Is Avoidance a Form of Rest?

We explore the fine line between restorative rest and reactive avoidance, using body cues, purpose, and outcomes to tell them apart. We share simple practices to renew energy, regain perspective, and rebuild self-trust without shrinking your world.

• purpose of rest as energy renewal
• avoidance as delay that grows fear
• refreshed versus relieved as a key cue
• intentional, time-bound pauses with endpoints
• rest creating clarity and internal spaciousness
• avoidance narrowing options and repeating loops
• self-trust through chosen breaks and re-entry
• practical tests: five to ten minute resets and body scans
• examples from work, roles, and relationships

If you would like to support Rigby's pursuit of daily treats, click the support the show link in the show notes and toss a little donation Rigby's way

Transcript

Fan Mail And Mini-Episode Setup

Defining Rest Versus Avoidance

Purpose Of Rest And Its Effects

Intentional Rest Versus Reactive Avoidance

Natural Endpoints And Clarity

Spaciousness Versus Shrinking

Self-Trust And Body Cues

Mary 0:00

Hey, welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. Before I start, I want to read a quick fan mail that I got from 1382 that says, Hi Mary, just a short text letting you know that this episode resonated with me and made me really think. Thank you. Keep doing what you're doing. I love fan mail. So fan mail is basically a text message that I can answer. I don't know who you are. I just have the last four digits of your phone number. But you can send me fan mail through my show notes. So thank you, 1382, for your note. It made my day. Okay, so I'm going to talk about something that is kind of a tough call and I think can change from person to person and from day to day. I'm going to talk about rest versus avoidance because I think it can be a really tough thing to tease apart. You all know that I talk about rest on this show relatively often because it's something that we seem to really undervalue, especially sleep, because we think that there are other things that are more important, but more and more research is showing us that there is not anything more important than sleep. And every stage of sleep is important. But there's also rest, the times that we take kind of a respite during the day, or we may decide that we need a mental health day from work, or we build in just some time for ourselves. But there are also times when we may have planned to do something, or we even agreed to do something, and at the last minute we have this urge to just cancel. That's a tough one. So let me try to tease apart a little bit of this idea of rest versus avoidance. So the first way to frame it is thinking about the purpose of rest. So the purpose of rest is to restore or maintain your energy. So after you truly take a rest, you feel that you have a more depth of resources. You feel refreshed, you feel a sense of being able to go to the next thing, do the next thing, continue on. Avoidance, that just basically is delaying engagement in whatever the thing is. And a lot of times when we avoid something, we often create a situation where now that thing that we avoided has more power. When we push against something, it just sometimes gets heavier. So in the case of avoidance, if there are certain situations that we find ourselves backing out of continually, that's probably a clue that you just don't need rest. But there's something about that situation that you're trying to avoid. And you don't feel refreshed. You probably feel relief. So I think that's one of the differences. If you rest, you feel refreshed. If you avoid, you often feel relief. But when that thing comes around again, you have that same tension that you want to try to avoid. And rest should be intentional. I mean, sometimes there are we don't get a good night's sleep, or we don't feel well, or we're going through a lot of things. There might be increased pressure at work, or maybe there's an issue with a family member or a friend that we're running at a higher stress level, hopefully temporarily, and we need to rest after that happens. But rest is something that we are aware of. So, for instance, let's say I'll talk about myself. So when I was working at the college level, it was often a situation where there would be days that unexpected issues came up. We would have a crisis or two crises, or there would be um just a lot of unexpected things happening in a week. And so when I would feel the, I guess, increased pressure, you know, a lot of things happening. I would often find a spot in my day where I could actually just leave my office, take a 10-minute walk. Sometimes I would just, you know, there was a loop around campus, I would do that. That's intentional rest to rest your mind. Avoidance is reactive. So that's something where when we feel discomfort, we want to get away from it. So maybe it's a situation where there's a coworker that we always try to avoid. We're not just taking a break from our work, but there's one person we're trying to avoid or one task that we often try to avoid. So we're reacting by trying to get away from it versus intentionally deciding we're gonna take a break. Rest also has a natural end point. So if we are taking time to restore ourselves and really rest, we should then feel sort of like an opening up or things get clearer. You know, if we take a rest from, let's say, maybe a friendship, or we take a rest from an activity that we've been doing a lot because we feel that it's gotten to be a little bit much, we take that intentional space from it. We're going to discover something. We may make a decision that, okay, I just need to manage this differently, or maybe this is not something I want in my life. But rest leads to movement or clarity. All avoidance does is it stretches on and it repeats. So we're going to end up in the same situation. If there's something that you find yourself always avoiding, then that doesn't get better when you avoid it. It again, it might feel relief for a minute, but when that situation or that person or that relationship comes up again and you avoid again, it just makes it kind of one of those immovable objects in your life that you're constantly trying to walk around, but then it shows up again. Rest also creates internal spaciousness. So, what I mean by that is it gives us the ability to have some perspective, to maybe, you know, have a drone, be the drone of our lives and be able to look down and get some perspective by taking a break from something, stepping back from something. Um, so maybe you have a situation where you've been you've been having a role for a long time in your in your family. Let's say you're often the one to organize things, and there comes a time where you just feel burnout from it. You just feel like you don't want to do it. It's a lot of effort. You may take a rest from doing that for a year or a season and then recognize, you know what, I really do like this. Or maybe it's a hobby that you just have been pressuring yourself to do in a certain way. When you take a rest from it, it gives you the perspective to decide if you really want to continue doing it. So that expands you. It gives you more information, it gives you space internally to see something differently, maybe make some choices differently. Avoidance, however, narrows your world. It shrinks your options or it reinforces indecision or fear because you're not kind of expanding and resting from something, you're tensing and you're turning away from it and you're worried that it's going to come up again, and you're using a lot of energy. Avoidance takes a lot of energy. Rest renews energy. And finally, I think rest aligns with self-trust. So when you have a sense that you need a break, you need to just renew yourself, you need to step away from something, or you need to lean away from a relationship or a situation, and you're trusting your gut, even if maybe there are some other issues in life or other things, people that would discourage you from taking this rest. You know you need it. You trust yourself to say, I'm gonna lean away from this a little bit, I need some perspective. But what avoidance does is you are kind of at the mercy of that feeling, that fear, um, the dread, whatever is causing you to avoid, then becomes more powerful. And so what tends to happen is we feel disappointed in ourselves that again we allowed whatever the situation or the person or the event or whatever it is, we allowed that thing to have the power. And instead of consciously leaning away, taking a break, breathing through it, and deciding what we want to do, we we turn, we run, we do, it's almost like we want to cover our eyes and not see it. And we just, you know, we just want to avoid it or um try to not have to deal with it. And in doing that, it is, as I said before, it's reactive, it's not intentional. So I think the best way to tease this apart is when you're in a situation, listen to your body. If you feel tense, if you feel fear, if you feel like I have to get away from this, take a minute and be curious about that. Is it just that you truly want to just take a break? And would a five or ten minute mindfulness or grounding or a walk would it take care of it? Or is it something where you just don't want this thing in your life? And I think it's the sense of needing to feel renewed versus needing to feel that you have to protect yourself or create walls around this thing. You truly want to avoid it versus you're simply trying to find rest. So hopefully that's helpful. Those are my thoughts for the week. And before I go, I want to tell you that my cats love treats, especially Rigby. He's my gray stripey cat, and he is food motivated for sure. He used to be 22 pounds, and then because he's 14, we found out he's hyperthyroid. So now he's on medicine. So he's lost a lot of weight, but he still eats 50% of the day. So, anyway, if you would like to support Rigby's pursuit of daily treats, click the support the show link in the show notes and toss a little donation Rigby's way. Thank you for listening. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.