You finally have time to rest, but somehow you cannot settle into it.
Maybe there is nothing urgent that needs to be done, yet you find yourself looking for something. You check your email, straighten up the house, think about what you need to do tomorrow, or start feeling guilty because the day is passing and you have not been "productive."
Sometimes we are exhausted and still have a hard time allowing ourselves to stop.
When Rest Feels Like Wasted Time
For many of us, productivity carries meaning beyond getting things done. Being productive can represent responsibility, ambition, independence, or simply being someone others can count on. When those qualities matter deeply to how we see ourselves, slowing down can feel uncomfortable.
There may also be messages we picked up long before we had language for them. Perhaps you grew up in a home where everyone was always working. Maybe rest came after everything else was finished—which meant it rarely came at all. Or perhaps adulthood has required you to manage so much for so long that staying busy simply feels normal.
Eventually, doing can start to feel more comfortable than not doing.
Research supports how powerful these beliefs can be. Tonietto and colleagues (2021) found that people who viewed leisure as wasteful or unproductive actually enjoyed their leisure time less. Those beliefs were also associated with lower happiness and higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress.
In other words, we can finally get the break we have been asking for and struggle to experience it as a break.
The Difficulty of Switching Off
Rest also requires some separation from whatever has been demanding our attention. Research on recovery from work suggests that being able to mentally disengage from work is an important part of restoring the resources used during periods of demand (Sonnentag et al., 2022).
That separation is not always immediate.
You can close the laptop while continuing the workday in your head. You can take a vacation and spend the first two days thinking about what is waiting when you return. Sometimes the demands stop, but mentally, we are still managing them.
This is why rest may require more than simply having free time.
It may also require allowing that time to have value even when nothing is being accomplished.
What Have You Learned About Rest?
There is nothing wrong with being driven, responsible, or enjoying productivity. The question is whether you can also feel comfortable when you are not producing something.
If rest consistently comes with guilt, it may be worth paying attention to what that guilt is saying. Somewhere along the way, rest may have become something that comes after you have done enough, helped enough, worked enough, or checked enough things off the list.
But there will almost always be something else that could be done.
Maybe the question is not whether you have earned the right to rest.
Maybe it is when you learned that rest had to be earned at all.
References
Sonnentag, S., Cheng, B. H., & Parker, S. L. (2022). Recovery from work: Advancing the field toward the future. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9, 33–60. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012420-091355
Tonietto, G. N., Malkoc, S. A., Reczek, R. W., & Norton, M. I. (2021). Viewing leisure as wasteful undermines enjoyment. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 97, 104198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104198
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