When Rest IS the Work

Turns Out, Lying on the Couch is Really Hard Work.

I’ve had two surgeries in two weeks. Yesterday, gum grafting. And two weeks ago, I had my gallbladder removed because three ultrasound scans stated I had polyps growing (spoiler alert: biopsy results negative for polyps… quite the ‘oops’).

Post-op, I expected pain. I expected downtime.

What I didn't expect was how completely useless I would feel… and how annoyed I was by that feeling.

I looked fine, but for the incision marks on my torso (and now gums). I was sitting in my recliner most of the day, alternating between sleep and doing nothing. Naturally, my mind started getting busy: I should be able to work from this chair, then help some with the 4 kids at home. Because it’s incredibly lazy to just ‘sit here.’

Fast forward to post-op day 2, when I hopped online just to check a few Teams messages… within minutes, I was completely drained.

Later that day after a super long nap, my husband and kids urged me to get me outside for our usual after-dinner walk. Well, one block into our stroll, I got winded and needed to turn around.

I felt shame, guilt, and impatience. Who gets winded after one block and a couple teams messages? I lead from the front, not the armchair.

It was only after I sat with my feelings did I understand why they surfaced. Because when we're used to measuring work by output, it's hard to recognize the work we can’t see.

But my body was working.

After my abdominal surgery, an enormous amount of energy got redirected toward healing: repairing tissue, managing inflammation and crazy post-anesthesia symptoms, recalibrating my digestive track circuitry to operate sans one (hopefully unimportant) organ. 

In fact, it was my Whoop fitness tracker clocking my biometric marker data that proved to me I was very much at work, with my resting heart rate, HRV, respiratory rates, and stress levels all way off my norm.

From the outside, I looked like I was lounging around like my daughter on summer break.

But on the inside, my body was working overtime.

Rest, it turns out, is a different kind of work.

Despite how it looks or feels, rest is vital, not indulgent.

It’s restorative, not productive.
Latent, not visible.

That got me thinking about how often leadership advice gets reduced to rules you see on motivational posters. The funny thing is, the posters often contradict each other, don’t they?

Slow down. Push through.

Set boundaries. Be resilient.

Protect your energy. Do the hard thing.

These can each be good advice.

Just not universally in each moment. 

My mind was telling me to push through. My body was telling me to slow down. My lesson was learning which one to listen to.

The Leadership Shift

Good leadership isn't knowing what you should do. It's developing enough self-awareness to know what you need to do right now.

Sometimes resilience means pushing forward.

Sometimes it means stopping.

Sometimes the boundary is saying, “I can't do that today.”

The hard part is being able to tell the difference.

That requires paying attention to your internal signals instead of other people's expectations. Your capacity instead of your calendar full of commitments.  And what you actually need instead of what you've decided a “strong leader” is supposed to look like.

Bottom Line:

Not all work looks like work. And not all strength looks like pushing through.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is give yourself permission to recover.

Rest isn't the absence of work.

Sometimes, rest is the work.

To better (and to health),

— Jess

The best medicine :)