Why It Might Be Difficult for You to Rest

It's a cultural problem, but is it a personal one, too?

Photo by Zach Lucero on Unsplash

In my last post, I asked: Do you rest? Some of us have trouble with the idea of resting, but we aren’t exactly sure why. One problem I noted was our cultural lack of imagination around rest. We tend to associate rest with sleep or inactivity, rather than things that are relaxing, rejuvenating, recreational, restorative, renewing, or refreshing…. things that are different for different people. (One person’s rest is another person’s work, and vice versa!) So maybe we’re uncomfortable with rest simply because we don’t know what it is.

Today, I want to unpack some other, more interior, reasons that we might struggle to rest well.

(1) A devaluation of being

There’s no doubt about it, we live in a productivity-driven culture. “I wasn’t very productive today” is always a lament, never a claim to rejoice in. Our world, unfortunately, values people not for the fact of their existence, but for what they can do. That’s why (sickeningly) we don’t value those who are classed as a ‘drain on the system.’ This often leads to:

(2) Achievement- based identity

Who am I if I’m not _____? What is the point of my life if I can’t _____? God forbid I become a burden to others.

When our very identity is linked to what we do, who are we when we don’t do that thing? What significance or value do we have? Some of us can’t rest because we’re worried that we’ll lose our very selves in the process. This means that:

(3) Rest is considered low-value

It doesn’t make the priority list. There are always more important things to do than rest! We don’t give it pride of place in our weeks, we don’t make space for it in our days, and we can go entire years without really doing it. (I once heard Marie Forleo say that she hadn’t taken a vacation in seven years of building a business.) If we don’t think that resting is important, we’re always going to push it out of the way with other things.

But sometimes rest doesn’t make the priority list for another reason:

(4) Fear of what might happen if we stop

You know when you’ve been going, going, going like crazy all day and then you sit down? It feels like you’re never going to be able to get back up again! Some of us take that approach to life in general. We don’t want to stop and rest because we’re afraid that if we do, we’re never going to be able to do anything ever again.

The thing is, that ‘never wanting to get back up again’ feeling is an indicator of a need to – you guessed it! –actually rest. I’m no doctor, but it doesn’t take a medical degree to know that our bodies aren’t designed to function well on vast amounts of caffeine and very little sleep. Maybe it’s time to admit that we’re just trying to do too much.

There’s another kind of fear, as well:

(5) Fear that things will fall apart if I rest - aka, pride

Most of us enjoy feeling indispensable. We like being needed, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if it isn’t balanced with the understanding that, ultimately, the world does not keep on turning because of us, we’re in for disappointment. We are not God, and other people are probably more capable than we give them credit for. (And if they aren’t? How else will they grow in capability if we don’t give them the chance?) Sometimes pride creeps in and lies to us, insisting that if we rest, or step away, everything will implode.

Of course, there are some situations in which we really are needed, seasons of survival mode during which a step away would be imprudent. But those circumstances should be the exception, not the norm. If we build a life in which no one else is capable of stepping in to help, we’ve built something as precarious as a house of cards. The Body of Christ is designed to function together. It can be hard to ask for help, and even harder if we ask and others say no! But don’t give up out of discouragement. Keep asking.

This is difficult, especially if:

(6) We’re not in the habit of being receptive.

Rest, ultimately, is about receptivity, not activity. When we rest, we allow “our wells to be filled again” - by God, by time, by nature, by beauty, by others. It requires us to be comfortable with not being the giver all the time. Are we, to borrow a phrase from Emily P. Freeman, able “to sit down on the inside”? For some of us, this comes more easily than it does for others.

If we haven’t acquired the habit of rest, if we aren’t comfortable in a posture of receptivity, why not? It’s worth praying about.

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I’d love to hear: have you ever had a realization about why you struggled to rest? Has anything changed for you?

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