Negotiation #5: Negotiate Your Rest

Rest Is Essential for Your Career

Rest fuels creativity, clarity, and resilience. Even when you’re sleeping, your brain is active—consolidating memories, solving problems, and preparing you to perform better the next time. Yet in medical training, we often learn to suppress the need for rest. Long calls, overnight shifts, and a culture of endurance teach us that rest is optional—or even a weakness. But in reality, rest is one of your most valuable assets. If you don’t recognize its value, you won’t prioritize it. Negotiating your rest means reclaiming it as a non-negotiable part of your success.

Five Steps to Negotiating Your Rest

1. Recognize the Value of Rest

The first step is mindset. Rest is not wasted time; it is active recovery. It is what sharpens your mind, fuels your productivity, and sustains your career. Without rest, your ability to do high-level work declines over time.

2. Be Intentional About Time Off

Work will never be finished. There will always be another chart, manuscript, grant, or email waiting. If you wait for the work to end before resting, you will never stop. Rest requires intention. Decide when you will rest, and treat it as seriously as any other professional commitment.

3. Create Boundaries Around Rest

Protect your rest periods. This might mean putting your phone on airplane mode, turning off email notifications, or setting an out-of-office reply. Boundaries ensure that when you are resting, you are truly resting—not half-resting while still tethered to work.

4. Take Restful Vacations

Vacations should restore you—not leave you needing recovery afterward. While exciting, activity-packed trips have their place, make sure you also schedule vacations that are restful. Allow someone else to handle the planning. Let your mind fully disengage so you return recharged, focused, and ready.

5. Build Rest Into Your Workday

Rest is not only for nights, weekends, or vacations. It belongs in your workday too. Whether it’s a midday nap, a short walk, or intentional white space in your schedule, micro-rests keep you energized and productive. Protect these pauses just as you would a meeting or clinic block.

Rest Protects Your Most Important Asset

As an academic physician, your mind is your most valuable tool. Rest is what keeps it sharp. By recognizing its value, scheduling it intentionally, creating boundaries, taking truly restorative breaks, and embedding it into your daily rhythm, you protect your greatest resource.

What’s Next: Negotiating Your Resources

Rest gives you clarity and energy. Next, we’ll talk about how to secure the resources you need to do your work well—and why failing to negotiate them can hold you back.

Reflection Questions

• How has your training shaped your current relationship with rest?

• What boundaries could you put in place to better protect your rest time?

• When was the last time you took a vacation that truly restored you?

• Where in your daily schedule could you add small moments of rest?