Reflections
Beware the Downward Spiral
Work Chores Play Rest
Work Chores Rest
Work Chores
Work
Work – activity performed as vocational exchange of value
Chores – activities performed as non-compensated work to maintain agreed-upon lifestyle
Play – activities performed for pleasure and recreation, out of sheer delight.
Rest – inactivity to permit one to recharge, refresh and be restored for effective work and chores
Human activities can be somewhat loosely allocated to one of four “buckets”: work, chores, play and rest. The first three are activities that differ in their primary purpose.
Work is the activity of vocation. It is the space where we bring our primary skills and giftings to the arena in an exchange for money or goods that we repurpose to meet the basic necessities of life: food, shelter, and clothing. And if there’s any extra, we use it on things that are less essential to survival and more about experiences that we find attractive.
For many of us, our vocation is also a significant part of our identity. Many a conversation between strangers begins with this basic inquiry: “What do you do?” As such, it can at times take on a larger-than-life role as our needs increase or the demands of our vocation expand.
Life also brings with it a set of social expectations we might label as chores. Whether you live alone or with a family or other group of people, there are required activities for maintaining a healthy, ordered lifestyle. Someone needs to cook, take out the garbage, clean the house, mow the grass, and do the laundry. Typically, these responsibilities are assigned to specific members of the household. They often assume a slightly lesser degree of urgency than vocation; we can live in a messy and dirty house, wear clothes the second time, and grab a bite in a drive-thru on the way to work. And yet, they mark out a significant signpost to the quality of our lives.
As children, we spend much of our lives in the third category of activity: play. This can be very arduous activity! The purpose is not to provide food, clothing, or shelter, or even to provide an orderly space in which to live and rest. These activities are for pleasure and recreation. While initially these activities may not seem significant, they are very important to healthy development. Children learn motor skills, social skills, and emotional intelligence through play. They learn to know themselves and others. While the time we allot to play may diminish as we mature, the need for play as a component of a healthy life does not disappear.
The fourth space is less about activity and closer to inactivity: rest. The primary “activity” of rest is “sleep”; however, it is far from the only way we rest. Rest is an essential space for each of the four human dimensions: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
As the intensity of life increases, rest becomes increasingly important to provide that refreshment and reset to carry on in our work with effectiveness. It can be easily ignored for a short period of time, yet to neglect this much needed reset is to radically impact our performance. (For example, driving sleepy is dangerous. People die. Lack of sleep can quickly become as dangerous as intoxication.)
Understanding rest wholistically, however, requires us to also address matters of spirit, emotions, and mind. When we live in a perpetual state of guilt and shame, this spiritual exhaustion begins to impact the other dimensions of the self just as the inability (or neglect) of getting adequate sleep can begin to negatively impact our mental, emotional, and physical health. There is a deep interconnectedness between the four dimensions of the self. Adequate rest in each dimension is essential to health.
A healthy, well-ordered life is comprised of a healthy interplay and a dynamic mixture of the ebbing and flowing cycles of these four primary activities. A disordered and unhealthy life results from neglect or a serious imbalance between these four. The downward spiral to exhaustion, whether or not it leads eventually to a breakdown of some sort, is marked by a common pattern. It’s worth paying attention to this spiral.
In summary, the first step down in the exhaustion spiral is marked out by neglecting recreational play. Play for adults tends to provide a significant and essential reset in several dimensions. Spiritually, play says, “I can’t take myself too seriously. I don’t control all aspects of my life and world.” To engage in playful activities is to acknowledge that someone else is in charge, and that Someone Else has given us a world of goodness and beauty to be explored, enjoyed and inhabited.
Various forms of play provide various types of refreshment: these can be emotional, social, or mental. Strenuous physical activities stress the body and actually contribute to much deeper and healthier rest. In the busy-ness and stress of vocation, however, play is often the first thing to go. And as it is neglected, the spiral toward exhaustion begins.
The next activity to be ignored and neglected is rest. Obviously, you cannot completely ignore it for any extended period. Many people do ignore getting adequate rest, though. A healthy eight hours’ nightly routine is reduced to seven hours, then six hours or less. Sleep deprivation begins to impact our mental alertness and emotional resilience. We begin to recognize we are tired, so we take a quick vacation. Yet during the vacation, much of the time is spent sleeping. The playful side of true restoration cannot take place due to our exhaustion. We come back from vacation more tired than ever, because stepping off of the treadmill for a short bit without resetting the speed of the treadmill means that we merely have to run harder when we get back to work.
Fatigue reaches a very serious state when chores—those normally expected contributions to the household—are neglected due to diminishing energy, fading awareness, or lack of margin in our time to accomplish these tasks. Life becomes all WORK. All work, no play; and while we might spend some regular hours in bed, we never really get rested. The mind is whirling constantly, emotions get backed up or bottled up. They remain unprocessed, building up behind a fortified dam that will eventually be released at an inopportune moment.
The impact of this level of fatigue can be quite serious. It tends to show up abruptly in an area of vulnerability that may not be previously identified. For some it is spiritual—a moral failure that completely baffles those close to you. For others it is physical—the heart attack for which there were no previous symptoms. Often it shows up in declining mental health—rapidly escalating anxiety or depression. For some, there is an emotional collapse.
Severe fatigue has serious consequences. There is often a huge price to pay for these consequences—financial, emotional, relational—and the road to recovery is usually longer than you can imagine.
We often ignore the signs, because we feel it is “impossible” to do anything about it. We can’t take time off! We can’t afford it. What would they do at work or at church if I stepped away? This reasoning fails to take into consideration that a crash of some sort due to fatigue will take you out completely. At that point, you won’t be able to prepare for it or manage it in any way. This means incurring a much greater cost than if you had intentionally stepped back and engaged in a thoughtful reset, leading to a sustainable and effective future.
Do you find yourself somewhere on this downward spiral toward exhaustion? No one else can or will do anything about it. Even if someone close to you notices your decline and has the audacity (courage!?!) to call you out, the further down the spiral you are, the less likely you are to actually “hear” them.
Pause. Seriously reflect on where you are on this spiral. If you are leading a healthy life comprised of all four “activities” in a healthy balance, congratulations!! You should be enjoying a productive and effective life. If, however, you find yourself further down the spiral toward exhaustion, act now. Talk to a trusted friend or colleague and enlist his help in doing a reset radical enough to actually stop the downward spiral and begin the climb back to a healthier place. Act today…tomorrow is too late.
SPIRAL OF EXHAUSTION
One comment on “Beware the Downward Spiral”
Good article. Play is about ten years in the rear view mirror. I am now at the stage that to simply sit and rest, during the day, leads to feelings of guilt. There are too many things demanding my time, I am being lazy and irresponsible if I am not always on task.