TGIF :: Rest is the New Flex

I publish bi-weekly on undimming, the practice of noticing when we’re numbing or escaping with all kinds of things including over-activity, alcohol, work, perfectionism, sex, exercise, and snark. The framework is the Eight Awarenesses. Prior posts here. Information about my book Undimmed, upcoming events, and more via my website and at the end of this post.

There was a time when a monthly redeye to New York from San Francisco, all while doing my best to raise two young sons, felt heroic.

Full day of work in Palo Alto. Commute 90+ minutes north. Dinner with the family. Distracted bedtime routines all while tracking email, drinking wine, holding adult conversations on the side. 9pm shower and hair. Uber south to the airport. Land at JFK 8:33am. Do a Wonder Woman reset in the Terminal 5 bathroom: bra, nice shoes, comb out, makeup. Straight to the office for a full day of meetings.

“You’re a savage!” my colleagues would say, the young men particularly impressed as I popped out of the elevator before their second cup of coffee, roller bag in tow. The well manicured women on the global revenue team I managed looked on scared, the young ones sometimes expressing curiosity… “How do you do it?” The older women—most of them empty nested—rolled their eyes, comment-less. The divorced ones knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable. They were right.

When I received my breast cancer diagnosis in December 2022—year #21 of working full-time (and then some) primarily for tech startups as general counsel, CRO, COO, and more—you'd think my first feeling would have been fear. Fear of cancer treatment. Fear of surgery. Fear of dying. No. Surprisingly, I instead felt relief. Now I can rest, I thought to myself.

I’d decided to leave my last tech exec role nine months earlier, and had communicated this to the CEO during a one-on-one check-in call I took from my car sitting outside of my son’s afternoon school play rehearsal. My car was parked as close as possible to the cute cabin on a hill near the freeway to catch the WiFi and I’d been rushed on the way there, not present with my kiddo in the few minutes between his long school day and his afternoon activity.

I hadn’t planned to tell my boss I was ready to go on that call, but something inside of me just decided that was the moment. “I need to take some time to myself. I’m behind on basic things—medical appointments, exercise, time with loved ones. I need a real break,” I heard myself say. Like every other male CEO I’d supported and eventually resigned from, he told me I had the timing wrong, that I should wait. He urged: “we’re about to hit a real inflection point, try to stick with it a bit longer.”

It took nine months to orchestrate a clean transition from that role. Many more people tried to talk me out of it. A former boss noted that a couple more years and I could coast after a sale or an IPO. A family member questioned my choices, also from a financial standpoint. A few friends seemed perplexed, for this was a departure from the hard driving way I’d been living since they knew me.

Yet, I stayed the course and architected a departure, admittedly with a small voice inside my head whispering: Are you sure? Could you stay just another few years? Is it too soon? Is this a mistake? The diagnosis came six days after I’d confirmed my departure date with the board and team. The words “breast cancer” eliminated all of that internal chatter. For months or longer my primary job was going to be taking care of my health, myself. Yes, it felt like relief.

I put a pin in the moment, standing at my bathroom mirror, to come back to it. How could anyone get to a place where a cancer diagnosis feels like relief? I’m learning I’m not alone.

I’ve written extensively about how we use dimmers to tune out our inner guidance. A glass of wine to soften relational tension in the evening. A snack to soothe stress during the day. A scroll to ease boredom. Perfectionism or busy-ness to evade a sense of low self-worth.

As I’ve engaged with Undimmed readers and many of you as I explore these themes, I continue to be startled by the height of the stakes. When we don’t listen to ourselves, we stay in something that deep down inside we shouldn’t. We avoid a step that scares us. We dull out the edge that is pushing us towards some healthy or essential change. We dodge the appointment. We stay stuck. We don’t pause. We forget to rest.

An under-celebrated bit of intuitive guidance that exists in all of us is the desire to rest. The human body needs and naturally craves it in its many forms. I’ve been doing my best to tune into that as much as possible and have discovered new flavors of this human experience as I’ve felt my way through these learnings.

The term rest is both a noun and a verb. Rest means “respite from labor or exertion of any kind” and “refreshment or repose obtained by a pause in activity” and “freedom from trouble, distress, molestation, aggression and so forth; a state of peace.”
(Oxford English Dictionary, 2012).

For example, I could barely talk to anyone—not to mention send meaningful texts or other digital communications for well over a month after our April wedding. My cup was beyond full—so much to integrate, process, and feel. I let it happen as naturally as life allows with walks, more music than podcasts, and according to my wearable, ten(!) naps in the last 90 days.

Though we’re traveling a bunch (mostly getting kids to and from their adventures) this summer, the weeks we’re home I’m doing my best to indulge in this new-feeling magic. Unplanned evenings. Long, slow mornings. Space for spontaneity. Enough sleep. Books. Drives. Recipes. Watching the World Cup games. And being easy on myself about the stack of unwritten thank you cards that have been on our kitchen table since May.

There is a charming cafe on the bottom of the hill I’ve lived on for many years. In my crazy tech exec commuting days, I’d drive by it twice a day and see people hanging out. Kids. Dogs. Laughs. Conversation. Connection. I want to do that someday… who are these people who get to just be? I’d think to myself. These days I try to make it my business to go sit there, at that actual cafe, at least once a week and just sip the tea or coffee. Watch the world go by. Talk to the people. Pet the dogs. Notice.

I’ve lived long enough to know this itself is a moment. Sitting at the table in our living room this morning with a candle and a view of the forest, the kids all doing their own things scattered across the state and country, my health intact, food in the kitchen, meaningful work to do. What a blessing… and I know this too is impermanent.

Part of rest, in this season, is just letting it in. Probably the biggest lesson of all my undimming is learning to listen to myself—really listen, before life forces me to.

That little voice inside today is saying: enjoy. Don’t get too soft, but enjoy. My plan is to keep getting better at this listening part, so I don’t need another diagnosis to reset me down the road.

Love.

This will look very different for all of us.

The invitation is to track rest like we track anything else worth tracking. The goal is not to optimize it or hit a target, but to notice.

For the next week (or more), keep a simple tally. Naps, early nights, unplanned afternoons, a slow and screenless coffee/tea—whatever counts as rest for you. Take note in your phone or a piece of paper. (My wearable did it for me without my even asking, which is how I found out I’d taken ten naps in three months, a number that would have horrified me a year ago and now makes me a little proud.)

Notice what comes up when you rest on purpose. Is it guilt, an itch to justify it, a voice that says you should be doing something?

Explore whether rest can just be its own thing, not a reward or something earned. Notice.

If you haven’t already, please sign up to receive my free updates-based newsletter: The essentials, straight to your inbox: new Undimmed podcast episodes, upcoming in person and online events, and the occasional gift made just for this list. Separate from Substack, less frequent, more curated. The first in three months will go out on Monday, July 6th, the six month “birthday” of Undimmed, The Eight Awarenesses for Freedom from Unwanted Habits.

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Of note!

If you are not already reading my friend Dr. Sara Szal’s The Female Edge here on Substack…. I encourage you to check it out. This morning’s post The Cost of Being All Things to All People literally stopped me in my tracks. Deep bow to this transformative work and the gift it is to so many, with more to come. Her next book is expected early next year and I can’t wait.

One baby step at a time… A shoutout to Kristen Bear’s post yesterday, capturing some of the insanity that continues to be revealed about the Big Alcohol Industry’s cover up of science linking alcohol to cancer. (I’ve been admiring her work on IG for some time and discovered her Substack there. I guess cross-pollination among these platforms really is a thing.)

As noted above… Undimmed is six months old on Monday! What an incredible journey it has been and continues to be as I deepen my work with retreats, smaller groups, private workshop settings, and various corporate / team engagements. Learn more here about how we might work together.