Chapter 3: The Art of Resting: Long Hours, Breaks and Sleep

A Letter from Tomas

Dear Jiwoo, my sister told me to write to you, and I am doing it mainly so that she will stop asking. I drive a delivery van. Six days a week I load parcels before sunrise and drive until the last one is gone, which is often after dark. A small device on the dashboard tells me where to go next and how many minutes I am behind. I am paid for each parcel I deliver, so every stop that is not a delivery feels like money falling out of my pocket.

I eat my lunch at the wheel, usually while driving to the next address. I do not take breaks, because there is always another street waiting. On my one day off I should feel free, but instead I feel restless. I cannot sit through a film. I check the device even though it is switched off. When I finally sleep, I dream about addresses and doors that will not open, and I wake up more tired than when I lay down.

Last week something happened that frightened me. It was late in the day, the light was going, and I drove through a crossing just as the light turned red. Nothing happened, thank goodness. But I realized afterwards that I had not really seen the light at all. For a few seconds my mind had simply gone somewhere else.

My father always said that rest is for people who have finished their work, and that a man can rest when he is old. He worked very hard his whole life, and I respect him. But I am thirty-four, and I feel old already. So I want to ask you honestly: is rest really part of work, or is it a luxury? How can I rest when I cannot choose my hours? And why can I not switch off, even when I finally have the chance? Respectfully, Tomas

Dear Tomas

Thank you for writing, even if your sister had to push you a little. I am grateful to her. Before anything else, I want to talk about the crossing, because that moment matters more than anything else in your letter.

What you describe, a few seconds when your mind went somewhere else while your eyes were open, is something that workplace-safety agencies warn drivers about again and again. Deep tiredness slows reactions, weakens judgement and can cause very short moments of sleep or near-sleep that the person does not even notice. These moments are not a sign of carelessness or weak character. They are what a tired brain does when it has been pushed past its limit. The guidance for drivers in general is clear and simple: if you feel your eyes growing heavy, your attention drifting or your memory of the last few minutes of road going blank, stop in a safe place and rest before you go on. Losing a few minutes of work is far better than losing what a crash can take away.

I say this first not to frighten you, but because your question about whether rest is a luxury has already been answered by your own experience. On that evening at the crossing, rest was not a luxury. It was safety. And what is true for your body behind the wheel is true for your mind in every kind of work.

Rest Is Part of the Work

Think of how athletes train. A runner does not get stronger during the run itself. During the run, the muscles are worked hard and even slightly damaged. They grow stronger afterwards, during rest, while the body repairs them. Coaches plan rest days as carefully as they plan training days, because they know that training without rest leads to injury, not to strength.

The mind works in a similar way. Psychology textbooks describe attention as a resource that gets used up during the day. Concentrating, making decisions, controlling emotions and watching out for danger all draw on it. A driver, Tomas, uses a great deal of attention: watching the road, reading addresses, judging traffic, keeping track of time. When that resource runs low, mistakes become more likely, small problems feel bigger and patience runs thin. Rest is how the resource refills.

Your father's saying comes from a real place. Many people of his generation worked very hard because they had to, and their endurance kept families fed. I would not want to take that pride away from him.

But traditional wisdom also contains other sayings that point the other way. One old saying warns that a bow that is always bent will soon break. Many religious and cultural traditions set aside a regular day of rest, not as a reward for finishing work, but as a part of the rhythm of life itself. In those traditions, rest is not what you earn after the work. It is what makes the work possible.

It can help to know that there is more than one kind of rest. Physical rest is what the body needs after effort: sitting, lying down, sleeping. Mental rest is a break from concentration and decisions. Social rest can mean time with people who make us feel at ease, or time alone after a day with too many people. And some people speak of sensory rest, which means a break from noise, screens and bright lights. Your days are full of the noise of traffic, the glow of the device and the pressure of the clock, so you may need several kinds of rest at once.

How can a person tell when he or she is short of rest? Public guides describe signs that many people will recognize. Small tasks start to feel heavy. Mistakes that would normally be caught slip through. Patience runs out quickly, and little things cause big irritation. People may feel worn out and tense at the same time, too exhausted to do anything useful but too restless to sit still. Some people find that their days off feel almost as tiring as their working days.

Reading your letter, Tomas, I can see several of these signs in your own week. They are not proof of anything on their own, but together they suggest that your body and mind have been running on credit for a long time.

Breaks and Rest Days When You Cannot Choose Your Hours

Your second question is the hardest one, and I do not want to pretend that it is easy. Many guides about rest are written as if every reader can simply decide to take a break. You cannot. You are paid by the parcel, and a break costs you money. Many people around the world are in the same position: people paid by the piece, by the trip or by the hour, people with two jobs, and people who work for themselves and earn nothing when they stop.

Here, as in the letter I wrote to a nurse just before this one, the sources differ in a way that matters. Public guides speak to the individual: take regular breaks, step away from the screen, rest on your days off. International organizations that work on health and on work, and workplace-safety agencies in general, speak mainly to the people who organize work. They say that schedules and workloads should leave room for rest, that drivers in particular need regular breaks, and that a system that rewards working without pause puts both the worker and the public at risk. In many places there are rules about working hours and breaks, especially for drivers, and these rules exist because tired driving is dangerous. If you are not sure what rules apply to your work, it may be worth finding out.

That is the larger picture. Inside it, there are still a few things you might be able to try.

You could plan a break into your route the way you plan a delivery. If you think of it as one more stop, with its own place in the day, it may feel less like money falling out of your pocket and more like part of the job. Even ten minutes can help if you use them well. Workplace-safety guidance for drivers commonly suggests getting out of the vehicle, walking a little, stretching and looking at things far away, because these give the eyes, the body and the mind a change from driving.

You could eat at least one meal away from the wheel. Eating while driving means that you never stop paying attention to the road, so your mind never gets its pause. Sitting on a bench, even briefly, gives your body a signal that it is allowed to come down from alert.

You could protect your day off. One day a week is very little, so it is worth guarding. That might mean leaving the device in a drawer, telling the people you work for that you cannot be reached, and planning at least one thing for that day that has nothing to do with work.

You could also use the very small pauses that already exist in your day. Between parking the van and knocking on a door, there are a few seconds. Between handing over a parcel and climbing back into your seat, there are a few more. Some drivers use these moments to roll their shoulders, to look up at the sky or to take one slow breath out. None of this costs a single parcel. On its own, a pause of a few seconds will not make up for a day without breaks. But many small pauses, repeated through a long day, can keep the alarm in the body from ringing without stop.

People in very different jobs have found their own ways of resting inside long days. On a construction site in the middle of the day, a crew of workers sits together in the shade of an unfinished wall. They eat, they talk about their families and one of them falls asleep for a few minutes with his hard hat tipped over his face. Nobody wakes him.

In places where afternoons are very hot, many shops close for a few hours in the middle of the day, and people rest at home before opening again in the cooler evening. And in a small school high in the hills, a teacher sits outside with the children for a few minutes after lunch, saying nothing at all, letting everyone look at the clouds before the afternoon lessons begin. None of these people stop working for long. But each of them has made a small space inside the day where the mind can let go.

Sleep, the Deepest Rest

Sleep is the deepest kind of rest, and many sources describe it as one of the foundations of mental health. Psychology and medical textbooks explain that during sleep the brain sorts and stores memories, the body repairs itself, and the systems that manage mood and attention are restored. When sleep is short or broken for a long time, people often find it harder to concentrate, harder to control their temper and harder to feel hopeful. Many people notice that worries look much bigger at night after a bad week and much smaller after a few good nights of sleep.

How much sleep is enough? Many public health guides say that most adults need somewhere around seven to nine hours a night, while also saying that people differ and that the right amount for one person may not suit another. A useful sign is how you feel during the day. If you often feel very sleepy during the day, or if you wake up feeling unrested most mornings, your sleep may not be giving you what you need.

Public guides about sleep tend to agree on a handful of everyday habits. Going to bed and waking up at roughly the same times each day helps the body's inner clock. Getting daylight in the morning and dimmer light in the evening helps too. A quiet, dark and cool room makes sleep easier. Coffee, tea and other drinks that keep people awake are best avoided in the later part of the day. Bright screens just before sleep can keep the mind alert. And many people find that a short winding-down routine, such as a wash, some quiet reading or a few slow breaths, helps the body understand that the day is over.

Your working day begins before sunrise, which makes some of this harder. People who start very early, and people who work at night, often have to protect their sleep with extra care. Many public guides for shift workers suggest keeping the bedroom as dark as possible, asking the people at home to keep things quiet during sleeping hours, and keeping roughly the same sleep times even on days off, so that the body's inner clock is not pulled back and forth. This last suggestion is not always easy on a single free day. But even keeping your waking time within an hour or two of your usual time may help you feel less shaken at the start of the next week.

Your dreams about addresses and doors are something that many people with repetitive work describe. The mind keeps working on what it did all day, even at night. A winding-down routine may help with this, because it gives the mind a gentle bridge from work to sleep instead of a sudden drop.

Please also keep this in mind. If sleep problems last for weeks, if you are very sleepy during the day even after a full night in bed, or if someone tells you that you snore loudly and seem to stop breathing for moments in your sleep, talk to a doctor. Some sleep problems have causes that a doctor can look into, and for someone who drives for a living, this is especially important.

Learning to Switch Off

Now to your third question: why can you not switch off, even on your day off? You describe a restlessness that will not let you sit through a film and a hand that reaches for a device that is not even on. I think of an engine that has been running hard all day. When you turn the key, it does not go cold at once. It stays hot for a while and keeps ticking as it cools. Your body and mind have been running at full speed for six days. On the seventh day, they are still ticking.

Psychology textbooks have a name for the opposite of this ticking. They call it detachment, which means stepping away from work in your mind as well as in your body. General explanations of research describe detachment during time off as one of the things that helps people recover from work. They also describe the opposite, which textbooks call rumination: going over and over the same thoughts about work, without solving anything. Rumination keeps the alarm I described in my letter to the nurse switched on, even on a day off.

Detachment does not usually happen by simply telling yourself to relax. It tends to happen when something else fills the mind. Many people find that the easiest way to stop thinking about work is to do something that needs their full attention but asks nothing of them: cooking a meal from start to finish, repairing something with their hands, playing a game, playing music, or walking somewhere they enjoy. Being with people who make you laugh helps. So does being outdoors, among trees or near water, if you can reach such places.

Some people also find it helps to give the restlessness a way out. If your body is still ticking on your day off, a long walk, a swim or a game of football with friends may help it cool down faster than sitting still. Then, once your body has used up some of that speed, the film may become easier to watch.

The device on your dashboard deserves a special word. It is switched off on your day off, yet your hand still reaches for it. That reaching is a habit, built by thousands of moments of checking during the working week. Habits like this do not disappear by willpower alone, but they do weaken when the object is out of sight. Putting the device in a drawer, in another room or in the van itself, rather than on the table beside you, may help your hand forget it a little sooner. The same is true of a phone that brings messages about work.

There are old customs in many places that do this kind of work without anyone needing to explain them. In some places, families walk slowly through the streets together in the early evening, greeting neighbours. In others, people sit on their doorsteps after the evening meal and talk while the day cools. In others still, friends gather to drink tea for a long time without hurrying. None of these customs were designed by experts, yet each of them gives people a regular, shared way of letting the working day go.

As for your father, I hope you can carry his strength without carrying his saying. Strength can mean working until you drop. But strength can also mean knowing when to stop, especially when other people on the road depend on you to be awake. I suspect that if your father had read your letter, he would have wanted you to rest after that evening at the crossing.

You work so hard to bring other people what they are waiting for. I hope you will let rest arrive at your own door too. Until the next letter, Jiwoo

A Question to Think About

Here is my question for you, Tomas, and for every reader: what would a day of real rest look like for you, and what is one small piece of it that you could have this week? Let the answer be as small and as real as you like.

You might begin by thinking about the kinds of rest I described: rest for the body, rest for the mind, time with people or time alone, and quiet for the senses. Which kind do you miss most? When did you last feel truly rested, and what were you doing then?

You might also think about the shape of your working day. Is there a moment that could become a planned pause, like one more stop on a route? And on your days off, what could fill your mind so completely that work has no room to come back in?