Why Do You Feel Guilty When You Rest?
I sprained my ankle this week and have consequently spent far too long in bed, foot raised, icepack on, watching Gilmore Girls (yes, I’ve been re-watching for the last three months, no I don’t feel any shame).
I watched as the days passed by and my task list grew dusty and un-ticked. Even writing’s been a challenge because healing and resting are apparently exhausting, and Rory Gilmore does enough for the both of us anyway.
Cue: enormous guilt. And it’s not the first time I’ve taken unprecedented time off work and felt guilty for it. My wonderfully fluctuating energy levels due to my menstrual cycle mean some weeks I become entirely blob-like. Not much more gets done than the wake-up, make tea, stare out the window cycle.
And in my most energised days, I was forced to create a new time-off-work mission so I’d actually take that time off, instead of panicking and resorting to work again to stave off that weird, empty feeling that came up.
It’s almost ubiquitous: rest isn’t productive, and being unproductive isn’t okay, hence the guilt.
And it’s not our fault — we were raised in a society of hard workers, just ask any boomer or older. My ninety-three-year-old grandma and my late granddad built a fish-and-chip empire here in Yorkshire. They worked until their bones couldn’t take it, my baby mum and uncle wriggling in potato sacks hung on the back fence while they ran their first shop.
The industrial revolution showed us a new way to work, and we’ve been living it ever since. It began with the question: how can we squeeze as much production out of this line as possible? And this question we’ve internalised. It’s been in our schooling, prepping us for the ever-ready workplace, in our jobs and the glory days of our forebears.
And let’s not forget those forebears: work hard, and you can buy a house for your family. A single modest salary bought a home fifty years ago. Today, you’d have to be earning almost six figures in order to have the same house-buying ability that a Regular Joe in 1970 did.
And we’re pelted by the endless numbers of productivity-boosting books and podcasts and hacks and apps on a daily basis. They’re in our social media feeds, advertised on the tube, in our inbox, making us feel less-than if we’re not keeping up, and ever-more guilty for shunning work for ten minutes because the sun’s come out.
So we overwork. We spend longer in the office because our bosses are clueless automatons who think hours sat in an uncomfortable, strip-lighted, dead-plant hosting box equates to a job well-done.
We squeeze in more work on our commutes, we work the weekends, we have our emails ever-present in our pockets always just a tap away. And don’t forget our habit of filling any brief second of unaccounted time with a scroll on the social tickers of doom, justifying it by telling ourselves we might find the next great hack, we might find the inspiration we need, that we’d be missing out otherwise.
Is there any wonder we’re fried? Anxious? Overwhelmed? Mentally and emotionally over-stimulated with the attention span of a wooden spoon?
It’s not just you, you’re not a weirdo, and there’s no wonder we feel guilty when we opt out for a moment.
But we can be the revolt against this tirade of always-on usefulness. And it begins by recognising we’re simply a product of our environment. If we can go easy on ourselves for being stuck in these ways, if we can rest anyway, opt-out anyway, find more time to be idle and easy even when we feel friction around it, we’re not only setting ourselves up for a smoother ride, but we’re healing our messed up heads, too.
The steps I recommend to help you rest well and rest good are included here inside Joyful.
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