The art of rest: Mastering the pause

Celeste: Welcome back to week two of the Nursing and Midwifery Health Program Victoria's podcast series: Wellness Reimagined How to Thrive in Stressful Times. I'm Celeste Pinney, a Registered Midwife and Senior Clinician at the nursing and midwifery Health Program Victoria and host of the podcast. And I'm joined by wellness speaker Mark Bunn. Welcome back, Mark, great to have you here. 

Mark: Celeste, great to be back. Looking forward to today's episode. 

Celeste: Absolutely. So today, we will be exploring the art of rest, mastering the pause. In the modern age, it's quite difficult to carve out time for rest, as I'm sure we've all experienced. This is especially true for nurses and midwives who do shift work, making it harder to get into a routine and incorporate regular rest periods. We'd love to hear a little bit more from you Mark about why is rest important? Why does it matter? 

Mark: Oh, I love that question. It's one of my favourite questions. And I've probably just, in the last year or two, started to think of rest as a superpower. And I think, like many nurses and midwives, as you said, very, very busy, trying to be practical for them, because I've had the same experience that probably did a bit too much activity and bit of burnout and over adrenaline, and sort of learnt the hard way about the importance of rest. But my background is very much in the traditional sciences, is, of course, this connection to nature and natural laws, natural rhythms. And one of the things that really was brought home to me was, if we thought of a formula that mother nature, we think of mother nature that, you know, feminine, earthy wisdom, sort of keeper of the world. How does she regulate life? What's, what's her formula for success? PageAnd in the west, we often think of activity. You know, we're going to do more activity. We're going to be good at this. But mother nature's formula for success in life is rest, and activity. We need both. We have winter, which balances out summer, we have night which balances out day. As one leg is walking, the other leg is stationary on the ground. The heart beats, we all know as nurses, you know it contracts. Blood goes out, then it expands. So everything in nature, everything is rest and activity. If we want to build a tall skyscraper, 100 feet in the air, or 100 meters in the air, we've got to dig really deep foundations first. If we want to shoot an arrow long and far with a lot of power, we first have to pull it back, and so rest, in the Vedic tradition, my training and most of the Eastern sciences is seen as the foundation of dynamic, successful, powerful activity. And we all know, even from sleep as an example, we don't sleep well, we don't get good rest, our activity for the rest of the day is compromised. And I'll finish this with my favourite quote ever. I think it's pretty much my favourite quote. It's from Claude Debussy, and he says that music, is the space between the notes. If all we have is the notes without the space between them, it's just a jumbled mess, and life is the same when it's all activity, as a friend of mine in America, when we present together, she says, in the west, we bow down, we honour, we worship at the altar of activity. But having those little bits, just space in our day, little rest periods, just can create such a massive improvement, not just in terms of our health, but our mental and emotional health. You know that joy of life, music is the space between the notes. So I think rest, although it's challenging, and particularly for nurses and midwives, just little bits, little bits in the day and the week can make a really profound, sort of difference to our health outcomes. 

Celeste: Yeah, sounds really critical the yin and the yang. 

Mark: Yeah, beautiful. Love it. Well, yeah. And building on from that, on your website, you've got an article about a three minute rejuvenators for reducing stress and restoring balance, which probably is, a little bit about what you're talking about there. So would you mind just explaining this further and how that might work for busy nurses and midwives?

Mark: Yeah, definitely. Interestingly, I wrote that article before I heard of a fascinating study done by Dr Adam Fraser, Adams a great speaker himself, he works closely with Deakin University in sort of a lot of areas around wellbeing and work life balance and performance and just sort of out of COVID, he was looking into this whole aspect of resilience. You know, it was a big buzzword, you know, nurses and midwives and everyone, we had to be more resilient. You know, it's like, you've got to put on the armour, and you've got to deal with all this stress, and you've got to push through. And how do we sort of not get burnt out and, but what he found was that, of course, we have a limit to how much we can put on the armour and be resilient. Rather than continually trying to be resilient, what we need to do is focus on what he called micro recovery, little things that we do each day or each week, which might only be a minute here or two minutes here or five minutes there, but just give our organism physiologically, just a break. You know, it's like stopping at the lights in the car and turn the engine off just that little bit of break. He says, if we can increase that, then over time, we have over 44% reduction in our levels of burnout, and so I think this is really critical for nurses and midwives. So that article around three minute rejuvenators was on a similar theme that just, bit like we spoke about in habits last week, you know, making them easy, it's not that we need to craft out 45 minutes to go to the gym or, you know, go and have a whole weekend away with no one bothering us. But, you know, can we just get out in the fresh air for a couple of minutes? You know, few more minutes before the shift starts, or on a break or end of a shift, we're just getting some, that natural light through the eyes, and some breath work. We'll talk about that in another episode couple of minutes, to just calm the nervous system. Little practices, things called palming, where we just rub the palms together in Ayuverd the Vedic Krishna that stimulates the life force, the prana, in the palms, and we just place that over the closed eyes, and it just gives a really calming effect on the nervous system, maybe we just go and find a quiet space and meditate for 2,3,5, minutes, just trying to find these little practical, time efficient things that just break, you know, that constant on the go, pushing, getting the job done, giving the body just that little bit of rest, so that that whole adrenal system doesn't just sort of get depleted over time. So this is the idea of micro recovery, small rejuvenators, even on the phone, I have a classic one that I'm starting to put into sessions now where instead of people following just sort of news sites, and it can get very depressing, and the whole doom scrolling, we get into these little rabbit holes, and after two minutes, we feel really depressed. Can you follow, sort of feel good, positive, the ones I'm following at the moment are pandas, you know, the big panda bears. And it's just hilarious. And I show these in talks now for a minute, just like three or four little panda videos, and they fall out of trees and they fall off chairs and they roll, and it's just so, everyone laughs, and they're just gorgeous. And I'm sure if you could measure your dopamine before and after that one minute watching those videos, your dopamine would get a massive boost. And so these are just examples of what we can do. You know, you're on a break, you go to your phone, if you're following these sort of feel good, uplifting, dopamine positive feeds, then within a couple of minutes, you can be actually starting to feel really positive and uplifted, rather than the opposite. So they're just some little examples. But world's your oyster. You know, whether it's a little bit of exercise, meditation, breath work, just going on online and finding something funny, you know, people telling jokes or funny videos, just little ways to break up that day give us a feel good boost, and they're really powerful rejuvenators. 

Celeste: I like funny cat videos. 

Mark: Cat, yeah, cat, really, dogs, yeah, whatever people are into. And, ah, beautiful. 

Celeste: Well, that's great. I think it's, you know, a lot of us need to hear this around rest and knowing that, you know, we don't have to carve out hours and hours in the day, because I think that can lead to people just going, ah, well, it's too hard, I can't achieve that. But just bringing in, you know, a few moments here and there, and that statistic you mentioned is profound, really, in terms of the impact it can have on us. So it is a really critical part of self-care. And I'm curious to know, how do you think that we might be able to begin to change our mindset around rest? Like to not see it as a waste of time or something to feel guilty about, but as a crucial element of our wellbeing? 

Mark: Yeah, beautiful question. I think that's sort of that idea of where I started, just really cementing our appreciation that we as human beings are connected to nature, mother nature. We're a part of that sort of fabric and the same cycles and rhythms that governs nature and the planets and the seasons, is in us. And so that rest is equally as important as activity. They go together. So I think the first step is really just getting a real conscious appreciation of the importance of rest, that doing nothing is actually doing everything, if that makes sense. You know, it's like, and that's, I have a good fortune of spending two or three months in Bali each year. And people think, oh, you're lucky. You know, they got beautiful weather and, you know, they got the data. But the real beauty of Bali and people that have been to such locations, is the life lesson of just how they approach life. And I'm always intrigued that when they finish the work day, or they've got a break of some kind, they don't just go and do something else. They will actually just sit and do nothing, its really quite sort of confronting in many ways, but 

Celeste: Radical concept! 

Mark: It is. And there's lot in Scandinavian countries, you know, a lot of research now about many of the Scandinavian countries having, you know, the highest sort of wellbeing indexes in the world. But they also have these concepts. They have specific words that escape me now, but words for literally doing nothing, that that is a health prescription. And so can we just sit in a park and watch the world go by? You know, the old lying in a hammock for 10 minutes, not having to listen to a podcast when we're doing it, or not having to write in the journal, or all these things that can be very effective and powerful, but can we literally just do nothing? I'm always reminded of the old, the front porch, you know, in these sort of country homesteads, where at the end of the day they'd get the cup of tea and they'd sit in the rocking chair and just watch the world go by. You know, can we find a place we don't have porches anymore, but just somewhere where we can just sit and do literally nothing, and just this is, provides a really deep rest to the body and understanding that it's like, and even sport, you know, we think of the millions and trillions of dollars that goes into research on sports performance. You know, athletes, and they get paid these ridiculous amounts of money, but 80% of that research is now about recovery. It's not about the actual performance and the training. It's how we get them to recover quicker. How do we get them to have deeper rest so that they can then perform for the next one and a nurse and a midwife, particularly on shift work and rotating shifts, it's that ability to have those micro recovery moments and that rest of just time to do nothing that'll really rejuvenate them for the next shift and help them to do that ongoingly without the, hopefully, the burnout. 

Celeste: I think it comes back to habits, doesn't it like it? Some of us can easily get into habits around like you said, you know, over using technology, and there's definitely an addictive element, perhaps, to being on the go all the time, and we get caught up in the adrenaline rush. So, you know, coming back to if anyone hasn't listened to our previous podcast on habits, checking that out, and looking at ways that we might be able to start bringing more rest into our lives and knowing that, that is a really important part of sustaining ourselves in the profession, but also in life. I think that's great that we've reflected on that today. 

Mark: Yeah, simple, but not always easy. 

Celeste: Yeah, that's right, easy to talk about. It not always easy to do. So just for a few practical ideas. I mean, you have sort of touched on it, but you know, if you could choose, say, five, three to five top activities that people could use for rest, 

Mark: Yeah 

Celeste: Maybe activities is the wrong word there. But you know, ideas for rest. I mean, you mentioned, you know, just porch sitting, or, you know, just doing nothing, anything else that you could suggest that might be useful for people? 

Mark: Yeah, I always come back to a meditation as my number one. I sort of am a bit lucky. When I was 19 was when I first learned to meditate, something called TM, or Transcendental Meditation. And so anything that creates what we call transcendence. So TM is obviously a meditation technique specifically designed to do that very easily, but transcending is where we go beyond. That's what the word transcend means, to go Pagebeyond. So we go beyond the thinking, busy, often agitated or turbulent mind, and we experience that silence, that calm, which is our, our nature. So meditation would be really, really primary. So particularly those transcending based techniques and again, just 5-10, minutes to start with, really powerful. Number two would probably be just nature. So the Global Wellness Institute over the last decade which is a worldwide institute looking at the latest sort of cutting edge research on health and wellbeing, looks at what they call NDD- Nature Deficit Disorder, telling us that a lot of or most of our western ailments, or large majority of them, have a strong correlation with our disconnection from the natural world. And when you look at these, you know traditional cultures, indigenous cultures, that have particularly far less inflammatory diseases. It's due to that connection to Mother Nature. And so the Earth itself has its own frequency or vibration, and when we're connected to it, it actually brings our brain, activity, and body into that same resonance, which is a calmer, less anxious, settled physiological state, and which is the exact opposite of this hyperactivity. So when we're talking about rest, the earth, if it's like natural vibration, is that rested state. So anything we can do to connect to the natural environment. So if we are going for a walk, can we do it rather than on a treadmill in a gym? Can we do the same walk in a park or a, you know, in a park, or a hike in a forest. Can we, if the now that the weather's improving here in Melbourne and Victoria, can the nurses or midwives go out on a break and have lunch, or before they start their night shift, and have, sit in a park while they eat their meal. On a holiday or on a day when they're not working, they've got a break and they're down near a beach, for example, taking the shoes and socks off and walking on the wet sand, what they call earthing, or grounding. The research shows just a massive, powerful way to reduce the inflammation in the body. Integrate mind and body, and when we think of hyperactivity, this sort of inability to rest and have that sort of deep, settled state, we think of words like, you know, I feel a bit spacey, I'm a bit airy, you know, I'm way the fairies. And so earthing or grounding is the exact opposite of that. And so, two would be anything to do with more nature connection, just, you know, parks, walking in natural environments, as we said, earthing, really, really powerful. And three would probably be just that, the general understanding we've touched on of doing nothing, and I'm laughing, because 

Celeste: Challenge 

Mark: It's been a challenge for me. I've been going for three or four years in this you know, I knew the theory of it probably 10 years ago. But as you said, the challenge of actually doing it is really so foreign to us that I'm not expecting everyone to pick up this straight away, but just really stopping and literally sitting and doing nothing, you know, not doing the podcast as well, or not doing the crossword or not. It's like it's really a challenging thing. But that old style of sitting on the stoop or sitting out on the porch and just literally watching life go by really, really can help wind down those sort of brain waves and get us into a nicer, settled state even before sleep, you know. And we'll talk about this with shift work and coming off shift, you know, often we don't want to go straight from work. We're busy, you know, there's been some issues on the ward, or whatever it is, and we don't just go straight home and straight to sleep. We need this sort of transition time. So this is a good little transition activity for whether it's sleep or before we go and meditate, or we get home to the family and have to engage with kids or partners or whatever. But yeah, takes a bit of practice and getting used to. Very powerful. 

Celeste: Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us today, Mark and we look forward to having you back next week. 

Mark: No, absolute pleasure and yeah, hope everyone gets some really good quality rest before we have a chat about sleep next time. 

Celeste: Great. We look forward to being with you next week for our next topic on sleep, for any nurse or midwife in need of support, you can call 03 9415 7551 to make an appointment with one of our nurse or midwife clinicians. We'll see you next time you.