To Everyone Who Feels Guilt Around Rest

The importance of taking a break

I talk a lot about how important rest is and that we shouldn’t feel guilty for needing it, yet it is hard to follow my own advice sometimes.

It takes days of me pushing myself to my limit and more till I finally crash and cannot do a thing.

Yesterday, I experienced severe burnout and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was hard to bring myself to move let alone do anything else. I had been noticing the signs of burnout but I chose to ignore them, and convinced myself that my brain was just trying to make me “lazy”.

I couldn’t ignore the call for rest any longer and ended up being forced to hit the brakes.

When we don’t listen to our bodies, we neglect to nip things in the bud before they become problematic and this is something I noticed myself doing.

Not taking rest caused me to feel:

Intense fatigue

Heightened anxiety

Insomnia

Physical weakness

Looking at the list it doesn’t seem worth it to not take a break to experience all these things, but it never feels that way when I am on a roll.

The root cause of guilt

Understanding why there is so much guilt around taking a break has a lot to do with our environment, which ends up affecting our mindset.

When we are fed so much information about hustling and over-exerting ourselves to reach our goals, it’s hard not to let that affect our attitude towards rest.

So when we do come across a time when our minds and bodies are telling us to take a break, we perceive it as a sign of weakness. Phrases such as “you can rest when you’re dead” don’t help the cause either.

It also doesn’t help when there are things like algorithms that will stop favoring us if we take a break from social media or writing.

I have even seen articles here on Medium where people noticed a decrease in views, earnings, and engagement after taking a hiatus from writing on this platform.

Rest is imperative

It’s no wonder we feel the need to keep charging ahead even when we really don’t feel up to it. However, doing so only causes us to feel chronic stress and fatigue, which in the long run has a greater impact on our health and affects the quality and longevity of our lives.

It’s one thing to understand how important rest is, it’s a whole other thing to actually practice taking a break without feeling guilty.

Just like anything, adopting this mindset takes practice and patience.

We have to be patient with ourselves and allow our minds and bodies to get the reinvigoration they deserve. We dishonour ourselves when we don’t allow ourselves to rest.

After experiencing exhaustion-related symptoms myself, I can honestly say it’s not worth it to ignore the call.

I hope this article inspires anyone who has been over-exerting themselves to take a break and to know that it is more than ok to do so.

Taking a break does not equal laziness.

Taking a break means honouring the needs of your mind, body, and soul and serving your future self in a positive way.

Thank you for reading this article!

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