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Rest. How great does that sound? In our harried times, many of us crave it. Yet for a long time, we knew little about it. For example, we never knew the answers to basic questions, such as: What feels restful? Who gets enough rest and who doesn’t? And does it really matter?
The wellness company, Hubbub, wanted to know more. With the help of BBC radio presenter Claudia Hammond, they brought together collaborators from 12 disciplines to design The Rest Test. The online survey drew 18,000 participants from 134 countries, making it the biggest study of rest by far, though the participants were self-selected and not a representative sample of any of the nations.
Rather than defining rest, the researchers asked the participants to choose the three activities, from a list of 25, that they found most restful—and the activities most commonly experienced as restful were the kinds of things most often done alone.
Activities Most Often Experienced as Restful
These activities were described as most restful by more than 50 percent of respondents:
- Reading
- Being in the natural environment
- Spending time alone
These activities were mentioned as especially restful by between about 35 and 41 percent of respondents:
- Listening to music
- Doing nothing in particular
- Walking
- Having a bath or shower
- Daydreaming
- Watching TV
Finally, these activities were selected as particularly restful by somewhere between about 22 and 26 percent of respondents:
- Meditating or practicing mindfulness
- Being with animals
- Seeing friends or family
- Drinking tea or coffee
- Doing creative arts
- Gardening
Other research shows that we are particularly happy when we are hanging out with our friends. This research suggests that a happy experience is not necessarily a restful one — seeing friends and family, for example, ranks fairly low on the list of restful experiences. The researchers also had data on participants’ levels of extroversion and found that even for the extroverts, the kinds of activities they could do on their own were considered more restful than spending time with other people.
One activity that did not make the list of most restful activities was exercise. Even so, a nontrivial group of people — 16 percent — said that they found exercise restful.
How Much Rest Do People Get and How Much Do They Wish They Could Get?
Participants were asked how much rest they had in the past 24 hours. Again, they got to define rest for themselves. Answers ranged from zero to 14 hours. The average was about 3 hours. Was that enough? Two-thirds said no: They wanted to get more rest.
Among the least rested people were:
- People with high incomes
- People working night shifts
- People with full-time jobs
- People who were caring for others
Among the most rested people were:
- Older people
- Retired people
- Unemployed people
- People with lower incomes
Most people with full-time jobs said that rest was the opposite of work, while people who were self-employed and people who did volunteer work were less likely to see rest as the opposite of work. We don’t know for sure why that is, but maybe it is because self-employed people and volunteers are more likely to do work they find meaningful. They probably also have more control over when (and maybe even where) they work — and that probably feels restful, too.
In some circles, there is a kind of status to claiming to be super busy. Maybe some people underestimate the amount of rest they get in order to seem more impressive. For example, men, more often than women, said that they got less rest than the average person. But when the researchers looked at the reports of how much rest the participants had actually gotten in the previous 24 hours, the men had gotten more rest than the women.
What Does Rest Feel Like?
If you think this question is silly or obvious, you may well have an enviably uncomplicated relationship with rest. You are probably among the majority of people who say that rest feels “relaxing,” “peaceful/calming,” “comfortable,” or “recuperative.” But not everyone feels that way. For 9 percent of respondents, the idea of rest was associated with darker experiences, such as “guilty” and “stress-inducing.”
Participants were also asked what goes on in their minds when they are on their own. Most often, they said they were focused on their feelings. They said they were carrying on an inner dialog with themselves about 30 percent of the time.
Does It Matter If You Get Enough Rest?
Participants answered questions about their well-being — for example, having more positive feelings and fewer negative ones. The researchers correlated those scores with participants’ reports of how much time they had spent resting during the previous 24 hours.
Generally, people who had more rest experienced greater well-being. Extra hours of rest increased well-being all the way up to about 5 or 6 hours. After that, well-being slipped a little, but still remained high.
Because these are just correlations, we don’t know whether getting more rest makes people happier, or whether happier people get more rest, or whether something else about these particular people makes them both happier and more likely to get rest.
The researchers also compared the people who said they did not need any more rest than they were already getting to those who wished they could get more. They found that “people who don’t feel in need of more rest have well-being scores twice as high as those who feel they need more rest.”
Conclusion
Here’s how the authors summarized their conclusions: “To truly feel rest do we need time alone without fear of interruption, when we can be alone with our thoughts? From the Rest Test, it would appear so.”
Thank you, Dr. Robin Beers, for the heads-up about this research on rest.
