Pete Wright:
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright, and I’m here with Nikki Kinzer.

Nikki Kinzer:
Hello, everyone. Hello, Pete Wright.

Pete Wright:
Hi. How’s your rest?

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s going pretty good.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, it’s pretty good. You got a puzzle going on? You’re able to clear your head?

Nikki Kinzer:
No. I don’t have a puzzle going on right now.

Pete Wright:
I am so excited. I’m going to just tell you out loud, I’m getting you a puzzle. But I haven’t picked it out yet. It’s from a collection of the best puzzles I’ve ever done and ever had experience with in my life. And I think you’re going to love it.

Nikki Kinzer:
Wow.

Pete Wright:
But I haven’t quite nailed down the one.

Nikki Kinzer:
All right.

Pete Wright:
So just know that sometime in your future — sooner than I have been without a dishwasher — you will have a puzzle from Pete, and I think you’re going to get a lot out of it.

Nikki Kinzer:
Cool. I love that.

Pete Wright:
I’m very excited to give it to you.

Nikki Kinzer:
Thank you. The last time I got something from Pete it was a microphone.

Pete Wright:
Yeah. This is much better.

Nikki Kinzer:
This is much better.

Pete Wright:
“Suddenly, Pete gives you a microphone.” Wow. Not on brand for today’s topic. We are talking about rest — the right rest, the wrong rest. We’re talking about word derivations and etymologies, and I’m very excited about it.

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Okay, Nikki.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
This is a bit of a callback to an episode that we did last season. We were talking about the self-image that we have of being lazy, or doing things wrong on purpose, or doing the kind of rest that doesn’t really apply to the thing that makes us tired. And we kind of wrapped it up by saying, look, rest isn’t earned. It is required in life.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes. And can I just say, this is perfect timing, because I just had a conversation with a client yesterday about this exact thing. She was coming home from work. She’s a teacher. And she was saying that she wanted to work on having some kind of routine after work — what she was going to be doing — because she felt like she was wasting too much time and she wasn’t being productive.

And I said, well, what do you mean exactly by being productive? What do you want to do after you’ve worked with children all day long? That was my thought.

And she was like, well, I don’t know. I mean, there’s some goals. And she talked about some exercise, and wanting to read more, and some things that she wanted to work on. It all made perfect sense. But then I said, so what is it that makes you feel like you need to be more productive? And she sat there for a second and she said, I guess I feel guilty. I feel guilty if I’m just watching a movie.

Pete Wright:
I feel guilty — especially if you live in a house or a place with multiple people in it, and you constantly have that weight over your head. What if somebody sees me watching this show right now while I’m not multitasking the show? Do I know how to watch something without having my laptop open in front of me? Do I know how to do that with my brain?

And that’s kind of where we’re going today. I did this whole outline last night and I was happy with it, and then I went to sleep. And when I woke up, I found myself thinking about the words that we use to describe the things that are broken for us.

I just want to talk about my experience with Etymonline — Etymology Online — which is a very cool website. I like it so much. It gives you the historical derivation of words as they evolve over the course of the history of human language.

Nikki Kinzer:
What is it? Oh, okay.

Pete Wright:
I started with Google and Ngram Viewer, but these three words are pretty banal words. It’s not like we have a spike in the use of the word “rest.” It’s just pretty consistent. We use “rest.” It’s been with us the whole time.

So I started looking up these words at Etymonline. Rest: historically means sleep, mostly. Get some rest. Rest up. “Give it a rest” means stop — usually when someone is being irritating. Idiomatically, rest means cessation. Body or behavior: stop. Stop doing something.

Relaxation, the second of the big R’s, almost always comes as a command, and comes as some sort of admonishment. Relax. Just relax.

Nikki Kinzer:
All right.

Pete Wright:
It’s about who says it and when. And it’s almost always aimed at someone who’s being too much. That’s kind of the newer term.

Nikki Kinzer:
In that regard, yeah, for sure. But you can also think of, “go get some R&R.”

Pete Wright:
Stay with me. Because this is the one that has the most sort of idiomatic expression. “Relax, just relax” is used more than “to loosen,” which we’ll get to.

Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
Recuperation is the one that I woke up really having lingering on my tongue, because recuperation has much more of a medical register.

Nikki Kinzer:
For sure.

Pete Wright:
You recuperate from surgery. You recuperate from the flu. No one ever says, “I’m recuperating from Tuesday.”

Nikki Kinzer:
But they should.

Pete Wright:
Because Tuesday was hard. But they should. They should. It’s a word that generally feels like a doctor wrote it on a pad somewhere. “You have to go home and recuperate.”

Every one of these words, in the modern context, is defined by subtraction. Stop doing something. We have this awesome vocabulary for what rest takes away, and very little for what it gives back. And that, I think, is the root of our conversation today.

Now, Etymology Online. Recuperate comes from the Latin recuperare — to get back, to regain. It is built into this concept, the idea of gain, not stillness. It is the act of recapturing the strength. Recovery includes building resources back up, not just stopping the drain of energy, of stress, whatever.

Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
It is a word of action. It is a word of healing.

All right. Relax comes from relaxare — to loosen. It is specific and physical. It is a thing that happens to something under tension. It never meant leisure in general. In the purest form of the word, relax has not meant “I’m just going to veg.” It is something that you take an action to do — to loosen tension in a physical substrate, or in musculature, or in tendon, or in emotional tension.

Nikki Kinzer:
So true. Because I think about being in PT, and I have arthritis in my shoulder. So he’ll be working on my shoulder and he’ll be like, okay, you need to relax. Relax — and that means don’t tense up. You need to let go of your tension.

Pete Wright:
Right. Okay. Rest. I think this one is cool. Rest, of course, has two meanings. One comes from Germanic origin, and it means intermission and peace. The other comes from the Latin restare, which is to stand back, or to be left over. So these are two different roots that end up being on the same page of the dictionary. Two words whose origins converged.

This is not one word that drifted. These were two different words, and they came together. There are some places on the internet that say rest evolved from the word “leftover” somewhere. That’s not true. These were two completely different concepts.

And what I kind of love about this is that rest means both repose and what’s left over — the rest. And that’s kind of how we treat it. It sort of represents the time at the end, after everything else real is done.

And when I think about it like that, it makes a pretty good substitution for margin. Rest is what is outside of demand. And rest is what allows us opportunity for relaxare and recuperare. I know. You’re totally digging this right now.

Nikki Kinzer:
I just think it’s funny, because I’ll be honest — you lost me in some of that. But then you got me back when you were like, “the time left at the end, after everything else real is done.”

Pete Wright:
I got you back.

Nikki Kinzer:
And I love how you say relaxare and recuperare. You got me back on that. But can we just back up for a second and put this in — what exactly are you talking about?

Pete Wright:
There’s no backing up to do, because we’re only moving forward today.

Nikki Kinzer:
Okay.

Pete Wright:
Because we are talking about rest, relaxation, and recuperation as active processes that come to us when we are under stress. Too often we think, oh my gosh, the world is crazy, I have to have time for rest, relaxation, and — if you are brave enough — recuperation. And that means something like sleeping a lot, or doing less. And none of the research that I have found immediately says that.

We’re going to focus on one area that has got me thinking about these concepts in a different way, and that comes from occupational research — not ADHD research, but you’re going to love it anyway.

Nikki Kinzer:
All right.

Pete Wright:
So we’re going to talk about a measurement tool from Sonnentag and Fritz that originated in 2007. These two researchers were not writing a rest philosophy when they approached this tool. They were trying to build a measurement tool. And they came out with four categories that ended up being consistently validated across a thousand people.

The puzzle they were trying to solve for: hours off didn’t predict who came back restored. Something about the quality of the time that they were away was what made restoration successful. So the question that they went in with, in doing this research and talking to all these employees, these team members, was not “does rest help you do work better?” It was “what is the active ingredient for truly restorative or recuperative rest?” What actually allowed you to go home, and then mystery happens, and then come back feeling better than when you left? Because a lot of people came back and said, I didn’t come back feeling better. I came back feeling like time had passed.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
And that’s a very different thing.

Nikki Kinzer:
It’s kind of like burnout — going on a vacation when you’re burnt out isn’t going to help when you come back.

Pete Wright:
Right. Now, I’m going to read these four areas and we’re going to talk about them in a little bit more detail. But as I read them, this is the overarching rule that I want you to remember as you hear them. These four are distinct mechanisms that don’t substitute well for each other.

So this isn’t a menu where you’re saying, oh, I need to pick a little bit from category one and a little bit from category three and maybe a lot from category four and I’ll feel better. That’s not what the research showed. The research showed that there was a reason you were feeling burnt out or that you needed rest, and it was one of these major categories that caused massive change in the way you came back. It was one, not many.

So let’s talk about this, because the rule ends up being really fascinating. It means for us with ADHD — and I’m going to say this again later — failure isn’t failure. It is a mismatch. It is not a shortage. You can rest all weekend in a way that never actually touches what has drained you. Which is a much kinder way to look at the world than “you don’t rest enough, you don’t relax enough.”

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
So again, this is not ADHD research, it’s workplace research. The categories end up being well validated. The ADHD application is ours — well, mine, because you did not know I was talking about this.

Okay. Sonnentag and Fritz, the Recovery Experience Questionnaire. Four experiences that actually restore you after depletion.

Nikki Kinzer:
Ooh, this is going to get good. This is the good stuff.

Pete Wright:
Yeah, this is the meat. This is good stuff.

Number one: psychological detachment. This is category one. This implies you are mentally off. You are not thinking about the thing that has caused you stress. Psychological detachment.

Number two: relaxation. This is low activation, low demand. Category two defines what we normally define as relaxation. This is just pleasant.

Number three: mastery. This is challenge and learning outside of the demand. So if you are stressed out because you’re an accountant and all you do is spreadsheets and numbers and forms and stuff, then you’re learning to fish, or learning to fly a drone.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right, you’re doing something else.

Pete Wright:
You’re doing something very different with your brain. This is competence building.

And number four: control. This is autonomy. You decide how your time is spent. So if you work in a job where all of your time is defined by your manager or your team and you don’t have autonomy in deciding what you get to do with your time — let’s say, at an extreme, you’re an air traffic controller. You’re on a shift, and the planes are coming. You are the cog in the machine that just has to get them on the ground and in the air, and on the ground and in the air, safely. You don’t decide how your time is spent when you’re on the job.

Control in rest and recovery means you get to decide how your time is spent. Okay? All right, let’s go into each one of these, because this is where we have to reframe a little bit the way we look at each of these with regard to the ADHD brain. Before I plow through, do you have any questions about these four?

Nikki Kinzer:
No, I think they all make sense.

Pete Wright:
Okay. So detachment was the first one — psychological detachment. This is a hard one. Because it’s very difficult for me to turn off my ADHD brain. I ruminate. I go on replay loops, and I have open loop tasks that ping me all night.

Nikki Kinzer:
All day, yep, and night.

Pete Wright:
It’s hard to turn that off. Doing nothing raises the volume of the mental noise that I have going on, instead of lowering the volume.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
So we have to reframe that. Detachment isn’t about being still. It is about the work not having access to me at the time. Occupying my attention can be how I detach. So my detachment might be that I need to have a podcast or an audiobook in my ears when I am relaxing. I have to have something else calling my attention. I have to raise the noise floor in order for me to be able to detach.

But I can do that. I’m allowed to do that. And when I do that, I begin the cycle of recovery. I can’t just sit still in order to be psychologically detached. I have to have a practical alternative to whatever it is I’m detaching from.

So, a task with just enough load to sort of crowd out the loop of noise. It could be walking, or driving, or dishes, or audiobooks, or games — games with lots of rules that you have to keep track of. Go play The Settlers of Catan or something with your fellow game-loving nerds. That’s what we’re talking about.

Nikki Kinzer:
Dungeons and Dragons.

Pete Wright:
Yes, God, yes. Salute, endorse, cosign.

So, psychological detachment: whatever it is that stresses you out at work, you need to be able to completely detach from it. And I’m not saying it’s easy, but I am saying it’s important. And those two things go hand in hand.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
All right. That’s number one.

Number two: relaxation. So this is low demand, low activation. It is just a pleasant state of being. And when’s the last time your ADHD brain allowed you to do that? Low arousal states can feel genuinely intolerable when you are understimulated. “Just relax” is a demand that nervous systems cannot fill.

Nikki Kinzer:
I can just imagine my husband going crazy. He’s going to stand up. There’s nothing — no, he can’t just —

Pete Wright:
Right. He can’t do it.

Nikki Kinzer:
He’s going to do something.

Pete Wright:
He’s got to do something. So in some cases, relaxation has to be movement-shaped, rhythm-shaped, rather than motionless. Maybe relaxation is finally taking on a home project. Maybe it’s something physical, something that has your body moving.

But it’s important along the way, as you’re building this muscle, that you name the thing that you feel ashamed of not being able to do. Falling asleep during a meditation, for example, is not a character failure.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
You’re trying to relax. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It means you were tired. And that’s okay. But one of the things that this whole model is saying is that relaxing — even movement-based relaxation — is still relaxation, because this isn’t about physical energy stores often.

Nikki Kinzer:
It doesn’t have to just always be on a hammock doing nothing.

Pete Wright:
No, absolutely not. You can relax and physically exert too. That’s why people love water skiing. Relaxing is being physical, is moving your body, is doing those things to crowd out the noise of the other stuff.

Okay. Mastery. This here, though, is the ADHD sweet spot. This is the bullseye in the middle of the target.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. This is interesting.

Pete Wright:
This is the one we most often talk ourselves out of, too. I think about this all the time. I get busy doing things that look like I’m working, but are actually things that I’m doing in relaxation mode. I love doing things.

When I went to grad school, I had a thousand music CDs. I went to grad school a long time ago, and I spent my non-work time, my non-study time — study time was at the computer — I would spend my non-study time at the computer feeding CDs into the machine to figure out how audio codecs worked, and to learn the ins and outs of FFmpeg, and how to make audio and video files sing on my computer. That was a mastery that led to me being a full-time podcaster eventually.

So, getting rid of the language that says “I should be resting, not starting a new project” — that is the number one rule for mastery, for relaxation under the mastery area.

Nikki Kinzer:
But so it’s not —

Pete Wright:
This is interest-based engagement. There is no other reason for you to want to be doing this thing other than you’re interested in it, and you’re curious, and you’re celebrating the fact that you have a curious brain. And that is in and of itself regulating and recuperative. The hobby is not stealing from rest. It is rest.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
The caution is, as always, that mastery for ADHDers becomes another job when it starts to acquire things like deadlines, or an audience, or a monetization plan. You have to kind of watch that, because that’s a hard line for a lot of people.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
But it doesn’t change the fact that having that sweet spot as a target for the ADHD brain is a really good way to let yourself relax.

Okay. Control. Number four. Also enormous for ADHD, because so much of the day is externally scaffolded. Even if you don’t have a job like air traffic controller that requires you to constantly be on and not have control of your day, your day is probably externally scaffolded, because you have task managers that are constantly alerting you, alarms that are yelling at you, reminding you to do things in your life that without them you would not do. And that’s okay.

The act of having control and regaining control through autonomy means you are allowed to choose in advance the things that you want to apply your energy to. You’re not choosing in the moment. You get to pick the kind of rest before you’re depleted enough to need it.

You get to say out loud: at the end of my day as an air traffic controller, or as a ringmaster of a circus, or as whatever it is that you do, you’re going to do a thing that is going to give you more energy than it takes away.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
That, I think, is really interesting. And you’re not going to be ashamed of it.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
You’re going to do it because you chose to be there. And you are not going to let other people’s judgment of how you use your time get in the way of that.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
So those are the big four.

Nikki Kinzer:
I love that.

Pete Wright:
Once again: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control. So Sonnentag and Fritz figured out that in these big four, their respondents fell pretty cleanly in how they were able to return to work recuperated, healed, recovered, and ready to do better work — the work of their lives, their jobs.

I think that is really fascinating, because at no point in any of this does it say that their bodies were so broken they had to take vacation to just be in bed for a week.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.

Pete Wright:
That wasn’t part of it. All of these assume that rest is much more of an emotional state, of a brain state, of a brain recovery, than it is a muscle recovery. You can trust your tired body much more — it has much more fuel to it than your brain does, most often. When your brain is energized, your body will do whatever you want it to do.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.

Pete Wright:
Okay, so — fake rest. This is where the traps are.

Nikki Kinzer:
Oh.

Pete Wright:
The scroll, you guys. The scroll is not detachment. It is ambient demand. It is not relaxation — activation in your brain stays way too high. It is not mastery. It is not control. The feed chose what it is showing you. This is a zero.

Nikki Kinzer:
So true.

Pete Wright:
Across all four major categories. Just absolutely straight across the board, a zero. So put your phone away when you’re hanging out in bed, when you’re just sitting on the couch, when you’re on the toilet. Put the phone away. Just do it.

Rest is not a moral failing. That is a sign of fake rest — when you’re feeling judgment. The lowest activation cost option available to a depleted brain is that we’re doing something wrong when we’re resting. Of course we land there. We already feel like crap about ourselves all the time. But it is not a moral failing, and you have to say it out loud and often until you believe it.

Other sort of candidates that we poke at: rest is avoidance. Okay, not really. Sleep is an escape. Okay. Being alone is really hiding. All of these things are the language of shame in different clothing.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah, I agree.

Pete Wright:
These are all ways to just feel bad about ourselves. And we need to be able to say out loud, that’s not true. My brain needs something different in order to heal itself from the hard work that I did today. I’m going to do something different, and that will feel recuperative.

Sometimes the scroll is available to you, and that’s what you want to do. And I know that a lot of our lives — especially for those of us of a certain generation who invested a ton into building our social media, our families and our networks on these platforms — that’s all that we have. That’s the only way we have to talk to the people that we love. And that’s okay.

The problem comes when it’s the only tool you have to rest. And I think we need to be aware that that’s a red flag: when the only thing we’re doing when we want to shut down is pulling out the phone and turning on the social media, the scroll, the feed.

So, all right. The practical payoff of all of this — what is the practical payoff? I said earlier that failure is a mismatch. It’s not a shortage. It’s not really failure at all. And so that’s where we get back to the practical payoff, which is matching the kind of rest and recuperation we’re seeking to the drain that we are experiencing.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah.

Pete Wright:
So what actually depleted you? And then pick the recovery tool to best associate with it.

If you are depleted because you make decisions all day, maybe you reach for control. Something where you don’t have to make other people’s decisions all day, or you don’t have to suffer from other people making decisions for you all day. You get to decide how to spend your time. You get to control your time for a while.

If you’re depleted by — I put masking — if you’re depleted by your own experience of imposter syndrome, or by the high stimulus of being with people all day, maybe it’s detachment that you need. Maybe you need forest bathing. Maybe you have to go out and experience nature actively. There’s no performance required. You get to be alone in a space that you feel good about.

Nikki Kinzer:
Right.

Pete Wright:
If you are depleted by boredom and understimulation, the obvious answer is mastery. Find something new and learn to do it, and make it hard. Do something that’s a real challenge.

Nikki Kinzer:
Challenge. Yeah.

Pete Wright:
If you’re depleted by sensory overload, maybe you need to invest in a quiet space for your own relaxation. It’s dim, it’s quiet, it’s low input. If you’re depleted by emotional flooding, maybe it’s detachment and movement before anything else.

So for everything that you are depleted by — what are you reaching for in order to rebuild?

Nikki Kinzer:
I think this is good, because it also makes you realize that it’s just not one answer. Oh, I’m having a rough day — oh, go rest.

Pete Wright:
That’s the lesson. Yeah, right.

Nikki Kinzer:
Like you’re saying: no, what’s making it rough? And then let’s see what kind of recovery — what do you need that’s going to help you?

Pete Wright:
Yep. And I think that’s really it. The “I need a nap” diagnosis is often the wrong diagnosis. Sometimes you actually need novelty to re-energize, to get those neurons firing again, and not sleep. Sometimes you do need sleep. Sometimes you legit need sleep.

And so I was just kind of thinking, what am I going to do this week? Because, you know, physician, heal thyself. I’ve been researching all this stuff and I’ve written all this up. What am I doing to live this?

Nikki Kinzer:
Right, right.

Pete Wright:
And so my experiment for the week is just, at the end of the day, sort of as evening sets in, I’m naming the drain out loud. What is it that I have felt like is exhausting me at the end of the day? And I’m going to work toward picking the kind of recuperation that fits into the model that matches the depletion.

Nikki Kinzer:
Mm-hmm.

Pete Wright:
And I’m not going to make it long. I’m going to do fifteen minutes and make a few notes, and I’m just going to see if this pattern matching, if my pattern recognition, gets better, so I can learn more about myself along the way.

The research is sound and we’re still talking about it, still teaching it, for the last twenty years going on. The question is, how well can we associate it to our ADHD brains? I think that is absolutely fascinating to me. So that’s where we are.

Nikki Kinzer:
I like it. Good job.

Pete Wright:
Well, I’m exhausted.

Nikki Kinzer:
This is great.

Pete Wright:
I’m depleted.

Nikki Kinzer:
Yeah. You’re going to need to take some time to recover and do some relaxare.

Pete Wright:
I am absolutely going to need to take some time to recover. Yes. Relaxare, recuperare, restare.

Nikki Kinzer:
Relaxare. Yes.

Pete Wright:
Thank you, everybody, for hanging out and giving me a platform to wax poetic about rest.

Nikki Kinzer:
I love it.

Pete Wright:
And I hope you get something out of it. I hope you’re able to implement some of these things in your lives. I will, of course, put the list of the big four in the show notes, and a link to the actual questionnaire if you want to take it yourself.

We appreciate you downloading and listening to the show. Thanks for your time and your attention. Don’t forget, if you have something to contribute to the conversation, we’re heading to the Show Talk channel in our Discord server. And you can join us right there by becoming a supporting member at the Deluxe level or better.

On behalf of Nikki Kinzer, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next week on Taking Control: The ADHD Podcast.