, right? A lot of the times it's just a simple fear of mortality that keeps us from going to see the doctor.

But once you figure out why you're tired, you can start to actually address it Now, there's really no arguing the fact that rest meets resistance more frequently and with more intensity for folks in historically oppressed communities. Unfortunately, that is by design, right? These rich idiots are out here hand-wringing about a permanent underclass, you know, coming for us all as if they're not the ones working full speed to make it so.

Frankly, if you work three jobs to afford a two-bedroom apartment with five people, [00:24:00] rest is going to be harder for you to come by because if you had any free time at all, you'd probably start thinking about building a guillotine. And the people who design the policies that perpetuate the bigotry and it keeps you overworked all the time, they, they don't want you having that free time for obvious reasons.

So if you fall into this category of people who legit cannot rest because of systemic oppression, you can't both rest and afford to eat and pay your bills, let me just validate what you might be feeling. Struggling to rest in this case is not a personal failure. However, until we can overhaul this system, and I do believe that's coming in the next five to 10 years, but what do I know?

I want you to feel like there is still something within your power to make your experience of each day more restful or at least less [00:25:00] fucking exhausting. Working hard with a busy mind and working hard with a quiet mind are two different experiences, and the latter is going to be less exhausting overall.

So both things can be true here. This is important. We can be systemically oppressed and drained by systems that are too big for us to take on individually, and there can be tools within our power to make that experience tolerable or even slightly more sustainable in the long run. That doesn't mean that if you're struggling it's your fault.

It means if you're struggling, you're not out of hope

So taking five-minute breaks throughout the day, or two minutes if that's all your life will allow, but most people listening to this probably do realistically have five minutes here and there. That will be a useful stopgap, but not enough rest in the long run

However, this is where you start if you don't know how to rest yet. Don't plan an expensive two-week vacation and think you're suddenly gonna have [00:26:00] access to different patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing that you haven't practiced and that magically allow you to recharge on the beach. The five-minute breaks are the practice.

Eventually, you may find yourself feeling safe taking 15-minute breaks when you need them. Then eventually, weekends feel more restful than before because you know how to make them restful, and you can resist the fear patterns that steal that rest from you, and you can resist those patterns for longer stretches.

With practice, a week off will begin to be restful because you become more intentional about how you rest. You have to start with the five minutes. This is where you can learn to distinguish whether it's your heart, mind, or body that's tired.

If that's a difficult task for you right now, just start practicing that. Start small, build from there. Over time, you'll spend more time feeling rested each day, and you'll wonder why you beat [00:27:00] yourself up so much all those years when you didn't have to. So if you're wondering, "What if I don't know how to rest?"

Start by asking how fear is keeping you from believing rest is a safe option. Because rest isn't an option. It comes for us whether we want it to or not, and if we're not accommodating it, it may just show up as illness. Rest comes for us all. Then practice checking in with your three centers, head, heart, body, and listen to what they have to say.

See if each one is tired or if it's good to go. Activate the centers that aren't tired, and if all three are tired, babe, it's time for a nap. Don't have that option? See if you can go to bed early, and then just try again tomorrow. Now, that means putting your phone out of reach of your bed. No late night scrolling.

Don't even let that be an option. Keep it out of arm's reach You really can't give up on this idea of rest because it'll just find you at the worst possible [00:28:00] time if you try. So let's keep experimenting in five-minute blocks, trying this and that until we notice some small movement, and then we expand on that.

You'll feel rested or slightly less exhausted in no time. That's it for this episode. If you found it useful, please share it with a friend or reflect on it in a post online, or go subscribe to my Substack, "The Liberated Writer." And as always, if you're noticing that you could benefit from some one-on-one coaching around this issue, visit liberatedwriter.com and book an author alignment session with me.

Resting is not optional, and it's the most overlooked productivity skill around. If you want some homework, here you go. Once this episode ends, don't autoplay to another. Take five minutes and check in with each of your three centers. Just ask each one if it's tired and what it needs, and then listen. It's [00:29:00] okay if you don't hear anything back.

Just keep listening. So this process requires practice, but if you do it enough, you will start to hear or feel or sense something in return, some answer. And if you don't hear anything from a particular center, that's good information to explore, too. So thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Claire Taylor, and I hope you'll join me for the next episode.

Happy writing.