career
“This isn’t
working!”90 womenshealth.com.au FEBRUARY 2017
PHOTOGRAPHY:GETTYIMAGESKenny. “But we’re not designed
to maintain this response for long
periods, so a constant state of
busyness can take a real toll on the
body, leading to high blood pressure,
fatigue, muscle tension and anxiety.”
As to the old adage ‘a rest is as
good as a sleep’, psychiatrist and
sleep expert Dr Matthew Edlund
believes it bears truth. “Rest equals
regeneration when it comes to
the body, which is key to survival.
Since most of your heart’s cells are
remade in three days, and much of
your body’s within weeks, rest is not
wasteful but necessary. Fortunately,
there are many active kinds of rest- very different from the ‘passive’,
unconscious rest of sleep – required
for the renewal, recreation and
remaking of our tissues that keeps
us alive and lets us thrive.”
The science backs Edlund’s theory.
Researchers from Harvard Medical
School investigating the benefits of
yoga and meditation found that
after eight weeks of practice, MRI
scans of the participants’ brains
showed an increase in grey matter.
An average of 27 minutes’ relaxation
per day was shown to have a
massive impact in the density of
the amygdala, which affects stress
and anxiety, and the hippocampus,
the part of the brain associated with
self-awareness and compassion.
In short, taking time out to relax
reduces the negative effects of
chronic stress and can make us
more aware of the pressures we’re
putting on ourselves to keep busy.
In your quest to relax, don’t forget
to prioritise sleep, and not the kind
where it takes you hours to drop off
and you toss and turn all night – a
telltale sign of burnout. Use the old
tricks of a warm bath, an eye mask
and a soothing herbal tea to help
you drop off into a truly deep sleep,
which according to numerous
research (including a study from the
University of Notre Dame) is what
your brain needs to function well.
So there you go – downtime and
rest, good for body and mind.
Switching off? Game on. WH
“THE MORE STIMULATION WE GET,
THE MORE WE SEEK AND NEED IT
- IT’S BASIC HUMAN NATURE”
Ironically, even activities we
traditionally chose as ways to relax- baking, reading and yoga – have
become bragging opportunities,
as long as the brownies look good
on Instagram, the novel is a Man
Booker Prize winner and you can
prove you’ve nailed a handstand
pose in your Tully Lou tights.
Psychologist Emma Kenny
believes the need to make ‘me time’
Insta-worthy is damaging: “Choosing
to be busy is one thing, but selecting
things on a purely aspirational basis
is another. If even mundane tasks
become an opportunity to present
ourselves in the best light possible,
when can we ever truly relax?”
It’s increasingly evident the way
we perceive the value of our time
has changed significantly. But to
suggest to any Type A woman who
is juggling work, motherhood,
relationships and Instagram, we
should simply regress to our golden
days of downtime is nonsensical.
We’ve convinced ourselves that
wringing as much out of life as
possible will make us happy – and
yet, when it comes to the science,
the opposite is true. By relentlessly
flitting from one task to another,
constantly switched on and that
all-familiar guilt propelling us on
to the next project, we place our
bodies in a state of chronic stress.
“It’s back to that old problem of
the ‘fight or flight’ response being
switched on continually – so our
hearts, muscles and focus are on
high alert all the time,” explains
5.1 hours of unpaid overtime every
week – but another survey by the
UK’s Stylist magazine found a
staggering 96 per cent of women
experience guilt at least once a day.
In fact, research published in the
Spanish Journal of Psychology
suggests women are genetically
biased to feel guilt at a significantly
higher level than men.
And we’re not just feeling the
pressure to be busy, but to ensure
our plans provide tangible ticks off
the to-do list or come with bragging
rights. It’s not enough to walk
through the door in the evening
and collapse in front of the TV with
a bowl of leftovers, not when you
could have spent that time going
to see Cate Blanchett in a play or
dining at a restaurant glowingly
reviewed in The Urban List.✱ Switch off
to switch on
Social media and developing
technology play their part. “The
more stimulation we get, the more
we seek and need it – it’s basic
human nature,” explains Mann.
“We’re so plugged in to what’s
going on around us – whether that’s
an email alert about a new fitness
class or a friend’s day out posted on
Facebook – we pursue more and
more novelty and stimulation. The
result is that our benchmark for
what counts as interesting and
time-worthy has changed.”