The evening clears unexpectedly. Nothing to prepare for, nobody needing anything from you. And within about four minutes you’re up, sorting a press that has been perfectly fine for months.
This is what rest anxiety looks like from the inside, and it almost never announces itself as anxiety. It looks like being productive. It looks like being on top of things, which is precisely why it can run for years without anyone naming it, including you.
What rest anxiety looks like when you’re high-functioning
For some women it’s the to-do list. For a lot of the ones I sit with, it’s the house. Lunches prepared two days ahead. The wash that could technically wait but somehow can’t. The email answered at half nine on a Sunday that nobody was waiting on.
None of it reads as avoidance from the outside. That’s the difficulty. Nobody interrupts a woman who is being productive to ask whether she’s doing okay.
I know this one from the inside. After a long stretch of training, research and full-time work, I badly wanted empty space in my calendar. When it finally arrived I moved almost straight into more training, collecting qualifications like evidence. Some of that was real in that I’d found work that mattered to me and it was filling something that had been sitting there a long time. But there was another part, and it took me considerably longer to see. When an evening did open up, I went to the list.
Why your body treats stopping as a loss
Pat Ogden, whose work sits at the centre of sensorimotor psychotherapy, describes how patterns of coping get held in the body itself. Not as memories or beliefs, but in posture, in breath, in how you occupy a chair. The shoulders that never quite drop. The breath sitting high in your chest by four in the afternoon. Being half out of your seat before the conversation has finished.
The body settles into a shape around sustained effort. Once it’s settled there it stays, because as far as your nervous system can tell, the shape is working. You’re functioning. Nothing has fallen over.
So when you think about stopping, your body doesn’t produce relief. It registers the removal of something structural, something that has been holding you up. That’s why an unexpectedly free evening can arrive as unease rather than pleasure, and why you fill it before you’ve consciously decided to.
The thing underneath the list
Here I’d go further than most of what gets written about rest, because I think the nervous system explanation is true but incomplete.
Irvin Yalom wrote about choice as a form of relinquishing. To choose one life is to give up every other life you might have had, and he described this as one of the quiet, difficult facts of being a person, one most of us organise our days around not looking at directly.
Constant motion is a very effective way of not looking. While there are still items on the list nothing has been decided yet, and every version of your life you might still have remains technically available to you, which is a strange sort of comfort, and one a full diary protects extremely efficiently.
The list never ends. That’s the point of it. The bottom of the list is an elusive nowhere, a place we’re all steadily working towards and none of us has ever reached.
So I don’t think this is procrastination and I don’t think it’s a boundaries problem. I’d say something stronger: telling a woman in this state to simply rest more is usually useless and occasionally makes things worse, because it asks her to take away the scaffolding without offering her anything to stand on.
What actually helps
The resistance is accurate. Your body knows the effort has been holding something up, it knows there’s a question underneath, and it would like some say in when you meet it.
Which means the work isn’t a stricter rest routine or a week booked off in the hope that the discomfort resolves itself somewhere else. It’s building enough steadiness that stopping stops registering as danger so that if and when you approach the bottom of the list, you can meet the question rather than outrun it.
That happens slowly, in much smaller steps than you’d expect. And it happens in the body a long time before it shows up in your diary.
The next time you feel the pull to fill a gap, you might try pausing before you fill it. Ten seconds. Long enough to ask what you’re moving away from.
You don’t need an answer. Noticing that the question is uncomfortable is itself the information.
If this is familiar, the free guide What Does Your Body Actually Need? covers this ground more slowly. Subscribe here to get it.
Cli O Carroll is an integrative psychotherapist and somatic practitioner in Dublin. She writes Body Dispatch, a fortnightly letter on the body and the nervous system.