How I’m Prioritizing Deep Rest and Play in 2025

To finish off our month talking about deep rest and deep play, I thought I would share some behind-the-scenes of how I’m working brighter right now.

Specifically, how I’m trying to prioritize deep rest and deep play right now.

Let’s get into it!

My rest goals for 2025

One of my self-care goals for this year was to minimize shallow rest and play. Not just to make room for deeper self-care instead, but to also make room for more shallow work.

Since getting COVID last year, my brain fog and executive dysfunction has been a lot worse, making productivity extremely difficult. I have so little mental energy that it takes all that I have just to keep up with the deepest and most important work.

That’s meant that less urgent (but still important) shallow work like admin and maintenance tasks have fallen to the back burner for the past few months, and things are starting to get messy.

Lately, my days have included an hour or two of deep work that fully drains my mental energy, then spending the rest of the day on rest and play, which sounds great, but it’s mostly shallow things that aren’t very restorative.

So my goal for this year is to build up the capacity to work more, while still respecting my energy and limits.

And I know that to be able to work more, I need to rest better.

My “blocker” to working more isn’t a lack of time, it’s a lack of energy. So if I’m going to work more without pushing too hard, I need to increase my energy capacity.

And my quantity of rest/play/self-care definitely isn’t the problem, it’s more about the quality.

So my hypothesis for this “productivity experiment” is that with higher quality rest, I can spend less time on self-care but still recharge my energy more than I currently am. And as a result, I should be able to eventually add more work blocks into my day without getting an energy hangover.

What self-care looks like for me

When I’m talking about my personal rest and play activities, here’s a sampling of what I’m probably talking about:

My go-to deep rest activities

• Prioritizing sleep: I arrange my life around my need for sleep, including making sure that every day has a 2-hour block open for me to nap if I need to (and most days, I need to).
• Journaling: I probably spend at least an hour a day journaling, when you add up all the little mini-sessions. And on days where I can take my time with my morning routine and let my morning pages last as long as they want to, I can literally go on for hours. It feels like I just think and relax better on paper.
• Mindful entertainment: actively reading a fiction book or watching a TV show, movie, or thoughtfully curated YouTube playlist (without multitasking).
• Meditation: this started as just a part of prioritizing sleep (a quick meditation before bed helps me fall asleep faster), but found it so helpful that now I turn to it in a few other situations, too.

My go-to shallow rest activities

• Social media scrolling: I’ve mostly broken myself of this habit, or at least put enough guardrails around it to keep it under control, but I tend to doomscroll social when I’m particularly stressed in addition to being low on energy.
• Mindless YouTube binging: while I’ve taken the time to create the thoughtfully curated playlists for myself mentioned above, sometimes I still fall into a black hole of clickbaity nonsense from a video on the homepage or something lol.
• Browsing the web: aside from YouTube and social media, I feel like I spend too much time browsing things like Pinterest, Dribbble, tech subreddits and other sites that aren’t as harmful to my mental health as social media, but are still too stimulating to be restful.

My go-to deep play activities

• Playing cozy sim games. Simulation video games with somewhat open worlds and little combat are my favorites. The past few years I’ve mostly played The Sims 4, Minecraft (which can be cozy and combat-less when you play the way I do 🤣), and Stardew Valley, but I just started Disney Dreamlight Valley.
• Tech tinkering. A fun realization I had during the month’s deep dive into deep play research is that a lot of the “tinkering” and playing around I do in Notion, Shortcuts, and other tech tools is deep play. I always considered it “just procrastinating more urgent” work, but realizing it hit all the criteria to be restorative deep play let me ditch the guilt around it.
• Reading murder mysteries. I’m a few years deep into my Whodunnit Era. Either in audiobook or ebook form, over the past few years I’ve read almost all the works of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy L. Sayers. (I still need to decide which author from the “Golden Age of Mystery Fiction” will be my next target. 🤓) Sometimes I get really nerdy and take notes and/or make an evidence board and try to figure out whodunnit before the book tells me.
• Easy arts & crafts. I’ve been intentionally picking crafty activities that don’t seem too challenging, since I have a tendency to mess those up then start getting frustrated and self-shamey. Things like simple coloring pages, gem painting, and super simple knitting projects (aka anything square-shaped and garter stitch lol).

My go-to shallow play activities

• Casual mobile games. In addition to deep play video games, I spend more time than I’d prefer playing games like Sudoku or Candy Crush that don’t pull me into them in a way that could make them restorative.
• Rewatching comfort TV shows. As much as I love Schitt’s Creek, Parks and Rec, and Will & Grace, and for as much as they don’t make me laugh, when I consider the deep play criteria, the way I usually watch them doesn’t match up.

The strategies & habits helping me prioritize deep rest and play

So what am I doing to help me prioritize deep rest and deep play this year? During my goal setting and planning at the beginning of the year, I came up with some things to focus on.

So far, they work when I use them, and it’s just a matter of getting myself to use them more often.

Intentionally designed tech systems

I’ve been meaning to do a separate series about all the ways I’ve set up my phone, laptop, and iPad to nudge me towards the things I want to do more of and away from the things I want to do less of, because it will take a long time to fully explain.

But the parts of the system most relevant to today’s topic are:

• Using the JOMO app to set up rules around when my devices let me check social media or watch YouTube.
• Leveraging iOS’s home screen customization to put nudges towards how I want to spend my time front and center on my phone.
• Minimizing opportunities for distraction by using what the podcaster MacSparky calls contextual computing.

Digital Shabbats

I’ve been interested in the concept of Digital Shabbat for a while now, and had done a few sporadically, but this year I’m trying to do a version of my own every other weekend.

So far, I’m not at the point where I can go truly offline, but the “rules” for my version are customized to the ways I want to be using technology on the weekend. I put away my laptop and disconnect my phone and iPad from WiFi and data, so I can only access stuff I’d previously downloaded to the device.

That means I can still use the apps that help me with deep rest and play, like Spotify and audiobook apps and video games, but can’t check social or binge random YouTube videos.

Sleep hygiene changes

Late last year, I decided that sleep hygiene was more important than my pride in being a night owl, and started trying to go to bed earlier. And now, for the first time since maybe middle school (but definitely high school), I’m going to bed before midnight on a regular basis.

This was because I realized I wasn’t sleeping as soundly at night anymore and naturally wake up earlier than I used to, and needed to adjust my routines accordingly. Right now I go to bed at around 11:30 and wake up around 7:30, with a nap for about an hour in the afternoon (I know it sounds like a lot, but apparently it’s still not enough 🤷‍♀️).

Gentle movement daily

The past year or so, I feel like I’ve unlearned everything I thought I knew about exercise and working out. I used to not count something as a “real workout,” unless I was super sweaty at the end and sore for days. (How Hustle Culture impacts health culture is a conversation for another day.)

Basically, I thought working out was synonymous with pushing myself as hard as I possibly could. But for the past year or two, my only form of exercise has been walking. Pretty slowly, most of the time.

And for the first time in my life, I don’t regularly feel worse after exercise. Sometimes I actually feel better after it, which I thought just wasn’t ever possible for someone with my health conditions and disabilities. It turns out, I had just literally never worked out without pushing myself too hard.

As much as I miss the rush of high intensity dance and cardio classes, I do not miss flaring up after them.

Let ya know how it goes

These are just the things I’m trying to help me reach my goals right now. We still need to see how they work. Be sure to stay tuned for my personal goal progress updates to see how it goes!

And if you liked this post, you'll also love:

• Restful Recovery: How to Recharge Your Energy to Avoid Burnout
• Why Rest is the Secret to Sustainable Productivity
• Gentle Productivity: Because Hustle Culture & Brute-Force Productivity Don’t Work