E16: Rest Matters | Stacy Shaw, Assistant Professor Social Science and Policy Studies

Colleen: Shh, I'm relaxing before this episode of the WPI podcast coming up, you'll understand why. For college students, rest can feel elusive or even like a four letter word with back-to-back classes, deadlines, part-time jobs, and social pressures. It's no wonder rest often takes a back seat. But what if we told you that rest isn't just necessary? It's academic. In fact, fields like psychology, health sciences, and even design and leisure studies advocate for building something called a diverse leisure repertoire. Yes, you heard that, right? It turns out that how we rest and what we do during our downtime can make a real difference in our wellbeing, creativity, and performance. WPI one professor is flipping the script on burnout culture by assigning rest as homework. So what does science actually say about the benefits of rest? Does scheduled downtime work and how do we learn to disconnect from the digital noise? I'm Colleen Wamback and we'll discuss this and more straight ahead.

Our guest is Stacy Shaw an assistant professor in social science and policy studies. Her research focuses on understanding creative thinking in mathematics, how anxiety and other threat experiences affect mathematical cognition and reasoning. Recently she has become interested in the role of rest for academic achievement, burnout, and student wellbeing. So Stacy,  how do you define rest?

Stacy: I think that's a really great question and a hard one to answer because rest has been around for so long. There's so many names for it, and even in the field of psychology and leisure studies, there's a million different versions of it. So I've seen it show up. Being called things like recovery experiences in industrial and organizational psychology. So how do you recover from the workday? We see it just as leisure or serious leisure or passive leisure from leisure studies in the field of creativity is often called an incubation period. So what do you do when you're incubating on a problem? So carving out your own slice of the rest pie to study can be a little challenging. But in my lab we tend to operationalize it as. A form of activity that serves to energize, restore, or de-stress the individual. And oftentimes this rest period might result in an external reward. So maybe you're learning to play piano and finally get to have that recital. But important to us as it's not solely contingent upon it. And this often means rest is elective, right? You get to choose to do something. So this is our own internal definition. But when we work with college students and we study them, we tend to give a little bit of a easier to understand definition. So we will define it as rest, referring to just taking breaks, engaging in pleasurable, or fun hobbies. 

Colleen: What does it mean beyond just getting sleep?

Stacy: We exclude sleep from this definition, and this is because our lab is really interested in how do we get students to make better decisions about what to do with their waking hours rather than sleep. So sleep is biologically mandatory, but we're interested in, if you have 24 hours in a day and you get aided off for sleep, what can you do with the remaining time in between that could boost your wellbeing, creativity, things like that. Is rest different from relaxation? Rest can really describe this full gamut. A lot of variation in what people do with their free time. So if you ask a leisure scientist what is leisure for example, they'll say, well, it's not work, it's autonomous, like you get to choose to do something, but they don't really separate as much things that are really good for you and wellbeing versus things that maybe aren't so great all the time. So we know from past research that things that are really high in distractions like social media, TV can be helpful in some circumstances, but is often associated with just poor leisure satisfaction. So yeah, you watched four hours of Bravo TV but did you feel any better afterwards or could you have used that time for something better? 

Colleen: So no more Real Housewives marathon for me? 

Stacy: Look, sometimes you need to go home, you need a nap, you need the Bravo, marathon or the Great British Bake Off whatever you need. And you just need to be quote unquote lazy. And that's a perfectly normal thing to do. If it's the only thing you do for your rest periods, then it can become problematic. But I think thinking about rest from a very passive, very sort of distraction, all the way to very focused, very serious hobbies or even intellectual play. It runs the gamut, but what we are interested in our lab is how do we help students figure out what works for them and what helps them meet their own psychological needs in the moment. 

Colleen: What inspired you to explore rest in a deeper, more intentional way? 

Stacy: Yeah. It's a really interesting question because in graduate school at U-C-L-A I studied, and I still study mathematics, teaching and learning. So I've always been fascinated with how do people put the pieces together to understand something abstract. And that sort of delved into, understanding statistics, which is work I still do. But my piece of the pie in grad school was really thinking about creativity. How do people all of a sudden just have these eureka moments in mathematics that bridge different fields together, or even at the student level, like make a connection. And what's fascinating about these aha moments is that they kind of signal learning is happening. So we know when people are like, "oh, I got it" right, or, "oh", that's the greatest sound to an instructor because we're like, oof. I just saw you in real time take two pieces of the puzzle and connect them. And learning is all about connection making. So I started studying these creative aha moments that were happening. And in my own work, in my dissertation, I, uh, I brought 500 undergrads into the lab and I give them a really stubborn math problem. And then if they weren't able to solve it, I kick them out and then say, "Hey, if you happen to think of the solution to this problem. Go ahead and take that survey, tell me what you were doing, how it felt, et cetera". Um, but if they didn't solve, we would just have them take the survey anyways. So what I found is that half of the students who were unable to solve this really stubborn math problem in the lab would go on to solve it outside the lab. And they showed patterns of what we call incubation periods. So students were reporting, solving this problem when they're falling asleep or waking up when they're in the shower, right? Those wonderful shower moments we have when they were driving or on the bus, when they were zoning out in class. All of these different activities have something in common, which is that they are low in cognitive demand and they can be considered sort of a rest period. So falling asleep, taking a shower, even going for a walk. And what I've shown in my work and has been shown decades and decades ago is that aha moments are often facilitated by rest. And so you think about grappling with a math problem and getting really irritated and running out of ideas, and then your brain's like, walk away. Just you need to take a shower. You need to go for a walk. And during that time, it feels like we're abandoning our work. It feels like we're abandoning that problem. We know what's actually happening is we're sort of allowing our minds to engage in really rich cognitive processing that's outside our awareness. So we know when you walk away from that problem to do rest, right? You feel like you've abandoned that problem, you semantic network or how your knowledge is structured. Is becoming more and more active, a ripple in the pond. More and more remote ideas are coming online. We know that things that you weren't able to look past, so maybe there's a line of code you haven't been able to figure out like, why is my code not working? Maybe there's one thing that just drew all your attention, you couldn't get over it. When you take that break period, you're allowing yourself to forget that and see other viable options. And we also know that you can even assimilate cues from the environment to help you solve the problem. And this is the weirdest one, I think. So during rest periods when you walk away from that problem, your brain is like hit with a lot of different information, a lot of visual information. And so in the example of my dissertation, the math problem, the secret-I won't give out everything, but the secret was to think of exponents. And once people could think of exponents, then they usually could figure out the solution. Well, some of my participants said 'it came to me when I was zoning out in my English class, and then the teacher said, okay, we're gonna talk about form and power, and then boom. That's when it hit me that taking the power of a number would work. And I slapped myself in the face.' That's what someone literally said. I slapped myself in the face. Um, another student said 'I was staring at the corner of my desk. When my boyfriend called me, he was talking about this Minecraft stream. I was zoning out and then I thought of a right triangle grams theorem, A squared plus B squared, equal C squared and then I thought of exponents, right?' So there's all these weird ways that our brain is trying to assimilate information, but it almost always happens outside of our awareness and during rest periods.

Colleen: Okay, so exponents wouldn't excite me, but finding the perfect question for a podcast might.

Stacy: One of the most interesting findings from research on incubation periods is that people will not show any benefit to problem solving and aha moments during breaks if they don't think the problem matters. So if you get a group of students in and you say, Hey, won't you try this math problem? Ah, oh, you failed. Okay. You know what? Don't worry about it. We're not gonna come back to it. If you say we're gonna come back to that, you will see patterns of the incubation facilitating connection making. So a lot of this is motivation and there's a really cool effect in psychology called the NIK Effect, which basically says people are better at remembering unfinished tasks or lingering problems. And so sometimes it could feel like we're holding onto those. But yeah, what we think is happening is when you shift your conscious attention away from a problem, you're really allowing all these unconscious processes to take over the problem and give it back to you. So the way I like to think about this is, going back to the Great British Baking Show, you pound and you need the dough, and you get it into a form, and that's your hard, gritty consciousness working on a problem. But then you need to let it rest. You need to let it rest so it can do other things that will help sort of create this, I don't know, beautiful cake or whatever. But if you're only kneading, you're not really helping. Right. You need both on and off periods. 

Colleen: You took this idea and experience to the next level. How and why?

Stacy: So the shift happened because of COVID. So when I came here as a professor. It was 2020 after my first year was 2021. We saw a lot of concern about mental health, wellbeing, self-care. I was involved in a lot of efforts on campus to try and help students sort of deal with the new normal to help them recover from really stressful academics. And one of the conversations I was in, I remember. Someone saying, we have to convince students that rest is important. We have to convince them. We need to find a way to show them that they need to do this. I thought that was wild because of course rest is important. It's associated with all these wonderful things in the mind and the brain. And so I thought, well, if we're gonna start to convince students that rest is important, we need to understand their attitudes and their experiences of how they think about rest. So I started a study here at WPI, where I ask students what do you do for rest? What are your barriers to rest? Do you think rest is important to your productivity? When I got some preliminary data, I was able to share it with some of my colleagues at UCLA and it looked a little bleak. And I remember, Karen Given at UCLA was like, wow, what can I do to help? So together with my graduate students, we started studying student attitudes. I think we ended up over 250 students, I believe, and we just gave them the survey, which was like, help us understand how you think about rest, and we learned some really important things. One of the most shocking things was we had predicted that if you ask a student, especially a WPI student, how important is rest for your productivity? We were like they're gonna say no. They're gonna be like, what do you mean? Because often rest is seen as this antithesis of work. So we're like, students are gonna have terrible attitudes about rest. They're not gonna think it's productive at all. We pre-registered this, we were so confident, so of course we were dead wrong. So what we learned from the first study is that students surprised us. They said that they do see rest as important for their productivity. In fact, like 85% of them said they strongly agreed or agreed with a statement that rest is an important part of their productivity. We thought it was gonna be the opposite. We thought 85% might say no, of course not, because often rest is seen as the antithesis of work. So students really surprised us. The other interesting part about this is if you ask students, do you feel guilty when you take a rest period or a break, you. Also see about 85% of them saying, yeah, I do. And so you have this really interesting tension of a student population who both feels that rest is important and probably worthy, but also feels really bad when they engage in it. And so the results of this study suggested that we don't really need to convince students that rest is important. We need to help them deal with negative emotions when they're trying to engage in rest periods. 

Colleen: I found it fascinating that you kind of trick students into resting. Can you explain how you gave them permission or a license to rest?

Stacy: So out of the original study, we were like, man, we have students who know they should do this. They just have a really hard time doing it. We also had students who were reporting things like, I know I need to do it, but I just can't. I have too much work. I can't stop myself. It's just too hard. And so out of that first study, we are really grappling with how do you change some attitudes about rest. How do you get students to rest better? What we found in the first study is that oftentimes people would say the way they would rest is by literally going home and laying down and watching TV 'cause they didn't have the energy for anything else. Or they just doom scrolled, right? because that's what felt right. But afterwards they knew it wasn't satisfying. It didn't leave them feeling any better. And so the question then becomes, how do we help people who already know rest is important to perhaps rest better. So I took this into the classroom. What I ended up doing was I do a lecture about rest and the importance of breaks to talk about things like incubation, unconscious processing. Then I have them read like a popular blog about deliberate rest. This was a term that was coined by Alex Pang. He wrote a book about rest. He never defined it, which as a psychologist, I was like, oh, this is such a cool term. I would love a definition. But his take on it is that it's active. You're going for a walk, you're hiking up a mountain, you're doing something. You're not just sitting there. And so he would really distinguish deliberate rest from distraction people need distractions. Sometimes TV's good, totally fine, but he really wanted people to be very deliberate about how they rested.

Colleen: And now that leads us to your course assignments.

Stacy: So you come to my class, I teach you about rest. I have you read about the difference between distraction and deliberate rest, and then I ask you on a homework assignment, Hey, if you were to suddenly find yourself with two hours. What kind of deliberate rest would you make for yourself? The kids these days call dopamine menu. What kind of menu would you give yourself and students say, oh, I'd finally call my mom. Or I'd finished that art project and they designed these these rest periods with no clue what's coming next. So then they return to class, we talk about their different rest periods, and we talk about the barriers to rest. And it's almost always the same thing. I don't have enough time. There's too much homework. Where am I gonna find an extra two hours? And I will say, great. Okay, so are you ready for our surprise lecture next class? And they're like, yeah, what is it? It's been on the syllabus, right? I'm like, yeah, we're not meeting you are gonna take the time that we would normally have a two hour lecture and you're gonna engage in your deliberate rest period and then you're gonna report back. And this last time I was met with a groan, my entire class was like, ah, man. And I'm like, I'm literally assigning you rest something you designed for yourself. So I've been doing this for a few years. When it works, it works really well. Sometimes it doesn't work. I had one student who said, I tried to build a model boat or something, and it had 400 pieces and the next thing I knew what was four hours later and none of it worked and I was just angry. Right? And so this is sort of illustrating the idea that sometimes our rest periods don't serve us and we have to be very aware of our logistical constraint, our time constraints, and what actually is a good match, but at least to a good conversation later. So students go do their rest and then they come back and we talk about how it went. And this last class I had 42 students who allowed me to collect data on them, which was great. Thank you students. And what we find is just by changing the behavior first. We actually see shifts in attitude. So about 57% of those students mentioned that they thought about rest differently. They thought about more things they could do for rest. They thought about how they could be more intentional. They thought about how maybe what they were doing before was rest and that was beneficial. I see this in my teaching evaluations a lot. I'll ask, what is one thing you're gonna remember from this class? And they'll say, rest. Even if it's not a class about rest, they'll always say rest. When students reflected on their rest habits, I noticed a wide range of responses. Many emphasized active forms of rest, like hobbies, while some others mentioned passive ones, like endless doom scrolling. 

Colleen: Did that surprise you?

Stacy: It was a relief? Because the purpose of this class activity was to get them to be deliberate and active. I encouraged my class to think about what sort of needs they might need to have met. There's a lot of theories in psychology, but one of them I really like is called Self-Determination Theory, and it's theories upon theories, but basically it centers on three core psychological needs that most people have, which is the need for autonomy. So you are in control of something, the need for competency, so to master or grow in a given domain, and the need for relatedness to feel like you belong. So you can think about this as like autonomy is you have no control over your job or what you're studying. You go home and you're a creative writer, and you build your universe and you get to figure out what happens, right? Competencies, maybe you didn't get a win that week, so you go home and you want to defeat the final boss of your video game, you need that win. Relatedness is you wanna feel accepted, so you go volunteer or you hang out with your friends, you foster those relationships. And I encourage my students to think about what don't you get from your work as a student or every day? And how can you build and rest opportunities to fulfill those needs? And so, yeah, I think the most common one is creative hobbies? These are people who were knitting or they were painting, they were writing, they were just engaged in play, which coming from the field of creativity, I'm like, ah, yes, we love this. Right? Next was socializing. So maintaining those relationships was really great. Followed by things like games, reading and I really resonate with this. A lot of people said chores. I think that was about 12%, but I'm like, yes, I love a clean environment. So getting my chores done always feels really good.

Colleen: How did you balance your goal of encouraging students to rest with your role as a researcher, studying the effects of it?

Stacy: Yeah, so coming from education research, it's totally normal to study your students. But I think studying rest periods requires going out of the role of the student and into the role of participants. I have to do harder IRBs, so like human ethics, there's also like a power imbalance. So I didn't look at these data until after grades are due.

Colleen: Let's talk about the physical benefits. What does science tell us about how we rest and sleep ?

Stacy: There's interesting connections between sleep and rest. So. One of the things we know sleep does, especially for learning, is it consolidates memory. After a really heavy day of learning as a student, you need your sleep because if you do not sleep, nothing you learn gets consolidated into your memory. It's sort of like baking it in. And when fascinating. Finding that we know of is like Adderall. People who are addicted to Adderall have really bad memory problems, and it's not because of Adderall, it's because Adderall prevents them from sleeping. And if you don't sleep, you're not consolidating memory. But we also see some potential for rest in this role. So I have one student, who's been trying to figure out how to use these brief moments of rest where you just cross your arms on the desk and put your head down to see if that will actually help consolidate memory after physics learning. So imagine you're in the physics classroom, your teacher's just overwhelmed you with information. You know our ideas. Maybe if you just put your head down for 10 minutes, you can be able to consolidate that. We've seen some of this evidence from other researchers in the lab where they memorize lists of words. We see this when people are learning. I think Aaron Wamsley is the one who did this, looked at brain states with EEG and found that the more people switch between an online and offline state, the better memory they have. So it's this idea that when you rest or allow your attention to just settle down, you can dedicate more cognitive resources to baking in things you just learned.

Colleen: Do your findings or advice apply beyond college life?

Stacy: Yeah, college students sometimes are good models for all humankind, and sometimes they're not. As psychologists, we like to just pretend that, you know, all our students are really representative of all humans. But in this case, I think they are, but it's interesting. One of the first times I did the classroom activity where I signed deliberate rest, I had a student, she is a grad student. She just recently graduated. But she's a full-time teacher and this was during 20, 21, 22 school year. The new normal-everyone's overwhelmed, everyone stretched. Then a lot of teachers left the profession, retired early. So she's working at night getting her PhD. She was one of my best students. And I remember when I said, your job this week is to rest. She was like, are you kidding me? And I remember her saying, you can't ask me to do one more thing. You can't ask me to even put something else in my to-do list, even if it's rest. And I said, well, if it was work, would you do it? And she said, yeah. And I said this is work. You are just gonna have to figure out how to rest. And she came back the next week. And she's like, I owe you a huge apology. I left my school bag at work. I did not take it home with me. I take my bag home every night and I just sit there and it, eats away at me. I've got to grade, I got all this work. She's like, I left my bag at work and I had no idea how it would change my life. By the way, this is not normal, not everyone has this experience. The student was just truly exceptional. But she since then leaves her bag at work every single day and four years later, she's like, that literally changed how I thought about rest, how I do rest. Because we don't think about it sometimes as recharging us and energizing us. We think of it as one more thing we have to do. So by going through the motions and putting yourself first and being very intentional about. How you're resting and what you need from your rest and designing around that can feel like a burden sometimes. But I challenge anyone to think about their needs. Design something for themself, engage in it and see how you feel.

Colleen: Electronic baggage or distractions like texts, emails, notifications. They seem to be constant. How do they interfere with how we rest and can we set boundaries?

Stacy: We are all completely driven by our environment. So if you put your phone next to you or you put that email notification on, or you take your bag home or whatever it is. That's a reminder in your environment, you can't rest. Look, there's work to be done, so I am just gonna challenge anyone listening to this, to put yourself first and be very deliberate about how you rest. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn't. And I think part of becoming a good rester is to experiment with what works for you. The sad truth is it's gonna change, what you used to do for rest might not serve you anymore or you might need to change it up. So we are constantly evolving and our needs are changing, but as long as we are trying to think intentionally about how our rest can serve us, that will be helpful. One of my physical therapists has this thing I love, which is, everybody I feel like at this point has heard this, you know, how can you pour out your teapot if you're not, pouring yourself first. But she said to me, Stacy. Do you wanna fill yourself with a cheap tea or do you want like the most exquisite gourmet tea to fill yourself up with? And that's how you have to think about your rest are you on the TV scrolling through social media versus going for a walk or writing poetry or doing music, or whatever it is. That's a much stronger quality that you're filling yourself up with. And sometimes it's easier to sit on the couch. Than to go for a walk. But the outcomes are different.

Colleen: What about scheduling rest? Does that actually work?

Stacy: Yeah. And this is not something I've discovered, and I've changed psychology. We've known about this for a long time and this comes from cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a practice used in clinical psychology oftentimes for depression. And so one of the hallmarks of depression is that people stop getting positive reinforcement from their environment. They don't wanna go outside, they don't wanna leave their bed. They're just sort of stuck and of course, cognitive behavioral therapy has a cognitive element, so some of this is like change the way you're thinking. So instead of saying, I'm so tired, I suck, everyone hates me, they'll try and get you to think, you know, I'm just having a slow morning I'm just having a bad day. Not everyone hates me. Just sometimes I have a thought that, you know, maybe I'm not where I want to be right now in life or something. And so some of it is focused on changing the way you talk to yourself, changing the way you think about things, but there's this other really cool aspect that's totally focused on behavior and the idea there, which I think is so fascinating, is sometimes the best way to change an attitude is to change the behavior first, and part of the suite of techniques of behavioral activation is something called pleasant activity scheduling. And the idea is that, you know, there's lists that exist out there, but you sit down with a therapist or a coach. And they're like, what do you think is gonna make you feel really good if you do it and you're like, you know what? I wanna go film a podcast, or I wanna go, uh, call my mom or finish that puzzle. And so, you come up with a plan. So you identify what you're gonna do, but also when you're gonna do it. And the trick is you don't follow your mood, you follow your schedule. So if it's at 6:00 PM you're calling your mom. Doesn't matter if I feel up for it or not, I'm gonna do it. And what they find is that when people follow a schedule and not their mood, they tend to show better outcomes. They show less depressive symptoms. They show sort of increased momentum. And I always think about like going to the gym, like no one ever wants to go to the gym. You drive there and you're like, oh God, I'm so lazy, right? You come out of the gym, you're like, yeah, let's go. Like you feel energized. And so our mind often plays tricks on us. Just lay there, just stay there. Just turn on the tv. Everything's so much easier. What's actually beneficial for us is getting up, moving, keeping that momentum.

Colleen: You've advised student-led projects related to rest. Can you share an example of one and what made it stand out? 

Stacy: We had a really cool MQP happen this past year. So this was, myself and Dr. Angela Incolingo Rodriguez. We paired up to co-advise this project where they wanted to see what would happen if you brought students into the lab and you either, randomly assign them to do business as usual. So they go on their phone or they do homework, or you force them to rest. And our lab looked amazing for the whole year. We had puzzles, we had coloring books, we had a train book, which was awesome. We had all sorts of play activities and so they bring people in the lab, they'd get them to do this for about 15 minutes and then they'd say, 'surprise, you're gonna have to take an exam from your class, by the way, I'll be right back.' So unexpected stressor. And their hypothesis was that if you get people to rest before a stressor, that would actually buffer a stress response. So oftentimes we think, oh, I'll just do it later. I'll work, I'll use rest as a recovery. But we are also thinking maybe it could help maintain your stress throughout your week, your month, or your years, whatever. They brought people in the lab and they did just this. What they found was really interesting. So first of all, the manipulation totally failed. We did not stress students out. I think it's really hard to shake WPI students. They've been through a lot, right? Seven week terms, maybe finals week. But we did find something really interesting, which was students who are randomly assigned to do business as usual rated that 15 minute period as more restful compared to people who were in the rest condition. But if you look at their cortisol levels, which was collected through saliva samples throughout the study, people in the rest condition showed lower cortisol, meaning that their bodies were showing less sort of stress compared to people who were doing business as usual. So at the same time, you have people perceiving one condition as being more restful, but their body's showing higher cortisol when the other condition is seen as less restful, but their bodies are showing greater indications of rest. And this is the mind body disconnection sometimes. 

Colleen: How hard is it really to detach from work?

Stacy: It's a hard thing. I struggle with it. I know I should not, I'm like, oh, I study rest. I should be really good at this. It's really challenging sometimes. Part of the time it's because our work is really stressful and your brain's always trying to prioritize thinking about the thing that's the most important. So if you have a big deadline or you're worried that you made a mistake, it's going to eat away at you. But also at the same time sometimes I'm really excited about my work, I wanna stay up all night thinking about rest and how all these studies I wanna run. But I realize the next morning all those ideas were really bad and just ate up my sleep. And so it doesn't really work. Sometimes I think rest, good rest, comes from constraint, stopping yourself from maybe doing something that feels good in the moment, but you know, you'll pay for later. Stopping yourself from overanalyzing situations, which can be really challenging to do. But, one thing I found that works, at least for me because I love thinking is my rest periods have to be immersive. I have to be able to be so absorbed in what I'm doing that I can't possibly think about my work. So I'll just admit to you right now, and to anyone listening, it's World of Warcraft. The way I love to decompress is I go online, I hang out with my friends, I heal a 20, 40 person man raid. The tank's slowly dying. People are pulling agro, if you know what that means. And I'm trying to manage everything at once and it's so fun for me. I feel like it recharges me, but I can't think about my research and heal the raid. So that is a really important part of my rest menu or my dopamine menu. So do I need to immerse myself so I can forget about work? And the answer is often yes. Sometimes if I feel okay, like it's not sort of spilling over, I can do something more light like cleaning or something like that. But I really encourage people, if you have a hard time detaching yourself from work do something where you're interacting with other people, or you feel like you're so absorbed in your novel or your art or whatever, that it just sort of gives you the space to walk away.

Colleen: In your experience, what's the key to truly getting good rest?

Stacy: I think the key to getting good rest is to be intentional about it and to take it as seriously as you take your work. I think once it reaches that status that you give the time of day to think about it that is where it really needs to be for you to, to benefit, Having what's called a diverse leisure repertoire, which is a fancy way of saying a very strong dopamine menu, having lots of options that you can pick from at a given notice is helpful. So if you're like, I want to be a woodworker and that's my rest, but you don't have the space for woodworking, you don't have the tools, it's not really a low barrier, right? So you wanna have a lot of options that at any moment you are prepared to engage in because you have to be flexible so along with the intentionality, the immersion, I think the greatest thing people could do for themselves is not only take rest seriously, but engage in the great experiment of life, which is figure out what works for you. Take notes, reflect, did that make you feel better or worse? Oftentimes our brains will tell us, sit on the couch or go on social media or do this thing and it feels good in the moment, but later it feels really terrible. And so being able to identify that for yourself, to experiment with new hobbies, which is related to. All sorts of wellbeing and, you know, successful aging and things like that can really enrich our lives. Sometimes you know, myself, I'm like, oh, I wanna do watercoloring, it seems so relaxing. Oh, I hate it. I hate it so much. I can't control the water goes. It's just not for me. And I want it to be for me, but it's not. So life is often unfair. And the things we think are restful are not, we trick ourselves into believing they are. And I think in order for us to protect our wellbeing and self care, we need to engage in the experiments with ourselves and really figure out what is gonna work for me and how do I engage in that?

Colleen: Stacy, this has been enlightening, eye-opening and so helpful for not only college students but people from all walks of life. Thank you.

Stacy: Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. I hope you get some good rest.

Colleen: This has been the WPI Podcast. You can hear more episodes of this podcast and more like this one at wpi.edu/listen. There you can find audio versions of stories about our students, faculty, and staff, everything from events to academic projects. Please follow this podcast and check out the latest WPI News on Spotify, apple Podcasts, apple Music, audible, or YouTube podcasts. You can also ask Alexa to open WPI. This podcast was produced at the WPI Global Lab. In the innovation studio. We had engineering help from PhD candidate Varun bot. Tune in next time for another episode of the WPI Podcast. I'm Colleen Wamback.