The Case for Rest: Why You Don't Give Yourself Permission to Stop (And Why Perimenopause Won't Let You Ignore It Anymore)

Why Women Don't Rest (And the Case for Rest in Perimenopause) | Planting Seeds Counseling NJ

Rest is necessary

Author: Edwige Theokas, LPC, EMDRIA Certified | Planting Seeds Counseling NJ

If you’re like me, you struggle with the concept of rest.

Between work, kids, home, and all of the things, it almost seems that rest is a luxury we don’t have time for.

And rest can look like collapsing on the couch, scrolling social media, and generating your to-do list for the next day.

So, I ask you, when was the last time you rested - not scrolled, not half-watched TV while answering texts, not collapsed on the couch already thinking about tomorrow's to-do list, but actually rested?

If you had to think about it for more than a second, you're not alone.

Most of the women I work with can't remember.

And when I ask what stops them, the answer is mostly, "I don't have five free minutes."

But it’s also: “I don't know how to just stop.

And when I try, I feel guilty, or antsy, or like something bad is going to happen if I do.”

This normalized way of being is worth examining seriously - especially now - because perimenopause is about to make rest a biological requirement whether you've given yourself permission for it or not.

Why Don't We Give Ourselves Permission to Rest? 

Culture Told Us Rest Is Laziness

Most of us inherited a version of this Protestant work ethic without ever choosing it: your worth is measured by your output.

Stillness is idleness.

Idleness is a moral failing.

It's baked so deeply into American culture that even our vacations come with productivity guilt attached - the mental math of "I should be doing something with this time off, the money spent."

For women specifically, this gets an extra layer.

Productivity isn't just about career output, it's about the invisible labor of managing a household, anticipating everyone else's needs, and making it all look effortless.

We are asked, "What did you do today?" as subtle judgment.

A woman resting while there's laundry undone, a kid's permission slip unsigned, or an email unanswered isn't neutral in most households - it registers, to her own nervous system, as a small act of selfishness. 

And it’s not helpful when the school sends you the angry-toned reminder email, or your child says, “mom, I don’t have any underwear; where is my favorite sweater?!”

Social Media Has Turned Rest Into Another Performance

Social media didn't invent perfectionism, but it gave it a highlight reel and a comparison engine running 24/7.

Scroll for five minutes and you'll see the aesthetically arranged "morning routine," the color-coded planner, the woman who worked out, meal-prepped, and closed three client calls before 9 AM.

Even the posts that are ostensibly about rest get performed: the perfectly styled reading nook, the "soft life" as an accomplishment to display rather than an actual experience of stopping.

This creates a strange trap.

You can't just restanymore. You have to earn it, or curate evidence that you rested well, both of which is not rest.

Social media creates another task where we need to document and get approval.

FOMO Makes Stillness Feel Dangerous

Fear of missing out doesn't only apply to parties and vacations.

It applies to the side hustle you're not building, the workout class you're skipping, the group chat you haven't responded to, the version of yourself you imagine falling behind while you're "just" resting.

In a culture engineered for constant comparison, stopping can genuinely feel like losing ground,  even when, rationally and biologically, it's the thing that would let you catch up and show up as a better version of yourself.

For Many Women, Rest Was Never Modeled

If you grew up watching the adults around you, often your mother, in a near-constant state of doing, you didn't just absorb a work ethic.

You absorbed a template for what a woman's nervous system is supposed to do: stay activated, stay useful, stay available.

Rest wasn't demonstrated as something adults were allowed, so it never became a skill you were taught. You can't default to a setting you were never shown.

Why Rest Can Actually Be a Trauma Response - In Both Directions

This is the piece that doesn't get talked about enough, and it cuts two ways.

Sometimes, the inability to rest is the trauma response.

If you grew up in a household where your value was tied to being helpful, capable, or low-maintenance - where stillness meant risking being seen as lazy, selfish, or a burden - your nervous system learned an equation early: “productivity equals safety.”

Slowing down doesn't just feel unproductive; on a physiological level, it can genuinely feel unsafe.

That restless, guilty, almost itchy feeling that shows up the moment you try to sit still isn't weakness.

It's a nervous system that was trained to associate stillness with danger, and hasn't been given a reason to believe otherwise.

And sometimes, what looks like rest is actually a trauma response too - specifically, a freeze response.

There's a real difference between restorative rest (a nervous system that feels safe enough to downshift) and collapse (a nervous system so overtaxed it shuts down because it has no other option left).

Numbly scrolling for three hours, unable to make a decision, unable to get off the couch, even though you want to- that's not the kind of rest that replenishes you.

It's your body pulling the emergency brake.

Both patterns point to the same underlying issue: a nervous system that hasn't learned how to move fluidly between activation and genuine, restorative rest.

This is exactly why "just relax" is such unhelpful advice, and why rest so often requires more than a bubble bath and good intentions.

If your nervous system equates stillness with danger, you can't logic your way into resting.

You have to teach your body, over time, that it's actually safe to stop, which is nervous system work, not a scheduling problem.

The Case for Rest - Especially Now, in Perimenopause

Chronic under-rest carries a real physiological cost: elevated cortisol, disrupted sleep architecture, a weakened immune response, and what researchers call "allostatic load".

Allostatic load is the cumulative wear on your body from staying in a state of stress for too long, without enough recovery to offset it.

Rest isn't indulgence; it's the mechanism by which your body actually repairs and integrates everything it's been through.

Perimenopause raises the stakes considerably. Estrogen helps regulate your HPA axis — the system that governs your stress response — and supports the neurotransmitters that help you recover after stress.

As estrogen fluctuates, that stress-response system becomes more reactive and slower to return to baseline, which means the margin you used to have for pushing through on too little rest has genuinely narrowed.

What used to be sustainable- the six-hour nights, the back-to-back obligations, the "I'll rest when things calm down"- is no longer sustainable.

Your body doesn't have the same hormonal buffer it once did.

This is also, not coincidentally, when burnout and exhaustion tend to peak, and brain fog becomes hard to ignore.

Rest isn't a nice-to-have during this transition.

It's closer to a medical necessity.

And continuing to treat it as optional is one of the fastest routes to the kind of depletion that takes months, not days, to recover from.

What the Research and the Thinkers Get Right

Several books have shaped how I think and talk about rest with the women I work with (including myself), and I want to share how I'm using them here.

I'm sharing some of the frameworks that I think are most useful. I encourage you to further explore these ideas and apply it to yourself. 

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less

Pang's central argument is that rest is not the passive opposite of work - it's an active, deliberate practice that makes visible (oftentimes paid) work possible.

He calls this “deliberate rest”, and he backs it with a striking historical pattern: many of history's most prolific thinkers and creators - Churchill, Darwin, Dickens, the mathematician Henri Poincaré - worked in short, highly focused bursts (often around four hours a day of actual deep work), and treated the rest of their day as protected time for walks, naps, and unstructured thinking.

The work wasn't happening despite the rest.

The rest was part of how the work got done.

A few of his most useful concepts for our purposes:

- Active rest: rest that involves gentle movement or absorbing activity (a walk, gardening, a hobby) rather than pure inactivity, which research suggests restores focus more effectively than collapsing in front of a screen. 

- Deep play: an absorbing, skill-based activity done purely for its own sake, with no productivity goal attached.

It uses your mind differently than work does, which is part of why it's restorative rather than just another obligation.

- The default mode network: the brain network that activates when you're not focused on a task, which does real cognitive work in the background: consolidating memory, making unexpected connections, processing what you've taken in.

Constant stimulation never gives this network room to run. 

- The value of the nap and the vacation: treated not as luxuries, or nice-to-have indulgences, but as structural parts of a sustainable working life, with real cognitive and physiological benefits.

Pang's overarching point, backed by both historical example and contemporary research: rest and output are not in competition.

Sustainable rest is what makes sustained output possible at all.

Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout

Newport's book is aimed at knowledge workers, not specifically at rest or women's health - but its central critique names something I see constantly in sessions with midlife women.

Newport calls our busyness pseudo-productivity: the reflex to treat visible busyness itself as the proxy for value, even when the busyness produces very little that actually matters.

If you've ever felt frantic and behind despite being in motion all day, that's pseudo-productivity, not real output.

And it's one more reason rest gets treated with suspicion.

Rest doesn't look busy, so it doesn't register as "productive," even when it's the thing making real output possible in the first place.

In place of pseudo-productivity, Newport organizes his approach around three principles:

1. Do fewer things. Newport endorses radical selectivity - saying no to most of what competes for your time so you can go deep on what actually matters, instead of spreading yourself thin across everything at once.

2. Work at a natural pace. Meaningful work doesn't run on artificial urgency.

Newport argues for rhythms that include slower seasons, rather than treating constant sprint-pace as the only acceptable mode.

3. Obsess over quality.

Measuring what you do by its impact and craftsmanship, not by how fast or how much you produced.

For women navigating perimenopause, this reframes something important: doing less, or doing it more slowly, isn't a failure to keep up.

Per Newport's own argument, it's frequently the more effective mode, even for people operating at full capacity, let alone a nervous system that's already managing a narrower margin than it used to have.

Read alongside Pang, Newport's work makes the case from the other direction: Pang shows that rest produces better work, and Newport shows that doing less, more slowly and more selectively, is itself a form of higher performance rather than a concession to it.

Together, they dismantle the idea that rest and ambition are opposites.

10 Small Ways to Reframe Rest and Start Practicing It

You don't need a week at a silent retreat to start changing your relationship with rest. These are small, specific starting points - pick one or two, not all ten at once.

1. Rename it in your own head.

Every time you catch yourself thinking "I'm being lazy," try replacing it with "I'm doing deliberate rest"  (Pang's term).

Language shapes whether your nervous system registers stopping as a threat or as legitimate.

2. Apply "do fewer things" to one commitment this week.

Pick a single obligation, project, or "should”, do not shrink it, drop it entirely, and notice what capacity that frees up.

This is Newport's radical-selectivity principle applied to a life, not just a career: doing less isn't being less ambitious, but instead it's often what makes the things you keep doing sustainable.

3.     Try active rest instead of collapse.

When you have twenty free minutes, notice the pull to scroll, and experiment with a short walk, some stretching, baking/cooking, gardening, or time outside instead.

It's a different kind of rest than doing nothing, and for many nervous systems, it's easier to access first.

4.     Structure your schedule for deep work.

Where possible, build your work so that deep work can be done with no interruptions. No email checking or phone calls, but rather an opportunity to get into a flow where you can make real progress and headway in important things.

By allowing yourself the opportunity to do deep focused work, when deliberate rest takes over, you’ve given your brain a chance to restore itself and come up with more intentional, creative ways of being.

5.     Protect one small pocket of quiet, daily.

Ten minutes with no screen, no podcast, no input, just quiet and being “bored”.

This isn't about achieving stillness perfectly; it's about giving your default mode network the space Pang describes to actually do its background work. 

6.     Find one "deep play" activity that has no output attached.

Not a productive hobby, not something for content, not something you're trying to get good at for anyone else's benefit - something you do purely because doing it feels good. 

7.     Practice a five-minute "no" this week.

Decline one small obligation -  a group text you don't answer immediately, a favor you don't say yes to on reflex.

If your nervous system learned that your worth depends on being available, this will feel uncomfortable.

That discomfort is information, not a sign you're doing it wrong. And it’s something that needs to be developed over time. After a while, you will become more comfortable saying no. 

8.     Build a digital sunset.

Pick a time each evening to put the phone away, even thirty minutes before bed.

This directly interrupts the FOMO and comparison loop that makes stillness feel like falling behind.

Instead, use the time before bed to present your brain with a dilemma that it can begin to mull over while you sleep.

9. Nap without negotiating with yourself about it.

This is especially helpful when you’re a perimenopausal woman who is constantly waking up at 3 AM and struggles to fall back asleep.

We know that sleep is one of the crucial ways to support our perimenopausal transition, but it can be elusive.

For many of us, we don’t have the luxury of sleeping in late or catching up on sleep on the weekends.

But a 15-20 minute nap is long enough to be restorative and short enough to avoid grogginess.

If lying down with an alarm set feels more permissible than "resting," start there.

10. Schedule rest like you'd schedule an appointment you can't cancel.

If it only happens when there's time left over, it will never happen, there's never time left over.

Put it on the calendar with the same seriousness as a meeting, or dinner with your best friend, and treat it as equally non-negotiable.

You Don't Have to Earn Rest

If part of you is reading this and thinking, that all makes sense, and “I still don't think I can actually do it” that reaction is worth paying attention to, not arguing with.

It usually means the block isn't information you're missing.

It's a nervous system pattern, often one that started long before perimenopause, that equates your worth with your output and your safety with staying useful.

That pattern can shift. Trauma-informed therapy, especially EMDR, helps process the original experiences that taught your nervous system rest wasn't safe or allowed — so that stopping, eventually, stops requiring so much willpower.

For women who want to move faster, EMDR Intensives offer a concentrated way to do that work without adding "one more weekly appointment" to an already full life.

If you're in New Jersey and you're ready to build a genuinely different relationship with rest, not just find five more minutes for it, but understand why you can't access it in the first place, I'd love to talk. Learn more about working with me →

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why do I feel guilty when I rest?

For most women, rest guilt isn't really about the specific thing you're not doing; it's a nervous system pattern that you learned, often early in life, that your worth and safety were tied to being useful and available.

Cultural messaging about productivity and gendered expectations around caretaking reinforce it further.

The guilt is real, but it's not a reliable signal that resting is actually wrong.

2. Is rest really that important during perimenopause, or is it just self-care advice?

   
   

It's more than self-care advice. Estrogen helps regulate your stress-response system, and as it fluctuates during perimenopause, that system becomes more reactive and slower to recover. The margin you used to have for pushing through on insufficient rest is genuinely narrower now, which makes consistent rest closer to a physiological requirement than an indulgence.

3. What's the difference between rest and being lazy?

Laziness implies avoidance of something you're capable of and should be doing.

Deliberate rest, a term from Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's research, is an active practice that supports your capacity to function, think clearly, and sustain effort over time.

The two aren't the same thing, even though the same culture that praises constant output tends to conflate them.

4. Can not being able to rest actually be a trauma response? 

Yes, for many people it is.

If stillness was associated with risk growing up being seen as lazy, selfish, or a burden, your nervous system can learn to treat rest itself as unsafe.

The restless, guilty feeling that shows up when you try to slow down is often that early learning showing up in the present, not a personal failing.

5. Is scrolling on my phone considered rest? 

Usually not in the restorative sense.

Passive scrolling can put your nervous system into a kind of numbing or freeze state rather than genuine recovery,  it often leaves you feeling more depleted, not less.

Active rest (movement, quiet, absorbing activities without a screen) tends to be more genuinely restorative than passive consumption.

Edwige Theokas, LPC, is an EMDRIA Certified therapist and the founder of Planting Seeds Counseling in Bordentown, NJ. She specializes in EMDR and EMDR Intensives for women in midlife and perimenopause. She is currently pursuing Certified Menopause Practitioner training. Learn more at plantingseedscounselingnj.com 

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