Intentional Rest: The Key to Boosting Productivity
Intentional Rest
Do you struggle to rest without feeling guilty? Are you someone who's constantly feeling drained, yet you continue to push yourself to do more each day?
If so, rest probably feels like a luxury – something you'll get to when everything else is done. But, rest isn't a luxury, it's a necessity if you want to sustain your energy, protect your health, and achieve your goals.
Being intentional with rest is more than making a quick break once a week. It’s a mindful, practical approach to productivity and energy management, that recharge before you burn out.
When you rest purposefully, you boost focus, creativity, and resilience. Intentional rest is about working smarter so there's space to rest and recover every day, not at the point of total exhaustion.
This blog explores how you can make intentional rest part of your approach to achieving goals.
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Table of Contents
What Is Intentional Rest?
Intentional rest is the deliberate choice to take time out and do things that recharge you mentally, emotionally and physically. Whether it’s a quiet moment with a nice cuppa, spending time on your hobbies, or taking a mindful walk; it's rest that helps you handle life’s demands more effectively.
Active vs Passive Rest
Rest can be both active and passive.
- Active (Intentional) rest is planned and purposeful. For example, regular yoga sessions, daily meditation, journaling, or walking.
- Passive rest is rest with minimal activity and shutting out distractions. For example sleep, napping, or fully relaxing your body and mind by lying down on the sofa, with your eyes softened or closed.
While passive rest is essential for physical recovery, sleep it's not enough on its own. If the only time you switch off is when you climb into bed, you're definitely not getting enough rest to replenish your physical, emotional and cognitive energy stores.
Intentional rest nurtures your mind, body and mental wellness. As with sleep, it's a necessity and one that is largely ignored or the first to be dropped when time is tight.
The Science Behind Rest
Research shows that intentional rest lowers the stress hormone cortisol, reduces anxiety, and improves focus. Rest also boosts productivity by allowing your brain to reset. This helps to improve problem-solving and decision-making skills.
According to Psychology Today, not getting enough rest can lead to physical and mental fatigue, reduced efficiency, and ultimately burnout.
The Impact of Overworking
Skipping rest to work on your goals doesn’t make you more productive in the longer term, it just depletes your energy and delays your progress.
Prolonged overworking can lead to:
- Burnout: Complete exhaustion that impacts your emotional and physical health. This can cause disengagement with not only your work, but in life generally. Burnout can take a lot of time to recover from, inevitably causing it to take much longer to achieve those goals.
- Lack of focus: When you don't make time for rest it can lead to fatigue, which lowers concentration, making it difficult to do anything at all. It can cause you to make more mistakes, taking longer to complete tasks, and ultimately impacting your confidence and emotional well being.
- Health issues: Persistent and long-term overworking can impact your health quite significantly. It increases the risk of heart disease and weaken your immune system.
- Emotional fatigue: The impact of fatigue can lead to irritability, increased stress and overwhelm, as well as low mood or potentially depression.
For decades the hustle culture has glorified overworking, but it's unsustainable and a recipe for burnout. As a young person the belief of “you have to work hard all the time” was ingrained.
After witnessing this first hand in my previous career and onset of chronic health issues, I’ve become passionate about advocating gentle productivity and guilt-free rest.
According to a study by Brevard Health, intentional rest prevents burnout and enhances long-term well-being. When you prioritise rest, you’re giving yourself a productivity boost.
How Rest Improves Productivity
When you think about rest you probably imagine yourself relaxing on the sofa, or just doing nothing. But intentional rest is more than that. It's about intentionally stepping away from your work to recharge your mind.
Intentional rest helps because you're giving yourself the space to engage in things that fill your cup. This allows you to be you, and to simply experience the world around you. This is vital for improving mental clarity, energy, and creativity.
Improved Cognitive Function
Rest sharpens your brain. Without it, you can experience mental fog, like you're unable to think clearly. It can lead to poor decision-making that can impact your work as well as your personal life. When you're exhausted it can reduce your creativity, frequently experiencing ‘blank page syndrome', or being unable to solve problems like you normally can.
Intentional rest breaks act like a reboot for your mind. It allows you to approach problems or creative blocks from a fresh perspective. If you think of your brain like a computer, when you have too many tabs open it can run slower!
Choosing to step away from your work is similar to closing those tabs, giving it a rest to allow you to free up space in your mind and refocus your attention.
Increased Energy and Focus
Short, intentional breaks throughout the day can help keep you energised. It's why I love approaches like the Pomodoro Technique and time blocking (working in focused intervals with planned breaks).
Try adding a 10–15 minute rest between tasks. Use the time to stretch, step outside, or chat with a friend. You’ll likely return to your work more alert and productive.
Subconscious Insights
This is my favourite part of intentional rest – giving space for those subconscious insights to seep into your consciousness.
Have you ever had one of those “aha moment” while in the shower or doing something completely unrelated to your work? It always reminds me of when you've forgotten the name of something, and the more you try to force yourself to remember, the more it stays on the tip of your tongue! But once your mind is distracted “Ta-da!” you suddenly remember it!
That’s your subconscious problem-solving at work. Intentional rest gives your brain the space to process things by switching off. If you don't take this time, and your brain is constantly switched on and alert, it doesn't give you the time or space to process things in this way.
If you're hyper-focused on something but it's just not happening, or you're struggling to connect the dots and solve a problem, stop for a while and take an intentional break. This will give your brain the space that it needs to process and problem solve in the background while you're enjoying a mindful walk or relaxing with your favourite book!
Ideas for Intentional Rest
Mental & Physical Recharge
Meditate: A few minutes of mindfulness lowers stress and calms the mind. You don't need to sit in a particular position or listen to meditation music if you don't want to, but taking a few minutes to sit quietly, rest your eyes, and use your breath to allow you to quieten those thoughts racing around in your head. It can be particularly powerful if you're feeling anxious or stressed. If you prefer music, create a relaxation playlist, find a meditation on Youtube or if you prefer, apps like Calm or Insight timer are great for beginners with lots of guided or unguided meditations.
Journal: Spend at least five minutes clearing your mind by writing down your thoughts, worries or practicing gratitude. It's great for lifting your mood and clearing mental clutter. If you're under a lot of pressure from studying or working on a big project, journaling can help a lot.
Mindful walk: Plan a daily short, mindful walk outside when you can. It's a great way to boost your energy and lift your mood. It's also very good for heart health!
Sleep Quality
Nightime routines: Sleep is essential for physical and mental wellness. If this is something you struggle with, experiment with an evening routine to help you unwind. If your mind races, have a journal next to you and dump the thoughts onto it. It's so effective and something that has helped me over the years. Aim for 7–9 hours of restful sleep to allow your body and mind to recover.
Power naps: A 20-minute nap can refresh energy and enhance focus. However, if sleep is an issue, or impacts your nighttime sleep, be mindful of this.
Micro-rests: Micro-rests are are tiny moments where you pause. Simply closing your eyes, and breathing deeply for a few moments can reset your energy when time is tight.
How to Include Intentional Rest
Remember, intentional rest is something that you need to plan for. When you build it into your daily routine, you lessen the risk of it being forgotten, especially during those high pressure times.
Plan Regular Breaks
Plan your short breaks throughout the day. Hold your boundaries with these, and block out your calendar as you would if you were attending a meeting. Use the Pomodoro Technique, or your version of it where you work for 25/30/45 minutes, rest for 5/10/15 minutes, and repeat throughout the day.
Use this time for walking, stretching, breathing exercises, arts and craft, preparing a meal, chatting to a friend on the phone etc. These pauses dotted throughout the day are a great way to recharge your focus and energy.
Stay Consistent, Even on Busy Days
Even when life is hectic, and you're approaching a tight deadline, still make rest a priority. It may look a little different to the times when you have more flexibility, but by continuing to prioritise rest, you're giving yourself and your brain the best possible chance to hit those deadlines.
Remember that consistency isn't about being perfect with it, it's about building those habits into your day-to-day life that will benefit your both today and in the longer term.
Tools, Resources & Support
Below are some of my favourite tools and resources:
Mindset & Wellness Worksheet Bundle – A set of worksheets and activities to help you improve your confidence and sense of wellbeing. A great selection of printable mental health & therapy & coaching tools for personal use, or to use with clients.
Canva Pro – Upgrade your content design with Canva Pro. Explore the enhanced features available in Pro. Grab your free trial here.
Etsy – Are you ready to create your own online store? Etsy is a brilliant shopping platform that's used by millions. Setting up your store is simple, and when you sign up with this link we both get 40 free listings!
Grow With Evelyn – Evelyn Weiss is an extraordinary coach. GWE is the best membership I've been in. The level of support, the courses, challenges & community are exceptional. Highly recommend if you're a coach, digital creator or small business owner.
Impact Stationery – Have you ever dreamed of creating your own high-end stationery products? Laura has an amazing course & community designed to help you created printed products that you can market on Amazon, or your own website. It's different to KDP in that they're not print on demand, and the quality of products are incredible.
Final Thoughts
Intentional rest and gentle productivity are two of the things that I am most passionate about. As someone who manages chronic health issues, fatigue and low energy, working this way has enabled me to continue being able to achieve my goals.
Rest used to be a swear word for me – I hated being forced to rest – but now, it's part of my life every single day. Yes there can be times when I'm working much harder / longer than others, but I always take those focus breaks and it's helped me massively.
Intentional rest isn't some fashionable new idea, it's a way of living and working that will help you achieve your goals without burning yourself out.
It's important to remember that rest isn't just about doing nothing, it's about making time to do things that are meaningful to you.
I would love to hear from you! How do you feel about Intentional rest? Is it something you do or that you're going to start to do? Share below ☺️
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Meet Lynsey
Hey there! I'm Lynsey, a counsellor, coach and mentor for women who want to create change, but are feeling lost, uncertain and exhausted. With over 7 years’ experience of training, running businesses, and over a decade as a tutor and adult trainer, I've learned the value of a gentle and intentional approach to work and life that energises you without draining all of your energy.
I've lived with ME/CFS since 2011, and since then re-trained as a counsellor, and achieved a distinction for my Masters in Counselling and Psychotherapy Practice; all while running 4 businesses!
How? Improving your mindset, finding acceptance in yourself, and developing a gentle, but solution-focused approach to achieving goals is key. Knowing that it's not about how fast you move, but finding your own pace and trusting that you can achieve your goals in your own way, one step at a time.
If you'd like to know more about working with me, you can email [email protected] or find me on socials (links in the menu)
Have you seen my online store Quietly Conquer – Find DFY templates, downloads and more!
