Why You Can’t Relax (Even When You Have Time) & How to Rest Without Guilt

If you've ever sat down to relax only to feel guilty, restless, anxious, or immediately overwhelmed by everything you "should" be doing instead, this episode explains why.

In this powerful masterclass, I reveal the latest neuroscience behind why so many ambitious, perfectionistic women struggle to rest. You'll discover how childhood experiences, cultural conditioning, high-functioning anxiety, and nervous system patterning can actually make rest feel unsafe—even when your body desperately needs it.

You'll also learn practical, research-backed strategies for calming your nervous system, overcoming guilt, creating healthy boundaries, and finally experiencing the kind of deep, restorative rest that improves your relationships, productivity, emotional regulation, and overall wellbeing.

If you've ever thought, "I don't know how to relax," "I can't sit still," or "I'll rest when everything is done," this episode will completely change the way you think about rest.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU'LL DISCOVER:

• Rest isn't difficult because you're lazy, but because your nervous system learned that slowing down isn't safe
• Why so many high-achieving women become physiologically addicted to stress, making calm feel uncomfortable—or even threatening—instead of peaceful
• How toxic productivity culture glorifies hustle and makes rest feel selfish instead of necessary
• How rest is what gives you capacity to be productive in the first place
• 11 practical ways to build more rest into your life
• And so much more

AS MENTIONED:

• Register for my “13 Things NOBODY Is Telling You About Your Nervous System” masterclass: https://solutionsforsimplicity.thrivecart.com/13things/
• Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Sacred Rest

FOR SO MUCH MORE:

Join the next round of Moms Made NewTM so stress no longer sabotages you—or your relationships: https://momsmadenew.com 

Book a free consult with Dr. Amber 1:1: https://tidycal.com/solutionsforsimplicity/free-consult

HOMEWORK:

Which of the reasons why rest feels impossible applies to you? Reach out to me via email or on Instagram @solutionsforsimplicity to share your thoughts on this episode. 

COMING UP NEXT:

Join me back next Tuesday at 5am Eastern to keep unpacking the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy.

Loving this podcast? Please help it get found by more listeners by taking quick minute to leave a rating & review in Apple Podcasts. Take a screenshot of your text review before you submit it, then email that to help@solutionsforsimplicity.com and I'll send you my powerful Happy Mom Protocol™ (a $297 value) FOR FREE!

CONNECT WITH AMBER: Website | Instagram | YouTube | LinkedIn 

Ready to finally get to the root of your problems and change your life FOR GOOD? Book your free 60-minute consult to learn more about working 1:1 with Dr. Amber.

Transcript

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If you grew up in a high-stress environment, then your body may have come to rely on the hormone cortisol as a way of fueling itself and feeling safe. That could have created an addiction to cortisol. where you need more and more and more stress in order to feel good. It's very backwards. I know it sounds so strange that stress would make us feel good. But when you are used to living in such an intense, high-pressure, go-go-go life, and then you try and slow down, It is the rest that feels so threatening and evokes a new sense of stress for you. Your body is so used to being in overdrive that it feels unsafe to slow down. Welcome to More Time for Mom, where overwhelmed moms get science-backed strategies to overcome the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. I'm your host, Dr. Amber Curtis. Ready to make more time for you? Let's dive in. Right now it is the middle of summer and you are probably leaning one of two ways. Either you are more overwhelmed than ever with kids home and the chaos of all the unscheduled, unstructured time without school to keep things in order. Or you are feeling bored out of your mind and wanting to throw yourself into projects and activities and all of these things to stay busy. I talk with so many women who all say the same thing. They don't know how to be still. They dream of being able to sit and do nothing. But they are juggling so many demands. There is always more to do than time to do it. And then, whenever they do try to sit down and enjoy themselves, Their mind is bombarded by all of these unfinished tasks, or clutter that they see across the room, or this vicious guilt that they should be doing more. If that's you, you are so not alone. This is truly a huge thing that I have personally wrestled with as well. The more nervous system training and certification I've done, the more I now know what is really at the root of this problem. Today, I want to share with you a super powerful masterclass I led a while back called The Art of Leisure, How to Rest Without Guilt. Now, I am an open book over here, and so my motivation for releasing this masterclass here on the podcast is twofold. One, I just got back from a trip with my husband where we got away to celebrate our upcoming 20th wedding anniversary. It was the first time we have ever left our kids in 13 years of parenting. Long backstory, but without any family help. On top of having so many little kids that are all close in age and not wanting to leave the little ones when they are too little, There are so many factors that have gone into this, but we had the most amazing week. It was truly so great. Such wonderful time to reconnect, to really pour into each other, to reflect on our 20 years of being married, 26 years together. I speak from time to time about relationships here on this podcast and, spoiler alert, it all comes down to your nervous system, to your attachment style, to all of the things that I regularly speak and coach on. Happy to share more about how to navigate really hard times in marriage because we have definitely had more than our fair share. how to reconnect and repair after those hard things, what neuroscience shows are the keys to a successful relationship and a thriving marriage, reach out to me on Instagram at Solutions for Simplicity and let me know if you want more content on that. Because of that trip, I didn't get a new episode recorded for you, and I really wanted to give you something valuable to listen to, so I decided to repurpose this old paid content here for you for free. The second motivation for sharing this previous paid masterclass is because I want you to see or, in this case, hear firsthand How jam-packed my masterclasses are. When you attend one of my workshops, you are getting the latest, cutting-edge research on neuroscience, psychology, child development, and all of these other things that I have not only been studying academically for years, but have then been so personally obsessed with as well. If you haven't yet heard the announcement, I am offering a brand new masterclass on Thursday, July 9th on 13 things nobody is telling you about your nervous system. Every mom needs to be on this call. It will be live online via Zoom. Of course, there is a replay included if you can't make it live, so do not let that be the reason that you don't sign up. There is going to be so much that I cover that is not only going to dispel these big myths circulating, but also call out all kinds of misinformation being propagated out there, and then share with you these crucial truths that every woman needs to know and that you will not find anywhere else. Certainly not on Instagram, on YouTube, on Clod, or ChatGPT like You cannot get this anywhere else and I really, really want you to have it. Check the link in the description. Make sure and sign up. You do not want to miss this. All right, now on to how to rest without guilt and pay special attention to the part where I talk about cultural conditioning and nervous system patterning. Because if you are someone that struggles to rest or struggles to have, let alone enjoy, any leisure time, I guarantee these are the big reasons why. Welcome to this training on the art of leisure, how to rest without guilt, Now, I do want to say upfront that we're going to talk particularly about the rest dimension here, because that's what I find is so hard for busy, ambitious, high-achieving, perfectionist women, like many of us, to do. It is so hard to actually rest. And then even when you are resting, it's hard to get the deep, restorative rest that you need to then come back stronger and replenished. We will touch a little bit on the leisure dimension and just these ways of building more joy and little breaks into your day and your life. But I will guide you through all of this in step. I'm going to first set the stage by helping us define rest and understand why it has such a negative connotation to so many of us. In other words, why it's a four-letter word and we avoid it or feel guilty for resting. Then we're going to delve into the many deep underlying reasons why we've acquired this subconscious belief that rest is bad or that we feel guilty for resting. And of course, hit home with 11 practical tips for building a better rest routine into your life and then prioritizing your leisure time so that you can have that well-balanced, well-rounded life that you crave. So why is rest so challenging? I used to pride myself on not needing to rest. I was that person that pulled countless all-nighters, not just during undergrad, but during graduate school. And I used to, even once having kids and being woken up constantly and things like that, I used to just pride myself on how much I could do on so little sleep. Then I've reached a point where not only am I more aware of how harmful that bad sleep hygiene and the inability to rest was, but I'm at an age, many of you are maybe in similar life seasons, where what you used to do no longer works and is actually even harmful to you. If you want additional discussion on perimenopause and how that just compounds this rest problem, Whoo, I would love to delve into that, and maybe we can do future trainings on some of that stuff later on. But for now, let's just start with the premise that we all know we need rest. We get tired, life is exhausting, we feel burnt out, and yet we often just keep pushing ourselves to do more and to keep getting it done, and then there's always more to do. So rest feels really impossible. Let's start by clarifying what rest even is. So our good old definition, there are actually several that I think give us this beautiful multifaceted definition, but it really is firstly about stopping work, right? That you cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh yourself, or recover your strength. Enter in the chat your initial gut response to this definition, particularly that word cease. I would love to get some conversation going on what you think about when you think of ceasing work. Secondly, rest means to be placed in a certain position or supported so that you aren't having to carry all of the load yourself. We might rest an item on a tabletop or a bookshelf or something like that. But I wonder if we've ever considered that allowing ourselves to rest is inviting vulnerability, right? It's allowing ourselves to be supported. by other people or by life in general and trusting that we can step back in order to recharge and recover and come back even stronger for that. Third dimension is when you stop engaging in strenuous or stressful activity, so you really need to step back, And then I love this extra little piece about how it applies in the music world, where it's kind of intentional. And having that silence then can make the music that much more profound, right? We only appreciate the melody when we also have a pause or a silence or the absence of music. Same thing in life. We often only appreciate something when we experience its absence. Right now, Maybe you are missing rest because you are so deeply engaged in your work and your competing demands. We worry that if we rest, then we will somehow miss out on our work. And I want to offer that there is a way to do both and that the more you rest, the more counterproductive you will be. Let me check the chat here. Yes, Lauren says, it seems hard to have time to cease work until you're absolutely exhausted. That time piece is key. And we're going to get to that. Fully agree. And then Shelly says, as a wife and a mom, the work never seems to end. So ceasing is hard. Amen to that. Yes. We're going to have our rant about the good old womanly art of caregiving, let's call it, coming up here. For further clarification, let's differentiate rest from leisure. Rest was really about stopping work with the assumption that maybe we are recharging our body probably through sleep. That is the main form of rest that we think of and that we need. Leisure, on the other hand, is something you do for enjoyment. It is allowing yourself to do anything but work just for the sake of doing it in that moment and not being concerned about the end result. You're not doing something for what you get out of it. You're just doing it because you enjoy it. As busy women, I think a lot of us Forget what kinds of things we enjoy. Even if we know what we'd like to do, we're so busy trying to get our work done, putting others' needs ahead of our own, that our leisure time gets squished and just minimized to the point that maybe it's not even there at all. I want to offer that the more we build in intentional leisure time, the more energy you have to pour back out to the other areas of your life. We want to really flip the script in our minds through the course of this training. And as we're practicing the tools I'm going to share with you right now, You, like me, might be thinking, I can't afford to rest. I don't have time for the things I want to do. But the reality is that when we make time to rest and when we make time for what we enjoy, we are that much better and more productive at all the other areas of our life. So it really is a win-win, even though it feels like such a trade-off starting out. How did we ever come to think that rest is bad? What contributed to this major epidemic of exhausted, overwhelmed, burnt out, hardworking women that we're experiencing and that we're exemplifying ourselves? I wonder how many of these statements sound like you. If this resonates with you, just kind of keep a mental tally in your head as I go through, and then we can enter the number in the chat. But have you ever thought to yourself, if I'm not getting something done, I'm wasting time? Do you have this underlying need to be producing something and crossing things off your to-do list in order to feel worthy and feel good enough? Do you have a subconscious belief that leisure is indulgent and selfish? And maybe you had drummed into you from a young age that idle hands are the devil's handiwork or that you need to stay busy and be productive so that you stay out of trouble. You were always needed to be the one that was filling in and taking care of other people. So don't you dare just sit around doing what you want to do. Maybe we've acquired that belief. Did you ever hear messaging that made you think that being busy was equivalent to being the good girl, maybe the good daughter or the good worker, the good student? Conversely, did that lead you to think that being still and resting was the equivalent of being weak, lazy, or selfish? Then, most viciously, Do you ever find yourself feeling guilty when you try to sit down? Even when you're so exhausted, does that shame and the inner critic emerge, just offering you all this guilt saying, you better get up, you're so worthless to sit there and relax when there's so much to do? Lastly, number five here is when you are desperate to rest. Do you ever find that your brain won't be quiet, that you just keep having those spiraling thoughts or thinking of more things to do, replaying how the day went, all the undone things on your to-do list? I'm putting all these out there because you know they are definitely things that I have experienced and see commonly with clients. So out of five possible scenarios or beliefs you might have internalized, enter in the chat if there were any number that resonated with you. I've already shared that all five of these are my past beliefs that I've been working to rewire. Shelly adds that she grew up on a farm, so there was always something that needed to be done. Yes, and in that instance, right, it is so real that if you're not working and not getting things done on the farm, then you're not going to have food and the animals aren't going to get what they need, right? And so, like, there's no choice but to work hard. It's interesting that even though our modern lifestyle is often very removed from that physical necessity, we still have these cultural norms that continue to send us that message. Lauren says they all resonate, but the last one really rings true. So hard to shut off our brains. Okay, so With all of that out in the open, that rest is so desired, so needed, and yet so hard to actually attain, let's dig deeper into why that is. As always, you guys know, I I share a lot of things on these trainings that can feel pretty confrontational because we are getting to the root of a lot of things and it may not be a way that you've thought about the problem before. So if it feels threatening to you or if you start to feel a little triggered by some of these things, I'm so here. You are so safe. This is the space for that. There's nothing wrong with you. We're bringing all of this to light so that you can now assess for yourself where some of those beliefs and tendencies came from and, more importantly, be equipped with tools to change the narrative in your mind. so that you can really rest and enjoy your free time in a way that perhaps you never have before. The first main reason that rest is so hard for women is just basic reality. We live in a saturated nonstop world where information is buzzing all around us. You've got everyone expecting you to be available at every moment of the day. You have every bit of information at your fingertips. And so there's just so much that you could or should be plugged into, it actually is hard to disconnect from that. It's hard to step away from social media. It's hard to step away from the constant news cycle. It's hard to not have your phone on and receive all those notifications and know what's happening to everyone every moment of every day. However, We now have plenty of research that being plugged into this high-tech virtual world is really, really bad for our nervous systems. And it presents us with a lot more actual threat than our nervous systems were meant to handle. I want to offer that one way that we can give ourselves more ability to rest is by intentionally disconnecting from screens and the virtual world. But again, that kind of feels threatening on its own to then not have the connection that we're used to. We'll talk more about those tips in a second. But again, basic reality for why it's hard to rest, because you're always getting messages, notifications, news is always unfolding. There's just so much going on all the time. It's hard to close your eyes and really isolate yourself from that in order to rest. Next reality factor is that you have a lot of different roles in your life. Whether you are a mom or not, and regardless of how old your kids are, you have other people in your life who rely on you. You may have an outside job. You may have family. You've got plenty of other things with which you are involved. And that takes a lot of time. And you're often expected to complete those tasks at times that are not of your own choosing. We'll come back to this in a second when we talk about your circadian rhythm and how hard it is to prioritize rest in the moments where you actually feel like resting. A lot of times you have demands that require you to do certain things at certain times, especially if you are a parent, particularly a parent of young kids. You are exhausted, but you've got kids being sick, and so your relaxation time or your sick vacation time is getting spent on their needs, and then you feel like you can't take any for yourself. You're trying to sleep, but you probably have little kids waking up at night. Maybe you have older kids and then you're not sleeping because you're waiting for them to get home and you can't really rest until you know that they're safe and sound. There's a whole lot of factors here where it's just really hard to really just like close the doors mentally and physically and let yourself rest and know that everything else is going to take care of itself because you're the one who is taking care of it all. Similarly, the work never ends. There's always more to do. And the really vicious underlying belief that many of us have is that we need to be the ones to do it. And that if we don't get this done, it won't get done up to our standards. You see things that other people don't see, and you have standards that other people don't necessarily know or live up to. Those are things we can work on, but we just want to acknowledge that it's part of why you feel the pressure to do the things, and it makes it hard for you to rest. And then, of course, life doesn't stop. Just when you think you're going to finally rest, there's an emergency or something unexpected happens. And then you're so busy and on high adrenaline, high stress, like dealing with that thing, that you just do it. And you suffer the mental, emotional, physical toll. You're feeling behind by the time all that is over. And there's no time to really step back and process what you've been through. Life is just a whole lot. It's just hard. Second reason why rest is challenging is because a lot of us have fallen into just the bad habit of not making rest the priority it needs to be. And I'm only calling myself out here, but the most vicious way that we don't take good care of ourselves is by having inconsistent sleep. Your circadian rhythm, that natural 24-hour body clock that we all have, varies by person. Some people are a morning person, others are more of a night owl, and there's a whole lot of variation in between. The bottom line is that it's your circadian rhythm that governs when you are sleepy versus when you are alert, when you're hungry, all those other things. when you do not go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, you cause major hormonal disruptions to your circadian rhythm, meaning that your body will naturally be secreting a hormone like melatonin that makes you feel sleepy at a time where you are forcing yourself to be awake and you're staying up late because you've got a really fun uh you know engagement with friends or something so you stay out late and you do this fun thing but then you still have to wake up really early the next morning to get to work then you compensate and you sleep in the day after that but what we are actually doing when we have varied sleep and wake times, and we get different amounts of sleep every night, it is throwing our circadian rhythm all out of whack. It's called social jet lag, where your body is then literally behind and unable to catch up with where you are in that moment because it's secreting hormones at a level that's not in alignment with the task you're trying to do. This isn't necessarily your fault, particularly if you are say a night owl and yet you are working a nine-to-five job where you're forced to get up and be at work at a certain time. Or if you have young kids and you don't have a choice but to wake up when they wake up or get them out the door to school by a certain time. I work with so many women and this is just part of our reality in this season of life where you would love a lot more sleep, but even if you try to get consistent sleep, you're still being woken up or you're still not getting to sleep when your body would most benefit from it. The good news is that there are adjustments that you can make for that, but I just want to honor that it's not as black and white as we want it to be. The key would be to get consistent sleep in a dream world. But if you've got kids and jobs and pets and thunderstorms and all the things, it's just really hard. The thing that is in our control and the bad habit that I sure have fallen into is looking at screens before we go to bed or finding those few moments of peace and quiet late in the evening so that when you could be resting, when you could be sleeping, you are actually just doing something that maybe is a leisure activity. There's nothing wrong with scrolling per se, but when it is detracting from your sleep and your restorative rest, that's where maybe it's a habit we want to evaluate and look to change. Not resting and not sleeping in the moments that you could really trains your body to do opposite activities than rest in the places where you should be resting, like here. People are scrolling and looking on their computers in the bed instead of actually sleeping. I'm going to come back to how to solve this at the very end. Now we're going to get really deep into some of those potentially triggering factors behind why it is hard to rest. Third factor is this umbrella of cultural conditioning. Join in the chat if any of this resonates with you. I want you to notice that here on this front page, I have intentionally put a picture of a happy, carefree little girl who is just so full of joy, presumably sleeping great at night, and she doesn't know anything but what the world is going to tell her. And here are some of the things that maybe it has told you. These are things it told me. First off, hustle culture tells us that to work hard is glorious and that the more you do, the better you are. In other words, it implies that rest is lazy and that you're a failure if you're not hustling all of the time. And then we are seeing other people getting ahead, so then we feel like we're falling behind if we're not keeping up with that constant work ethic. This very much ties into the second factor, where when you listen to the messages from toxic productivity culture, the underlying message is that who you are and how worthy you are is somehow dependent on not just what you do, but how much you do. So we come to equate our worth with our productivity. And then this can be so benign, but if you were praised as a young girl for being helpful and being so responsible, and you saw that others were happy when you did X, Y, or Z, or if teachers applauded you for turning in a good assignment, if a parent was really happy when you made a pretty picture, all of those things. sent messages to your brain that what you did made you better, that people liked you more, people thought you were worth more when you accomplished certain things. So your brain started to believe that your worth depends on producing things that make other people happy. And we just almost develop this compulsion to keep doing things and keep accomplishing, keep striving, keep making other people happy in order to feel the same dopamine high in our brains, but then to really feel that sense of worth that we are chasing. Next factor is what we call caretaker syndrome, where little girls are very easily socialized to think that their role is in the home, and it's so beautiful to love and serve our families, right? But we are often told or shown that we should put other people's needs ahead of our own, that resting would then somehow be selfish or irresponsible. We're taught to be always aware of other people's needs and ready to jump in and help them when they need something so that then we feel guilty resting or turning off notifications because we feel like we might be letting other people down. All this ties into perfectionism and people pleasing where our desire to be seen by others as competent and selfless leads us to overcommit and really just deprioritize rest. altogether. We look at other people who seem so good and so productive and it makes us think we're not doing enough. We also worry that other people might think we are a slacker or that we're not pulling our own weight. Maybe people have even criticized us for those things, in which case it can hit home that much harder. We fear rest, or we don't allow ourselves to rest, because rest feels like a risk. Our to-do list never ends, and so we carry that mental load with us all the time. We could go on and on about the mental load, but the underlying belief is then that if we rest, we're just getting farther behind, and we will never catch up. I had a wonderful coaching call with a client earlier today where we were just acknowledging that part of being adults is actually realizing that we won't ever catch up, that there is always going to be more we could or should do than we have time and energy to do it. And the problem only comes in when we make that mean anything is wrong with us. So what if we come to just see the never-ending to-do list as a neutral circumstance? It doesn't have to mean that we need to do all those things. It just means that we get to choose which things are most important. But it definitely doesn't have to mean there's no room for rest while we're accomplishing all those things. Okay, this next one was a big factor for me, and I'm curious for you ladies as well. In terms of cultural conditioning, so many young girls have mothers that seem like they do it all, or they at least put pressure on us to do it all. Maybe it wasn't a mother. Maybe it was another female figure in your life. Maybe it was the opposite example where your mother wasn't doing very much or somehow like relied on you to do so much. Whatever it is, the women that we grew up with and the model that they set for us really sent a message to our brain about our relationship with rest and whether that should be something we prioritize or have guilt around. At a minimum, I think very few families talked about rest as something that was good and needed and important in its own right, as opposed to having people in our lives who maybe did rest, but in a way that was harmful or neglectful to us, that maybe our caretakers were not as available for us and they relied on us too much to the point that there was a little bit of neglect or abandonment that went on and then we just still feel like we have to do, do, do in order to make up for what our caretakers weren't or to keep our caretakers happy. All of that. Ultimately, the first three factors, they really just all culminate in this fourth one. This is the punchline. This is what it all comes down to. The reason that rest is so hard is because your nervous system may have been patterned and programmed to see rest as a threat so often. And this is how you'll know it's you. But if you have trouble sitting still, If you feel anxious when it's too quiet or when there's not noise in the background, when you sit down but then there's things in disarray and you're just like compelled to get up and do something about it, it could be a sign that your body is so used to being in overdrive that it feels unsafe to slow down. Secondly, there's new research underscoring that if you grew up in a high-stress environment, then your body may have come to rely on the hormone cortisol as a way of fueling itself and feeling safe. That could have created, I know it definitely did for me, an addiction to cortisol, where you need more and more and more stress in order to feel good. It's very backwards. I know it sounds so strange that stress would make us feel good. But when you are used to living in such an intense, high-pressure, go, go, go life, and then you try and slow down, It is the rest that feels so threatening and evokes a new sense of stress for you because you're used to a certain kind of stress from performing and achieving. Your brain knows how to do that. It knows how to tolerate that. And it's used to lots of cortisol pumping through your veins to deal with your normal demands. Being still is totally different. And so your nervous system actually then feels like it's being chased by the saber-toothed tiger when you try to sit still. Shelly says, I often don't know what to do when I'm not doing a million things. Yeah, it's crazy how uncomfortable it is to do nothing. And I have some tips coming up to help us get through that. But again, rest isn't always relaxing. When you try to sit down and you know there's a lot to do, but even if you're trying not to do those things, rest doesn't always feel initially like what we're craving. You're tired, but Resting feels threatening and your brain, your body is kind of vibrating with this nonstop hypervigilance of all the things going on around you or what could you have forgotten, all the thoughts racing through your mind. It's just a sign that your brain has been trained to be on the constant lookout for danger. and the way that your nervous system has kept you safe all these years is by meeting those dangers where they are and accomplishing the tasks and doing the things and keeping other people happy so that those threats subsided. We want to really find a new normal where you learn to get comfortable letting some of those other things be, letting other people fend for themselves, so that you can rest without that buzzing and you learn what it feels like to get past that and really rest. What can you do? I'm going to run through these relatively quickly, but I have 11 different ideas. Let's jump into it. It's not a quick fix per se. This is a very deep, multifaceted issue, but I hope it's giving you some great food for thought for why rest has felt so hard and then how to actually rest more moving forward. If you have never heard of this book, highly recommend it. This book by Sondra Dalton-Smith talks about seven different kinds of rest. I think a lot of us, even I, started this training with the definition of rest as physically ceasing to do something, maybe also emotionally or mentally ceasing to think and process all of our thoughts. But rest isn't just taking naps and going on vacation. Rest is physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual. This book argues that we need all of those types of rest in order to really feel rested. For example, Even if you're getting great sleep at night, but you have a lot of overstimulation in your life from work demands or young kids or other life circumstances just throwing things at you all of the time, you could be in sensory deficit. Like you're not resting your senses. Similarly, if you are getting good sleep and everything seems fine but you don't have time for a creative outlet, then you have a creative rest deficit. of these ways that we might want to rethink what rest looks like with the underlying point being that the more rest you can get in each of these areas the more they all just compound and spill over into one another the more filled up you feel socially in terms of your creative outlet, in terms of your spiritual life, and definitely in terms of your emotional processing, the more able you will be to physically and mentally rest, the easier it will be to turn off your brain because you'll be able to feel so much more calm and safe in those other areas of your life. Second more practical tip, much more practical, is to actually write it on your calendar that you are going to rest during these times. Now, I'm still not quite in a season of life where that is super practical, but one example might be that if you have young kids and your kids have a quiet time or a nap time, then can you just actually go and rest in those moments as well instead of feel that immense pressure to crank out as much housework or work work as you can do when they are sleeping? Even if you don't have young kids, is there a time of the day or the week where you can have some recharge time just for you to have open space on your calendar and then you intentionally don't do housework or anything else? You're not checking email. You're not looking on your phone during that time. You really are just letting yourself be. I love the idea of giving it a name, like a formal, fun name to add legitimacy and make it feel more real and important. We can also really start with micro moments because we are busy women. We don't necessarily have an hour or even eight hours to carve out for the rest we might crave, but we can build little moments of rest into our day, finding joy in the juggle, and really being intentional about finding things that light us up, give us that leisure. Even just a couple of minutes of sitting still and just letting yourself take in the world around you, it can change your whole nervous system and help bring you down to a more calm, regulated state. Examples would be maybe taking a few deep breaths in your car before you get out and go into the crazy grocery store or taking a few moments to just walk down the block. Or, again, this is a situation in my life, but I've got four young boys and It's just crazy how many people are always talking to me and needing me at any one time, even if I want to be quiet and still. That's not always my reality, but are there ways that you can get those other people covered so that you could have some quiet alone time? Those micro moments sound like they should be so simple, and I know they're not, but they do go a long way when you get them. Next is to ask for and accept help and even just let things be less than ideal. This feels very triggering if you're a perfectionist like me, but it also is one of those muscles you build so that the more you let other people help or the more you just let things be what they're going to be because you're not going to do it, The more comfortable you get with it all, the more your brain sees that life doesn't end just because you didn't make dinner for your family that night or whatever else. Maybe you chose to go and sit outside and relax instead. Where can you get help? Where can having other people step in give you more time and energy to devote to your own rest? Here's the trick, right? All sounds good in theory, I'm sure, but how can you ditch the guilt? I find, and research does underscore, that when you can rewrite the narrative in your head from rest is bad and I'm the only one that can do these things to actually rest is making me a better wife and mom, then you build up more desire and validation to do that thing. Also, for all the moms in here, I really want us to be so conscious of what we're modeling to our kids. In rest, with our happiness, just in life in general. Because as we dig into a lot of our own patterning and programming and complex trauma that we might have experienced in our childhood. I'm sure on a mission to make sure I don't pass that same stuff on to my own kids. And I'm sure you're feeling the same, that you want to model good, healthy habits, good behavior, a happy life, a well-rounded life for your kids. And we're not perfect at this. I don't want to put even more expectations or pressure upon you. This is just a gentle invitation to think about what you would do for your kids if you saw that they were as tired and burnt out as you might be. You would want them to rest. So let's model that for our kids to help them know that rest is good and safe and necessary and makes us that much stronger. This one I find to be very, very helpful. This tip is to designate no work zones, whether that is in terms of times of the day or week. But I like to think of it in terms of a physical space, part of your environment, where you really are free of those distractions and free of the things that would interfere with your ability to rest. In terms of time, I gave you some examples here. Maybe you could start building a habit that you have 15 minutes after dinner where you are going for a walk or sitting and connecting with family. Maybe you could not use your bed as laundry mountain and you're keeping anything out of your bedroom like a TV or the laundry or obviously phones and screens and things like that that would invite you or tempt you to do anything other than rest. Our family has really been working this year to make sure Sundays are screen free and that has been very challenging but it's been so good and I think it's more than reasonable to expect myself to go a day without constantly checking my phone. These are just some things to offer you, but especially in terms of our sleep space, I invite you to think about what that looks like for you. What do you have near your bed that in any way reminds you of work or tempts you to do things other than sleep and rest? How can you create a better sleep environment so that your brain is more likely to relax when you go to that physical place? Love the idea of using leisure as fuel and motivation, not as a reward. So much of the productivity space, the toxic productivity culture, was all about rewards and you've got to incentivize yourself to do things. We're like trying to make ourselves do the work to think we have to earn the rest. That if we do the work, then we can take a nice relaxing bath or get a massage or something like that. I want to offer that it's the opposite. What if we thought of doing those restful self-care activities, particularly sleep, of course, but even the other self-care things, even just leisure, the things we enjoy and do for fun, what if we thought of those as the starting point, that we schedule those things in first, and by doing those things, by filling ourselves up then we actually have so much more energy to bring to our work and bring to our homes and then we're not as depleted and it's easier for us to rest. It really is a very virtuous cycle because we don't get as exhausted doing the hard work because we had leisure first. Try that on and let me know how it goes. We all know that we should have better boundaries and be better at saying no, particularly have this ability to say no without feeling a need to justify why we can't do something. The goal is to not only say no more often, but avoid offering any explanation or perceived excuse for why we can't do something. This is really hard when you are a perfectionist people pleaser whose worth has been tied to what you do. But the goal, the skill we want to build here is learning to feel safe and regulated in your own body, even when other people are upset around you, and recognizing that other people can totally be upset with you saying no. That's on them. It's not your job to make them feel better. It definitely doesn't mean you need to change your stance and do something that you didn't want to do. But that takes a lot of practice to build up that skill and build the muscle of saying no and then standing firm in the midst of others' discomfort, their dysregulation. I'm here to help. All right, this idea has had me brainstorming nonstop. I don't know if anybody else has this problem. Sometimes you find yourself with free time. And yes, there's work you could do, but you already know you're not going to do work in that moment. And yet your brain is like, but I don't even know what I like to do for fun. Or you're just like searching for the perfect thing to do in that moment. So I've been creating a rest and joy menu for myself of all these ideas of things that I like to do. That way, my brain doesn't have to think of something in that moment. I can just either plan it in ahead of time, or I can look at the list and get ideas and find the perfect thing when the opportunity arises. Next thing you can do to really prioritize rest is lower your impossibly high standards. I didn't used to think this was possible. And again, I felt so on edge. My nervous system was so threatened at the thought of things not being perfectly perfect all of the time. What I've learned is that I don't die when the dishes sit in the sink overnight. If you saw my Instagram stories yesterday, I had a dinner party and I worked so hard to clean the house. It looked so amazing except for this one counter that I just piled everything else on and nobody said anything. Nobody cared. It made me a human. Like, why would I ever care or expect that there's a problem with having a messy house? I also I'm that person that used to take my clothes out of the dryer immediately and then hang them up assorted by color and sleeve length in my closet. I'm a crazy person. Then I had kids, and now it's like, oh, here you go. Your clothes are wrinkly and just shoved in a cubby. My kids actually do their own laundry, so they're that much more wrinkly. But nobody is dying. And people might have thoughts about how wrinkly our clothes are, but you know what? I am okay with it. I've learned that that is a price I'm willing to pay to have more time for the things that give me rest and leisure. Same thing with making dinners. These are just a few of my examples where I used to have a ridiculously high bar of what I thought things should be like. Those are great ideals to have, but they do take time and energy. So if you're exhausted and if you're not feeling rested, if you're not getting enough rest and sleep, then I want to offer that the world isn't going to end if you let some of those things go. And maybe you don't let them go all the time, but certainly when you are the most tired and you most need rest, Try it, and you will see that lowering your standards is incredibly freeing. It actually feels so empowering. Next, the biggest thing that I have done, because I have that brain that won't shut off, is that I don't make it a problem. I thought that I needed to be able to lie down and fall asleep right away, or that I needed to be able to sit down and really focus and enjoy a movie with my family. I still wrestle with doing both of those things, because my brain won't be quiet. I'm hypervigilant, and I'm always seeing more that could or should be done. But what I have gotten so good at, and I encourage you to practice too, is here at the bottom. We want to recognize the trigger and the urge that our body offers us in response to what we see needs doing and the pressure to work or the thoughts running through our head and the fact that our mind is racing. We're not trying to deny any of that. It feels so real to us. It is there. And we can also just let it be. We don't have to act on those urges. I don't have to get up and start cleaning the kitchen. I can just sit and let the dishes be in the sink and enjoy the movie with my family. Similarly, I desperately want to fall asleep, but I can't turn my brain off. I don't have to get up and write down all the thoughts in my head. I can just lie there and let the thoughts come and go, but lay still and just keep reminding myself that it's OK to be quiet, even though it feels uncomfortable. The more you let those urges go unanswered, the more you will train your nervous system to be comfortable resting and to rest faster, to get into those rest states faster. Additionally, I want to bring you back to designing your rest routine, aligning your day with your circadian rhythm so that you are trying to go to sleep and get consistent sleep. around the windows where your body is naturally tired, that you don't bring screens and other things into the bedroom, and that you do carve out time without screens before you try and go to sleep, because we all know the blue light is so harmful for getting the good restorative sleep we need. No matter what, I encourage you not to make it wrong when it's hard for you to rest. Just let yourself stay still and be uncomfortable. And keep doing that, just as you would lift weights in a gym. Just keep lifting the mental, emotional, physical weight of discomfort from sitting still. And soon, over time, you will find that it gets way, way, way easier. And you feel so much better because you are resting in a way you didn't allow yourself to before. Oceany. I am fully here for questions, comments, all of your thoughts on this. Would love to get a conversation going about what rest looks like for you, how hard or easy it is for you to turn your brain off, and any parts of this training you found helpful or want more information on. Shelly says, I often read a book on my phone at night. So is the blue light causing issues? That's a great question because devices make everything so convenient. Research would suggest that yes, using that device to read before bed could be impeding your brain's ability to get into the deep sleep that you might crave. If you are feeling fully rested when you wake up, then maybe it's not as much of a problem. But if you are feeling pretty regularly tired or just fatigued, then it would be interesting to see whether reading a physical book for the hour or two window before bed. Does that make a difference? I would try that for two weeks and see what you think. Even a week. Give it a week and see if you feel any difference in your energy. It's so hard because so much of our lives is on our devices. But there are some really harmful physical effects. The other maybe interim or middle level solution you could try if you haven't already are the blue light blocking glasses. Those are not as great a solution as just not taking in any of the blue light at all. I do love the habit of reading before bed, though. That's so good, and research shows that that is a great way to help your brain separate what happened during the day and what happened at work or with your family, and then start to shift into a greater relaxation mode because your brain gets full of other fun thoughts or you're doing something you enjoy, and it's a beautiful segue to sleep. Lauren says, I have a hard time falling asleep, so I often listen to things on my phone. What are your thoughts about leaving the phone on the nightstand and listening to soothing music or sounds? Actually, I think listening is totally fine. That's a great suggestion for all of us. A lot of times, soothing music or the nature sounds They definitely are shown to help calm our nervous systems down. I think white noise is really beneficial when you sleep. It can definitely help you get into a deeper sleep because then you don't hear as much of the other ambient noises that might be going on with your kids or your house. I'm a big fan of that. But I think listening to something, even if it's on your device, is fine as long as the light isn't interfering with your darkened environment. OK, we didn't touch as much on the leisure dimension here. Leisure is so personal. I would love to start a conversation about the kinds of things you enjoy doing for fun. And I want to challenge us all to do more of those things first. Before we get to the housework, before we get to the obligations, before we say yes to other people, let's be a lot more intentional about planning leisure time in and then giving it a while to start to feel comfortable being still, doing the leisure activities. Our brain is going to really try and make us feel guilty about it. Our nervous system is going to feel a little stressed out and on high alert if what we are used to is go, go, go, high stress all of the time. But again, we can retrain our bodies and our brains to really love rest and then benefit from rest so we have that much more energy to do the work. It's just a beautiful virtuous cycle that I want for all of us to get into. All right. I hope you got so much value out of that masterclass. Do not forget to sign up for my upcoming one, all about 13 things nobody is telling you about your nervous system. It's happening Thursday, July 9th, 2026. If you are hearing this podcast after the fact and want to get your hands on the replay, then just send me an email through the link in the show notes. And of course I will hook you up. Your homework for this episode is to think about which of those reasons why rest feels so impossible applies to you, which factors personally resonated the most, and what are you going to do In order to start overcoming those, I promise you it is so possible. Of course, the best and the fastest way to do that is to reach out and schedule a call with me through the link in the show notes. This is an entirely free, no-pressure consultation. where I want to hear more about your story and then see if we're a good fit for coaching together, tell you more about what that process would look like, and really solidify how great things could be when you do this incredible nervous system work. And I'm there supporting you every step of the way. I sincerely hope that after hearing this episode, you are better able to get both more rest and more leisure. Join me back next week for another episode unpacking the hidden sources of stress stealing your time and joy. Until then, remember nothing you do changes how wonderful and worthy you are. Have a great day. I know more than anyone how precious your time is. So the fact that you spent it listening to this podcast means the world. Make sure to subscribe. And if you got value out of this show, I would be so honored if you'd leave a review and share this episode with another busy mama who needs to hear it. We've got this.