Learn why rest is essential for stress management and resilience, and discover simple ways to build restorative downtime into everyday life.
We spend a lot of time talking about what we should do to manage stress. Exercise. Meditate. Eat well. Practice breathing. Get enough sleep. But sometimes one of the most effective things we can do is actually to do less.
Rest is an important, and often overlooked, part of what I identify as our foundational health habits. And I’m not talking about sleep. Rest is waking time when we deliberately step away from productivity and allow ourselves to recharge. It might mean socializing with a friend, working on a hobby, sitting outside, daydreaming, puttering around the house, listening to music, or simply staring out the window. None of these activities necessarily accomplish anything. That’s the point.
When we are chronically stressed, we need periods when our minds and bodies aren’t being asked to perform, produce, respond, or achieve. Rest creates that space. It helps restore some of the bandwidth that constant demands consume and makes us more resilient when we return to those demands. The problem is that many of us have become really bad at doing nothing.
The “Cult of Efficiency“
Celeste Headlee wrote the book Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving when she realized she was stressed and burned out. It wasn’t just the demands of her job or the ever-present tug of technology. It was also the culture in which she operated and her own insatiable striving.
“I realized it was not my circumstances that caused my stress but my habits” (p. xii). Headlee identifies what she calls the “cult of efficiency.” We have gradually shifted our attention away from what makes life fulfilling and toward what makes life feel productive.
However, a sense of worth doesn’t come only from doing. It also comes from being. Being present for our lives. Recognizing what is happening right under our noses. Slowing down enough to actually experience the life we are working so hard to create.
When we focus too much on efficiency, we neglect things that are technically inefficient, yet incredibly important. We spend less time really connecting with close friends and family, rather than simply liking a post or sending a text. We neglect hobbies, social activities, fun, time to putter around the house, opportunities to be bored, and moments spent staring out the window. In other words, we stop resting.
How Did We Get So Busy?
Headlee traces our push for efficiency back to the Industrial Revolution, which, in the grand scheme of human history, is relatively recent. It changed expectations about how quickly things should be done, when we should sleep, how many hours we should work, where we should live, and how we should use our time. As productivity increased, some people became very wealthy, but many more became overworked and exhausted.
Our society also adopted the mentality that “time is money.” When time has monetary value, we become increasingly concerned about “wasting” it. Leisure can start to feel indulgent. Doing nothing can make us uncomfortable. We might even judge ourselves for resting when there is something productive we could be doing.
At the same time, the distinction between work and personal time has become increasingly blurry. We can work almost anywhere, which means work can follow us almost everywhere. Ironically, many of those additional “working” hours aren’t particularly productive. We respond to instant messages because we feel they need an immediate response. We treat emails like urgent communications. We bounce from one task to another, checking our phones in between. We are busy, but busy isn’t necessarily the same as productive.
More Work Doesn’t Equal More Productivity
Research on working hours has repeatedly demonstrated diminishing returns. There are only so many hours in a day during which humans can perform effectively. Eventually, additional “work” becomes noise.
Our hustle culture is burning us out, yet we continue to engage in an unwinnable war with our own limitations. When we are caught in the constant pull of productivity and availability, it can feel like we are accomplishing more. Yet, taking time away from work can actually make us better at working when we return. Rest can also support our health and well-being.
And still, as Headlee notes, “more than half of U.S. employees feel overworked or overwhelmed on a regular basis” (p. 51). If we already feel overwhelmed, the solution probably isn’t to become even more efficient at cramming things into our days. Sometimes the more sustainable solution is to deliberately leave some space empty.
Rest Is a Resilience Skill
Rest is different from sleep, although both are important. Sleep is a biological necessity. Rest is deliberately taking time away from demands so we can recharge. It can include socializing, hobbies, daydreaming, spending time outside, reading for pleasure, listening to music, sitting quietly, or doing absolutely nothing. What matters is that we are temporarily released from the pressure to accomplish something.
This is important for stress management because resilience requires bandwidth. When our days are filled with demands, decisions, stimulation, interruptions, and responsibilities, we continually draw from that bandwidth. We need opportunities to restore it.
Rest isn’t something we earn after we finish everything else. If that is the rule, most of us will never get there. There will always be another email, load of laundry, work task, household project, or item on the to-do list. Instead, we can treat rest as part of the maintenance required to keep functioning well over time.
Rest assured (pun intended!), taking time to recharge is good for our long-term sustainability and wellness. And, ironically, it can make us more productive when it is time to work again. So how do we actually do it?
How to Build More Rest Into Our Lives
Rest sounds simple, but in a culture that rewards busyness, it can be surprisingly difficult to practice. Building more rest into our lives requires us to notice what gets in the way, protect some of our time from constant demands, and become more comfortable with moments that aren’t productive. Here are a few ways to start.
Recognize the influence of hustle culture.
As Headlee points out, many of us “complain” about how busy we are. But talking about our busyness can also serve another purpose. In our culture, being insanely busy can signal that we are doing something worthwhile. We are needed. We are accomplishing things. We are important. This reinforces the insidious cultural assumption that our self-worth is directly related to our productivity.
Yet, many coaching clients come to me after realizing that all of this hustling has made life feel less fulfilling, not more. Often, by the time my clients make this connection, they are already burned out.
We don’t have to wait until we are burned out. We can start noticing our own reactions to rest. Do we feel guilty when we aren’t being productive? Do we automatically reach for something, like our phones, to distract us and fill the space when we have a few free minutes? Do we judge an unproductive afternoon as a wasted afternoon? Awareness gives us an opportunity to challenge those assumptions.
We can also track how we spend our time to develop a more accurate perception of where it actually goes. According to Headlee, when we don’t know how we spend our time, we are more likely to waste it on activities that are neither fulfilling nor restorative, while simultaneously feeling overwhelmed.
Warning: The goal isn’t to track our time so we can squeeze more productivity out of every hour. It is to notice what is consuming our time and create opportunities to truly rest and restore. Even feeling like we have time to spare can make us feel healthier and happier.
Prioritize experiences over things.
Many of us feel pressure to work long hours partly because we want to afford the things we believe we need. Yet, the satisfaction we get from material purchases tends to be short-lived, while research suggests that experiences can provide more enduring happiness.
Working more also may not provide as much financial benefit as we assume. Headlee cites research suggesting that people working more than 50 hours per week make only about 6% more than those who work less. That is a relatively small incentive for a potentially significant cost.
When we step away from consumer culture, we may find that we need less than we thought. That can give us permission to work a little less and live a little more. In fact, people tend to be happier when they stop trading so much of their time for money and, when possible, use money to give themselves more time. Time scarcity has been associated with poorer sleep, anxiety, lower happiness, and other negative health outcomes.
This doesn’t mean we need expensive vacations or elaborate experiences. Rest can be very simple. Dinner with friends, an afternoon hike, playing a game with our kids, gardening, or sitting on the patio with a cup of coffee all count.
Create a clear distinction between work and home, and honor it.
Work is not inherently bad. In fact, meaningful work can be really good for us. It can provide purpose, structure, connection, stimulation, and a sense that we are contributing to something. So the goal isn’t to stop working. It is to counter working hours with leisure hours.
Headlee points to benefits of idle time, including creativity, insight, and intellectual sharpness. Working less can also give us more time to spend in and with our communities, and we know that relationships are an important predictor of both happiness and health.
It is also important to feel psychologically separated from work when we are at home. Workers who feel detached from work during their personal time tend to be more emotionally healthy and satisfied with their lives than those who remain mentally connected to work.
Scheduling can help. We can create a schedule that draws a clearer distinction between work and leisure. This isn’t meant to make our calendars even more rigid or create another source of stress. It is simply a way of protecting time for what matters. One of my clients called it “white space on the calendar.”
Our to-do lists have an incredible ability to expand to the time available, known as Parkinson’s Law. If we don’t protect leisure, we will almost always find something productive to fill the space.
Try choosing a stopping point for work and deciding in advance what happens afterward.
- At 5:30, I close my laptop.
- After dinner, I don’t check email.
- Saturday afternoon is unscheduled.
Small boundaries create space for rest.
Create physical breaks from our phones.
As Headlee reports, “most people touch their phones about 2,600 times between waking and sleeping and spend about five hours browsing on them every day” (p. 155). In a world where so many of us feel like we don’t have enough time, that should get our attention. Our phones certainly make life easier. But they also consume time and attention that could otherwise be spent on activities that support our health and well-being.
Mindless phone use can also prevent us from truly resting. Scrolling may look like downtime, but our brains are still processing a rapid stream of information, stimulation, decisions, and emotional cues. If our goal is restoration, we need a break from input altogether.
Our phones also encourage constant task switching. When we are interrupted by a notification and redirect our attention, we ask our brains to disengage from one task and engage with another. Repeated switching consumes cognitive resources and makes sustained attention more difficult.
We can make rest easier by creating some physical distance. Leave the phone inside while sitting outside. Put it in another room while reading. Take a walk without it when it is safe to do so. Charge it somewhere other than the bedroom. Choose one period each day when it simply isn’t within reach. We don’t have to eliminate technology. We just need to occasionally give our brains a break from it.
Define what is truly urgent.
Headlee asks us to consider whether all of our distractions, messages, and emails are truly urgent and deserving of immediate attention. Every time we stop what we are doing to respond, we treat the interruption like a fire that needs to be put out. As Headlee writes, “Your mind treats all those notifications that come in as seriously as it treats a fire alarm or a knock on the door” (p. 159). Eventually, we can begin to feel constantly stimulated and reactive because that is how we are treating our inputs.
Research on interruptions shows that regaining full focus after switching tasks can take significant time: over twenty minutes! One study found that workers switched tasks approximately every three minutes. That constant switching is exhausting. Instead, we can create more reasonable expectations about response times and silence unnecessary notifications. Not everything deserves immediate access to our attention.
Start Small: Create a Rest Practice
We don’t need to overhaul our schedules or suddenly find hours of free time to start benefiting from rest. Instead, we can experiment with creating small periods when nothing productive is required of us. Start with five minutes.
We can choose a time when we would normally fill an empty moment by checking email, scrolling, doing a household task, or crossing something else off the list. For five minutes, deliberately don’t. Sit outside. Look out the window. Listen to a song without doing anything else. Pet the dog. Have a conversation. Put our feet up. Daydream. Putter. Be bored.
Then notice what happens.
Does it feel good? Uncomfortable? Do we immediately start thinking about what we should be doing? Do we reach for our phones without thinking? That reaction is useful information.
From there, we can look for slightly larger opportunities to protect restorative time. Maybe it is 15 minutes after work, an hour on Sunday afternoon, or one evening when we deliberately leave the calendar empty.
The specific activity matters less than the intention: This time does not need to be productive.
Rest Is Not Wasted Time
We live in a culture that constantly encourages us to optimize our time. That makes it easy to believe that the answer to overwhelm is better efficiency. Sometimes it is, but more often, we don’t need another productivity hack. We need to stop producing.
Rest gives our minds and bodies a chance to recover from the demands we continually place on them. It creates space for relationships, creativity, enjoyment, reflection, and all of the parts of life that are difficult to measure but deeply important to our well-being.
Most importantly, rest helps restore our bandwidth.
We don’t have to wait until we are burned out to give ourselves permission to slow down. We can deliberately build periods of non-productivity into ordinary life, even if we start with only five minutes. There will always be more we could be doing. Sometimes the healthier choice is deciding not to do it.
Simple, Science-Based Habits
Rest is one example of how you can build real resilience without adding more to your plate. Through simple, evidence-based habits and my Take Five Framework, you can feel calmer and be more resilient.
Ready to put this into practice?
If you’re ready to move beyond reading and start applying these tools in real life, I can help. When you’re ready to turn these tools into real change, I help individuals and organizations build practical stress-management and resilience habits that fit into everyday life. Let’s work on it!
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