Rest Day Guilt
What it is, why it's a bit silly, and some ideas on how to stop feeling it.
Note: This was previously published on my non-substack blog. I’m moving everything over here (slowly - don’t worry, you won’t start drowing in emails from me) so you want to
In 6 days time, i’m running my first marathon. Over the course of a comparatively short 11 week training block, i’ve run 209.9km, completed an average of 4 weight training/HiiT/Metcon sessions, and welcomed our beautiful, exhausting firstborn into the world.
Everyone knows that the week before a marathon should be all about rest. Outside of one or two short easy runs to keep the legs loose and a potential ‘shake out’ the day before to ease the nerves, race week is all about stretching, rolling, recharging, sleeping, chilling out.
Why then, did I feel a pang of guilt today seeing others run up and down the seafront while I was out for a restful walk? Why did I feel in my bones that I should be exercising today too?
Let’s name this phenomenon Rest Day Guilt. I’m not the only one who feels it, so I thought it would be helpful to explore it.
Rest Day Guilt is a common challenge for active people. It’s the persistent feeling that you should always be active. The guilt felt when you act in accordance with Every Expert Ever and take a day to recharge and recover every now and then. More broadly, it covers feelings of not doing enough exercise, or the right exercise, or enough of the right exercise.
In it’s proper place, it can be healthy and helpful; it’s a version of Rest Day Guilt that gets you back on track after abandoning your workout plan for a week, and another that lifts you out of bed for an early morning class. At it’s worst, it’s unhelpful, anxiety-inducing, destructive.
Rest Day Guilt arises from different places for different people. For some it’s competitiveness or an overwhelming desire to achieve an athletic goal. For others it’s a byproduct of a world in which we’re encouraged to track and share everything, and where rest doesn’t feel so trackable or shareable. For many (including myself) it’s likely a deep-rooted and challenging relationship with the idea of being enough.
So how do we manage Rest Day Guilt? Might it even be possible to befriend it? To take the positives and avoid the negatives?
Firstly, we can attempt to let logic win the day. Perhaps we can try to redpill ourselves on the benefits of rest and recovery in athletic pursuits: whether you are trying to gain muscle mass, improve a Hyrox time, feel better about the glimpses of your naked body you catch in the mirror, or improve your Bench Press PB, proper rest and recovery is scientifically proven to make you more likely to achieve your goal. A binge of Huberman & Galpin (below) or Williamson & Israetel or some time spent chilling out with Hammond might be a useful prescription.
Then we could look to use some of the tools we know help whenever we’re acting against our own best interests; we can try to notice, to increase the space between stimulus and action. We can use some of the tried and tested methods of CBT to help us deal with Rest Day Guilt. Cognitive Restructuring for example can help us notice the voices telling us we’re being lazy, falling behind or not doing enough, and actively challenge them with what our better selves know to be true.
Finally, if we’re not ready to go full cold-turkey we can try to fill the rest day void with light activity that will promote recovery. We can tick our ‘work out’ box with a yoga session, half an hour with a foam roller, 10,000 steps or targeted stretching. We could also try an ‘active recovery’ session – but these sessions come with a special set of perils for those of us prone to Rest Day Guilt. Zone 2 can quickly become Zone 3 and Zone 4, and before we know it we’ve defeated the point.
Next time you’re tempted to lace your trainers up out of guilt, try to pause. Try to remember that your goal is not perpetual movement, it’s something greater that will be all the better for an intentional rest day and less self-flagellation.