Column: Make rest intentional again

As finals loom ever closer, I’ve found myself with less and less motivation to lock in and do the necessary work. The finish line seems so close that it's hard to dig into whatever energy may be left.

I’ve heard much the same thing from friends around me — first semester was exhausting, the second demotivating.

It's becoming easier to spend more and more time crashing, scrolling through Instagram Reels with a sordid combination of pride for not being on TikTok and guilt for being on my phone in the first place.

I think that part of the drain that many of us feel comes from a fundamental de-prioritization of rest. The issue is that many of the ways we decompress are unintentional

At the end of the school day, we collapse into a nap, or we spend the morning dreading the inevitable reality of leaving bed to trek across campus and try to savor the last few moments before the third alarm goes off. Instead of choosing to rest intentionally, rest and recovery become pressures that force themselves into our lives.

They push themselves into moments of procrastination, into the breaks between classes, and fill up the little bits of time we allow for them. Because there’s no room anywhere else in our lives, rest becomes something inopportune that happens to us.

When we do rest, it's a passive process. We try not to think about the activity of resting, for fear that the guilt and shame that comes from not doing work kicks in and spoils the entire activity.

My suggestion is this — rest must be treated with the same weight as the rest of our obligations. We should make time in our schedules to take intentional breaths. When making your to-do list for the week and scheduling out your homework, pretend that rest is an additional class you’re taking. Allot time for it as you would any other necessary item on your agenda.

Remember that leisure is not something that can be postponed indefinitely. If you don’t actively choose it, your body will schedule it for you. As the year grows later, it manifests itself in tiredness, in sickness, in irritability, etc. If rest only exists in moments of procrastination it does not exist at all, and exhaustion is quick to follow.

Often, the counter-argument to this is a lack of time. For those of us lucky enough to have swaths of open schedule space, making time for yourself is an easier process. I don’t want to give blasé, catch-all advice that ignores the reality of student life, in which many of us juggle major course loads as well as jobs and a host of other commitments.

In many cases, though, I think that the time to rest already exists in our lives — it's just consumed with the guilt that we should be doing other things.

Don't ignore the collection of other pressures on your time. It’s to choose to be intentional about it. The next time you find yourself feeling shame and guilt for “rotting,” or finding it difficult to start an assignment after the third hour of staring at a blank page and a blinking cursor, stop trying to force productivity. If you can — if you have the time — let yourself sink into it. Make it intentional.

@dthopinion | opinion@dailytarheel.com