Resilience: What Kind of System Expects Us to Be This Tired?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Hello, and welcome back to Bethcast: Periodically Productive. I want to start with something I come back to again and again, which is this idea of humanist productivity.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

It rests on three pillars. Authenticity, which for me means integration over perfection. Connection, which means community over individualism. And sustainability, which means resilience over burnout. And today's episode really sits in that third pillar. Sustainability. Not in the shiny, colour-coded, "fix your life in six steps" sense. I mean sustainability in the lived sense. Can a life be carried like this?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

I've been thinking about rest, and not just as recovery. Not just as the thing you do after the proper stuff is done. More as a question. A slightly awkward one, actually. What kind of system expects us to be this tired in the first place?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Because I know this pattern in myself so well. Even with all the language I have now around compassion and pacing... I still catch myself trying to earn rest. I'll just finish one more thing. I'll just clear a few emails. I'll just get slightly ahead, so then I can rest properly later. And it always sounds sensible. That's the trap. It sounds responsible. It sounds grown-up. It sounds efficient. It rarely ends.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

There is a quiet rule sitting under all of that. Work first. Rest after. And if work expands, which it has a nasty habit of doing, then rest just gets squeezed into whatever corner is left. The leftovers. The crumbs.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

As a disabled solo parent, I don't really have the luxury of pretending limits are theoretical. Limits are practical. So when I talk about rest, I'm not talking about indulgence. I'm talking about whether our ways of working are built around actual human lives, or around the fantasy that we should always have a bit more to give.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

One of the books that has really stayed with me is Tricia Hersey's Rest Is Resistance. And this is where the conversation shifts, because Hersey is not offering a nicer planner, or a gentler morning routine, or some polished little system for managing yourself better. She is asking something far more unsettling. Why has constant labour become normal at all?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Her writing locates exhaustion in systems of extraction and control. Not as an unfortunate side effect, but as something produced. Something built into the way the world has been arranged. She grounds that in lived experience shaped by work, caregiving, financial pressure, illness, and racial harm. So rest, in her framing, is not a wellness accessory. It is survival. It is refusal. It is a way of saying, no, you do not get unlimited access to my body, my mind, my spirit.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

What hit me most was how completely she rejects the idea that rest has to justify itself. That is such a deep script for so many of us, isn't it? Rest has to be useful. It has to make you more productive tomorrow. It has to be earned by effort. It has to come with a good reason. You're ill. You're burnt out. You've finished the project. You've hit the deadline. You've been "good." And Hersey just... refuses the whole premise.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Rest, she says, is a human need. A right. Full stop.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Now, I think it matters to say that lands differently depending on who you are. It should. I am very aware there are aspects of the systems she is naming that I have not had to navigate in the same way. And that discomfort is part of the point, really. Questioning what has been normalised is uncomfortable. Realising that what felt ordinary, neutral, even virtuous, may actually be shaped by harm... that is not a cosy process.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

But even without sharing every part of that experience, I recognise the pattern immediately. The way stopping feels like it needs permission. The way tiredness is treated as background noise. The way we've internalised the idea that our worth is tied to output.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

There is something very radical in Hersey's focus on naps, sleep, slowing down. Because if rest is not a reward, then an awful lot of what we have organised our lives around starts to wobble. If rest belongs to us before we prove anything, then the whole structure shifts. And again I come back to that same question, because it won't leave me alone now. What kind of system teaches us that rest must be earned?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Alongside that, I've also been thinking about Cal Newport's Slow Productivity, and the conversation feels different there, but connected. If Hersey is asking about the roots of the system, Newport is looking closely at how work feels day to day inside it. Less, why does this exist? More, what is this doing to us in practice?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

He gives language to something I think many of us know in our bones. Work is so often fragmented. It's the switching, isn't it? The constant responding, checking, reacting, carrying six half-finished things in your head while another seven arrive. A lot of activity, not always much meaning. You can end a day absolutely shattered and still feel as though you haven't properly touched the thing that matters.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

That is what I found helpful in his framing. The problem is not simply that we are busy. It's that the structure of work generates a particular kind of busyness. One built from overload, urgency, and fragmentation. And the cost of that is often hidden, because from the outside it can look like competence. You answered everything. You kept all the plates spinning. You were available. Gold star. Meanwhile, your attention has been sliced into ribbons.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Newport's response sounds almost too simple at first. Do fewer things. Work at a natural pace. Focus on quality. But I don't think it is simple in practice, because it asks us to challenge what counts as productivity in the first place.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

I notice this in my own working life. There are days when I am in pure response mode. Messages, follow-ups, logistics, little fires, tiny decisions. I am moving all day. It looks productive. It feels dreadful. Then there are quieter days, where I do less, technically. Fewer tasks. More focus. One piece of thinking with room to breathe. One conversation that is not rushed. Those days can look sparse on paper. They are often the days that feel most sustainable, and frankly, most useful.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

What Newport seems to make visible is the overhead of juggling too much. The hidden drag. The cognitive tax. He helps explain why constant motion can leave us depleted without leaving us satisfied. And I think that matters, because once you can name a pattern, you can begin to challenge it. Not perfectly. Not overnight. But with more honesty.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

So no, Hersey and Newport are not saying the same thing. One is systemic and resistant. The other is practical and professional. But they do seem to meet around a shared refusal to accept exhaustion as the natural price of getting things done.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

There is a moment in my day, most days really, that has become strangely important to me. Late afternoon. I am tired, but not finished. There is still enough left in the tank to do a bit more. And that is the moment. Do I keep going, just to get ahead? Or do I stop before exhaustion deepens?

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

For a long time, that felt like an easy question. Of course you keep going. Use the time. Be efficient. Future you will be grateful. Sometimes future me was not grateful at all, actually. Future me was snappy, foggy, in pain, and wondering why everything felt heavier than it should. Small decisions repeat. That's the thing. One extra push is not dramatic. But a life built from one extra push after another can become very, very tired.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

What I am left with after these two books is not a single answer, but a place to stand. Tricia Hersey offers a refusal: you are not here to be consumed. Cal Newport offers a redesign: work does not have to be structured around constant overload. And somewhere between refusal and redesign, I think, a more human way of working begins.

Dr Elizabeth Blakelock

Thank you for joining me here on Periodically Productive—a small space for big reflections. Until next time, I hope your hours are filled with purpose, and your days are shaped by what matters most to you. I’ll see you next time.