What’s your relationship with rest?
Most people have an immediate, almost automatic answer: “I’m bad at it.” Or, “I rest… but only when I crash.” Or, “I know I need it, but I struggle to give myself permission.”
I ask clients about their relationship with rest often, and I know all the patterns that show up. The productivity guilt. The hypervigilance. The “I’ll rest when everything’s done” mindset—except everything is never actually done.
I thought I had done enough work on my own relationship with rest that we were on solid terms. And then the flu showed up this week and cleared my entire calendar. No discussions, no negotiations. Just: you’re done. Stop.
All therapy clients and meetings: cancelled. Plans: wiped out. My voice: gone. My energy: nonexistent.
You’d think that would make resting easy. When your body completely gives out, there’s not much else you can do. But instead of surrendering to the reality that I was sick, my brain kicked into overdrive.
The clients I was letting down.
The income I was losing.
The logistics of rescheduling everyone.
The parenting tasks I was half-doing, half-avoiding.
The fact that I was eating jumbo freezies instead of whatever healing bone broth I was supposed to be having.
There is nothing like being flattened by the flu to remind you that your relationship with rest is more complicated than you think.
The Mental Spiral of Forced Rest
This is the part people forget: when your body is unwell, your mind is affected too. And not in the pleasant, dreamy way. More in the foggy, emotional, easily-frustrated way.
Fatigue lowers our tolerance. Fevers make thoughts feel dramatic. Brain fog reduces perspective. Our emotional bandwidth shrinks.
In other words: unhelpful thoughts get louder. Self-criticism ramps up. Catastrophic thinking becomes easier to believe. And because we’re used to functioning at a much higher level, it’s easy to interpret those thoughts as meaningful rather than as symptoms.
This is something I talk about with clients constantly—how stress, illness, and exhaustion make our internal experience louder and less accurate. But there I was, scrolling LinkedIn while feverish (a choice I do not recommend), comparing myself to people who were apparently hosting events, producing content, launching things, or thriving in ways I absolutely was not.
Shockingly, that did not help.
But it did highlight something important: even when we know the psychology, even when we teach the skills, even when we think we’re “good at rest”—our relationship with it can still get shaky when life forces us to slow down.
Rest Is Not Passive
We like to imagine rest as something effortless. In reality, rest is often active work. It requires:
- Letting go of productivity (or the illusion of it)
- Tolerating unfinished tasks
- Sitting with the discomfort of not being needed in the usual way
- Not measuring your worth by what you accomplished today
- Accepting that your body is calling the shots
That’s not passive. That’s emotional labour.
For many adults—especially those who juggle caregiving, demanding jobs, or a lifetime of being praised for productivity—rest is not neutral. Rest can feel threatening. It can feel guilt-inducing. It can stir old patterns: the urge to prove, perform, push through.
So when rest is enforced—when your body takes away the illusion of choice—those patterns get loud.
When I Finally Let Rest Take Over
Yesterday, after several days of resisting reality, I stopped fighting it. I put my phone away. I let myself Netflix without mentally calculating the rescheduled appointments. I ate more freezies because they were the only thing that felt soothing. I abandoned the idea that I needed to use this downtime “wisely.” I didn’t journal or self-reflect or make meaning out of anything.
I just rested.
Not because I felt serene and balanced. But because my body insisted. And because once I stopped spinning mentally, the truth was obvious: evaluating myself—my work, my parenting, my capacity—while sick was never going to generate anything helpful.
It wasn’t a sign that I was failing.
It wasn’t data I needed to act on.
It was simply illness.
A temporary state. A distorted lens. A moment where my brain chemistry and my emotional bandwidth were not in their usual shape.
If You Needed the Reminder Too
Rest is not a reward for having done enough.
It’s a biological necessity.
It’s an emotional recalibration.
It’s a boundary your body holds when you won’t.
And sometimes it’s messy. It doesn’t always look like herbal tea and gentle stretches. Sometimes it looks like pyjamas at noon, low-sodium soup, and whatever frozen treat goes down easiest.
If you’ve been hard on yourself when you’re sick, tired, or stretched thin, you’re not alone. Most people carry stories—about productivity, responsibility, worth—that make rest more complicated than it seems.
You don’t have to feel good about resting for it to matter. You don’t have to enjoy it. You don’t have to use it as an opportunity for growth. Sometimes rest is just rest.
And if your brain is loud, anxious, or dramatic right now, it might be because your body is depleted—not because you’re doing life wrong.
So if you needed the reminder too:
Rest.
