By Jilly Mcbane, student staff member

“Don’t you ever take a break?” For many of us college students, taking a break can seem like the last thing we want to do. It can feel like we can’t take a break before we’ve registered for classes, gotten an A on our exam, written our thesis, and secured our post-college job. When it comes to school-mandated holidays including winter and summer breaks, we might find ourselves with no other option than to rest in some capacity or another.  

Many college environments, including the University of Utah, can be fast-paced, rigorous, and demanding. This can be exciting and fuel our overall learning and creativity. Additionally, having a sense of structure and a schedule can be beneficial for a lot of students who struggle to stay organized when juggling classes, work, and extracurriculars. But, the university system, and other systems rooted in competition and urgency, can actually cause more harm than good when they make us feel as though our worth is based solely on our productivity or how much we accomplish on any given day. We start to think that something is wrong with us if we don’t have some pertinent, time-sensitive task at every moment. The truth is that allowing ourselves to take a break or experience boredom can help us process the busyness of our lives and start to behave in ways that are less harmful to ourselves and others. Maybe taking the time to rest and reflect over break could help us engage more deeply with ourselves and start practicing better ways of being in the new season after all…

Now we must consider how changing our ways of being and existing as college students can actually be a step toward ending violence. I’d like to invite all students to engage in practices that allow us to heal from the pressures that have been placed upon us. One form of healing is resting, or taking an intentional break. While rest can certainly include taking a luxurious bubble bath, rest is anything that allows us to reconnect our body and mind. You might truly need physical rest in the form of regular, sufficient sleep. Maybe you need mental rest by little breaks or microsleeps, journaling, or reading fiction for fun. Allowing ourselves to find joy and humor in little things or enjoying a home-cooked meal with our loved ones is one way of respecting our emotional needs. When we honor our limits for what we can and cannot do on any given day, we are practicing a form of rest called social rest. Lastly, resting might come in the form of taking care of something other than yourself, including a plant or a pet. 

While this might seem abstract—and trust me it can be—there is so much you can do. We often believe that if we act as we are supposed to and get everything done that we should, then we will be led to safety. The perceived safety and relief we feel end up being quite short-lived when the very next day we fall back into the cycle of unrealistic expectations and judgments when we fall short. When productivity and capitalist structures demand so much from us, we can become disconnected from ourselves and our needs. Sometimes, we have to remove ourselves from these structures to solve the issues ingrained within them. Rest is a way of nourishing ourselves, and when we are nourished, we create a less harmful world—a world that is kinder and more compassionate to others. After all, there is a direct link between unmet needs and harmful behavior.