At this point in the week, there should be no doubt in your mind about why this is called Hell Week. If you’ve done it right, it’s been a tough week, maybe the toughest week you can remember. You should feel mentally and physically exhausted. You should also feel great—the satisfaction that comes with good, honest hard work.
You should also feel different, changed from who you were before you began. If you don’t, it might simply be because you have not had time to reflect over the week. Once you reflect, you will begin to realize how much your choice to pursue Hell Week has done for you. You have changed because you chose to. Exactly how you’ve changed is up to you. Only you can accurately determine how you are different, which is why you must listen to yourself. Reflection is something that you must take time for. It is a natural human process, but we tend to push it away a lot because it requires a certain level of peace and quiet to reflect properly. Peace and quiet is a precious commodity in today’s world.
Often, the only time we reflect during the day is right before we go to sleep. This is because your mind is not occupied with tasks and your body is inactive. You are lying still; all you can do is either fall asleep or think—and often that thinking turns into reflection. I probably don’t need to tell you that late-night reflection is usually not very healthy. You end up thinking about things that worry you. As a result, you don’t sleep well. To avoid this, you need to set aside time to rest, so you can process your thoughts peacefully instead of restlessly.
Friday is rest day. On Thursday, I told you that you should only take the easy road in life when you have pushed yourself and deserve a reward. Friday is a kind of reward, but don’t look at it as a day to waste. Everything about Friday is meaningful. Rest is not downtime. Rest can and should be a meaningful exercise, an exercise that augments the effects of more strenuous work.
To begin your reflection period on Hell Week, I will make several suggestions. You are free to replace them with activities that help you relax better. The critical thing is that you rest with purpose.
When you complete Thursday of Hell Week at 5:00 a.m. on Friday, having been up for a full twenty-four hours, I suggest you take a long, hot shower, preferably finishing off with ice-cold water for the last ten to twenty seconds to jump-start your system, and then eat a healthy breakfast. This morning you can drop exercise and postpone it until evening. But if you’re really tired, it can be a good idea to exercise.
Exercise wakes you up. It gives you energy more than it depletes it. So you have to make a tough decision: exercise or no exercise; it is up to you. Remember, today you will have to go to work as usual and take part in all the activities you would normally participate in. The only difference between this Friday and other Fridays is that you haven’t slept the night before. And so you need to be wide awake and grab any chances you get for brief and effective rest.
During the short spaces of reflection throughout the day, ask yourself what Hell Week has meant to you so far. Think about how you felt before the week began. Ask yourself how you felt each day. Ask yourself how you feel today. Finally, ask yourself how you might feel tomorrow. Asking yourself these questions and answering them, honestly and fully and only to yourself, will process your feelings. It will make you conscious of who you are, what you can do, and what lies ahead. It makes you stronger. Going through Hell Week without reflecting is like going to work but not cashing your paycheck. Reflect. It pays.
I’ll now share what my years as a mental trainer have taught me about rest. After that, I’ll introduce you to a selection of rest techniques that have proven effective with many of my clients.
Rest is the period to gather strength and energy. It’s when you recharge your batteries and recuperate. While we all know that sleep is necessary, we often view rest as a luxury, when in fact it is a necessary part of successful living. The beneficial effect of rest is that it makes you more creative and helps you learn more rapidly. Rest gives you energy, perspective, and the power to deal with matters more efficiently and with greater vigor.
While the benefits of rest are more or less the same for all of us, rest is still highly individual, and it is up to you to determine your proper rest routine. Research is constantly telling us new things about the science of rest. One of the best things you can do is to listen to your body and adapt your rest routine accordingly. Sometimes you will want to rest when your body doesn’t really need it, and sometimes your body will need rest when you are too busy to listen. Mess with your rest for long enough, and it will start messing back.
Rest is a critical area for me to cover as a mental trainer in my daily conversations with clients. With rest, as with many issues, most people fall into one of two camps—those who do too much and those who do too little.
Camp one includes people who get too much rest. Symptoms of this group are that you sleep in on a regular basis. You take naps when you don’t need them. You end up binge watching your favorite TV series when you should be checking off your to-do list. You waste hours on Facebook instead of answering emails. You reward yourself with breaks, not because you earned them, but because you are avoiding the task at hand. If you nodded yes to any of these things, you are in camp one. Do not despair, though. If you have the courage to admit you are in this group, you are already on your way out of it.
It is simple to say that over-resters simply need to stop sleeping and lazing around so much, but there is more to it than that. This group has a fundamental misunderstanding about what rest is and how it works. If excessive rest were a simple problem, it would be easily remedied by just resting less. But that treatment is not enough, because resting too much is only part of the reason why camp one abuses the resource of rest.
Rest is an instrument, and like any instrument, rest is only as good as the skill of its user. The best litmus test for your skill level is your motivation for rest. If you are using rest to avoid dealing with obstacles between you and your goals, then your skill level is low. The only way to remedy this problem is to recalibrate your motivation for rest. You have to begin resting for the right reasons. If you do this, you will find that the ailments of camp one—feelings of laziness, apathy, and listlessness—begin to diminish and the true benefits of rest will begin to activate.
Others never get enough rest; they are in camp two. They work too hard and don’t manage to prioritize their time properly. If you are an under-rester, consider why you undervalue rest. Do you get to bed late and get up early to get work done? Do you work through your lunch break? Do you order takeout, because you don’t have time to cook a meal? Is your weekend indistinguishable from your weekdays, because you just have too much to get done? If you are in camp two, you are probably guilty of a few of these. And to make matters worse, you are probably proud of it.
When was the last time you took a vacation? If you are in this camp, it has probably been too long. You lack faith in rest. You do not trust that it is as inherently valuable as the things you are choosing to replace rest with. Neglecting rest is bankrupting your success. It is taking an energy loan that you can never pay back.
Interestingly, the results of camp one and camp two are strikingly similar. Both groups are low on energy. When you rest too much, you end up becoming lethargic. When you rest too little, you are running on an empty tank. Both inactivity and overactivity are sources of stress and tension. Both will leave you feeling dissatisfied with life and unsuccessful. The sweet spot, where you feel energized, productive, and rested, is the balance both camps must move toward, if they want success. As Hell Week has shown you, neglecting rest in order to push through and complete hard tasks is sometimes necessary, but when you consistently neglect rest, you and your work will inevitably suffer.
Like camp one, camp two has a fundamental misunderstanding about what rest is. Under-resters view rest as a necessary physical function like going to the bathroom, and so camp two rests only when the need is as demanding as a bathroom visit.
Many of us undervalue rest as a useless time-waster. And having come this far in Hell Week, you may think that rest contradicts the essence of my philosophy of hard work. But rest and hard work are inexorably linked. The best of the best rest more thoroughly, and more consciously, than others. It’s always striking to me how many of the really excellent clients I work with, the truly world-class ones, are expert resters. They are driven by what they do and manage the impossible—that is, to feel good about themselves, to have control, to accomplish everything they desire, and at the same time feel in harmony with themselves and their surroundings. If you look at people at the top of any field, you will find it conspicuous how many of them don’t stress, don’t complain, and don’t have a chaotic daily life. What keeps their high-octane lives glued together? Proper and adequate rest.
Activity and rest are two vital aspects of life. To find a balance in them is a skill in itself. Wisdom is knowing when to have rest, when to have activity, and how much of each to have. Finding them in each other−activity in rest and rest in activity−is the ultimate freedom. —SRI SRI RAVI SHANKAR
I think back here to my own military Hell Week in 1992. As part of the mental training regimen, we were required to learn vocabulary in a foreign language as well as the names of various classical music compositions, while at the same time completing intense physical challenges. It was amazing how difficult it was to learn even the most basic concepts as our rest periods decreased.
For most people, more rest will mean better results in every area of their lives. But it is important to remember that rest has to be planned. It has to become part of your daily routine, your week, your month, and your year. Consciousness is a key word in mental training, and rest must also be something you do consciously. Rest must become a deliberate part of your life.
How should you rest during a day, a week, a month, or a year? There is no simple solution. How long your vacations should be, and how many weekends off you should take, are things you have to discover for yourself. On a general level, I believe many people take too much time off, and also cannot fully appreciate vacations because they have not worked hard enough leading up to them. In addition, they lose the pleasure that comes from working hard over a period of time. We should not just work with a restful vacation in mind. We should be consciously finding rest in the peace of mind hard work provides. Far too many people do something somewhere in between. Most people get on well in life. Most people perform well. Most people perform in their jobs passably well and find reasonable enjoyment in their vacations. Your challenge is to not be like most people. Your challenge is to do everything fully. Work fully. Rest fully.
I believe from time to time in life you really need to step on the accelerator, and at other times strive for an increased sense of calm and balance. As we have discussed, we must choose areas of focus to be effective. I believe that during a month you can spend a week focusing on your work, and at other periods emphasize other values and activities. Think both long range and short term, and cast your mind back to time management, mood, and focus. Hell Week should help you to discover where your limits lie. Considering these things should help you to discover how rest will accompany your workweek and life goals.
During Hell Week you must go to bed at 10:00 p.m. and get up at 5:00 a.m. This should be enough sleep. If in addition you build in different kinds of rest during the day, especially on Hell Week’s Friday, you can quite easily be on your feet and working hard throughout the day. I think seven to eight hours is enough for most people with a fairly average day. During Hell Week you should fall asleep more rapidly, because surfing online has to be kept to a minimum and TV of course is not allowed at all.
A change is as good as a rest. —STEPHEN KING
Rest exists in many forms. Beyond actual sleep, it can be meditation, a hot bath, time with loved ones, or even work. Yes, work can be a form of rest as well. Take a look at your to-do list. Find the item that is the hardest task on your list and imagine that you have begun working on it. You likely consider this your hardest task because you aren’t quite sure how to solve it. It will require a lot of thinking, juggling, and patience. Now imagine that after making some headway in this task, you decide to spend some time knocking out some of your easier tasks. Look at the easiest task on your list. Imagine yourself leaving the difficult task and taking a break by working on the easy task. Doesn’t that feel like a break to you?
It can be a kind of rest to do something completely different. The key is that you cannot keep thinking about the previous task while working on the new one. If you do that, then you aren’t resting, you are just wearing yourself thin. I’ll give you an example. If you’re one of the many people who have a job that starts at around 9:00 a.m. and finish your working day at around 5:00 p.m. or later, then usually you come home feeling exhausted. If your job is very involved, then it’s not unusual to take work thoughts home with you. This is a huge mistake and should be avoided. It doesn’t benefit you to be partly present at home and partly thinking about work. If you develop this debilitating habit, you will find that you are never fully anywhere.
You will begin to recharge your batteries more efficiently if you think of the stairs leading up to the door at home or the elevator up to your apartment as magical—a magical stairway that makes all your thoughts about work disappear. You switch off your cell phone on the way home, and it should remain switched off for at least an hour because you want to wind down and recuperate when you come home. You want to rest by shifting your thoughts. You have the ability within you if you want to do it.
What you do at home for the first hour is irrelevant, as long as you do it 100 percent with your thoughts 100 percent present in what you are doing. Perhaps you spend time with your significant other. Perhaps you have dinner with your children or with friends. Be inquisitive about the people around you, be attentive, and be at your best in this role.
The magic stairway or elevator is so magical that it makes you shift focus, and that gives you energy. Tell yourself you’re totally on the ball, you’re now going to be the best parent in the world, or you’re going to be at your best as a spouse or partner. On your way into the magical sphere, undergo a change, because you have control over your own thoughts. Imagine yourself doing this as you make your way to work. Imagine coming home and being first class in your role at home. It has to be wholehearted. In this way, you will manage to give something to the people around you, and this will benefit you at work, as well. You are able to step on the gas during longer working days as required, producing better quality in what you’re doing and improving your performance. You might ask why this is considered resting advice, but once you experience the satisfying feeling of knowing you are in the moment and living life fully, you will answer that question for yourself.
Doing something different purely and simply is a kind of rest. It produces an effect similar to taking a weekend off or going on vacation.