There’s a specific kind of quiet that settles in after the holidays. The pace softens, the expectations drop, and for a brief stretch of days, there’s space. The calendar isn’t pulling at you. The inbox slows to a trickle. And for once, the world seems to expect a little less.
And yet, many of us don’t know how to be in it.
Even when I step away from work—intentionally, with boundaries and auto-responders and all the right intentions—I still find myself circling the edges of rest. I say I’m off, but I start reorganizing a closet. I open my laptop just to “check one thing.” I get an idea for something I want to write or build, and suddenly I’m halfway down a rabbit hole before I realize I never actually gave myself a break.
It’s not that I don’t want rest. It’s that I’ve never been especially good at it. Stillness doesn’t come easily to me, and I live in a world that rewards motion. That celebrates drive and consistency and availability. That doesn’t exactly hand out trophies for lying on the couch with a book and zero agenda.
But the more honest I am with myself, the more I’ve had to admit that rest, real rest, isn’t something I can just fall into. It’s something I have to practice.
And that’s the shift I’ve been working toward: not thinking of rest as time off, but as a skill I’m actively learning.
The skill isn’t just in taking the time. It’s in not filling it. It’s in staying in the discomfort of not being productive. It’s in noticing when my mind starts searching for something to optimize, and choosing not to follow it.
For me, that practice looks quiet and unremarkable. Leaving my phone in another room while I have my matcha latte (how have I not talked about my match lattes with you guys yet??). Sitting outside without making a plan for what comes next. Letting the laundry wait another day. Watching my brain itch to do something useful and choosing not to scratch it.
None of it feels impressive. But that’s the point.
Rest is not something you earn once your work is done. It’s part of how you sustain the work. And it’s part of how you reconnect to yourself outside of what you produce. The more I treat it as foundational, the more I’m able to come back to my work clear, focused, and grounded.
So if you’re off this week but struggling to feel rested, you’re not alone. It might not be that you’re doing rest wrong, it might just be that you haven’t had much practice. That’s okay. You’re not behind. You’re just learning how to be a person in a body, in a life, that isn’t always performing.
You don’t need to earn this break, you just need to receive it. And that, too, takes practice.