A colleague of mine once gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: before a patient goes to a psychologist wondering whether they are depressed or anxious, first make sure they are not surrounded by idiots. She used a profanity for “idiots,” but in the interest of keeping this post fit for polite company, I’ll let your imagination fill in the blank.

Humorous as it sounds, there is a great deal of wisdom packed into that line. Environment matters. It shapes our mood, our thoughts, our nervous system, and, over time, even our sense of self. The people around us affect our well-being in ways both obvious and subtle. Their emotional tone, expectations, values, and reactivity all leave an imprint. We are influenced by what we live among.

But what counts as “the people around us” has changed dramatically. Community used to mean one’s tribe. Then it meant family, neighbors, and the rhythms of local life. With newspapers, radio, television, and eventually the internet, community expanded far beyond physical proximity. Today, the voices that shape our inner world may not come from anyone we have ever met. We are now connected globally, instantly, and incessantly. That may be a marvel of modern life, but it comes with a cost: we can be deeply plugged in while becoming increasingly detached from place, presence, and genuine relationship.

In earlier times, perhaps one had to contend with the village idiot. Now we can be surrounded by thousands of them before breakfast, courtesy of mass media and social media. Outrage, fear, foolishness, tribalism, and emotional chaos can all be delivered directly into our homes and into our hands. Is it any wonder so many people feel frayed, overstimulated, and exhausted?

This is where rest and retreat come in—not as luxuries, but as medicine.

Rest, in its simplest form, means honoring the body’s need for recovery. It means making room for sleep, for unstructured time, for moments in which nothing is being optimized or achieved. It means refusing to live in high gear all the time. Yes, there are busy days and demanding seasons. Life asks much of us. But if your standing answer to “How are you?” is “Busy,” then busyness has likely become more than a circumstance; it has become an identity. That is worth examining.

There is real liberation in learning to say no. No to one more obligation. No to one more request. No to the internalized belief that your worth is tied to your output. Our culture has become deeply confused on this point. It often treats exhaustion as a badge of honor and productivity as a measure of virtue. But being productive does not make you a better human being. In a society addicted to overwork and overstimulation, doing less can be a radical act of self-care.

Retreat is rest’s deeper cousin. If rest is a pause, retreat is a deliberate stepping away. It may look like a media blackout, a digital detox, a silent weekend, or simply a break from commitments and obligations. For the sensitive, introverted, or easily overstimulated among us, it may also include intentional stretches of limited human contact. This does not make a person antisocial or less engaged with life. There are reasons that monasteries, hermitages, and silent retreats have existed across centuries and traditions. Human beings have long known that the soul needs spaciousness in order to hear itself.

Knowing yourself is part of wisdom. Knowing your limits is part of maturity. Avoiding burnout is not selfishness; it is stewardship. When your own cup is empty, even your good intentions begin to run dry. But when you take time to replenish yourself, you become more available to do good in the world.
And then there is FOMO, that modern anxiety that whispers we are missing something important if we unplug. But FOMO is a moving target. It will never be satisfied because the stream of information never ends. The real task is discernment: What actually nourishes? What informs without overwhelming? What keeps you connected to reality without drowning you in it?

This is especially true with the news. There is a meaningful difference between being informed and doomscrolling. My suggestion is a partial media blackout: dispense with sensationalist television news that combines information with cortisol-spiking imagery, dramatic sound, and emotional manipulation. Read the news you want to learn more about in print or online. I repeat: read. Reading creates a different relationship with information. It slows the pace, restores some distance, and helps prevent the nervous system from being hijacked by sound bites and spectacle. Radio and podcasts can also be excellent options, provided you are discerning about the source, the tone, and the content you are letting into your inner world.

It is also important to choose your battles. Maybe the thought of foreign conflict is too much to bear right now, but you can still give your head and heart to issues surrounding climate change. Or perhaps another cause is where your concern can be focused most constructively. The point is that you do not need to be emotionally entangled with every crisis the world presents. Our species did not evolve to process the suffering of the entire globe in real time, every day, from a device in our pocket.

This, I suspect, is part of what underlies the rise in chronic anxiety, especially among the young—now often referred to as the “anxious generation.” We are trying to live with Stone Age nervous systems in a digital environment that monetizes attention, amplifies alarm, and rarely allows for silence. The result is not greater wisdom, but greater agitation. We become informed in fragments and depleted in full.

Rest and retreat, then, are not acts of avoidance. They are acts of wisdom. They remind us that a healthy life requires rhythm: engagement and withdrawal, effort and recovery, service and solitude. Without that rhythm, we lose our center. With it, we regain clarity, energy, and a more grounded way of being in the world.