Chances are you’ll be able to relate to one of these sentiments…
You find it almost impossible to sit still. The moment you stop and try to do something for yourself like read a book or start a creative project, there's a pull to be doing something useful or more productive. Resting actually feels annoyingly uncomfortable, with a side of guilt!
Maybe you’re not great at picking up the book or creative project, but you’re okay with being still. You get to the end of the day, collapse on the couch, scroll, watch something, and you don't feel guilty about it. It's the one bit of the day that you feel you finally chill.
No matter which sentiment you can relate to, the outcome will be the same… you’ll still be running on empty tomorrow. (Sorry, I’ll get more optimistic in a minute, I promise!)
I sat down with Dr Emily Musgrove this week. She’s a clinical psychologist, author of Unstuck, and resident psychologist on The Imperfects podcast. I had asked her whether our nervous system considers the evening veg out on the couch as rest.
Her reply: “There’s a big difference between being still and resting.” (I’ll take that as a no!)
Dr Em explained the stillness that comes with being horizontal on the couch, scrolling on your phone and/or watching TV is rarely restorative. We reach for it as a response to all of the demands in our day; to get away from how depleted we feel, and in the short term it helps us escape the exhaustion, overwhelm, burnout. But it does nothing to refuel the tank.
Okay, so if we know the scrolling doesn't actually restore us, why do we feel guilty stopping to do the things that would, like the book or the creative project? Dr Em explained it comes back to rules we absorbed long before we could question them.
“Internalised rules and expectations about what an ideal mother does, or what an ideal worker is… These were laid down in early childhood, both by our cultural messages and also what we saw our parents doing.”
For many of us, Dr Em so accurately points out, we will have seen our mothers seemingly doing it all. We may never have seen our mums lying down, having a rest, pursuing their own interests and hobbies. So there's no template there to know how to do that.
Striving was praised. Rest was not. And when there's no permission to rest, stopping can actually register as unsafe. So it feels stressful and agitating instead of relaxing, and reaching for something just for yourself brings a wave of guilt, because on some level it “breaks a rule” we were raised by.
Beyond our own homes, the culture only reinforced it. Busyness as a badge of honour. Productivity culture telling us our value is in our output.
It appears we've been sold a version of rest that doesn't restore us, and made to feel guilty about the version that does.
This is not our fault. We’re not lazy, we’re not broken… although we do need to start breaking some of those outdated rules!
Here’s how we start, according to Dr Em: “As an adult, we need to firstly recognise that’s what is happening. Second of all, we need to slowly teach ourselves that this is not only allowed, but also necessary in order for me to show up in a really resourced way in all the parts of my life that are important to me.”
Don’t worry, I asked Dr Em how to do that, too!
This is the first in a series where I'll share more of what Dr Em and I talked about. I’ll be dropping regular content on Instagram, too. (Thanks for all of the interest!)