Ep 106: How To Rest When You Absolutely Suck At It
By Charlotte Cummings | Feel Better Podcast
If your default setting is go-go-go, you’re not alone. Up to 75–85% of people report days without any real pause, and nearly half of New Zealand employees say they feel burnt out. We live in a productivity-obsessed culture, and many of us have nervous systems so wound up that stillness feels… wrong.
This episode is your permission slip and practical playbook to rest well—without needing a week-long retreat or a personality transplant.
Why Rest Feels So Hard
Culture rewards output. We absorb the lie that we are our achievements.
Overwired nervous systems. Stillness can feel threatening if your baseline is “on alert.”
Personal blockers. FOMO, guilt, anxiety, perfectionism—and the belief that rest must be “earned.”
Rest = waking downtime. Not sleep, but pressure-free moments where your body and mind can downshift.
Step 1: Meet Your Unbearable Feeling
We each have a feeling we’ve learned to avoid at all costs (failure, rejection, letting people down, being left out). If stopping triggers yours, of course rest feels impossible. Name it. Remind yourself: I can feel this and still be safe. You’re building tolerance, not waiting for the feeling to vanish.
Step 2: Change the Story You Tell Yourself
Ditch: “I suck at resting.”
Try: “I’m learning to rest,” “I’m running an experiment in tiny recoveries,” “I’m embracing micro-rest daily.”
Language matters. Narrative therapy 101—use words that make change possible.
Step 3: Make Rest Frictionless
Create a rest spot. A sunny chair, a swing seat, a blanket by the window, a “nest” that invites you to flop. Make it obvious and easy.
Book it like it’s paid work. Sauna, float, a beach loop, gym + 10 mins in the steam room—goes in the diary or it won’t happen.
Set a small daily target. One sit-down with a hot drink (the cooling cup becomes a 10–12 minute timer). Or 5 minutes of breathing. Start tiny, repeat often.
Time it for stressy seasons. School holidays, trial weeks, product launches—build more micro-rest then, not later. Use a buddy for accountability (text a photo of your rest moment).
Step 4: Plan Bigger Downshifts (So You Remember How Good It Feels)
A quarterly solo night in a hotel.
An annual personal retreat (even budget, even local).
A silent morning/afternoon—no talking, just walking, reading, journalling.
Big rests reset the nervous system and remind you why small rests matter.
Step 5: Know Your Kind of Rest
You need different refills at different times:
Physical: lying down, stretching, napping
Mental: white space, monotasking, doodling
Sensory: quiet walk, no headphones, soft light
Social: time with easy people (or time alone!)
Spiritual: nature, prayer, meditation, awe
Tune in: What would feel restorative right now?
Step 6: Expect the Guilt—Do It Anyway
Guilt is common when you change patterns. Let it ride shotgun while you rest. Over time, your brain learns this is safe and useful, and the noise lowers.
Step 7: Bust the Three Rest Myths
“I can rest when everything’s done.” That day never arrives.
“Rest is selfish.” Rested you is safer, kinder, smarter, steadier.
“It only counts if it’s long and perfect.” Five scrappy minutes count. So does two.
Step 8: Remember—Rest Is Productive (Even If That’s Not the Point)
Rest improves empathy, problem-solving, creativity, focus, blood pressure, cortisol, and overall resilience. You perform better and feel more like yourself. And if you’re parenting—you’re modelling. Kids won’t learn non-screen ways to downshift unless we show them.
Real-Life, Zero-Prep Rest (that actually works)
Sit in the sun with a hot drink (phone away).
Lie on the floor with feet on the couch, 20 slow breaths.
7-minute “no-sound” walk: no pods, just outside.
Shower + 2 minutes of cool water (lifts your state rapidly).
The infamous quick lie-down: get under the covers (even for 5 minutes). Your body associates bed + undressed with deep downregulation—use that wiring if you can.
TL;DR Rest Plan
Name your blocker (unbearable feeling).
Reframe your identity (“I’m learning to rest”).
Create a rest spot and book micro-rest daily.
Add a bigger block quarterly or annually.
Match the rest to the need (physical, mental, sensory, social, spiritual).
Feel the guilt—rest anyway.
Keep it scrappy and repeatable.
You’re allowed to be both busy and rested. You don’t need a different life to rest—you need different moments inside the life you have.
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Thanks for joining me. Now this is an episode for you if you suck at resting.
I hear from people so often, I really struggle to rest, I'm an active relaxer, I can only rest while I'm getting stuff done, I do self-care things but I struggle to do deeper relaxation things and I know that this is an issue that a lot of people face. So today I wanted to spend some time talking about how you get better at the art of resting. So let me set the scene here a little bit more in terms of explaining the problem that we have around resting and just quite how common this is.
So the range of different studies that I reviewed in prepping for this episode suggested that between 75 and 85% of people have days where they do not stop. That is, their most common day of their life that they live out is lived without pause or opportunities for rest or any kind of downtime. That is quite a startling statistic.
But this sense of rushing as we go about our lives, the reality that we're often really pressured for time, is something that is such a common struggle. And 70% of people say that they want more rest. Interestingly, a study of 2,000 employees here in the New Zealand context suggested that 49% of people currently feel burnt out.
That they're not able to find rest within their days, that they're feeling absolutely tapped out by what they're doing and they're feeling really exhausted. So when I talk about rest, to clarify I'm talking about time that you are awake, not overnight sleeping rest. But rest being downtime, time without pressure, time to deeply breathe in, time to slow down and not have pressures and expectations on your time.
Now that is something that for way too many people doesn't feature at all within a regular day of their life. So let's talk about how to get better if you're someone who struggles with rest. Firstly, I think we need to understand the context that we're living in.
That of course we live in a culture that rewards productivity, where we get the sense that we are our achievements and our achievements define us. Our achievements determine our happiness. We have these constant messages around the need that we have to keep being productive.
So there is an element of cultural conditioning when it comes to why we struggle to rest. There is also a reality that for lots of people, their nervous system is so very wired that being still actually feels like a threat. Now if you're someone who feels this, I bet you really get it when I make that statement.
But what I'm really saying here is that for some people, that moment of stillness is actually so deeply problematic because it feels like something is wrong. Your nervous system is so wired that that state of stillness is really unfamiliar and it feels like this is not how things are meant to be. I'm doing something wrong here.
This is really uncomfortable and I need to get out of it as quickly as possible. So that overwired nervous system can mean that when you do find opportunities to rest, even if you're working quite hard at that, it can feel really uncomfortable while you're learning to embrace that while you're winding your nervous system out of the current state that it is in. And also we often have personal factors that make resting hard.
We have a fear of missing out. We want to keep up. We want to keep doing things.
We want to cram as much as we can into our schedules because we don't want to miss out on that thing. There can be guilt around resting, that we're not doing enough, we're not serving other people well enough, we're not achieving enough. There can be anxiety, there can be unbridled perfectionism where we feel actually quite out of control in terms of how we're spending our time and this compulsion that we can have to keep doing things without resting.
Now I want to acknowledge here that this is something that I have got much, much better at over time. You probably understand that my life is pretty full. There is a lot going on.
I like to be creative. I've got a busy family. I have a husband who works and has his own busyness and pressures going on with that time.
But this is something that I have a real commitment to and a real commitment to those micro breaks and times of deep relaxation and resting wherever I can. And it is such a life hack. It is a game changer to be able to find that state of rest quickly, efficiently, to deeply embrace that time with no pressure.
And I think so often we consider that we need heaps of time to be able to do a big block of rest. And the reality is we actually need to include this somehow within our day to day lives. So as I talk about rest today, I'm not so much meaning about that quarterly holiday that you might have, but what you might do today to embrace some stillness.
Now, if you struggle with rest, one of the first questions that you need to ask yourself is how does this relate to my unbearable feeling? You will have heard me talk about this on the podcast before, that we all have a feeling that we want to avoid feeling. It is so unpleasant, it's actually unbearable to us. We don't want to feel it.
It's not the same as all the other feelings and we want to structure our lives around avoiding it. So if you are a person who struggles with rest, then your unbearable feeling will be part of this. You can't rest because then you'll fail.
You can't rest because then you'll be left out. You can't rest because then you will disappoint someone. Insert unbearable feeling here is basically what I'm saying.
But if you are struggling to rest, if you want more rest in your life, you're going to need to confront your unbearable feeling. Understand what it is, name it, and recognize that actually you need to feel that feeling. That feeling isn't a threat to you.
You're going to be okay after you feel that feeling and you can survive it. It's not a danger to you. But if you struggle to rest, you're possibly going to have to start learning to feel your unbearable feeling to be able to embrace rest more.
Now another thing that I challenge my clients on if they say, I'm not very good at resting, is I say, we're going to work out how to say that differently. Because guess what? You probably can't get better at resting if you're going to say things like that. Now this is where my background as a narrative-trained therapist is something that comes to the fore.
So what we want to do when we're struggling with an issue is frame that in a way that really opens up the possibilities to us and doesn't keep us stuck and trapped where we are. So for example, instead of saying, I suck at resting, I'm bad at it, I'm never going to be good at this, I'm only ever going to be able to be an active relaxer, you might say something like, I'm learning to embrace what it is to rest. I'm learning to do more rest.
I'm running an experiment in the benefits of more rest in my life. I'm embracing moments of rest. I'm learning to whatever it is that you want to do.
Don't keep yourself stuck where you are because you've got a narrative that you're telling yourself that is limiting you and keeping you right where you're at. Find some ways to switch up the language and embrace how you move forward with this. This was really important to me when I was redefining myself around rest, that actually this narrative that I had of being a busy, busy, busy person with an ultra full life who never stopped and paused was not something that was serving me.
So I wanted to move to a place where I was someone who inspired other people that they could be that busy, that they could have that much going on and they could still learn to be really great at taking those times of deep nourishing rest. So set yourself up here with a story that's going to work for you and it's going to help move you from where you are to where you want to be. My next practical tip is make a place that makes it easy to rest.
A little while ago, I was gifted an amazing thing called a millow, actually gifted a couple of them, shout out to Natalie who made this amazing product, basically taking the inside of mattresses and putting them in what we traditionally have as a beanbag. Beanbags aren't all that comfortable, but this giant pillowy, mattressy thing that you can flop onto that embraces you, that is in my house, set up in a place that is in the sunshine, at the window where there's light and there's an outlook to the garden, is such a beautiful, inviting place to go. And it's somewhere that I have now welded towards having that moment of rest.
So I'm able to go and sit, lie there, curl up there for a minute, I leave a blanket nearby and that is such an easy place to go to have some of those moments of rest. So whether that's setting yourself up with a chair that looks outside or some kind of space that is inviting to you, that is your place that you go, it might be a swinging seat outside, it might be a little kind of nook where you put a table and chairs that you can go outside and drink your cup of tea, whatever it is that fits for you, have a place that is special and dedicated towards your times of deep rest. The next suggestion I have is that you make appointments for things that are deeply restful for you.
So I won't necessarily have time to go and do a beach walk or a float tank or some of the things I find really restful unless I block them out in my diary. Even things like making it to the gym to do a workout and having the buffer of time of an extra 15 minutes to go sit in the sauna that I find super restful, don't find the workout so restful, but having that time in my diary, if it's blocked out, it will happen. If I leave it to chance, it absolutely won't.
So set yourself up with those appointments so you give yourself the greatest chance possible of finding those times of rest. The other thing that can be really fun to do is set yourself some rest goals. So maybe you want to have a little bit of an experiment around doing things differently, around some new things that you want to try or how you find an opportunity within every day to sit down.
The time of recording this currently, it's the school holidays and one thing I challenge myself to do every day in the school holidays is to sit down once a day. Now I know that that sounds ridiculously simple, but it's a clear, easy, measurable target for me and it makes a profound difference to how I feel during the day. So I make myself a cup of tea because I know that that then kind of sets a timer for me of like 10 to 12 minutes of I can't drink the tea straight away because it's still boiling hot, but I'm going to go somewhere, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to exhale, I'm going to take some time to myself.
It's possibly not going to all be ideal and completely child free without noise or interruption, but actually sitting down for that block of time during the day is really important to me. So set yourself a goal when it comes to rest. What is this going to look like? Is this setting yourself a timer for five minutes of breathing exercises a day? Is it making sure that you have two nights of the week that are more deeply restful to you? Start where you're at and set yourself some achievable goals where you can start moving from where you are in the direction that you want to go.
No you're possibly not going to get to the end point that you'd like to be at, but what will move you from where you are to where you want to be? Can be really helpful to build those rest goals around particular times that you find challenging. For me, school holidays are a real challenge to my mental health. I often feel overwhelmed.
I can do some shitty parenting in the school holidays because there's just so much going on. It's a bit of a sensory overload. It's just an intense time and I don't not enjoy it and not want to do it and not love my family.
It's just a challenge to my mental health. So something that I try and do with those blocks of sitting down time is it makes me feel differently about the rest of the day and I know that if I've got the option of those times, I know that there is rest coming. So think about what it is that you could set up for those times when you're particularly under pressure.
I work with a lot of really high achieving people who have got times within their working life where there is something challenging happening. For example, recently working with a client who's a lawyer, we were planning what does rest look like in a week where you've got a trial on? What does it actually look like to find those times of downregulation, of deep rest? No, you don't have a couple of hours to go to yoga or do some of the things that you really enjoy doing, but how are we still going to find those moments in time, especially you need them when you are under pressure. So how are we going to carve those out and set a goal? And that person actually had a target, a goal that they set for how they were going to pursue rest through that busy time and we set up some accountability.
They needed to message me every day with a photo of them doing the thing that they were meant to be doing. So if you're making a plan and setting a goal, find someone else who struggles with this issue and invite them into that. Set yourself up a little bit of a challenge.
This is a challenge that so many people need. My next suggestion is, of course, to plan some bigger times of rest. One of the things that happens when we have a bigger block of rest is we really remember how good rest feels.
We sometimes don't know quite how wired we are until we take those bigger blocks like a holiday or a retreat or some kind of time out. I know a mum, a busy mum with three kids who goes off every year by herself and has a retreat. She does it solo.
She finds somewhere to go that is relaxing, that doesn't have to be fancy, but it is her time out. Her time to plan, to dream, to unwind, to not have any stress and pressure. What a beautiful routine.
I know somebody else who has a quarterly night away in a hotel by themselves to do what they want, to have no time pressure, to just have some time out of conversation with people, able to have a bath, go for a walk, have some time freedom, not have any time pressure and take those breaks. Once upon a time in my very early twenties, I actually think I was 20, I had been studying really hard. I did my first degree in two years, not three, just because that's the kind of overachiever that I was back then and I found myself ultra burnt out.
By the end of my studies, I was working full time as well as studying what was a more than full time load and I had always worked every holidays full time. I had worked part time the rest of the way through my studies and I found myself really, really burnt out. I actually went and did six weeks in a convent of all places in the far north of New Zealand in this beautiful Maori community that totally embraced me, but I just had six weeks of silence.
I was allowed to communicate for one hour a day and that was very precious time to me, but that was a time for me to share, for me to have some input from somebody else, but it was a set time of conversation and the rest of the time was in silence. It was so deeply restorative to me. I was really frazzled and burnt out.
I'd also had some really difficult experiences in my personal life through that time about three things that had happened that were really tough and I really crashed, but I learnt the benefit of that silence, of that time of deep down regulation and that is something that is so powerful to experience if you can. So I wonder, could you challenge yourself to some kind of period of silence so you can experience that deep rest? The other thing I think is important is to be really motivated about why this matters. Something that helps me to do rest better and to do it more frequently and to also do it at times that might not necessarily be really convenient is because I know that my children will not learn to rest unless I model that to them.
I think so often our kids now only have screens as a way to unwind and to find that downtime and if your children don't have an option that isn't screens in terms of finding some rest and relaxation, then that's a bit of a problem. No wonder they ask for them so much. But it can be really motivating if you are a parent to remember that if you can't model rest to your children, they likely won't find it all by themselves.
It models some ideas to them. It tells them that it is okay to rest. It lets them know that even when things are busy, it is a good idea to take a bit of time out.
The other thing that's really significant about rest is it often unlocks our wisdom, our creativity, the answers that we have for ourselves. I took some time out recently one night and I went down to my gym for a long sauna. I had a bit of cold water therapy.
They've got an ice shower, not an ice bath, but like a 10 degree, super, super cold shower and I went for 40 minutes between the shower and the sauna and just had some unexpected but planned downtime. I came home and I journaled. I felt really inspired about my work for the rest of the week.
It was really, really deeply beneficial for me. So remember that rest is productive. You can gain so much from it in terms of that wisdom, creativity, and sometimes the answers to the dilemmas or the questions that you're facing in your life.
The other thing that rest can really reveal to us is what's there when we're still. So often we're blocked from our emotions just because we're too busy for them. We don't have that time and space to listen to ourselves.
We don't really know what's there until we take that time of stillness. So it is my encouragement to you to embrace those reasons why you want to do rest and why you want to have a different and perhaps better relationship with how you do rest. The other thing I think is important when it comes to rest is that you find your version of what this looks like for you.
Not everyone wants to be a rising at 5 a.m. cacao drinking meditator. I absolutely get that. And sometimes I think we have just one version of what rest looks like, that it has to be meditation, that it has to look a particular way, that it has to happen early in the morning and the total stillness and quiet.
And I really like the idea that we can actually come back to setting our own vision for what rest looks like for us. It might just be taking down time in the middle of everything. I have a distinct memory of what my mum used to do at home in the afternoons.
She was an incredibly busy, productive person who ran an amazing home and gave us a great childhood. She was constantly serving other people. She was that mum who was on the PTA and running the epic school fair and doing all the things.
But she also had this little routine where in the afternoon she used to go and lie in the sun. And I distinctly remember the sliding door, the space where she used to open it up so there was fresh air, and she used to lie in the sun. We used to go and annoy her.
And I'm sure that was very, very annoying, but she'd just take five minutes peace. And it was a beautiful thing to observe. So remember you're allowed to shape rest to look however you want it to look within your busy life.
It doesn't have to look grammable. It doesn't have to be something that copies what other people are doing, although it's great to get their ideas. This is allowed to look however it needs to look to fit well into your life and to feel good for you.
So often I think when it comes to behaviour change, we see ourselves as needing to go to the nth degree all of a sudden. And it's absolutely okay to try a few new ideas, to try things on for a period of time, and to switch ideas up. For some people, they hate the idea of being locked into a routine.
Spoiler alert, that is me. I am much better to do things for bursts of time that work for me and then change up the idea because I need that sense of novelty. I do not want to have a structured routine that I keep all of the time.
That to me is really boring. It feels like prison to do the same thing over and over again. I feel imprisoned by routines and I don't really like them.
So it's important to understand yourself when you're setting your goals around rest. What does this need to look like to work for you? Now here is a challenge for you. If you're someone who struggles to rest, I want you to embrace this idea.
Feel the guilt and do it anyway. One of the things I hear so often from people who struggle with rest is that they can't rest because they feel guilty, so they don't do it. But the trick is that if we're going to learn to embrace rest, to have more downtime within our regular day-to-day lives, then we need to find ways to do that rest even when we feel guilty, to have those downtimes even in the presence of those feelings, in the hope that over time, it is likely that those feelings will change.
Another little reminder that I'd like to mark a point around here is that there are different types of rest. So there is social rest, where we find ourselves in relationships that are easy for us. There is spiritual rest, where we place ourselves in environments that feel right and light to us.
There is physical rest, mental rest, sensory rest. So have a think within this concept of rest about the different kinds of rest that you need and when. For example, sometimes I know that when I go for a walk, I need that to be a restful sensory experience.
Often it is perfectly okay for me to be listening to music or a podcast while I'm out walking. And other times, I need a sensory rest. I need to listen to the sounds around me, I need lower stimulation, and so tuning in with that sense of what kind of rest I need is really important.
Now I just want to point out here that there are some common myths when it comes to rest. One is that you can only rest when everything is done. One is that to rest is selfish.
And the other is that our times of rest have to be long or perfect. All of those things are not true, my friend. And actually, you can find a place of learning to leave things undone and still rest.
You can hear that voice that tells you it's selfish to take that time out and you really should be doing X, Y, and Z and still rest. You can feel like you don't have the available amount of time that you'd like to deeply rest and carve out a few minutes and still rest. So those myths, those things that we have in our mind constantly about, I'll rest when it's all done, we know that that time isn't coming.
So we need to find ways to still do the rest that our bodies, our minds, and our spirits need even when it is hard, even when we are up against those common myths and messages. One of the other key points that I want to make here is that rest, in fact, isn't doing nothing. It is something that achieves so much for us.
It allows us to be more empathetic to other people. It allows us to solve problems better. It allows us to perform better, to concentrate more.
Rest is actually a process that is deeply productive and that's not the only reason we should do it. We don't need to do rest because it makes us more productive. That's kind of not the right message here.
But we need to understand that rest isn't just switching off and taking time off from everything that is an important thing that we do because we do it. It is something that is really important to our whole selves. It is something that we are designed to need.
We are wired for this. Our bodies work so much better when we rest. Our blood pressure comes down.
Our cortisol lowers. Our bodies, our minds, our spirits need this. Rest is productive.
It is something that we need and it is something that achieves so much for us. So I want to own here this isn't something that I have always been good at but it is something that I have loved and embraced over time. I will not get over the story that I told on this podcast.
I'm just never going to live it down. So many people talk to me about it. My husband uses it against me all the time.
But once on the podcast, I admitted that there is something that I do that I find profoundly restful that I get a lot of comments about. And it is this, that I often take my clothes off and get back into bed in the middle of the day because I know that if I've got five minutes in my lunch break, the most deeply restful thing that I can do is get back into bed but with my clothes off. Because I have this really strong association that being undressed and lying in bed leads to the deepest relaxation for me.
That is my most down-regulated time. If you think about how it feels in the evening when you finally hit the pillow for the day and you find that sense of like, okay, I'm done, it's all over. I've got this kind of time to breathe and have some space to myself.
That is often a place of really significant rest for us. You can actually go back and access that at other points in time during the day. Now, I know that some people work in offices and I really hate that for you, but I have structured my life around working from home.
Sorry, that is one of the reasons why I only see clients online now because I like my own environment. I like being able to have that space to really down-regulate myself. It helps me show up better for people.
My husband does though sometimes say to me, we can't all take our clothes off during the day and go back to bed. He's a helicopter pilot that wouldn't work in the environments that he is in. But what I'm really trying to say here is that you can do rest in a way that works for you.
You can find those things that really hit the spot, that give you rest and relaxation in a way that is really time efficient. And if that is an odd thing like taking your clothes off and going back to bed, then you go for it. It is possibly the most embarrassing, yet challenging and hopefully inspiring thing I have ever said on this podcast.
So in conclusion, I hope that today has inspired you to reflect on the place of rest in your life, on how well you're doing this, whether you want to do anything differently, on whether you can make a bit more space for rest, on embracing the idea that you might be learning when it comes to this, on finding ways that work for you, on setting up appointments, times and places that invite you towards rest, on busting some of those myths around rest that you have to have everything done in order to do it, you have to have a big block of time and that you're selfish if you have this downtime. We know that our whole selves benefit from rest, mind, body and spirit. This is something we're designed for, we're set up for, our lives go better when we have it and so many people want more of this.
So set yourself up some little experiments, try something new, set a target for what you might do day to day and I'd love to hear what you plan for yourself from this episode. Just know that if you're someone who has struggled to rest, there are many people who've walked this path before you who've found a different way, who've found a way to be busy and still have time for this downregulation, who've found how to have a full life and also respect yourself enough to allow yourself and build in the rest that you need. I hope this is super inspiring and I can't wait to hear all your stories about the great rest to come.
