A rest-do day is a practical approach to living with fatigue. By seeking a balance between resting and doing, I’ve learned how to rest more regularly. On the same day, I’ll also be able to do the activities that are necessary to life and those that make my days worth living.

Rest-do days are a simple and flexible approach to make our daily lives interesting and satisfying. They are not a quick fix, but if you’re experiencing fatigue and there is not much prospect of recovery, it can be a relief to imagine doing anything satisfying in the foreseeable future. 

My rest-do days habit has seen me through many changes and challenges over the past seven years and I am not giving it up. 

Each cycle starts with resting. Having a rest before we start doing something is a good way of ensuring we have energy to do what we want to do. Decide how long you are going to rest for. It could be anything for 5 to 55 minutes depending on your situation. 

Our energy is taken up in many different ways, including solving problems and talking with other people. There’s effort involved in doing any activity, not just because of muscle movement but also because our brains and bodies need energy to make sense of what is happening. 

Resting usually means taking a break. In a rest-do day, we ask ourselves what we are taking a break from and what part of ourselves are we resting. 

By deciding in advance how to rest and setting limits on the time for doing, we can save energy for certain activities and might be able to avoid becoming overwhelmed. A rest-do day requires us to balance resting and doing carefully, so we are aware of our fatigue but are active and feel better in many ways.

I vary the amount of time I spend resting and doing during the day, as my fatigue levels change. I might not know how my fatigue is at the start of the day, so I’ll begin with rest-do cycles of 10:20 minutes. I want to do something important so I’m hoping to switch soon to rest-do cycles of 5 minutes’ resting to 25 minutes’ doing. However, later my fatigue is worse, so I start having rest-do cycles of 25 minutes’ resting and 5 minutes’ doing. It’s good to feel in control of rest-do days when possible. 

I’ve found that when I’m feeling overwhelmed by fatigue, I can try a cycle or two of rest-do to see if it helps. I’ll do 55 minutes’ rest to 5 minutes’ doing, and slowly increase the amount of doing to 10 or even 15 minutes but keeping the rest roughly the same. It was my starting point when wondering how I was going to be able to do anything useful again. 

Limiting the time to do prevents the fatigue from getting worse. But more significantly, resting as part of a rest-do day makes fatigue seem less overwhelming. 

Resting regularly throughout the day can feel very different to keeping going until you drop, then resting for a long time. Vary how long you rest for, to explore how it affects what you can do in that time, but also to understand what makes a restful time.     

Fatigue can force us into a pattern of crashing after being more active, which is unsatisfying in the long-term, because it feels like only surviving. If fatigue is not going to go away in the foreseeable future, then finding a way of thriving as well as surviving is important.

This article has been created using extracts from Wendy’s book Rest-Do Days

Wendy kindly gifted a copy of her book to Living with ME in exchange for sharing this article

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