If Rest Makes You Anxious, This Might Be Why

You’ve had a whirlwind of a day. You’ve been at work finishing projects. You come home to make dinner and hang out with your spouse and kids. You finally get the kids down to bed and get the kitchen cleaned up. You sit down to relax and start to feel anxious…antsy…maybe even a little guilty for resting. You think to yourself “there’s got to be more that I can be doing”, but there’s another part of yourself that thinks “why can’t I just enjoy relaxing?”. 

For some people, rest actually triggers anxiety instead of calm. For some people who are hypervigilant–it’s hard for their bodies to relax and feel good resting. We’ll explore how this can connect to wanting to feel productive and feel worthy below.

Hypervigilance: When Your Nervous System Won’t Power Down

You might be wondering: What’s hypervigilance? I’d love to answer that for you.

Hypervigilance is when your nervous system is constantly scanning for danger, keeping you stuck in a fight-or-flight response — even when you’re technically safe. Even if the danger is a lone sock on the ground, dirty dishes in the sink, or a dryer full of clothes that need to be folded. Your nervous system can’t always tell the difference between a true threat and a messy kitchen.

Especially for women and moms this is particularly tough because they often notice the “home work” more than their partners. So when you’re home and noticing everything that needs to be done all the time–your body doesn’t know how to wind down or turn off that vigilance.

This can also be a byproduct of things you experienced in your childhood whether that was emotional neglect, trauma, abuse. These things teach us as young people to always be on the lookout for danger even when there might not be danger around.

That’s why stillness and slowing down can feel threatening! Because even when your body is telling you it needs a break: it’s also saying it doesn’t feel safe enough to take a break.

This isn’t something that’s broken within you–it’s just how your body learned to protect itself.

Why Productivity Feels Safer Than Rest (and Fuels Anxiety)

Oftentimes people use productivity as a strategy to help them feel good about what they're doing and to give their bodies something to do with feeling vigilant. Because let’s face it–there’s nothing worse than sitting around while your body is screaming at you to get up and do something!

One thing people believe when they're in this chronic cycle of hypervigilance and productivity is that “if I’m doing something, I’m less likely to be surprised or caught off guard”. It provides their nervous system some temporary relief because it sensed danger and technically you're doing something to hopefully rectify that. 

Unfortunately, when your body is stuck in this cycle it can’t slow down or relax. So you're stuck constantly feeling the need to do something or else you’ll feel badly either about yourself or for “seemingly no reason”. 

The busyness doesn’t solve the anxiety: it masks it.

This can be bad because at some point your body will need rest, and when it doesn’t know how to do that it may lead to burnout, emotional exhaustion, or increased anxiety symptoms.

When Your Worth Is Tied to What You Do

For many people, their self-worth becomes tied to their productivity whether that’s at work or at home. Now in Christianity we believe that all people hold worth whether they are productive or not because we were created in the image of God. You have inherent worth that isn’t dependent on performance. But even if you aren’t a Christian, it can be a tricky thing to tie your worth to your work because what happens when you inevitably can’t work?

Growing up, many of us have stories of learning that our worth is tied to work because we were praised in school for getting good grades, or in our family for being a “caring sibling”, or at church for volunteering. So it makes sense why when you stop doing things for other people and just “be” for a minute your body goes into fight or flight mode. Your body doesn’t want to lose the people around you or “lose your worth” because you rested.

Rest might be a threat to your identity instead of just a simple habit change.

The Hidden Link Between Hypervigilance, Productivity, and Self-Worth

All three of these components keep people stuck in a constant state of striving. If you’re hypervigilant, you’ll be looking for ways to be productive, and if you’re productive you’ll believe that you are a good person/confident/feel good about yourself.

On the surface, people see you achieving and working hard and they might even receive benefit from your work. But underneath all of that: you’re insecure in your identity, you’re striving for validation from others or your work, and you’re constantly fearing the danger that’s around the corner.

That’s why willpower can’t fix this problem. You need deeper nervous system healing and belief work to untangle the idea that your worth is based on your work.

How to Make Rest Feel Safer and Calm Your Nervous System

If you’ve never learned how to relax without guilt, it makes sense that rest feels uncomfortable.

One way we can start calming your nervous system is by slowly changing your mindset around it. If you are at all like who I’ve described above you might view people who rest as “lazy” or “selfish”. I want us to reframe rest as regulation, which is a fancy word for calming our nervous system down.

Another thing to start with is doing some “active rest”. So instead of sitting on the couch binge watching Netflix, you could go for a slower walk or do some gentle movement. Sometimes regulation doesn’t mean not doing anything–it can also look like doing things at a slower pace so your body doesn’t feel frazzled while doing the dishes.

When you’ve done those two things, you could graduate to doing some moments of stillness. I would start a little at a time and work your way up.

You can start in any of these areas: there’s no wrong place to start. If you notice yourself feeling anxious as you do any of these things I would just slow down and ask yourself what happened and what’s feeling unsafe right now. Make a note of that and then maybe return to that activity later.

It’s totally up to you where you go and what feels good for you!

You Don’t Need to Earn Rest to Deserve It

Let me just say this because I haven’t said it yet: You are someone who deserves rest simply because you’re a human. You have inherent worth as a person and you absolutely don’t need to earn rest. 

If this makes you feel uncomfortable, I’d love for you to sit for a moment with that discomfort and ask yourself why that’s a tough thing to read. Maybe even dive into what things you’re believing instead that prevent you from fully taking in this truth. Just notice what comes up for you.

When Support Can Help

There comes a time for some people when they think “I don’t want to do this work alone anymore” or “it feels hard to piece apart these thoughts in my head” or maybe “I don’t know how to get to those deeper beliefs on my own”. That’s where I come in. I offer trauma-informed therapy for women struggling with anxiety and burnout in the Inverness / South Denver area.

All of those things can be hard to do on your own, and I’d love to help. Therapy can provide a safe place and skills to help you slowly go deeper into why these beliefs have come about, why it’s hard for your body to slow down, so we can untangle those unhelpful pieces and start to rebuild something that’s lasting and healthy.

Remember: rest isn’t the problem. Your body just learned a long time ago that it was safer to always be aware. But now you’re ready to move on to a different chapter in life where you don’t have to feel so vigilant all the time. I’m here to help you and your body learn that rest isn’t dangerous. Let’s do it together.

If you want to learn more about how I do therapy to help people untangle their self-worth from productivity, please reach out below!

Part of the Things No One’s Told You About Anxiety series —> View Full Series