A new book explores why women find it harder than men to rest and switch off - and suggests ways to reset our attitude towards relaxation, writes Sophie Morris.
I carry the evidence that I need to relax more wherever I go. On a trip to the sofa, for example, I’ll take three magazines, a book and my phone. On a dog walk, I’ll try to get through some phone calls. I find it very difficult to go anywhere overnight without my laptop. I even found myself reading a book for work called The Relaxed Woman while I was on holiday last month, sneaking it out of my beach bag while my family was in the sea and drafting an email about it to send to my editor instead of enjoying the view.
For me, these are disappointing truths. I’ve been doing yoga for a quarter of a century. I even have a qualification to teach it! I’ve removed lots of the obvious practical things that get in the way of rest and relaxation from my life. I don’t have a commute, for example. I’ve left all but a few “essential” WhatsApp groups. I don’t iron.
It seems I am not alone in finding it hard to relax. According to recent data from the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) labour force survey, women are twice as likely as men to need time off due to stress, depression or anxiety. The over-55s, who “juggle menopause, ageism, sexism and caregiving”, are reportedly the worst affected.
Other research from the University of Bath confirms what many women know: they overwhelmingly carry the “mental load” of shopping, planning and organising that keeps a household running smoothly. Women take on 79 per cent of the daily jobs like cleaning and childcare - twice as much as their partners are likely to do.
These practical and logistical issues aren’t the only thing holding us back from rest, explains the psychologist Nicola Jane Hobbs. We’re also afraid of being seen as lazy or selfish, worried we haven’t done enough to deserve a break and trapped in a productivity mindset: if you’re not busy, and busy broadcasting your achievements, who even are you?
Finally, and this is a hamster wheel I am definitely stuck on, when we do make time to relax, we can’t switch off because our brains are jumping all over the place.
Women are successful, productive, anxious and apologetic - rarely relaxed. Writing a book at the same time as having a baby does not sound like a great recipe for rest and relaxation, but Hobbs, 35, explains that she has built a strong community around her including her mother, who is out with the baby while we speak.
“We can’t become relaxed women alone. We need a support network around us,” she says.
The result is out this week. The Relaxed Woman: Reclaim Rest and Live an Empowered, Joy-filled Life (Penguin, £16.99) draws on years of research into why women struggle to rest.
She was inspired to write it by the many female clients she saw who seemed constantly on edge. “No matter what they came to me for support with, the common thread was how difficult they found it to relax in their everyday lives.”
Three years ago, she wrote a post on Instagram that went viral and became the catalyst for her book. Hobbs posted the words: “Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But I would like to become one. I would like us all to become relaxed women.”
Her book explores the barriers women face when it comes to rest and relaxation and is aimed at women largely because men don’t suffer the same barriers.
“Whilst men face their own barriers to relaxation - including being taught from a young age to suppress vulnerability, avoid dependence and distrust softness - women often find it more difficult to relax because of the cumulative burden of gendered, cultural, relational and internalised demands and expectations.
“These pressures can lead to chronic nervous system dysregulation which makes relaxation feel not only unaccessible, but unsafe.”
One of my problems is that I’ve built loads of opportunities for rest and relaxation into my life, but I fail to take advantage of them. I’ll waste quiet reading time scrolling. When I get up early to do some yoga or meditation while the house is asleep, my mind will race forward to the day’s tasks.
My husband takes naps - to me they feel like a waste of time How did we get to a place where so many of us are on high alert, so much of the time?
“It’s a combination of factors,” explains Hobbs. “Both from the external world, in terms of the logistical and structural barriers of being working mums and juggling so many responsibilities and financial insecurity. Then there are the social norms, the patriarchal conditioning that we’ve internalised to be selfless and self sacrificing.”
A line from the book that hits hard for me is the suggestion we need “an untangling of our self-worth from productivity”. I find that at times when I keep my workload reasonable, I make plans to be more productive elsewhere, so not a moment goes to waste. Inevitably, I don’t finish that book or paint that room in my “spare” time and then feel even more frustrated. Hobbs elaborates: “There’s this neoliberal conditioning to be ambitious and to go after our dreams and the capitalist pressure where our worth is tied with productivity.
“That contributes to perfectionism and people-pleasing and ends up this perfect storm for exhaustion.”
I can’t put a finger on the origins of my own need to be so productive, though I was brought up with strong Methodist values and academic achievement was important. My husband has always taken naps and while I find the idea of them alluring, and have indulged myself from time to time, I can’t quite get over the feeling they’re a waste of time.
Resetting my attitude to rest What’s the solution? Surely we shouldn’t just give up on professional ambition? Obviously we need to earn money. “I support clients with finding the goals that matter to them and then embracing a more relaxed approach to move towards those goals,” says Hobbs.
“For example, identifying your values and how you can embody them in more practical ways if you’re in a corporate job.”
I like the sound of this, though in my experience, women in corporate roles who try to embody their values - lawyers who want to pick their children up from school, for example - don’t tend to stay in those roles for long. I’m not sure the corporate world is ready for relaxed women.
The book is filled with useful exercises to try to reset our attitude to rest as well as actually get some. This may start with learning how to understand and regulate our nervous systems, with regular calming practices such as breathing exercises, to help manage sleep problems, anxiety and fatigue.
It moves on to an examination of the beliefs that are keeping us from better rest and working out how to undo them. This could start with the simple mindset flip: instead of saying that you are too busy, you could say that your life is very full at the moment. Instead of calling yourself lazy, you could own up to being tired.
The five key steps that Hobbs outlines are: restore your inner resources; regulate your nervous system; nurture your relationships; release your limiting beliefs; and realise your dreams. The book is full of exercises that ask for reflection on why you struggle to relax and suggests how to get better at it. I recommend working through the book slowly, giving yourself a week or two to consider each section.
She also promotes tiny “rest rituals” with the idea that everyone can find time to soothe their nervous systems and get closer to better rest. I tell Hobbs that I don’t enjoy experts advising me to take the time for a cup of tea - as if a five-minute sitdown will solve anything. She says she prefers to weave “micro moments” of rest into the day, so that all the usual stressors don’t add up. These include pausing to place a hand on your heart when you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed, or sending out a “thinking of you” message to a friend.
When it comes to a cup of tea, she advises savouring the first sip of your morning hot drink, thinking about its warmth and flavour as a grounding ritual before the day ahead. Since reading her book I have started to take my first morning tea off to a quiet room at the top of the house first thing, to enjoy it alone and think about how good it tastes. I think everyone is benefiting from my improved morning mood - unless they tackle me before the tea.
Learning to switch off I try swapping my scrolling time for a comforting micro moment, devastated all those years of work and study have come down to policing myself for watching goat videos. I put down my phone whenever I notice myself watching a reel, and look out of the window or talk to the dog like she’s my baby instead. God knows if this helps. My screentime doesn’t seem to have gone down. But the dog is happy.
I build up to bigger rests. My goal is to have an afternoon nap for the sake of it, rather than because I’ve fallen asleep exhausted. The first few attempts fail. I lie awake, fingers tensing for a screen to poke at, mind lining up the tasks I’ll conquer when I’m out of bed. But, a few weeks in of trying three times a week, I find it easier to switch off.
Hobbs reiterates that she knows access to rest is mired in inequality, from the cost of yoga classes or holidays to childcare support.
Soon enough, my overriding need to achieve kicks in and I start making plans to win at this rest challenge. I’ll take a month off work, I think. I’ll go on a solo break. I will build myself a cabin to rest in and lock everyone else out.
Hobbs credits the American writer and activist Tricia Hersey as a significant inspiration. Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of Rest is Resistance, reclaims genuine physical rest as a way to overcome ancestral trauma and remake the world differently. “She’s one of the first people who has spoken publicly about rest and she talks about the ways that she role models it in her life,” says Hobbs.
Although now the poster woman for relaxation, Hobbs hasn’t always enjoyed such a calm existence. “I spent much of my adult life as the opposite of a relaxed woman,” she confesses. “For years, my days were a frantic blur of stress, urgency and exhaustion as I tried desperately to juggle multiple responsibilities, driven by both financial necessity and a deep sense of unworthiness.”
According to Hobbs, somewhere between the ages of eight and 13 she stopped resting and began to base her self-worth on who she pleased and how much she achieved.
“I absorbed society’s message of what a ‘good girl’ and ‘successful woman’ should be - self-controlled, self-silencing and self-sacrificing,” she says.
What changed? She reached what she says could be burnout or depression and was later diagnosed as posttraumatic stress and began the long road to healing herself as she worked to heal others, too, through her work as a yoga teacher and therapist. She has even converted her own mother, who retrained as a yoga teacher herself at 70.
I would hate my own daughter to feel guilty for resting. She loves nothing more than staying in her PJs all day eating toast, something I, too, used to love but have been conditioned to see as a lazy waste of time.
I have realised I can see my way to resting more if it means that I’m a good role model for my daughter, in the hope that this cushions her future with the luxury of R&R. I’m not convinced it counts if I’m doing it for someone else, but it feels like I’m on the right track.
‘The Relaxed Woman: Reclaim Rest and Live an Empowered, Joy-filled Life’ (Penguin, £16.99)
FAST FACTS EQUAL SHARES
In a British Social Attitudes Survey, three quarters of respondents said that domestic chores should be split but 32 per cent of men admitted that they did less housework than they probably should.
On average, a typical couple will do 63 hours of unpaid household work each week but only 29 per cent of couples share the tasks equally.
Britons spend 76 per cent as much time thinking about taking housework tasks as actually doing them.
Women perform four to eight hours more household chores per week than men, and tasks such as shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry are primarily done by women, research suggests.