Chapter 1: Why do we feel guilty when we rest?
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Chapter 2: How has busyness become a form of social currency?
I mean like this sense of like I'm doing something wrong, like I have broken a rule here. I have stolen time. I've stolen something I haven't paid for. What makes this so confusing, because I know 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.
Just like you don't deserve food or you don't deserve water. 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 also want to talk about this idea that laziness might not even exist as we know it and all the 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 is like some crazy fascinating historical social cultural shifts that i'm going to walk us through today 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. We're in Norway. It's my mom's 60th birthday. Like, amazing mom. Shout out to Melinda. And throughout this trip, I would have this urge often around 3 p.m.
to go back to our hotel, go back to our Airbnb, go back to wherever and work. And like, I'm going to admit, 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 saving lives. Like, nobody urgently needs an Instagram post at 4pm on a Saturday.
Nobody needs an updated episode description at 9pm 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?
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Chapter 3: What historical factors contribute to our guilt around rest?
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 naturally without social influence or narratives about good and bad.
So what exactly from then to now has changed in 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 problem. If you were late for work, you weren't just late for work because somebody was sick. 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 perceived responsibility is shifted.
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Chapter 4: How do social media platforms influence our perception of productivity?
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 14-hour factory shifts, like... That is not glamorized the way that a CEO 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 that 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, that's 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 success. 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 opportunity. And if you're in your 20s, 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 20 years ago. I got to be the one who gets that.
You know, the people who are enduring this the most, this sense of competition and this reduction in jobs and this limited opportunities is 20 and 30 somethings. Here'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 stressed generation about the future is 18 to 34 year olds.
98% of them are reporting at least one symptom of burnout. 2% of us are not burnt out.
The whole system is building 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 four hour work week? You know, why is everybody even more stressed about getting ahead 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.
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Chapter 5: What beliefs prevent us from taking restorative breaks?
It's deeply psychological here that 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 something that's going to be really 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 sick leave is
It 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 going to come with it.
There's a lot of memories, worst case scenarios, this vague sense of dread that's going to 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, 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 dangers 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.
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Chapter 6: Why is time off not always restorative?
Oh my gosh, yes. You take the car along and you try and get money and you try and get degrees and you try and get to the end where either you have a mansion or a ranch or a shack. And once you get to retirement, you're done. What about the whole path along the way?
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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. You 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 researchers at the Center of Sleep and Respiratory Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania, they conducted a chronic sleep restriction experiment with 48 participants aged 21 to 38. 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 had consumed 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.
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Chapter 7: How can we reframe our understanding of rest for better productivity?
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 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 hypervigilance when you are in a state of vigilance you are not resting when you're in a state of alert and attention you're
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, taking.
You're going to hit zero. Those systems get tired. They get way less efficient. That is why you can sit at your laptop for an extra two hours and get less done than when you first started in 20 minutes. Or if you were to come back, you know, the next day.
A 2022, 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 wellbeing. It's going to make you feel so much better, less fatigued, more vigorous.
Doing 30 minutes on of work, 10 minutes off, doing an hour on, 20 minutes off works so well for our brains because it gives us these micro doses 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 gonna be less efficient. What I'm gonna say to you is that if you wanna be smarter almost immediately,
You have to counterintuitively rest more. And that might sound like a lie, it might sound like a farce, 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 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.
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Chapter 8: What practical strategies can help us overcome rest guilt?
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 what it sounds about, 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 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 really helped me, I think, in such an important way. Basically, how I've started to think of it is that some parts of life, like I said, are 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. There's autumn, that's like the shedding. There's 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 Earth 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 doesn't mean you can override nature. 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 naturally set for your humanness and what is naturally set for your body and for your mind.
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