I’m feet up, watching Netflix, and when I hear the sound of my husband’s car on the driveway, I jump up and switch the TV off.
I was exhausted, feeling like an extra on The Walking Dead. I hadn’t slept through the night for months, waking up at 3 a.m. and finding myself downstairs reading until I finally nodded off at 6 a.m., just before I heard my husband get up and the morning ritual of kids’ breakfasts and school runs started. So resting on the sofa before starting dinner is a perfectly acceptable activity.
But why did I react this way?
I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but hearing a family member come home while resting triggered me to jump up and pretend I wasn’t. It wasn’t a conscious decision; even though I was struggling with sleep, nerves on edge and brain fogged, I was hard-wired not to be caught resting.
During my burnout recovery in my 40s, I struggled with the advice, ‘You have to rest.’
I defined rest as sitting on the sofa, eating wotsits … the epitome of unproductive. And being unproductive was sinful.
I can now look back and see how strongly these word-hard stories of mine kept me from recovering from my burnout … I was hardwired to be productive at all times, so being caught with my feet up on the sofa was a bad thing.
Resisting rest is not normal
Today, I speak to hundreds of women (and men, too!) who tell me similar stories of resisting rest. It’s all too common now, to the point that we joke about it with our friends, which helps us normalise this behaviour, knowing that this Pavlov Dog’s reaction inflicts others.
But resisting rest is not normal.
It should never be normal to jump up when someone is having an afternoon nap, a quiet moment decompressing from back-to-back meetings, or resting on the sofa before the next job needs doing.
If our bodies need rest, we need to rest. If we don’t, we will get ill. Fact, yes?!
Rest is not a reward for hard work
Rest also needs to happen before we need it.
Another hard work story I see play out with many, myself included, back in my 40s, is that we can rest when we have performed. We can rest once the jobs are done, and our productivity levels mean that we are ahead of the tasks and now have time to rest.
I always return to Mother Nature and look at how seasons work. Our modern calendar puts Spring at the start of the seasons, with Winter at the end of the year. And yet, Mother Nature begins her incredible work in Winter, preparing the earth and drawing on its resources so she is ready to burst forward in Spring. Winter may feel like a dead month on the coldest, darkest days in December, but it’s far from dead because without these precious months of rest, recharge, and reallocation of resources, Spring could never happen.
I’m sure you know how you feel after a good night’s sleep and how much more productive and in flow your day is, so why not rest before the busy periods in your day?
Unravel your hard work stories
Resting during periods of illness ought to be essential, and you probably know this on a logical level. Yet our hard work stories prevent us from resting, even when we know we need to.
Some journalling questions to help you ponder on yours …
- How do you define productive?
- When do you feel most productive?
- Who taught you about resting (or not resting), and what did they say?
Many of our stories are given to us by our parents and peers growing up, so I invite you to go back to your teens and 20s, as well as your more recent decades, and reflect on how those around you perceive rest. You may find that your hard work story isn’t yours … find a thread and pull it. Unravel those stories that hardwire your ability to rest.
