Sunil Rajaraman, VP of marketing at GoodRx, joins Dr. Emily to discuss the importance of rest and why it can be difficult to unplug. Listen now as Dr. Emily and Sunil walk through how to maximize and protect our downtime without feeling guilty about it!

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Ready to break an emotional sweat? Welcome to Emotionally Fit, with me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. As a therapist, I know that staying mentally healthy takes work and repetition. That's why I'll share emotional pushups, short, actionable exercises to help you strengthen your mental fitness. From improving your friendships to managing stress, let's flex those feels and do some reps together.

Hey there, fit fans. I'm here today with Sunil Rajaraman, marketer, investor, and VP of marketing at GoodRx. Sunil, it's so great to have you here today.

It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Absolutely, and today we're going to be talking about the importance of rest and our complicated feelings about it. I'm curious, what does rest look like in your life and how good are you at prioritizing it?

It's funny that you ask that because I am trying to figure that out myself at the moment. I'm not very good at disconnecting and I constantly feel like I need to be in a state of doing things. This is going to be a great exercise for me today because I'm hoping I actually learn from you, Emily.

Fantastic, I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense and allow me to present a common scenario to you here. So you wake up in the morning one day, and you realize that you really need a day off. So you spend the next half hour debating with yourself. Should I go to my meetings anyway? Should I call in sick but still return emails? Should I book myself a spa day but be reachable on Slack? And you go back and forth in your mind until the decision has been made for you because it's too late to get ready in time for your first meeting anyway. So you get a momentary boost of excitement about all of the relaxing that you're going to do that day and all of the life tasks you're going to catch up on, but pretty soon, the guilt starts to settle in. You feel bad that you bailed on that meeting with your team, you're resting and they're working and why the hell should you get a break when they're working their asses off to hit that deadline? So even though you're still in bed in your pajamas, your mind is at work, and your stomach is unsettled.

By the end of the day, you don't feel recharged or relaxed. You mostly feel guilty and anxious to get back to work to make sure everything went smoothly in your absence. You really wanted a break, you needed it actually, but the part of you that doesn't believe you deserved that break makes you feel stressed and worried. It punished you out of relaxing actually, thereby bringing about its preferred reality, the one where you didn't get a break at all. So now in addition to missing work, you've also missed out on all of the benefits your day off was meant to produce. Your guilt has sabotaged your time off. So Sunil, does this sound familiar at all? Has it ever happened to you?

This sounds so familiar to me. Yeah, I lost days to basically the scenario you just described. Extremely familiar to me. So yes, that hit very close.

I can tell you that it's what happens to me almost every single time I take a day off. Despite the fact that my team is really supportive of rest, it's just how I end up feeling. And of course the moral of the story here is that we need to stop punishing ourselves for taking a break. When we take time for self-care which we should be doing regularly, we can't just take the time, we actually have to enjoy the time. Because if we don't leave the break feeling recharged, what's the point? We should approach rest with the same intention and commitment that we bring to our work. We should schedule it in advance, we should stay off our email, we should really relax. Which I think will make our work-life benefit, our minds and bodies will thank us, our colleagues at that meeting are going to be fine.

So our pushup today is designed to lean into a guilt-free, sabotage-free kind of rest. So Sunil, step one of this pushup is to think about one kind of rest would be realistic in your life right now. You might not be able to take a week-long vacation, but could you have a co-worker cover for you and take a two-hour lunch? Would you be able to book a babysitter or a play date for an evening so that you can have some time without the kiddos? Or could you take a full day off if you were to plan it in advance? So for those listening in, feel free to pause here and think about what is possible in your life in the next few weeks when it comes to rest. Or keep listening to hear what Sunil shares.

So Sunil, what kind of rest is realistic for you in the next few weeks?

So it's funny that I'm actually recording this, Emily, on vacation, as you can tell from my background and the baseball cap I have on here. I will tell you, I'm trying to improve on this, so I have my nine-year-old and seven-year-old with me, my wife's with me who has a very intense job as well. I will not just say what I plan on doing but what I did do to plan for this vacation that was a little bit different. I haven't taken a proper vacation since COVID started. I started notifying coworkers a week in advance of this vacation that, "Hey, you know what? I am taking this full week off." I started notifying colleagues across other departments and projects that I'm working on at the company and I even sent an additional email, I basically over-communicated about my vacation to everybody to the point where I almost built a crew of people who said, "You know what? Yeah, you need it. Do not reach out to us. We've got this."

And here I am on day four of this vacation and sure enough, no one has really contacted me. I am tempted to check Slack and email every now and then, but I'm doing it far less than I normally would and I'm enjoying it. It's not perfect, I still have a couple of checks here and there throughout the day, but generally, this prep in advance and building a group of supporters around me to make this vacation a reality has helped a lot. And so I'm enjoying it to the extent that I can, Emily, which is actually much better than I previously would have.

Amazing, Sunil. It does sound like you're really ahead of the game here, although I will say, you are currently in a hotel bathroom recording this podcast with me. So possibly you could have done even a little bit more to really keep this time sacred for rest. But all of that said, step two of this pushup would be to block time on your calendar for the rest time, with as much assertiveness as you would a really important work commitment. So messaging your manager or coworkers so they know it's coming, making it unscheduloverable on your calendar, doing whatever you got to do to make sure the time is held. So it sounds like you did those things and it really helped free you up to enjoy the rest when you got there. So for those listening at home, go ahead and do these things Sunil suggested. Make sure people in your life know that this break is coming, and then for step three, it's all about figuring out what the best and most restful way to spend that time would be. Do you want to take a pottery class or get a massage? Go to the park? Catch up on your favorite show? Stare into space? Really think about what is most rejuvenating for you. You're not allowed to spend the time catching up on work. That's not what this is for.

So Sunil, I'm curious. With this time that you genuinely created for yourself, what have you spent your rest time doing or not doing?

Fantastic question, I think I might be a step ahead of you on this one as well, which is great. One of the challenges with going on vacation with younger kids, obviously they need constant engagement but today, we have a friend who lives on Maui which is where we're staying currently and we've arranged for her to help with childcare for the afternoon. I have a massage coming up, which is something that I really enjoy, could use, and yeah, getting a deep tissue massage this afternoon at 2:00.

Good for you. That's fantastic and I hope that when the time comes and you're laying on the table getting that massage, you remind yourself that if the guilt does creep in at all, that feeling crappy about resting will completely defeat its purpose. And for people at home, if you need to write down, "This break is for resting, not feeling crappy," on Post-it notes and put them all over your house, do that. Enjoy yourself, relax, and trust that the world will keep spinning while you take a moment to rest. So Sunil, I'm so grateful to have you here to break an emotional sweat and flex those feels. Thanks for coming in.

Thanks for having me.

And for those of you who want to hear more from Sunil, tune into our Taboo Tuesday tomorrow, where we'll dive into what it's like to deal with mental health struggles like panic attacks in the world of tech and Silicon Valley. We'll see you there.

Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit, hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. New pushups drop every Monday and Thursday. Did you do today's pushup alongside me and my guest? Tweet your experience with the hashtag #EmotionallyFit and follow me @dremilyanhalt. Please rate, review, follow, and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live, therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com, that's join-C-O-A.com, to learn more and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @joincoa. From Studio Pod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew.