Transcript of 5 Ways to Get Your Energy Back When Rest Isn’t Working

You can watch 6 hours of television while answering messages, tracking everyone else's needs, worrying about Monday, and feeling guilty that you aren't doing something more useful. Your body may have stopped moving, but your attention never became yours again. This sneaks up on us in many ways. It can be as simple as you finally sit down at home and a family member asks, "While you're sitting there, could you just look at this?" It takes 30 seconds, so of course you say yes. Then when your phone is out, you remember something you need to order, answer a message about the weekend, and check what time you have to leave tomorrow morning.

An hour later, you're still on the couch, but you've made 6 decisions, solved 2 problems, and arranged something for 3 other people. But if somebody asked what you did that night, you'd probably say, "Nothing, I just sat on my couch." Maybe you know that feeling of watching an entire episode of something and barely remembering what happened. You were looking at the screen, but you were also wondering whether that coworker was annoyed with you, whether there's enough food in the fridge to cook dinner tomorrow, and whether you should check back in on your friend that's going through something.

Even if your eyes don't leave the TV screen, your attention keeps bouncing a million places. Then it's time for bed, and somehow you still feel like you haven't had any time for yourself. I think this is where we get confused about rest. We assume that because we weren't visibly working, we must have been resting. But you can spend the entire weekend on the couch and never stop being available or truly giving your mind a break. The more I've thought about this, the more I've realized that the opposite of exhaustion may not always be sleep.

Sometimes it's agency. It's the feeling that for a little while you get to decide where your attention goes. A lot of what we call rest still leaves somebody else in charge of our attention: our boss, our phone, our family, our unfinished responsibilities, or even the voice in our own mind telling us to make better use of the time. We have stopped working, but we still don't belong to ourselves. Today I want to talk about why this happens and what you can do to fix it. I want to help you understand what may actually be draining you in your life, and how to start recovering in a way that really works.

We're going to look at 5 shifts you can make to immediately get some control over your rest and your energy. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear game plan for taking back your rest and making recovery more tangible. So let's start with something I think a lot of us experience: the workday ends on the clock, but it never really ends in your mind. The first shift is to give your day an ending. Most of us know when the day's mental work starts. Maybe it's in your first check your phone, or open your laptop, or clock in at your office.

There's a term in psychology called psychological detachment. It basically defines the moment when you've stopped working, both physically and mentally. This can be hard to achieve, but it's important. Research has connected this mental distance with better recovery and well-being. Research has also shown that the more demanding your work is, the harder it can be to switch off. To achieve psychological detachment, one thing that has worked for me is to do a mental handoff. I mentally hand any unfinished work from today over to tomorrow, and then I plan when I'll have time to do it within the proper hours.

Before you stop work for the day, choose the one task that's most likely to follow you around all evening. Decide on the next small step forward with it, and when you're going to take it. Thinking, "I need to deal with that presentation," is going to hover over you all night. But thinking, "Tomorrow, after my morning meeting, I'll review the first 3 slides," gives your mind something more concrete. You haven't finished it, but you know when you're coming back. Sometimes this is all your brain needs to let it go for the evening.

There's some interesting research behind this. In experiments by EJ Masiakampo and Roy Bomeister, unfinished goals consistently distracted people from whatever they tried to do next. But once they made a specific plan for finishing the goal, that distraction went down. Your mind might just keep bringing something up because it doesn't trust you to remember it. It's trying to protect you, but the result is unnecessary stress. A clear plan gives the thought somewhere to rest while you get to rest.

And please don't turn this into another hour of work. You don't need to plan your entire week, organize every folder, and create a perfect system for ending every day. Pick the task most likely to pull you back in, and give it a simple next step. Then try to trust the plan instead of checking 10 minutes later to see whether you should start working again. You can also mark the transition away from the workday in a way you can feel. When you put your work materials away, try changing out of the clothes you associate with the day to signal to your brain that you're shifting gears.

Other practices for this might look like taking a short walk, going to the gym, moving your computer out of your direct view, or calling a non-work-related friend for a quick chat. One of my other favorite ways is to put on some music that feels like work is over. Light a candle that puts you in a relaxed state. Use your senses to engage in a new feeling for the rest of the day. This gives your brain a way to feel the difference between the day you just experienced and the night you're coming home to. Now, I know for someone caring for children or a family member, the part of the day after work may involve yet another set of responsibilities.

I don't want to pretend a change of clothes creates an evening off. If that's you, and if you can, try to protect a small period between your sets of essential tasks. Maybe that's listening to your favorite podcast during your drive home. Maybe that's making a calming cup of tea before you start cooking dinner. Maybe that's simply meditating in your car for 5 minutes after you pull into the driveway. If your nights don't include a reliable break, you need to prioritize finding the moments that you can. I think many of us are waiting for the day that we're all caught up.

We're waiting for the inbox to be empty, the house to stay clean, or somebody to say, "Great work, you can stop now." Most likely that moment isn't coming. What you can do is decide what finished for today looks like. And once you give the day an ending, you can finally ask a more interesting question: "What would actually feel good now?" That leads me to the second shift, which is to prioritize rest from the parts of life that actually exhausted you. I think a lot of us have one version of rest, and it probably looks like laying down and allowing ourselves to do nothing.

That can be great, but think about it. A day of physical effort, a day of talking to people nonstop, and a day spent alone with a difficult problem are going to leave you needing completely different forms of recovery. Before you decide what to do tonight to rest, ask what you've already had too much of, and what you've barely had at all. Suppose you've spent the whole day making choices for other people. By evening, "What do you want to eat?" can feel like the final straw question that puts you over the edge. Someone may be offering you freedom, but you're needing something to just be figured out for you.

A familiar meal, a plan somebody else makes, or an activity with very few decisions might feel like a welcome rest from the day. Now imagine a different day, where you barely spoke to anyone and spent hours working alone. Another evening by yourself may leave you feeling more disconnected, even if it looks restful from the outside. Grabbing drinks with a friend or FaceTiming someone for a chat could actually be what you're missing. On the flip side, maybe you spent the day talking to customers or clients and felt like you had to be on all day. A night spent quietly reading or journaling could feel much more restorative than time with more people.

The key to true rest is feeling like you have control over your own time and choosing how to best prioritize it. Think about cooking. One night you want to try a recipe. Put some music on and take your time. That might feel great. On another night, you want somebody to put food in front of you without asking what you want or what sounds good. From the outside, cooking dinner is the same activity. But the way you attack this daily activity can actually be a really active choice towards what is truly restorative.

Sometimes cooking can be self-care. Sometimes it can be stressful and overwhelming. I've noticed that some of the things we call self-care are really just maintenance. Grocery shopping, washing your hair, cleaning your home, and meal prepping tomorrow's lunch may support your well-being. It probably will, but they still require effort and attention. They may make your life run better without making you feel restored. We don't need to stop doing them. They're important, but we should stop pretending every task becomes self-care just because we lit a candle first.

Here's a question I want you to ask yourself tonight: "What am I tired of doing today?" Maybe you're tired of deciding. Maybe you're tired of sitting. Maybe you're tired of explaining yourself, performing, or being interrupted. Once you can name it, the answer for rest becomes a little easier. If your body is tired, let it be physically still. If your mind is overwhelmed, maybe you need less stimuli coming in. If you're feeling antsy, maybe some physical activity will help. Pay attention to what the day asked of you and prioritize recovery accordingly.

Sometimes you want easy entertainment, escapism, or to think about other people's lives instead of your own. That's fine. Just notice how you feel while you're doing it and after you do it. Are you simply enjoying what you're watching, or are you constantly comparing yourself and feeling worse? The same phone can show you a film you love, connect you with a friend you miss, or hand you another hour of demands. Pay attention to which one is happening in your valuable moment.

This can show up in sneaky ways. Even if your phone is away and all your devices are on Do Not Disturb, let's go back to the example of cooking dinner. Maybe you've expressed you need some rest, so your partner is cooking dinner. You sit down to relax, and then the random questions begin. "What time should we eat?" "Where's that one frying pan?" "Do you want butter on this?" "Is the spinach in the fridge good?" They're physically doing the task, but you're still carrying the labor. You may appreciate the effort and still feel unable to settle into rest. A break that depends on you answering questions every few minutes is still not a true break.

If you have to organize everything else before you're allowed to relax, you are still working. The visible task may have left your hands, but the responsibility for its success has not. Sociologist Alison Daminger has studied this invisible part of household labor. She breaks it down into anticipating what needs to happen, thinking through the options, making the decision, and then checking that it got done. In the couple she studied, women carried more of that mental work overall, especially the anticipating and monitoring.

And this explains why someone can be helping you and you still don't feel helped. They're doing the task, but they're incapable of doing it without you. That's why "Tell me what you need" may only solve part of the problem. If one person has to notice the need, prepare the instructions, and check whether it happened, they're still overseeing it. Where it's appropriate, try handing over an entire responsibility with the information and authority needed to manage it. "Could you handle dinner tonight?" including deciding what we have and cleaning up afterwards, is clearer than hoping the other person understands what a break means.

A real handover also involves agreeing on letting go of control. The outcome may not be the same as if you had performed the task, but that's the trade-off for being completely hands-off. The person taking over will likely do it differently, and some of that difference has to be allowed. Now let's talk about the phone. Your phone can create a similar expectation of responsibility. A message arrives, and you feel an inherent need to deal with it instantly. But some requests can wait until an agreed time, and many notifications never need to interrupt you at all.

There's an emotional side to this too. Maybe you like being the person who always answers immediately. It makes you feel like a good friend, a valuable employee, or the family member everyone can count on. And being helpful can be a beautiful quality. But if being needed is where you get most of your sense of value, putting your phone down can feel strangely uncomfortable. You aren't only ignoring a message; a part of you is afraid you're becoming less useful and therefore less important. Sometimes the person preventing you from resting is the version of you that wants to be valued.

If everyone can manage without you for an hour, that can feel freeing, but it can also threaten an identity you've built around being the one who always comes through. Exhaustion can become the price you pay to keep proving your importance. This is where I find it extremely helpful to start by setting small boundaries. You might tell a friend, "I want to hear about this, and I can call you about it tomorrow." You might let the group chat know when you'll be available to help with plans, rather than answering every update as it comes in.

Those statements make room for both care and a limit. They also give people more accurate expectations of you, rather than just knowing you'll always be accessible as you grow increasingly drained. In today's technological landscape, you can live alone and still always feel like someone needs something of you. Nobody is in the room asking you a question, but you're keeping up with the family group chat, the work thread, and the friend you feel responsible for checking in on. Being physically alone doesn't mean you're off duty.

But remember, most messages are not emergencies. Most phone calls don't need to bypass Do Not Disturb. You do not need to be on 24/7, 365, just in case. Your phone doesn't only take your time; it keeps you psychologically on call. Even when nothing is happening, part of your attention is listening for the vibration that means somebody wants something from you. Again, start with small boundaries to push back on this. Maybe an hour of Do Not Disturb.

Maybe you started walking because you liked being outside. Then you began tracking the distance, setting a pace, and forcing a certain step count. None of those choices are automatically a problem, and you may enjoy all of them. But if a short walk without a recording device now feels like it doesn't count, ask what changed. Something you did for pleasure may have acquired a set of requirements you were never meant to take on. The same thing can happen when someone notices a talent. You make something for fun, and a well-meaning person says, "You should sell these."

Suddenly you're thinking about prices, orders, packaging, and how to be consistent. An activity that let you step away from responsibility now has customers in your imagination. Being good at something doesn't obligate you to turn it into another job. You can receive the compliment and leave the business unstarted. Not everything you love needs a growth strategy. Not every talent needs an audience. And if every enjoyable activity has to become productive, profitable, or public, you don't have leisure.

You have created a collection of new responsibilities. I want to connect this with the earlier thought about chosen forms of recovery. Enjoying a challenge can be compatible with rest. Learning a song, growing a plant, or working through a puzzle can be challenging and satisfying. The question is whether the goal serves your enjoyment, or whether you feel you have to justify the activity by producing a result. You can choose to learn while keeping the freedom to pause, wonder, or remain an amateur.

There's research showing that the way we think about leisure actually affects how much we enjoy it. In studies led by Gabriella Tonietto, people who saw leisure as wasteful enjoyed it less. And that makes sense. You can technically give yourself the hour off, but then spend the whole hour thinking, "I should be doing something useful." Your body is in the hobby, but your mind is still wondering why you're allowed to be there. You might recognize this in the way you choose a book. You want a story you can disappear into, but feel you should read something that advances your career or teaches you a new skill.

Useful activities have a place in your life. Of course they do. But the question is whether enjoyment ever gets to be a sufficient reason on its own without you attaching another task to make it acceptable. When was the last time you enjoyed something without asking what it was doing for you? When we're overwhelmed and tired, pleasure on its own can feel difficult to justify. But being present and enjoying something can actually be what the rest you need looks like. There may be a little awkwardness at first when trying something new just for fun.

You might keep reaching for your phone to document it, wondering if you're wasting time, or looking for a way to do it properly. Let those urges be something you simply notice, rather than another problem you have to fix before you begin. This leads me to my fifth and final shift. You do not need to justify why you're exhausted. And you're allowed to be exhausted, even if someone else is doing more than you. I think we as humans can get into the accidental game of comparing who is doing more labor. Instead of just saying, "I'm tired," you start building your case.

You list the hours you worked, everything you handled, how little you slept, and every task you took on. Or maybe you're the type to always say, "I'm okay," even when you're burnt out and overwhelmed. You're tired, but you know someone else has more responsibility. Yes, you need a pause, but you're still functioning, so you push on. You would enjoy an evening totally off, but nothing dramatic happened today to justify that. Here's the thing: you don't have to be the most exhausted person you know to need rest. Comparing burdens doesn't make the human need for restoration any less individually important.

Rest should not require evidence. Burnout is not the only morally acceptable reason to take a break. But many of us wait until our exhaustion becomes visible enough, until we're sick, crying, snapping at people, or unable to concentrate, because ordinary tiredness doesn't feel like a strong enough case. When your stopping point is complete depletion, you may only recognize a need to stop after it becomes disruptive. You lose patience over a small question, struggle to concentrate, or reach a point where everything feels overwhelming.

But you don't have to wait for catastrophe before prioritizing time for yourself. A break can be planned around being human, rather than having had a particularly difficult day. Every time you override the earlier, quieter signals, you teach yourself that your needs only matter once they become emergencies. You stop trusting, "I'm losing focus," "I'm getting irritable," or "I don't want to do one more evening." Eventually, your body has to communicate in a language dramatic enough that you will finally listen.

If that's you, please don't hear this as another instruction to become better at managing a hard situation. Rest is affected by resources, work conditions, and how care is shared. Your need for a more sustainable arrangement is real, even when an immediate solution is difficult to find. The goal of this episode is that you find where there is even just a little choice over your time, and notice the most restorative way you can fill it. I also want you to notice how often you save your own needs for whatever time is left.

You will make space for a request, an errand, or a change in somebody else's plans, then hope your own enjoyment can fit around the edges. Eventually, you may struggle to name what you want with your time because you rarely get control over it. Rest can include taking back that small ability to choose for yourself. I think you deserve to spend some time in a way that nobody gets a result out of. Time when you aren't improving yourself, preparing for work, or making sure everyone else is comfortable. You get to be a person having an experience that just belongs to you.

Go back to the evening we started with. You're finally sitting on the couch after a long workday, but this time you know where tomorrow's task is going. Somebody else knows what they're responsible for, a message arrives, and you decide it can wait. Maybe you watch an episode and actually remember what happened. And when you finally get into bed, you're actually able to turn off your mind and sleep. You don't need to overhaul all your free time after listening to this. But maybe tonight you give the day an ending or ask what kind of experience you've been missing.

Maybe you make one clear responsibility hand over, leave a hobby unmeasured, or take a break before you justify needing it. Thank you for being here with me on On Purpose, and I hope you get a little time tonight that actually feels like yours. Remember, I'm forever in your corner, and.