Many who know me describe me as a calm, balanced chick who seems to have found that often elusive sweet-spot between activity and down time. There is a good deal of truth to this, but it has taken me a lifetime to befriend rest. I am still learning.

I was raised on a dairy farm in Upstate New York. My home town is nestled in the foothills of the Catskills and Adirondacks and still has only one traffic light. It is drop-dead gorgeous. Beauty aside, I don’t sugar coat things when I tell people that farming is dangerous, relentless work. Cows need milking twice a day, barns need cleaning, animals need to be fed, and fields need tending. Equipment breaks year round, pipes freeze in the winter, and once in a while a neighbor calls to say that one (or 50) of your cows has broken the fence to graze (and poop) on their lawn. In short, farming is not a life of leisure!

Farm families know what hard work feels like. We know the agony of 4:00 a.m. wake-ups in blizzards and ice storms. We know the 18- hour summer days that flow between animal care and crop maintenance. We know the pain of salty sweat flowing freely into hay-scraped skin on 90 degree days as we unload wagons of heavy bales. We feel the chronic ache of hard labor in our muscles and joints. Growing up a farm girl taught me perseverance, respect for Mother Nature and changing seasons, and the value and satisfaction of a job well done.

There was one thing I didn’t learn on the farm and that was how to rest. While we had occasional Sunday afternoons when the whole family napped, slowing down regularly was not modeled much for me, in part because a farmer's work never ends. I have vivid memories of my father taking forced rest after injuries or accidents, which meant more weight for my siblings and me to carry on the farm, woven around school and extracurricular schedules. Other than that, my dad was a man in perpetual motion.

I have had to learn how to prioritize rest on my own as an adult. It has not been an easy journey and I still struggle at times, often acting more a “human doing” than a “human being”.

Why should we invest in rest? Because it is vital for our survival!

In order to function at optimal levels, we need to downregulate our nervous systems on a regular basis. Many of us spend the bulk of our waking hours in various degrees of fight or flight mode, amping up the sympathetic side of our nervous system to get stuff done. Without slowing down, we are constantly releasing stress hormones (like cortisol) so we can keep going and going, pushing ourselves to do “one more thing” before we collapse. Many people, like my dad, live in chronic states of activation and are slowed only when they become ill or burned out or depressed or realize their marriage is in the toilet because they’ve been too busy doing to pay attention to their partner.

The good news? Learning to slow down may not be as difficult as you think. But, just as we can’t grow physically stronger by simply thinking about the dumbbells in the closet, we cannot learn to rest unless we give it a go.

To give you a small taste of how to reset quickly, try the 10-second pattern interrupt exercise. This is a great practice if you begin to feel mentally overwhelmed or anxious and want to come back into better balance. Wherever you are, begin to rub your fingers together, noticing the ridges of your fingerprints, the temperature of your fingers, or the texture of your skin. Another option is to alternately touch your thumb to each finger. Just try for 10 seconds. Of course, you can continue for as long as you’d like, but aim for 10 seconds which, for most of us, is 1-2 rounds of lengthened breath. Either of these exercises will shift your awareness from the mental hamster wheel back into your body. You can repeat this practice throughout the day, as needed. Let me know how this practice lands for you!

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My daughter Maddie snapped the above photo of my dad and me this past summer. As this perfect July day drew to a close, the sky was painted with swaths of magenta and lavender and our nostrils were filled with the sweet scent of freshly mowed hay. Both my kids listened with rapt attention as their Grampy swept his arm across the horizon and took a moment to share that despite the endless hard work, he has never tired of his "workplace" of 200 acres of rolling hills and stunning views.

I have deep appreciation for the labors of my ancestors. I love going home and connecting to the earth the Kling family has worked for hundreds of years.

But this summer, I also realized this: working to the point of burnout and exhaustion is part of my lineage. It does NOT have to be part of my legacy.