It’s Time to Rest Our Brains
The Reader’s Edge | Charlie Samways | May 17, 2026 |
Ten months ago, I was lacking motivation and feeling constantly fatigued.
Searching for solutions, I revisited Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. The idea of walking as a means of deliberate rest stood out to me. I wondered whether this could be the solution to my troubles.
At the same time, I was planning videos for the launch of my YouTube channel. A challenge about getting more time in nature felt like something that could be interesting to others, as well as a benefit to me.
So, for one week, I spent an hour in nature every day to see if it could boost my mood and leave me feeling energised.
The good news is that getting outside daily worked, and I felt a genuine improvement in my mental and physical well-being.
The effects were so dramatic that I've continued this habit of getting outside every single day since. Most days, I walk outside for at least thirty minutes.
There’s a reason I mention this. This newsletter and my related channels are dedicated to finding the right balance between technology that can support our lives, while keeping out unwanted distractions. On the edge of this discussion is how we use the time this grants us back.
In an ideal world, we want to find methods that leave us feeling our best with the time we have available. Instead of passively engaging with our restful time, Pang calls for the need to take “deliberate rest”.
Deliberate rest is all about structured, intentional downtime that actively restores cognitive capacity rather than passively filling time.
One of the most popular methods of deliberate rest, used for centuries, is walking in nature.
Walking and Creative Thinking
Imagine for a second your life allowed you to wake up, take a morning walk and have your breakfast. You’d start work at 8am, and at 9:30am you would spend one hour reading and responding to messages or email. At 10:30, you’d begin working on a project that you are passionate about, before taking a walk outside at 12pm.
You’d take your lunch at 1pm and spend some time responding to more messages and emails. By 3pm, anything resembling work is done for the day. From this point on, you would nap, walk outside, have dinner, and fill the rest of your day with any hobbies or interests.
If you were a professor today trying to follow this routine, you’d be denied tenure. Try the same working in a company, and you’d be fired within the first week.
But this is the exact daily routine followed by Charles Darwin to write nineteen technical volumes, including On the Origin of Species, and his controversial The Descent of Man. His version of messages and email, of course, arrived by post, and probably at a more civilised pace.
Darwin is not alone. Take examples of other 20th-century thinkers, such as Winston Churchill and Henri Poincaré, and you’ll find more evidence that deliberate rest was key to the impact they had on society.
If a routine like Darwin’s feels out of reach, there are steps we can take towards incorporating meaningful rest into our own lives. My favourite principle comes out of Oliver Burkeman’s concept of priority selection. This principle is built around paying yourself first, meaning allocating time to your priorities.
As soon as I realised the positive impact daily outdoor time was having, I had to fit it into my own routine. My daily schedule was tight, but I could wake up half an hour earlier and use that time to get outside.
Deciding to protect these thirty minutes at the start of the day has helped establish a strong habit. This is exactly what paying yourself first is about.
Importantly, any new habit should come with one mindset shift. To truly engage in deliberate rest, you must relinquish any feeling of guilt.
Sometimes, when we give ourselves the space to rest, it can feel wrong. That can be one of the biggest obstacles to resting regularly. Consider this as the essential time you need to be your best self.
A life built with intentional tech and deliberate rest is the powerful combo you didn’t know you needed.
This Week’s Question
What does genuine rest look like in your life, and when did you last do it without feeling guilty about what you weren’t doing instead?
Reply to me at hello@charliesamways.com. I read every one.
From The Channel This Week
This week’s videos are a practical extension of this idea. The first video is all about the benefits I found following Darwin’s footsteps and getting my own daily outdoor time. The second video is about a technique I use for reading and listening, which increases the value of my deliberate rest time. If this newsletter resonated, this is worth your time.
I Swapped One Hour of Screens For Nature Every Day
Why Reading and Listening Simultaneously Is Genius
Plus, don’t miss out on my Free Kindle Guide, available to download here.
Wishing you all the best this week, and finding ways to be more restful.
Catch up next week,
Charlie Samways