How to Really Rest
It’s pretty common knowledge by now that sleep is important, and that we should make an effort to get the right amount of quality sleep. Sleep’s little sister, rest, doesn’t get so much attention.
But rest is important, too. Getting enough good rest can make your days and evenings, help prevent burnout, and reduce mistakes and accidents.
Photo by Ilham Rahmansyah
Maybe we don’t talk about rest because it’s hard to generalize about. Unlike sleep, which is about the same for all of us, rest is an idiosyncratic thing. One person’s rest — reading a thick novel, say, or running long distances — is another person’s toil.
But there are some common characteristics of activities that are truly restorative. It’s all about DRAMMA.
Bring the DRAMMA
DRAMMA is an acronym for a proposed model about what makes an activity restful. It captures the factors that seem to help people feel better after doing leisure activities.
Let’s break it down.
D is for Detachment. An activity needs to take your mind off stressful thoughts and worries in order to be restful. That might be by distraction, as with an engrossing book or movie, or a conversation with a friend, or a puzzle. Or it might be an activity that helps your mind wander or reach a meditative state, like colouring or running.
R is for Relaxation. A restful activity will allow you to recover by requiring little mental or physical effort. Of course, whether any given activity requires “little” effort will depend on the person doing it: an easy hike for one might be grueling for another, while a logic puzzle might be relaxing to one person and about as fun as a math test for the next.
It stands to reason that the relaxation should be relevant to the activity you’re trying to recover from. That is, if you spend your days working with clients who are emotional and combative, you probably don’t want to spend your entire weekend in charge of toddlers who are emotional and combative. If you work as a house painter going up and down ladders all day, lying on the couch watching long documentaries about warships might be a refreshing activity.
A is for Autonomy. You have to choose to do the activity yourself in order for it to be restful. Your partner’s idea of a relaxing afternoon might be exhausting for you. Preparing an elaborate dish to bring to a family gathering might be how you’re expected to spend your Sunday, but if you don’t really want to do it, it won’t be a restful activity.
M is for Mastery. This simply means feeling like you’re pretty good at whatever you’re doing to relax. Deliberate practice and challenging yourself is great for getting better at stuff, but it’s not restorative.
M is for Meaning. The activity should have some purpose or significance to you. It should honour your values, to put it coach-ish-ly. This might mean spending time in nature, if nature is important to you. If it’s meaningful to you to learn about history and culture, a vacation in a new city might be more restful than a week on the beach.
A is for Affiliation. An activity that makes you feel close to other people will be more restorative than one that is disconnected. It’s better to share your leisure time with people whose company you enjoy — and this doesn’t have to be family, friends, or a partner. Taking a work break with a colleague you like or singing in a choir will do the trick.
I don’t know if anyone has done research on this on this, but I’d bet that even solo activities that are done with others in mind would satisfy this parameter. I’m thinking of something like knitting a garment for a loved one, or sorting food at a food bank.
The Use of DRAMMA
I want to clarify that DRAMMA isn’t a ✨proven formula✨ for a relaxing rest activity. It’s a framework that scientists who study rest have created to express their best guesses, for now, about what makes rest restful. Some of these factors are probably more important than others, and context always matters.
But what’s useful for scientists is useful for the rest of us. When we’re doing our own experiments about rest in our own lives, we can use DRAMMA to think them. It might be a useful tool to decide whether the vacation you have planned is actually going to be restorative. It might help you figure out why you’re still so exhausted at the end of the weekend, and what you might try to do differently.
Quantity as Well as Quality
Whatever you do to get rest, don’t skimp. According to researchers, you need five or six hours of it a day! (And that doesn’t include sleep time — rest is a different thing.) It’s not quite as bad/awesome as it sounds: even a ten minute break can be restful, and that five or six hours is cumulative.
Think Collectively
Rest should not be a privilege. It’s a basic human need that doesn’t have to be earned or gifted. And yet, plenty of people aren’t allowed to rest.
People can be denied rest directly, if they work for an employer that doesn’t permit them enough breaks or time off, or if they are a contractor or gig worker in a job that requires a punishing amount of working time in order to make a living income.
People can be denied rest indirectly, too, by the systems they live in. For example, someone who has to commute for hours on a badly maintained transit system, or someone who has to do hours of unsupported child- or elder-care, is much less likely to be able to get enough rest.
What systems get in the way of you being able to rest?
Where do you have influence over the systems that stop you and those around you from resting? How can you consider access to rest when you vote? When you shop? When you employ people or hire contractors?
In Conclusion
Rest is as important as sleep, but not all leisure activities are created equal. The DRAMMA framework — Detachment, Relaxation, Autonomy, Mastery, Meaning, Affiliation — can help you think about how you spend your rest time. You can use it to create and assess restful experiences, whether they are 10 minute breaks or two week vacations. Rest well, my friends!
Further Exploration
I enjoyed Claudia Hammond’s book, The Art of Rest
Claudia Hammond’s TedX Talk
The New Scientist article that inspired this post, “Why relaxation is as important as sleep - and six ways to do it better” — paywalled, I’m afraid. (The “six ways” are the six letters in DRAMMA, to save you from clickbait FOMO.)
A 2021 study called “Drammatic breaks: Break recovery experiences as mediators between job demands and affect in the afternoon and evening”. The researchers used the DRAMMA framework to study whether rests during the day (or as they call them, “break recovery experiences”) helped schoolteachers feel better in the afternoon and evening. They concluded, among other things, that “experiences of detachment, meaning and affiliation during within‐workday breaks promote teachers' well‐being”.
A study called “Need Satisfaction and Optimal Functioning at Leisure and Work“ that was designed to test the DRAMMA model. They concluded in part that “relaxation and detachment from work were found to be most strongly associated with optimal functioning” — which reminds me to say, the purpose of rest is not to make you a better worker. You don’t need to “function optimally”; you’re not a droid.