373. Why rest makes us feel so guilty

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Let me ask you something. Have you ever sat down to rest, like genuinely rest, and within minutes you've just felt this dreaded sense of guilt creeping in, Not boredom, not like, oh I should probably do the dishes. I mean, like this sense of like I'm doing something wrong, like I have broken a raw here, I have stolen time, I've stolen something I haven't paid for. What makes this so confusing? Because I know, but this is something a lot of us experience. Is like, rest is one of the most basic human needs we have. Your brain and your body require a recovery time to function normally. Like just like you don't deserve food or you like don't deserve order like you need it. You don't earn or deserve rest either, you need that too. So why does something so necessary feel so difficult to access without guilt. That is what we're going to get in today. I Alwao want to talk about this idea that laziness might not even exist as we know it and all psychological and the social processes that have conditioned us into thinking self worth equals output and busyness equals value. Because your guilt around resting is not a personal issue. It's actually it's not that you're doing anything wrong. It's there's like some crazy fascinating historical social cultural shifts that I'm going to walk us through to explain why it is that when you take the day off, when you use your sick leave, when you don't do your grocery shopping straight away, you feel so bad. So without further ado, let's jump into it. My problem with guilt free rest, I think became very apparent this month. I was on a holiday with my family. This is like dream holiday, right, We're in Stockholm, we're in Finland, where in Norway it's my mom's sixtieth birthday, like amazing mom, shout out to Melinda. And throughout this trip I would have this urge often around three pm to go back to our hotel, go back to our airbnb, go back to wor wherever and work and like I'm gonna I even did it a few times. I was like I made an excuse and I went home to work, and my family was a little bit like what the fuck, Gemma, Like you're not You're not saving, Like nobody urgently needs an Instagram post at four pm on a Saturday, nobody needs an updated episode description at nine pm on a Monday. But it was this impulse. I couldn't settle for the day until I'd done something productive, like this terrible itch that wasn't leaving. I think younger me would have been very quick to tell you that, like, I just really like working hard, and I love to work, and it's like in my DNA, But I didn't particularly like not being there for family events, and I didn't particularly like feeling like I was missing out or not making memories. So why was I doing it? That's I think always a question we have to ask ourselves at different points, at points like this, like why do we do things we don't want to do when we don't have to? Why do we feel like we have to? So let's start by discussing what's going on here. Firstly, what is our cultural obsession with productivity because this is like this here is the root cause one of the biggest reasons why and how rest became this luxury of this thing to feel guilty about. Basically, I think happened when time stopped being something that we moved through and we experienced, and it started being something that you spent and you used. For most of human history, daily life was, you know, largely organized around tasks, seasons, sunlight, community, natural rhythms, work and productivity like expanded and kind of lessened based on what the community needed and the season. If your needs were fulfilled, you rested. There was no guilt attached to that. Guilt, we have to remember, is a social, but more importantly moral emotion. It derives mainly from social attitudes or other people kind of telling you that you're doing something wrong. It doesn't just come up nat truly without social influence or narratives about good and bad. So what exactly from then to now has changed our social attitude? We have to fast forward to the Industrial Revolution mainly, and this is so interesting to think about, when clocks started to enter the workplace. Feels weird to say, but honestly, that was a major shift. The historian ep Thompson. He wrote about this in a very classic piece on industrial capitalism. It's this very famous paper, and he basically says, when clocks were introduced into factories and into workplaces, that is when stuff went downhill. They were used to enforce discipline. They were used to enforce higher output, to basically coordinate the movements of the workers and the machines, but also to keep track of how many hours somebody was being paid for. Rather than output lateness idleness. They were then treated as an economic like if you were late for work, you were just late for work because you know, if somebody was sick like you, that was a productivity issue. There was money being lost based on your choices. Once time is measured in that way, we basically as a society begin to learn that there is always some kind of cost to rest or to not working that you know, that's time not being spent properly, and we might lose out if we're not on the go all the time. There is kind of a further social cultural element to that to why we panic with not being busy enough or occupied by tasks, And I think that element is that not being busy means we could be out of a job means that there isn't enough work to go around, means that you are not worth the cost to an employer. Actually, you know, looking back culturally, if you lost out on work, if you chose not to work like you were generally viewed pretty harshly. You were stigmatized for not doing so, and you would suffer like your family wouldn't eat. There wasn't as much social security, so on a huge scale. And I know this is a psychology podcast, but to get historical like this, our entire structure towards work and productivity and perceive responsibility shifted. It shifted from doing what was needed to doing everything in excess and what was required from you. And suddenly it's also the individual's problem. If work is not being done and money is not being made, like that's a stressful burden. If we move forward to modern day, you know, we now have unions, we have more adequate workers' rights in a lot of countries. You know, a lot of places have weekends off. Holiday pay is another example. But what we now have that wasn't around back then. There's still contributing to this is online platforms like LinkedIn and social media, and they are a huge contributor to why you feel bad about resting. What do we do when we have five minutes in between meetings, five minutes in between appointments, five minutes whilst our past to boils, We pick up our phones and we scroll, and in that moment we can potentially see dozens of other people doing more than us. And this creates competition with how we use our time. And where there is competition, you know there are winners and there are losers. There were people with greater status and people with lower status. I think I'm going to explaining this a little bit better. More so than ever, busyness psychologically has become a status symbol. There is research suggesting that in the US in particular, social perception is such that being busy and having little leisure time now means that you were important. It used to me that mean that the more leisure time you had, the less like the more important you were, basically because you could afford to not work. Now it shows that you're in demand, that you're needed. Being busy is the equivalent to having a designer handbag or a BMW longer hours, less free time. Again, it conveys social importance. This is as twisted as it sounds, because it's like only a particular kind of busyness, right there's only a particular kind of grind and hustle that's glamorized. People working three jobs to support their kids, People doing fourteen hour factory shifts like that is not glamorized. The way that a CEO jet sitting around the country is so nowadays, like we have this shift, and your phone is constantly showing that narrative directly into your face and into your life at all times, even if you don't think it is. Even if you think you're not picking up on this message, even when you're not actively thinking that you're comparing yourself to others online, your brain is naturally going to do it. Your brain is collecting information on those who are achieving the image, their progress, the praise they're getting, and what is considered impressive right now, and this influences your self perception and therefore your attitude towards rest. Even if you're not someone who thinks of yourself as competitive. Modern life is set up in a way that pushes you into competition even when you didn't really choose to be there. That is what is happening. So let's switch gears here for a second. There's also this other element that we need to talk about that makes rest feel bad, and it's the again hyper competitive hamster wheel of the workplace and of op opportunity. And if you're in your twenties, you felt it, this idea of like, oh my goodness, I better work really hard. I cannot switch off because if I do, I'm going to fall behind. There aren't as many opportunities as there were twenty years. I got to be the one who gets that. You know, the people who are enduring this the most, the sense of competition and this reduction in jobs and this limited opportunities is twenty and thirty somethings. He's a scary fact. A scary fact from an international well being study published out of Canada found that the most burnt out generation and the most stress generation about the future as eighteen to thirty four year olds, ninety eight percent of them are reporting at least one symptom of burnout. Two two percent of us are not burnt out. The whole system is building us to make it's billing us to make us productive and to make us output machines, which is so ironic because a major push behind the rise of AI, which is something that's making us so stressed, and the rise of technology, was that it was meant to give us more free time and was meant to make our lives easier and more accessible, and you know, give us time off. So why don't we have a for our work week? You know? Why is everybody even more stressed about getting a head and about getting stuff done. I feel like it doesn't matter how much free time you have available at this stage, the guilt doesn't go away because it feels like the opportunities are getting smaller and smaller. And that's what's at the base of all of this. We resist actually resting because it makes us feel uncomfortable from a survival lens. If all your life you have been taught that opportunities are fragile, that progress is really easy to lose, that you're only allowed to feel calm when you're ahead, then rest actually feels more dangerous than restorative, Like that's a huge psychological risk, like switch up, like putting you It honestly feels like sometimes when you rest these days, it's like putting your bag down in a crowded place, and like hoping nobody's gonna take it. That's what it feels like. Rest feels like giving somebody else an opportunity. Maybe on a more fundamental level as well. I think it's because again, it's about survival. It's about survival and about the sense of like not dropping the ball. And then as we've worked harder and rested less, our lives have become emptier. We've ignored a lot of stuff that we probably needed to address. How we've kind of learned that being busy is a form of emotional regulation. It stops us from having to do the uncomfortable inner work that comes with learning to be truly content with who you are and comes with learning to slow down. And it's deeply psychological here that the social cultural like these social changes have pushed us into such a hypervigilant stress state that we literally see rest as a threat, and we also see it as as something that's going to be really like emotionally revealing, so we avoid it. I think if this resonates with you, it's likely that you've been on this high alert for a long time and that you are filling your time with busyness to keep up a sense of functioning so really, again, this is all coming down to discomfort and how rest is going to allow your mind to relax enough to maybe question some of these life choices, question the system, and also let the anxiety start to creep in because things get a little bit calmer. So planning and monitoring and not taking holidays and not taking sickly gives you something to focus on, which is a lot more pleasant than thinking about bad experiences or thinking about how exhausted you are, or thinking about how uncomfortable this is. Rest removes that coping mechanism that has been building up for a while, that has been holding you together. So the moment you slow down, like, there's a lot that's gonna come with it. There's a lot of memories, worst case scenarios, this vague sense of dread that's gonna crop up. And that is the guilt. That is literally the guilt that we are explaining right now. And if every time you experience guilt when you rest, you're going to learn through association, purely through association, like that this is a dangerous thing. And so without even realizing, through this associative learning, you're going to avoid it even more. Okay, we're going to take a short break here. But after this short break, we're going to explore the real dangerous of this narrative and how we can start to unlearn these toxic, harmful thoughts about rest that we have been sold and we have been told, so stay with us. I kind of feel the need to remind us at this point that rest is literally a biological requirement, the same way that food and water is a biological requirement. Cannot deprive yourself of that. You can push through for a while, you can negotiate your way out of needing rest and needing recovery, you cannot outrun it. It's just not possible. Sleep is like one of the clearest examples we have of this. It's so measurable, so researchers often focus on it as a way of measuring rest. Obviously, that's not the only way to rest, but research is at the center of sleep and respiratory neurobiology. At the University of Pennsylvania, they conducted a chronic sleep restriction experiment with forty eight participants aged twenty one to thirty eight, and they basically put them in these different conditions where they either restricted rest and sleep to eight hours six hours or four hours, and this was maintained for two weeks. Then the people either didn't get any sleep for three days or they were allowed to sleep for three days. Honestly, at that point I'd probably be hallucinating, So I hope these subjects got paid some cash. But what they found was that those who had either four or six hours of sleep a night, their cognitive performance day after day got so bad, to the point where their level of impairment was the same as being drunk, as if they against you multiple beers, multiple glasses of wine. The scary part is that people often a lot of these people were like, I don't feel any different. So they walk around and they think, cool, it's okay for me to drive, and I'm paying attention at work, and I'm paying attention in class, and I'm making good decisions, and they're just not because they haven't restored their minds. And again, this is exactly what participants in this study also reported. They found that those who slept for six hours or less were also kind of experiencing this as well. And you remember those people who didn't sleep for three days. The cumulat of effect of sleeping six hours or less five four hours for two weeks and not sleeping at all for two days was the same. So that I'm fine feeling a is a lie. You're not fine. You need to rest. It's also a way of us allowing this habit of like pushing rest down to continue. If you don't feel dramatically worse, you assume you can keep going and going. But what, of course, like studies like this is showing us, is that you are just pushing the like the problem further down the line, and you've got to pay. You're to pay the sleep debt eventually. You've got to pay your sleep tax, your rest tax eventually. Now, sleep is like the ultimate form of rest. It's like it's like an emergency maintenance. It's emergency maintenance for your brain. It's consistent maintenance for your brain to clear out clutter, to restore itself from damage, to store memories. And we have a whole episode on the psychology of sleep if you're interested. But there's also more broader rest that's needed in your life. Resting, if you want a definition, is like when you don't have to fix your attention on anything, when your body can unclench and you're not in a state of vigilance or hyper vigilance. When you are in a state of vigilance, you are not resting. When you're in a state of alert and attention, you are not resting. That is the state that I'd say the majority of us are in all the time. So when you work for long stretches, especially on cognitively demanding tasks, you are spending natural reserves that have built up over time. Of you build like you're using your natural reserves of attentional control, working memory, emotional regulation, you are taking taking you're going to hit zero. Those systems get tied, they get way less efficient. That is why you consider your laptop for an extra two hours and get less done than when you first started in twenty minutes or if you were to come back, you know, the next day at twenty twenty two. I think meta analysis that looked at taking micro breaks and micro rests throughout the day actually found that this is one of the best things you can do for your well being. It's going to make you feel so much better, less fatigued, more vigorous. Doing thirty minutes on of work ten minutes off, doing an hour on twenty minutes off works so well for our brains because it gives us these microdoses of rest that it needs. Your brain is calling, begging, asking you to give it a break. It was not made to sit and stare at a screen for five hours. It was not made to sit and look at an Excel spreadsheet for five hours or Canva for five hours. If you rest, you actually make yourself smarter in a very specific way. And I think this is the important thing, because half the reason we don't rest, and we don't take breaks and whatever is because we again think we're gonna fall behind, we think we're gonna get less done, we think we're going to be less efficient. What I'm going to say to you is that if you want to be smarter almost immediately, you have to counterintuitively rest more. And that might sound like a lie outside like a fast might sound fake. There is so much evidence to this, it's like honestly ridiculous that people don't talk about it more. This is the best example I can give. Have you ever been stuck on a problem and then you go a shower, you go walk, you know, do something unrelated, and like the answer basically pops into your head. That is a documented effect. That is what rest does for you. Researchers in a two thousand and nine paper found what they call a positive incubation effect when you step away from a problem, when you let your brain rest and then you come back, because it allows you to have more open ended, creative thinking. You will literally waste less time by taking time away. You will be able to like rejuvenate cognitively by not forcing your body and your mind to do these long stretches of productivity. Like that is one of the easiest and most counterintuitive life hacks you could try today and you would see results. And I think most people won't do it because it seems so contrary to what we've been taught about hard work. So the big question we've kind of been running up to this whole time, this whole episode you were me, is how do we actually do it. We know it's important to rest, we can tell it's going to make us smarter. How do we stop the guilt the guilt from coming in. I have four key shifts for you, starting with this one. Stop treating rest like it's a reward. When you treat it like it's a reward, you put it at the mercy of your mood and your to do list. Your to do list is designed to win. It's literally endless. If you're a long time overworker, high achiever TIPE, you will always find something to do. I know people like you. I am somebody like you. You will always find something to even if it is the stupidest thing ever, like clean tupperware, or suddenly decide you're gonna do your taxes. If you have an empty space, you're gonna take it and you're gonna do something productive with it. We can think of it as an asset. We can think that it's great, like sometimes it's not. The first tip is to start treating rest not as a reward, but as an investment in the future and in future you. If you treat rest as an investment, like putting money away in a savings account every single week, it becomes part of how you run your life. I say investment because I think the brains of high achievers. Overachievers like that language more and how you speak about rest is important. Language towards rest matters. I think in minimizing guilt initially because it cognitively reframes its importance to you at the beginning as I don't know it sounds bad, but as a productivity additive. Almost so if you're just trying to firstly just rest without feeling guilty, Yes, you can think about it not as reward. You can also think about it as an investment in you, and that I think changes your emotions towards it. It's not something you do when you're good enough. It's not something you do because you deserve it. You do it because it's like maintenance. You are building a successful life. It is a non negotiable. It is a smart non negotiable. The second cognitive shift is to think of rest as being as natural as the seasons. When you rest, you are honoring the small winters of your life, and you can't have the summers and the springs without the winters. Rest is as important as the seasons are to earth, and you're part of Earth. And feeling that that it's really sinking into how natural it is to honor that and to honor the system and to not disturb the system by honoring the seasons of life has like really helped me, I think in such an important way. Basically, how I've started to think of it as that some parts of life, like I said, a summer, there are going to be natural seasons where I grow, I expand, I am full of light and energy. I am up all the time this autumn. That's like the shedding the spring. That's the work. And you have to have the winters. You have to have periods of hibernation and rest and just preparing for the next season. Every single cycle in your life requires a winter. You require consolidation, you require rest to be able to keep going. The problem is is that we often demand summer output across all seasons, especially in our winter seasons. And I'm not actually talking about seasons here, I'm talking metaphorically. But you know, we treat ourselves like a machine where the setting is going to stay the same the whole year round. Humans simply do not work like that. Like the cycles that the bath operates on and that you operate on are incredibly important and designed to make you the best version of yourself and designed to be the system that you work on. Just because you have stuff to do, it doesn't mean you can override nature, and it doesn't mean you can override your natural settings. So if you want your physical health, your mental health to be great, to be amazing, your cognitive health to be amazing, you have to acknowledge that there are so many factors that are going to contribute to when you are going to be forced to rest and when you are going to be able to be productive. You will be more productive if you follow what is it like naturally set for your humanness and what is naturally set for your body and for your mind. Now here is the un sexy part that makes all of this actionable. Throughout all this these tips, you actually need to start scheduling rest. Like I said, like it's a non negotiable. You cannot wait for it to naturally happen because you'll usually end up resting when you're sick. So it's just about recovery, not about like deep nourishment. I want you to look at your to do list right now, and I want you to look at your diary, and I want you to plan one day a week, one afternoon a week where you don't do anything as your scheduled rest day. I like to do this thing with my friends on Sunday mornings called the Dillydali. This is my rest. This is how I really restore my mind. And like allow, I hate saying the word alloud, but like help myself get into it where me and my friends I live for my Dillydally days. We all get together on a Sunday. We pick each other up, phones down, and we just potter along. We go to the markets, we get a coffee, we walk around the grocery store. When we come together, like we don't have any plans. We don't have any plans, don't have any agenda. We just get to do what whatever want. We deally and we dally and that's non negotiable for me. And I used to not have those things in my diary. I used to want to keep as much time open to be productive and to work and to do the podcast and whatever. And like now I know that that is an investment. That is my time. That is something that I do for myself. The final tip of the day, I actually have some homework for you. You can schedule rest, we can do all these things. But there is an expert on this who I just think is incredible. And it's a book I'm putting on the psychology. If you're a twenty syllabus called laziness does not exist. And this is a concept that I want us to get like drill into our brain. This is a book by Devin Price. It was gifted to me ironically by my family, so they were definitely trying to send me some not so subtle hints. But I adored this book, and I adored the theme, and there was one section of it that stood out to me, which is that calling someone lazy or calling yourself lazy, is a moral judgment, not a diagnosis, and moral judgments social judgments change. It is a socially constructed insult that is applied selectively. This is what this author says. He's like, when you call somebody lazy, we apply that selectively to disabled people, chronically ill people, and you're a divergent people, poor people, and marginalized groups. When you know, when they resist overwork, when they remember their limits, like before we were talking about this, you know, expectations around productivity. Productivity are deeply unequal. Like when somebody who's rich and famous works really hard, we're like, hustler, so good, Like they're so motivated. When somebody who's poor works really hard, it's like you, why are you neglecting your children? Like what is wrong with you? Some people are praised for rest and for having boundaries. Others are punished for the same behaviors. The myth of laziness that I want to finish on is basically like this is a tool to make people feel bad in order to reward others and in order to work harder for others. When you separate yourself from those narratives, when you realize laziness doesn't exist, that's just a moral judgment, you get to live life the way it was really intended, honoring the winters, honoring the downtimes, just doing what is needed and not excess stuff that isn't And in that way, you really experience human productivity in a much more nourishing way, in a way that is sustainable. Sure you might have less output, Sure you might lose the competitive edge, but when you shift into this mindset, like the things that you were competing for don't, you don't really care anymore because you realize, like, if I had to give up all that makes human for this and all that was enjoyable to have this, what's the point. I work so hard so I can have an enjoyable life. But if I didn't work hard right now, I'd have an enjoyable life. Anyways, Like, that's really the thing I want to end on. That's what I'm hoping you take away from this episode, Like, the guilt you feel may not feel optional right now, but it is entirely socially conditioned. You have no reason to feel guilty for rest. Your ancestors didn't feel guilty for us because they knew it was necessary. It doesn't make you a bad person. It is also not suddenly going to undo hours and hours of hard work. They got some moan biles, like best Athlete of all Time. She literally took two years off and she came back and won a bunch of gold medals, like it is an essential ingredient that you cannot neglect, and it is something that I think really incredible. Successful people have learned how to master and learn how to honor. You need to be one of those people. So if you've made it this far, thank you for sticking around. You have made it to our secret path of the episode, where I give you an emoji to comment below to prove that you made it to the end. Our emoji for today is a little cloud. I think that's a nice rest symbol. I appreciate you listening to the whole episode. I hope the message rings loud and clear in your mind. The next time you want to take a day off, the next time you find yourself sitting on the couch with nothing to do, here is your permission slip. You are allowed to do that. As always, thank you to our researcher Libby Colbert for her contributions to this episode. She is incredible and until next time, stay safe behind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very very soon.