Rest is Resistance book review

I want to be in bed at nine o'clock. I want to be rested. I want to spend time in my room. I want to go to sleep. Okay. Give me all the stuff that was punishments when you were a kid, right? Keep reading to discover what that has to do with today's book.

Hey, I'm Kyla Denanyoh, and we are talking all about the book Rest is Resistance. Now, it's called a manifesto, and that's for real because this is an evidence-based book. You hear me? It's full of all kinds of facts and quotations and all the good stuff. But this book is written by Tricia Hersey. The genre of the book is nonfiction. The theme of the book is growth and self-improvement. 

So, I know you're busy. Let's get straight into the most important examples of rest that I could find. One example is an extra-long shower, sipping warm tea before you go to bed, or a 20-minute nap, so literally rest. Meditating, resting your eyes, strolling through the park, praying, or deep listening to a full album. Not just music playing in the background, but like Beyonce, what are you saying in Renaissance? 

Rest is all of these things. The entire point of the book is that we have to take care of ourselves. We will not be here to fight the fight, to do the work, to be entrepreneurs, or to record the videos if we don't rest. So that is off-jump. 

So let's get into the first way I am resting, right? You see that? You see that? Y'all, I've been trying to stop wearing my digital watch for months. I have a ton of analog watches. I read physical books. I'm an analog kind of girl, but I like getting these little alerts and notifications when doing stuff. Ma'am, if you run a flight of stairs, it's good for your heart, not your watch. If you jump rope, it's good for your heart, not your watch. My first way to get rest is to cut no more digital watches. 

Did you know that rest is not a reward for you working hard? To me, I'm working whether it's editing, whether it's writing, whether it's reading, whether it's typing, whatever it is. Let's take a five-minute break as a reward for being productive. I never called it a reward, but it was a reward. I'm a big fan of the Pomodoro method, which is to work for 25 minutes and take a 5-minute break, or in my case, I work for 65 minutes and take a 10-minute break because 25 minutes is too short. 

So, for me, this book told me that I had to reorder things. I had to say I am taking 10 minutes to myself because I'm taking 10 minutes to myself. But that also means if there's a day that I am not feeling the work, I can also just take that day off or decide one day not to do the Pomodoro. I tend to commit and dive in. So now I'm like, if it's not Pomodoro, it's not working. Kyla, you can also go to work and take a break if necessary. If you're not good with taking breaks, which I'm not, that's why the Pomodoro method works for you. 

That leads right into the next point, which is that rest is intuitive. I'm going to talk all about rest being intuitive. I struggle with this one. Tricia was getting me together, and I don't know if it's the lawyer background or the entrepreneurial hustle, but I needed some net ministry, and Tricia got me together. 

An intuitive rest means you need to listen to your body and are allowed to rest. We're not talking about you becoming a slacker. It doesn't have to be that extreme. If your body is telling you you have been burning the candle at both ends and it is time for a break, you can take a break. 

I've been waking up at 5 in the morning to get work done. Now, my daughter wakes up at 7.30 in the morning, packing lunch, having breakfast with the husband and the kid, talking, all of this stuff.  I know the time is beneficial. I can't get up. So, you know what that meant? I started going to bed at 9.45. 

Our lives are busy—busy being professional troublemakers, busy running businesses, busy being all things.

Until the next book review, Kyla