You've been looking forward to your day off all week. Then it finally gets here and you don't really know what to do with yourself. You sit down to watch television, but within ten minutes you're checking your phone or thinking about something that needs to be done. Before long, your day off has turned into another list of things to accomplish.
For some people, doing nothing is surprisingly uncomfortable. We complain about being busy and talk about needing a break, but when we finally get one, we immediately start looking for something to do. Sometimes we even end the day frustrated because we didn't accomplish enough. So why can it be so difficult to relax when we finally have the opportunity?
Being Busy Can Become Normal
Most of us don't think of being busy as a problem. Being productive is generally rewarded, and being the person who gets things done is usually considered a good thing. At work, being able to handle several problems at once may be one of the reasons you're good at your job. The problem is that constantly having something to do can eventually become your normal state.
Work ends, but your brain doesn't necessarily get the message. You check email, think about what needs to happen tomorrow, run through conversations from earlier in the day, or start planning the next project. When you get home, there are bills to pay, laundry to do, things to fix, and people who need something from you. There may never be much of a transition between being responsible for something and actually being off duty.
Researchers use the term psychological detachment to describe mentally disengaging from work during nonwork time. It doesn't mean you stop caring about your job or never think about work after you leave. It means there are periods when you're no longer dealing with work tasks or continuing to think about work-related problems. Research suggests that high workloads make this kind of detachment more difficult, while a lack of detachment is associated with greater strain and poorer well-being (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015).
Sometimes Relaxing Feels Unproductive
There can also be a simpler explanation. Sitting around doing nothing can feel like wasting time, particularly if you've spent years measuring a good day by what you accomplished. You may have a difficult time enjoying an afternoon where nothing gets done because part of you is keeping track of all the things you could have been doing instead. Rest becomes something you have to justify.
That doesn't mean you consciously believe people should be productive every minute of the day. You may have no problem telling someone else that they need a break, should take a vacation, or need to stop answering emails at night. It's just harder to apply the same rule to yourself. There is always one more thing that could get done before you relax.
This can be particularly noticeable for people who are accustomed to being responsible for other people. At work, people come to you when something needs to be fixed, decided, or handled. At home, your family may depend on you for another set of things. When you finally reach a point where nobody needs anything from you, you may not know what to do with the empty space, so you fill it.
Your Body Doesn't Know That Work Ended at 5:00
There is another part of this that has less to do with how we think about productivity and more to do with recovery from the effort we put into work. A demanding workday requires physical and psychological resources, even when the job isn't physically demanding. Recovery happens when those demands are no longer being placed on us and those resources have an opportunity to recover.
The problem is that being physically away from work doesn't necessarily mean you've stopped responding to it. You can be sitting on your couch while you're still thinking about a difficult conversation, tomorrow's schedule, a decision you need to make, or everything waiting for you when you return. Research on recovery from work has found that psychological detachment is related to lower fatigue, and that both the characteristics of the job and what happens during off-work time matter for recovery (Bennett et al., 2018).
This can create the strange experience of being exhausted and unable to relax at the same time. You're tired enough that you don't really want to do anything, but you're too wound up to sit comfortably and do nothing. So you scroll through your phone, watch television without really paying attention, start another project, or find something around the house to do. Then you go to bed without feeling like you ever really stopped.
Work Doesn't Have to Be Dangerous to Follow You Home
I've written quite a bit about this problem with first responders because the effects are easy to see in emergency services. Firefighters, paramedics, law enforcement officers, dispatchers, and healthcare workers spend a lot of time responding to problems that require their immediate attention. You can't tell the cardiac arrest that you'll deal with it tomorrow because you're mentally tired. You learn to switch on and handle what's in front of you.
But you don't need to work in emergency services for work to follow you home. Managers make decisions that affect other people's jobs. Attorneys carry their clients' problems and deadlines. Teachers may leave work thinking about a student they're worried about, and business owners can always find something related to the business that needs attention.
Research supports the idea that this matters even outside obviously traumatic occupations. In a 12-month study of human-service employees, higher job demands predicted greater emotional exhaustion and psychosomatic complaints over time. Being able to psychologically detach from work during nonwork time appeared to provide some protection when job demands were high (Sonnentag et al., 2010).
Technology hasn't made the boundary between work and home particularly clear either. For many people, work used to end when they physically left the workplace, but now email, Teams, Slack, text messages, and whatever else your employer uses can follow you everywhere. You may technically be off work while still checking messages throughout the evening. Sometimes the problem isn't what you do for a living as much as the fact that you're rarely completely off.
Why Doesn't My Day Off Feel Restful?
This is where people sometimes get frustrated with themselves. They finally have time to rest, and they don't feel any better. They sleep later, spend a few hours on the couch, maybe take a nap, and wonder why they still feel exhausted on Sunday evening. Having time off and recovering aren't necessarily the same thing.
One of the interesting findings in this area is what researchers have called the recovery paradox. The times when work is most stressful and recovery is probably most needed are also the times when people may have the most difficulty recovering. High levels of job stress can interfere with psychological detachment, sleep, and other processes that normally help us recover from work (Sonnentag, 2018).
That makes sense if you think about a particularly difficult week at work. Friday evening arrives, but your brain doesn't suddenly forget about everything that happened because the weekend started. You may spend Saturday thinking about an unfinished project, a conversation with your boss, a staffing problem, or what you're walking back into Monday morning. You're away from the workplace, but part of your attention is still there.
We can even turn relaxation into another task. Now we're supposed to exercise, get outside, spend quality time with the family, see friends, work on a hobby, practice mindfulness, meal prep for the week, and somehow return to work Monday completely refreshed. By Sunday afternoon, we can feel like we failed at having a weekend. That's a lot to ask from two days.
Sometimes Staying Busy Is Useful
There is another reason some of us don't particularly like slowing down. Work and activity can be very good at keeping our attention occupied. There is always another problem to solve, another email to answer, another task to complete, or another person who needs something. When you're focused on all of that, there isn't much time to think about how you're actually doing.
Then things get quiet and you start noticing things. Maybe you're not particularly happy with something in your life. Maybe a relationship hasn't been going well, you're worried about something you can't control, or something happened months ago that you haven't really dealt with. Maybe you're starting to wonder whether you even want the career you've spent years building.
There doesn't have to be some major unresolved problem hiding underneath all of this. Sometimes being alone with your thoughts is simply unfamiliar because you don't do it very often. Staying busy isn't necessarily bad, either. It can just be useful to notice whether you're choosing to stay busy or whether you become uncomfortable whenever you stop.
Relaxing Doesn't Have to Mean Doing Nothing
I think we sometimes make relaxation unnecessarily complicated. Relaxing doesn't have to mean sitting perfectly still, meditating, taking a bath, or somehow achieving a completely empty mind. For some people, all of that sounds awful. If sitting on the couch doing nothing makes you restless, that doesn't automatically mean you're bad at relaxing.
Research on recovery from work actually makes a similar distinction. Recovery experiences can include psychological detachment, relaxation, doing something challenging or interesting outside of work, and having some control over how you spend your free time (Bennett et al., 2018). In other words, recovery doesn't require doing nothing. What you do with your time and your ability to mentally step away from work both seem to matter.
Recovery can therefore look like working in the garage, going for a run, cooking, playing a video game, walking the dog, reading, fishing, spending time with friends, or doing something with your hands. The question isn't necessarily whether you're doing something. The more useful question may be whether you're doing it because you actually want to or because you can't tolerate not having something to do.
There is a difference between deciding that you'd enjoy spending Saturday morning working on your motorcycle and wandering around the house looking for something that needs to be fixed because sitting down makes you uncomfortable. One is a choice about how you want to spend your time. The other may be another version of staying on. From the outside they can look exactly the same.
Pay Attention to What Happens Between Work and Home
If you have trouble relaxing when you're not working, it can be useful to pay attention to the transition between the two. What happens during the drive home? Do you continue replaying the day, thinking about tomorrow, or checking work messages throughout the evening? When you walk through the door, do you immediately start dealing with the next set of responsibilities?
Also pay attention to what happens when there genuinely isn't anything you need to do. Do you feel relieved, bored, guilty, restless, or uncomfortable? Do you automatically reach for your phone or start looking around for something productive to do? You don't have to judge the answer, but it can tell you something about how accustomed you've become to always being occupied.
You don't necessarily need to eliminate stress from your life or become someone who spends every weekend meditating. Most of us have responsibilities, and there are going to be weeks when there isn't much downtime. But if you're almost never really off, that may be worth paying attention to. Especially if you can't remember the last time you felt rested rather than simply not at work.
You Don't Have to Wait Until You're Burned Out
People sometimes assume therapy is something you do after stress has become unmanageable. You can't sleep, the relationship is falling apart, you're having panic attacks, you can't work, or something has finally happened that forces you to deal with it. It doesn't have to get that far. Being able to continue functioning doesn't mean you have to wait until you can't.
Research going back several decades suggests that simply getting away from work is not the whole story. The degree to which people mentally detach from work appears to influence how restorative time away from work can be (Etzion et al., 1998). More recent research has continued to find psychological detachment to be an important part of the relationship between job demands, recovery, and well-being (Sonnentag & Fritz, 2015).
Sometimes therapy is simply a place to figure out why you can't seem to switch off, why you feel guilty when you're resting, or why the life you've worked hard to build doesn't feel quite the way you expected it to. Maybe there is something specific that needs attention, or maybe you've spent so much time taking care of what needs to be done that you haven't thought much about what you actually want. Either one is a reasonable place to start.
You can still be doing your job, paying the bills, taking care of your family, and being the person everyone depends on. You don't have to prove that things are bad enough before you're allowed to want them to be different. Sometimes noticing that you're never really off is enough reason to start asking why.
Individual Therapy in Orlando
If you've gotten used to always being busy, always being responsible for something, or never quite feeling off duty, you don't have to wait until you're completely burned out before doing something about it. Therapy can give you a place to look at what's keeping you switched on and figure out what you would like to change.
I provide individual therapy in Orlando and online throughout Florida for adults dealing with stress, anxiety, burnout, difficult experiences, relationship problems, and the effects of demanding work.
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References
Bennett, A. A., Bakker, A. B., & Field, J. G. (2018). Recovery from work-related effort: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(3), 262–275. doi: 10.1002/job.2217
Etzion, D., Eden, D., & Lapidot, Y. (1998). Relief from job stressors and burnout: Reserve service as a respite. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83(4), 577–585. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.83.4.577
Sonnentag, S. (2018). The recovery paradox: Portraying the complex interplay between job stressors, lack of recovery, and poor well-being. Research in Organizational Behavior, 38, 169–185. doi: 10.1016/j.riob.2018.11.002
Sonnentag, S., Binnewies, C., & Mojza, E. J. (2010). Staying well and engaged when demands are high: The role of psychological detachment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(5), 965–976. doi: 10.1037/a0020032
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72–S103. doi: 10.1002/job.1924
