Do Less
My word of the year for 2023 is “whole,” and my theme for this year is “do less.” The need to do less - and thereby be more - has been gnawing at me for some time. As someone in a helping profession, I derive a significant amount of meaning from showing up for people, doing for people. However, doing without being is often ineffective and leads to burnout. I’ve been there: my nervous system has been dysregulated, my body has carried the burden of my doing, and my relationships have suffered due to a constant need to hustle.
Resisting the urge to always be busy is difficult in a culture that glorifies “the grind,” and I am finding that it takes intention to be more and do less. I am leaning into “doing less” in these three ways this year:
Maintaining my well-being by giving myself permission to rest.
One of the “gifts” of spending my young adulthood living with a chronic illness was the insistence of my body on regular rest in order to function. Growing up in a working class family that prioritized hard work, and my natural inclination as an Enneagram 3 (commonly known as the Achiever), I learned how to be disciplined and persevere through pain. However, developing a chronic illness forced me to find a balance between working hard and resting hard. For years, my migraine flare-ups would force me to lay in silence in a dark room for days, forcing me to rest. Initially, I was resistant to taking the time to rest and would only rest when my body could literally do nothing else. Over time, however, I came to understand the importance of rest - not as just a reaction to a flare-up, but as a consistent need that would actually prevent flare-ups, and would increase my overall quality of life.
I do not mean to imply that managing a chronic illness is as simple as “just rest” - there are certainly many other factors, including medication, therapy, and lifestyle changes that continue to be necessary for me. However, shifting my perspective on rest from something I was forced into against my will to something I deserved no matter my physical health or how “productive” I had been on any given day, has been a tremendous source of healing - and continues to be a work in progress.
A caveat I need to mention here is that my years of “hustle” in many ways were necessary, and working long, hard hours is often a means of survival for people who can’t afford to take (sometimes unpaid) vacation time, who need to work multiple jobs just to get by, who have disabilities that make working difficult, who are raising a family on (an unlivable) minimum wage, etc. Rest does not come easily, and there is often a certain amount of privilege in being able to take the time to rest. In my early 20’s, I had a difficult time resting not just due to the cultural glorification of busyness, but also because I was working several low-paying jobs while attending graduate school and trying to pay my bills in one of the most expensive parts of the country. Rest was not always something that felt like an option, and for many people rest doesn’t feel like an option. All this to say, lack of adequate and quality rest is a systems issue and is not solved simply by taking a day off of work. For a more in-depth conversation, please check out the Nap Ministry.
2. Releasing the religious indoctrination of perfectionism and “not enoughness.”
In the high-control sect of Evangelical Christianity in which I was raised, there is an emphasis on (albeit paradoxically) earning your “salvation,” becoming “holy,” and constant striving. While many Christian denominations emphasize being “saved by grace,” there is a paradoxical emphasis on “faith” without “works” being a dead faith. For me, this led to a lot of confusion - am I earning my faith or not? When you fear that your eternal fate (ie, avoiding hell and going to heaven) is dependent on your ability to be a good enough person, and you are also taught that you will never be good enough on your own (thus the need for “salvation”), it makes sense to spend a lot of time working your very hardest to ensure your eternity in heaven - not to mention, the importance of conforming to these expectations in order to maintain belonging within your family and religious community, which for many in high-control religions, is the only community they have. Not doing enough is literally a matter of life and death.
Once I began to deconstruct my religious beliefs and understand the ways in which my religious upbringing indoctrinated me to believe things about myself that I didn’t choose to believe, I was able to understand more fully the insidious way that this form of Christianity led me to be a constant do-er. Releasing this belief - that I need to earn my enoughness and that simply being is not sufficient - is in and of itself an act of resistance, an act of resistance that I have to re-engage with on a daily basis.
3. Learning to value my time by setting boundaries and saying no.
Another holdover from being indoctrinated into a high-control religion was the belief that I couldn’t set boundaries or say no, at least not without consequences. In high-control religious environments and cults it is normal for the “good” of the whole to be emphasized over the “good” of the individual - the good of the whole often being an arbitrary goal established by those in power in order to maintain control over the members of the group (which, honestly, doesn’t sound very good to me). Within this setting, the boundaries of the individual don’t matter. In fact, setting boundaries can be seen as disobedience, and deviating from the established path can lead to exile from the group.
Although there are a wide variety of reasons why folks may have trouble with setting boundaries (indoctrination into a high-control religious group being just one of those reasons), the importance of boundary setting is, in my opinion, universal. We have a right to autonomy over our time and our bodies. Setting boundaries can be difficult, especially when it’s a skill you were never taught; but it can be an important way of reclaiming your right to rest.
As I move further into 2023, I am excited about doing less. I am excited to find new ways to reclaim my time, to reexamine my relationship with productivity, and to be able to show up for myself and the people I love with more energy and compassion. I believe that doing less actually allows us to do more of the things we truly value. I hope you will join me on this venture.
