#142: Resting is a skill you've been neglecting
How often do you take breaks? Scrolling on your phone while your eyes sting with tiredness doesn't count. Do you even know what sorts of activities you find restorative? Do you remember what being relaxed feels like? And don't give me that 'I'm much happier when I'm busy, honest!' nonsense. If you find it hard to switch off and relax, that's not because you don't need a rest. It's because you're out of practice. But it's a skill you can learn (or re-learn) and have fun along the way. And, importantly, it's something you need to do before you crash and burn. Close that laptop and have a sit down with your Imperfectionist friend. Together, we'll locate your OFF switch.
Episode transcript:
When did you last work out your rest muscle?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Welcome back, my friends. Here we are, heading into the final quarter of 2026. For me, it’s the first teaching week of the new academic year, and you find me speaking to you at the end of one of those days that just got swallowed up with … stuff. Little things needing sorting out, just quickly, before I get on with some actual proper work, and I ended up spending hours in a state of ‘just clearing the desk here, won’t be a moment’, and then the end of the day - well, the working day, for me - arrived and I still hadn’t found time for the actual proper work I was hoping to do because of all the desk-clearing stuff, and by the way my desk (metaphorically speaking) isn’t even clear either and I’m exhausted - that horrible sort of exhausted that comes not from doing exercise or being outside but from just sitting there for far too long, staring at the screen. I know I’m not alone in this experience. And I know, too, that it can really mess with our sense of what sort of day we’ve had and what sort of down time we need. It’s common for people to think that, unless they’re happy with how much they’ve accomplished, they don’t deserve a break, as if breaks are something that need to be earned rather than a necessity required for continued functioning. I talked about that nonsense in my second ever podcast episode: But I haven’t earned a rest! But I’ve noticed that there’s something else going on too, another way of thinking about ourselves and our lives that interferes with our ability to rest and recharge. This thing isn’t so much to do with keeping an internal log of how productive you’ve been, and therefore how much rest you’re entitled to take. It’s more a case of losing track of when you’re doing work and when you’re not. It’s a case of normalising the grind. If you’re someone who is constantly feeling like they’re not doing enough, who is always worrying about falling behind, who finds it hard to switch off and relax properly, who feels guilty if they take time for themselves - how do you know when you need a break? That’s not a rhetorical question. I want you to think about the answer. Because I’ve heard some really alarming answers in my time, and you might have heard some, too. We all know the stories about the people who just don’t take a break, and then they collapse, burnt out or worse - but the stories that exist, often unnoticed, in the space before you get to that emergency drama situation are in a way more disturbing, because they’re just so ubiquitous, and so alarmingly normal. There are the people who wait to rest until they are unable to function - until they are falling asleep at their desk or struggling to understand the sentences they’re looking at - and even then they are impatient to get back to the grind as soon as possible. There are the people who insist that they feel fine, that they get their energy from being busy, that taking time away from their work would make them feel more stressed, if anything - not realising that they are powered by anxiety, and ignoring the fact that being afraid to stop is actually a huge red flag. There are the people who are just puzzled by the idea that they should be taking more breaks than they actually are, because obviously they’re taking breaks while they’re sleeping or on the toilet or driving, so what are you talking about? And there are the people who don’t think they really need a break at the moment because they haven’t really been doing anything, when actually they’ve been pushing themselves so hard for so long that they’ve lost any conception of what their baseline energy levels might be, and the ongoing stresses in their lives have become part of the background, things they don’t even notice any more, they way we sometimes stop noticing a sound or a smell when we’ve been around it long enough. You get the idea, I hope. These are people who are so chronically ‘on’ that they don’t notice that they’re doing anything that might use them up and require recovery. They are the people who wouldn’t know what to do with a day off. Who, perhaps, used to read novels or knit or play board games for relaxation many years ago, but can’t remember the last time they read for pleasure or picked up a pair of knitting needles or sat in the same room as a game of Monopoly. Who, when you ask them what comes to mind when they think of doing something restful, answer with something exaggeratedly decadent, like lying in a hammock on a tropical island getting a foot rub and a head massage at the same time - an image that has ‘unrealistic’ and ‘not for me’ etched into it. Who might have come to associate taking a break with stuff that they don’t even like - holidays in the sun when they can’t stand heat, or getting manicures when the idea of having to sit opposite a stranger and make smalltalk is excruciating - meaning that they end up dismissing taking breaks as something that’s not really relevant to them and which might even be counterproductive. These aren’t people who say things like, ‘I would like to take a break, and I feel I would benefit from doing so, but I haven’t yet earned one’. They’re people who have stopped being able to recognise when their cup is empty, and who wouldn’t know how to fill it anyway.
I’m vulnerable to this myself. I’ve talked about it - and joked about it - before on this podcast, when I described taking myself off to a coffee shop, supposedly for a nice relaxing time, and spent the whole time anxious about whether I was relaxing enough, and if there was anything else I ought to be doing in order to maximise the restful effect of my break. I know that resonated with some of you, because you emailed me to tell me.
So, if you’re someone for whom rest has become not very restful - if you recognise yourself in any of what I’ve said so far - what’s going on? Let me start off my answer to this with a definition. We philosophers love those. By ‘taking a break’ or a ‘rest’ - I’m using those terms interchangeably - I mean spending time away from your obligations in order to replenish your energy levels. I’m going to leave it deliberately vague what ‘replenishing your energy levels’ might mean. If you’re an athlete, it might have a literal interpretation: taking a break from your training allows your body to move more powerfully or efficiently or accurately when you go back. But we can also think in terms of cognitive and emotional energy too. Taking a break from your obligations - obligations that might involve writing a thesis or deciphering a spreadsheet or looking after children or something else - might involve giving your rational faculties some downtime so that you’re sharper when you come back, or taking time away from tending to other people’s needs so that you just feel happier. I’m aware that what I’m saying here might sound as if taking a break is instrumental - it’s something you do for the main purpose, or even the sole purpose, of being able to do a better job of fulfilling whatever your obligations are. Sometimes we do take breaks for that purpose. But taking breaks is valuable for its own sake. It’s a way of looking after ourselves.
Okay, back to that question: if you struggle with taking breaks - you might even have got to a point where you feel incapable of taking breaks, or you wouldn’t know what to do with them, or you think it would make you feel worse rather than better - what’s going on? I think it’s useful here to think of the ability to rest as a skill, one that we can lose over time, and one that we can learn and hone too. Perhaps you’re out of practice with resting. What this looks like, sometimes, is a lack of understanding about what rest is, for you. I have noticed this especially with people who have made a career out of doing something they love. Sounds idyllic, right? But what it actually looks like, very often, is that someone starts out following their passion - whether that’s an academic discipline or project, or a business doing something they enjoy, or something else - and over time, as it becomes their career, with all the stresses that go along with that, it changes from something that energises them into something that depletes them, and that transition happened slowly enough that they didn’t see it. That doesn’t mean that they’ve done something wrong, but it does mean that they need to update their ideas about where they get their energy. People like this might just not know what sorts of things will fill their cup any more, now that it’s not being filled by the thing that has become their job. People who think along those lines often say things like, ‘I don’t know what’s gone wrong, I used to feel so passionate and excited about what I do, and now I just feel tired and fed up, and I don’t know why’. I did an episode about this: check out #33: I’m supposed to be doing what I love - what’s gone wrong? This sort of experience illustrates that what rest looks like, for a particular person, can change over time. There’s this pervasive idea that we all just know - that we can effortlessly just intuit - what we need to do to relax. But that’s not always the case. It’s also not even the case that we all know what it feels like to be relaxed. And while there’s a whole industry, multiple industries, selling us off-the-shelf supposedly restful things like beach holidays and spa days, those things aren’t for everyone. If you don’t know what you find restful, and you’re not trying to work it out, then you might find that there’s trouble ahead, because at some point your need for rest is going to become impossible to ignore. But you can fix that, and a big part of fixing it is accepting that it involves a body of knowledge that you need to keep up with. Like a personal version of continuing professional development. Continuing personal development. Mandatory annual online audits of what is relaxing. Wow, amazing new business idea.
Okay, so, being able to rest involves keeping abreast of knowledge about what you find restful these days. I also mentioned that resting is a skill, which is something different. The first is about knowing-that, the second - which I want to talk about now - is about knowing-how. (That distinction is due to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, by the way.) It can be hard to switch off, especially if you’re not used to doing that, and especially given the messages we’re bombarded with that tell us that productivity and growth and becoming and improving are all good. You’d be forgiven for thinking that doing nothing, by contrast, means stagnating, getting left behind, being a dead weight, lazy, useless, selfish. There are plenty of people - perhaps you’re one of them - who have so thoroughly internalised this message that the only way they can make peace with the idea of resting at all is by telling themselves that resting now is necessary in order to be more productive later - as if productivity is the pinnacle of self-realisation. It’s no wonder that resting can feel so awkward and uncomfortable. It feels a bit like sitting in a waiting room. A frustrating waste of time. For many of us, rest is something that we pause life in order to do. It’s a diversion from real life, not a part of it. We end up feeling left behind when we step out of the grind for a moment, and perhaps we also feel an uneasy sense of mounting pressure when we rest, as if the demands of real life are continuing to build in our absence, ready to rush out at us in a torrent the moment we get back to it.
If that’s the way you feel about resting, what can you do? What’s gone wrong? I want to suggest that there are likely at least two things going on here: one has to do with you and the way you think about and relate to rest; the other has to do with what’s going on around you. Let me start with the second. Look, given that we all need rest - yes, even you - if it’s really the case that the demands of your life can’t spare you in order for you to switch off and disengage from them regularly and on an ongoing basis, then something is wrong with your life. You’re not living sustainably. You can’t keep this up indefinitely. I don’t mean, necessarily, that this is your fault. You might have little choice in the matter. Plenty of people, unfortunately, are forced into unsustainable ways of living, teetering on the edge of burnout as they struggle to earn enough to live on and fulfil their obligations. That’s doable for short periods, but not forever, and I hope that if you’re in that situation, you know that.
Setting aside your circumstances, though, feeling like a fish out of water whenever you try to relax might be a ‘you’ problem. Resting is kind of a dying art. Lots of us reach for our phones when it’s time to take a break from working, which isn’t working, but isn’t exactly resting either. Or we’ll finish toiling away at our desks and instead of getting up and leaving the desk, we’ll stay where we are and just switch from doing something work-related on the computer to looking at more recreational stuff. My daughter laughed at me only yesterday for this. She came up to my office, looked at my screen, and said, with a kind of appalled amusement, ‘Are you watching reels?’ Listener, I was indeed watching reels, and it was not very relaxing.
Remember that definition of taking a break I gave you earlier: it’s spending time away from your obligations in order to replenish your energy levels. Picking up your phone or looking at fun websites ticks the ‘spending time away from your obligations box’, but - at least for someone whose work involves sitting at a desk - it doesn’t replenish your energy. Making things like this your go-to method of relaxation means you’re not practising rest. You’re not working the rest muscle, so to speak. So you still end up clunky and awkward when you try to do something properly relaxing, just like I was in the coffee shop when I spent the whole time worrying that I was doing resting wrong.
What can you do, if you’re someone for whom resting doesn’t come naturally? I think a really important thing to do here is to open your mind to the idea that this is a skill you need to work on. Treat it like a project. Like maintaining your fitness. Like learning a new language. When you do that, you need to learn which words to use - the knowing-that part - and you need to get comfortable with saying things, which is the knowing-how. So, first, you need to work out what sorts of things you are likely to find relaxing and restorative. You can get some clues here from what sorts of activities you were drawn to as a kid. Were you a reader? Did you like being outside? Did you like to run around, dance, play games, solve problems, connect with others? You could also ask friends and family what they enjoy doing to relax. Don’t feel like you need to create an entire restful personality here - if you can find just one thing that you enjoy, that puts you ahead of where you are now. And you can have fun finding it, too. Exploring different things, checking in with yourself, noticing which needs are being met and which are left untouched, enjoying feeling parts of yourself waking up and stretching. Simply making that shift from asking yourself ‘What do I need to get done?’ to ‘How is this making me feel?’ is a positive step, because it means you’re becoming receptive to noticing both what sort of activities you might find restorative, and the signs that you need a break in the first place.
And then there’s the issue of resting feeling clunky and awkward. How do you fix that? This makes me think of something that my yoga teacher has us do in every class. She gets us to curl up into a ball and roll back and forth on our backs. She tells us that if it feels comfortable, then great. Nice healthy back. But if it’s uncomfortable, we need to do it more. Something similar is true for resting, I think. If it’s awkward, do it more. Practise. Same with that new language you’re trying to learn. If, when you try to have a conversation in Welsh or Norwegian or Hausa or whatever it is, it feels excruciating and you’re fumbling around for the words you want, do it more. One day, it will come easily. One day, it will feel comfortable and natural. So, if your trip to the coffee shop this week is not as relaxing as you intended it to be, go back and try again next week.
Back to that idea of rest as continuing personal development. No, I’m not going to try to sell you a six-week course. But if I was, just as a thought experiment, what would you want to see in it? What do you think you need to learn about yourself in order to be better at taking breaks? What aspects of relaxation feel clunky and could do with more practice? Is there one small thing you could do, today, to move yourself in the right direction - perhaps make your next tea break phone-free and go for a walk instead, or invite a friend or colleague to grab a coffee with you? I’d love to hear what you try - please do feel free to drop me a line, via the contact form on my website or via Facebook or Bluesky, and let me know what you try in order to work your resting muscle.
Right. Having finished sitting at my desk talking to you, I am going to take my own advice and go outside. Until next time!
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!