What Will Make Me Feel Rested?

This essay appeared in the Monday morning newsletter on 3/16/26. Subscribe here! 

Three Steps to a Happier Monday

Before we dive into a new week, let’s pause and ask ourselves some simple questions to reflect on where we’ve been, get excited about something today and set an intention for the week ahead.

GRATITUDE: What are three things I appreciated from the weekend? 

TODAY: What’s one thing I can be excited about today?

INTENTION: What is my intention for this week? 

For me, I’m thankful for downtime, easy errands and time with Matt and Ben. Today, I’m most excited to start my new job! Big day! And my intention for the week is to be curious. 

Okay, your turn! And if you want to share, I am all ears. 🙂

Monday Musings: What Will Make Me Feel Rested?

Recently, Matt and I have been enjoying going to Orangetheory Fitness classes.

While new to us, these classes have been around for a while, so you may already be familiar with them. But if not, they are one-hour, coach-led workouts that combine treadmill running, rowing and strength training.

Something that’s unique to me – compared to other fitness classes I’ve taken – is that you wear a heart-rate monitor that tracks which “zone” your heart rate is in as you move through the workout.

The zones are used as a guide throughout the class, including during my favorite part: the treadmill. We run in intervals – short bursts of effort followed by a walking recovery. During the walking recovery, the coach instructs us to bring our heart rate down a zone (there are five total zones, and you can see which one you are in on the treadmill’s screen).

When I first started Orangetheory, I was surprised by how quickly I reached the highest zone… and how hard it was to bring my heart rate back down. But over time, by slowing my breathing and actually letting myself recover during those walking periods, I’ve gotten better at it.

The heart-rate monitor shifts my focus. For years I’ve measured workouts by output: pace, mileage, time. But in these classes, armed with data from my heart-rate monitor, I’m also paying attention to recovery.

And counterintuitively, that focus on recovery makes the next effort stronger. If I want to push hard during the next interval, I have to bring my heart rate down first.

It reminds me of a quote I saw a while ago, attributed to Nicola Jane Hobbs:

“Instead of asking, ‘Have I worked hard enough to deserve rest?’ I’ve started asking, ‘Have I rested enough to do my most loving, meaningful work?’”

In a workout class, a heart-rate monitor makes recovery visible. I can see when my heart rate is high and when I need to bring it down before the next effort. In real life, though, there’s no screen telling me when I’ve reached the highest zone and need to recover.

So, inspired by this experience in Orangetheory classes, I’ve been thinking about how to create my own version of that signal.

A simple way I’m trying to do this is by repeatedly asking myself a question: 

“What will make me feel rested?”

I ask it when I’m planning my weeks and days – to make sure there’s space for recovery built in. And I’m trying to remember to ask it in the middle of the day if I notice my energy dipping, my patience running thin, or if I suddenly have a few free minutes.

This doesn’t come naturally to me. My instinct is usually to push through and keep going, keeping my focus squarely on the output.

But as Laura Vanderkam once wrote, “When people don’t take intentional breaks, they take unintentional ones.” … Which is usually how I end up scrolling around on the internet for 45 minutes without even realizing it.

To encourage myself to take actual breaks, I’ve started keeping a list of small things that feel like rest to me – a “rest menu” if you will. 

When I ask myself “What will make me feel rested?” I can reference the list and have ideas at the ready.

Here are a few items currently on my rest menu:

• Going to bed early
• Spending a morning at a coffee shop, clicking around on my laptop
• Walking outside (sometimes with no music or podcast)
• Standing in the sun for a few minutes
• Doing a quick sweep of the house, focused on putting things back where they belong
• Lingering in the shower for a few minutes
• Adding books I want to read to my TBR list
• Making a fresh cup of coffee or tea and sitting down with it for a few sips
• Turning my phone off for an hour

What’s key is that most things on the list are small. Sure, a few require planning ahead or making sure someone can watch Ben, but many take just a few minutes.

And “big rest” certainly matters too. But if I waited for big chunks of time to rest, it wouldn’t happen very often.

Maybe this week you could try asking yourself the same question I’m asking myself – What will make me feel rested? – and making your own rest menu with small things that help you reset.

After all, those small moments of recovery can make all the difference before the next stretch of effort.

P.S., from the archives: A similar idea (that was also inspired by a workout class!): “Could this be my rest?”