In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I explain why we need to change our relationship with rest. Over the last four years since my father passed away from cancer and grief forced me to slow down and re-evaluate my life, the uncomfortable truth was that I didn’t really know and understand the meaning of rest and the need for me to respect my body. Like so many of us, I also felt as if I had to ‘use up’ free time. So I share what I’ve learned and observed about allowing ourselves to rest. And I hope it inspires you to reframe any ideas you have about laziness and when, if and why you rest.

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5 key topics in this episode

  • If you want to use your free time to do absolutely nothing at all, including staring into space, that’s your prerogative. You don’t need to ‘give away’ your free time, and it doesn’t make you lazy or selfish that you have free time in the first place. You’ve got to stop acting as if your free time is burning a hole in your pocket and that you’ve got to give it to people who ‘need’ it. Hello, you have needs too!
  • Some of us make ourselves really busy so that people can’t lay claim to our free time. In fact, we’ll fill up our free time with stuff we don’t actually want to do just to avoid having to create healthy boundaries and say no.
  • The messages we’ve internalised about ‘laziness’ are racist, ableist, fatphobic, sexist, ageist, classist, and the list goes on. And we’ve internalised these bullshit narratives and started to call them our own beliefs as we run ourselves into the ground.
  • There’s this pervasive attitude that being tired, needing to rest, or have some space/downtime are not acceptable and legitimate reasons to say no to something. Um, they’re exactly the reasons we need to say no when we need, should or want to. Rest and listening to our body is precisely how we discover our limits. It’s how we connect with what we need and want, as well as what is and isn’t working.
  • It’s not a case of waiting until we’re flat-out exhausted, anxious, overwhelmed, chronically ill, etc., to finally give ourselves permission to rest. We need to live our lives in ways that allow us to take care of ourselves as we go.

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