No energy, and when you finally have a moment, you can’t rest

All day you dream of that one moment when you can finally sit down and do nothing. It seems that then everything will settle: your breathing will even out, your body will let go, your mind will slow down.

And when that moment really comes, something other than relief shows up. Restlessness. Distraction. A feeling that you don’t quite know what to do with the time.

You sit, but your thoughts circle around unfinished things, conversations you could go over one more time, what is waiting for tomorrow. You pick up your phone, you put it down. You put on a series, but it’s hard to focus. You lie down, but your body stays tense. And the moment you were waiting for passes without any rest.

It doesn’t mean something is wrong with you

It is a very common experience, even if we rarely talk about it openly. If I have the time and I can’t rest, maybe I have lost the ability? Maybe I am doing something wrong?

Much more often it is something else: for a long time you have lived in a mode that has no room for really stopping.

When most of your day is doing, reacting and managing, your system gets used to that pace. And the pace doesn’t disappear just because you sat down. Your mind keeps working as if there were still something to do, and your body stays on standby, even though nothing is happening around you any more. A bit like a car that has been driving fast for a long time: it won’t stop on the spot.

Rest you have to “earn”

Many of us carry the belief that rest has to be earned first. First everything sorted, the list closed, every duty wrapped up, and only then a moment for yourself.

Except the list never ends. There is always something else to do, fix or finish. So rest keeps moving to later.

Why stopping can feel uncomfortable

When space finally appears, it often brings not relief but the tension that was covered up by doing. Stopping means you start to feel what you have been putting off all day: tiredness, irritation, sometimes sadness or frustration.

That can be unpleasant. That is why we go back to doing something so naturally, even when it doesn’t matter at all.

You see it most clearly in women who carry a lot of responsibility every day and are used to “coping”. Rest is not just doing nothing. It is the moment your body really gets the signal that it can come out of constant readiness. And sometimes that has to be learned again.

Living abroad adds another layer

If you live in another country, this mechanism can be even stronger. Even if everything looks normal from the outside, inside there is often more vigilance. More things to check, more often you wonder whether everything was understood and handled properly. Your body lets go less often, and quiet moments don’t always feel safe. (I wrote more about this in Living in between 2 worlds.)

Instead of perfect rest: slowing down

Instead of expecting rest to be deep and restoring straight away, try looking at it differently. The point is not to feel relief immediately, but to give yourself time to slow down gradually.

At first it might be a few minutes in which you don’t try to catch up on anything or fill the space with more tasks. Ordinary moments in which you allow yourself not to be productive.

Over time these moments get longer and feel more natural. It is slowly learning a different pace, where not everything has to be done at once and not every break has to be “well used”. Rest stops being a task. It becomes a place where you don’t have to prove anything.

You don’t leave this mode with one decision, but in small steps in which you start treating yourself a little more gently.

Because sometimes the biggest change is not what you do in your free moment, but that you stop demanding that it be perfect.

Kasia Biernacka is an organisational psychologist and leadership advisor based in Belgium, with more than 20 years in HR and leadership development. She has talked about the hidden cost of living in “I’ll manage” mode in interviews for Onet and iKobiece.pl (both in Polish).