that feeling of guilt around rest often is rooted in a deep need for external validation.

When we’ve grown up in environments where love, praise, or safety were tied to doing, achieving, or being useful, our nervous system learns:

• Rest = danger or rejection

• Productivity = approval, love, safety

So we unconsciously seek validation by staying busy or over-performing… hoping to feel worthy, seen, or safe. In this way:

Guilt around rest is a trauma response, not a personality trait.

Somatically, the body may feel unsettled in stillness because it associates it with being unseen, unloved, or unsafe. That’s why rest can feel uncomfortable or even triggering.

So healing for you may mean learning to:

• Source safety from within (instead of from performance)

• More of a focus on soothing the nervous system enough to tolerate stillness (ice baths, silent meditation for 10-20 mins, regular morning/evening routines)

• When you feel the guilt around rest, your ‘punishment’ is an act of self love (face mask, bath, sauna, long walk without tech in nature, 10 minutes of journalling, etc). 

And when we stay in that hyper-productive, guilt-driven state for too long, it leads to burnout. 

Our body shuts down. Our nervous system becomes dysregulated. And the very thing we’ve been trying to avoid — not being productive — becomes our reality.

We hit a wall. We can’t focus. We procrastinate.

Because the body can’t run on empty forever. 

Journal prompt: 

Who would i be and how would i show up for myself and in my life if i no longer seeked external validation?