Rest As Discipline
Letter no. 05 ~ Rest as Discipline, Vanity Metrics, A Word of Encouragement, & More.
Hey,
I hope this letter finds you well.
In this weekâs message, I shared about how prioritizing rest is an act of discipline. Then I shared about why I donât focus on vanity metrics, and what to do instead. From the archives, I revisited a post in which I share a word of encouragement that I believe the world needs to hear.
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Musings
Rest as Discipline
Last night I went to bed at 7:30pm. After putting my daughter to bed, I was faced with a choice: muster up the strength to do a task or go to sleep? For context, I was feeling really, really tired. It was a heavy exhaustion. The kind that weighs itself inside my body, my bones. It was a busy week, filled with a busier weekend. The fatigue was one that accumulates over the course of a few days.
Along with feeling tired, I was feeling stressed. I left behind a busy week only to enter into a busier one. A multitude of obligations are lined up before me, with many subtasks related to each one. I thought that maybe I should stay up, plan my week, and schedule in all the subtasks. Create a master schedule of sorts. Figure out how Iâm going to make everything work.
So, in that moment last night, I had to decide:
Do I give in to my fatigue?
Or do I give in to my anxiety?
In the end, I decided to go to sleep. And I decided that I wouldnât view that as âgiving inâ. Going to bed when your body is tired is not weakness. Itâs not failure. Itâs not a lack of discipline.
On the contrary, I believe that listening to your body inn this hustle and bustle culture, is an act of discipline.
I think that we can all agree that we live in a society that rewards business and burnout. Itâs all about how much you can do. How far can you push yourself past your limits. And yes, sometimes thatâs necessary. Thatâs how you grow and become better. Except, we omit a really important element to that kind of mentality, and thatâs: rest and recovery.
I think part of the reason for omitting rest and recovery is because we donât define those things properly. We seem to have confused rest with relaxation, and directly associated relaxation with laziness.
But what if we shifted our perspective a little? Rather than seeing rest as something to be avoided, looked down upon or feel guilty for, we started defining it as what it really is.
Last week I wrote to you that I set in place some rhythms of rest throughout my day and week. Not just in the evenings and on the weekend. But throughout the entire day. From the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. My list included slow mornings, working out, quiet evenings with no devices to read and spend time with my husband, as well as 24 hours offline and off-duty from housekeeping. I believe this list is a far cry from laziness or a lack of discipline. These are rhythms or rest. Practices meant to restore my heart, mind and body.
After last weekâs letter, a few people asked me how I managed to prioritize the right things at the right times. Itâs a hard question to answer, since the way I organize my life involves personal habits and practices that make sense for my life. What I can say with more certainty, is that by implementing daily and weekly rhythms of rest, it becomes easier to decide what comes next. By having clear moments of your day in which you intentionally say stop, you are less likely to find yourself needing to ârecuperateâ (which often ends up as procrastination in disguise). You know what Iâm talking about: feeling so tired and overwhelmed that you sit down on the couch for a âmomentâ because you need a âbreakâ and then end up doom scrolling for 45 minutes and then feeling even more mentally drained than you did before. Not to mention guilty for having wasted so much time, when you could have been doing something âmore productiveâ. Which leads me into my other point, that when you intentionally set moments to rest, your mind and body have something to look forward to. Your to-do list doesnât feel endless, because it canât be endless. Thereâs an end to your day, to your week, and so you figure out what you need to do in order to meet those deadlines.
It takes practice. You wonât always follow through with your rhythms of rest. Theyâll be cheat days and failures. But the beautiful thing about these rhythms, once you create them, is that they exist and therefore act as anchor points to which you can return and cling to when you find yourself drifting.
Now, for the busy procrastinators like myself, itâs important to set up some guard rails around your moments of rest, lest you find yourself working out, journaling or reading for way longer than you should be, and therefore ignoring all other obligations and responsibilities. Sunrise and Sunset are good ones. Numerical limits are also good. For instance, journal for three pages at most, workout for no more that 20 minutes a day, read one chapter every evening, and so on.
All this to say: rest, when done properly with appropriate limits, is actually an act of discipline. Stopping yourself from doing something (like checking off yet another item from your to-do list) is evidence of self-control. Realizing that carrying out responsibilities non-stop in actually a form of âgiving inâ to your weaknesses. Maybe not your physical weakness, but your emotional and mental ones. Itâs giving into your worries and anxieties. Itâs giving into an improper hierarchy of priorities.
Respecting my rest rhythms with their limitations is a work-in-progress for me. But there has been progress. Iâve already noticed that I am more productive, more organized and more efficient in the things that I need to do. Iâm less likely to doom scroll or default to mindless forms of entertainment, like watching Youtube. I am also generally more relaxed and less rushed in my day-to-day.
With that, let me know what rhythms of rest you have implemented into your life, or want to implement. Iâd love to hear from you :)
Writerâs Journey Progress
Vanity Metrics
In my author-publisher business class last Friday, the topic was on marketing. The biggest takeaway from that lesson was the fact that, as writers, if we donât want to sell our souls to the algorithm gods and want to remain authentic and true, we need to avoid focusing on vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are the flashy, ever-fluctuating numbers of likes, comments, shares and views that we use to evaluate our success.
Keeping constant score of those numbers will only serve to turn us insane. Instead, we should focus on showing up consistently for our readers. The first question that popped into my mind when the teacher made this point was: okay⌠but how do I know if my thing is working? How else am I supposed to know if I need to tweak something?
In response, I was told that you need to show up consistently, and itâs only every quarter, six months and a year that you should take a step back and see the whole picture. What did you accomplish? How did people respond to your thing overall? Not just to a specific post.
I really took that notion to heart. Iâve been obsessing over the numbers lately, and it hasnât been good for me. With that, I decided to hide my subscriber count and the stats on my dashboard. Since I started this specific newsletter in beginning of January, I decided to keep those numbers hidden until May. The month of May will also mark one year for my publication moms of meaning, and by then I will have posted every single chapter of my novel on my publication The Purelight Stone Trilogy.
All this to say, I will spend the month of May looking at the big picture of all three publications. Not just the numbers, but the quality of the responses: the kinds comments on my posts and also the messages Iâve received in private. Based off of that, Iâll decide if there are any changes that I would like to make moving forward.
So, until then, I simply want to focus on showing up consistently the way I already have been doing thus far.
Publication Spotlight
Highlighting an Impactful Writer
James M Pielemeier is someone who wants to make the best of his life here on earth and does so by caring deeply about the people he encounters. Through his wild, hilarious and honest personal stories, James uses his gift of writing to bring forth joy, hope and encouragement to his readers.
Maybe itâs because of our shared conviction about decluttering, but hereâs the post that convinced me I need to subscribe to this guy:
This Week on The Purelight Stone Trilogy
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In a small, unworthy village, a mysterious traveler has disrupted the peace. After a tragic and confusing incident, the townsfolk can't help but spread rumors bordering on blasphemy. Rumors about the Immortal.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Wolfe Bloodwood, Dawnâs savior who had mysteriously disappeared on her, has been spotted in the inn she is staying at, just the night before. Dawn canât help wondering if his presence was coincidental, or if heâs keeping tabs on her. And if so, what does that mean for her survival?
The Unmarked is More Than a Book
In an age in which we are outsourcing more and more creative tasks to AI, my heart as a writer is to collaborate with other creators to bring parts of my narrative to life in brand new ways. To build something, not by myself, but as a community.
In this post, I give concrete examples of what building something as a community looks like, including an illustration of my story done by another creator here on Substack (and what working with him was like).
From the Archives
And now I would love to hear from you! What are you currently working on? Whatâs a valuable publication that youâre subscribed to? Whatâs a post that youâve written and are really proud of? Let me know in the comments.
Until next time,
- Jas
đ Jasmine Caroline is a free Substack publication today. If you feel inclined to give a contribution, know that your generosity will go toward my professional development as a writer and toward amplifying the quality of my publication in the coming future.