Why Don't You Allow Yourself to Rest?

3 minutes

Rest is the starting point, the place where great achievements are born and one of the necessary requisites for our well-being. So why is it that you often don't allow yourself to rest?

Written and verified by the psychologist María Alejandra Castro Arbeláez.

Last update: 07 November, 2022

Today, it’s easy to get lost in a world of exhausting routines, hours of work, and endless effort. Gradually, this exhausts you psychologically, socially, and physically. How should you deal with it? Allowing yourself to rest is key. We’ll explain how to do it in this article.

You might want to say goodbye to your seemingly everlasting exhausting routines and try and leave them all behind. However, doing this would likely make you feel anxious. So, how can you make sure that your life doesn’t only consist of work, study, and dedicating yourself completely to others? How can you turn your toxic routines into healthy ones?

Set your priorities

Sometimes, you can’t find the appropriate time to rest. You might even think that it’s impossible. However, have you thought about this question in detail? In fact, if you want to achieve your long-awaited rest, you need to establish your priorities. Here’s how to do it.

Set yourself goals. This will make it easier to recognize or set yourself a real destination. By doing, so you’ll begin to realize what you really want to do.
Take one step at a time. Trying to do everything at the same time will mean that nothing will go well. It’s better to gradually build your path to reach your goals.
Recognize what you need to do right now. Think about the present. This will help you realize which issues you must give priority to. There will always be certain things that require your immediate intervention.
Know how to let go. Wanting to take up all your identified challenges is often an impossibility because, in reality, your resources are limited.

All of these strategies will help you to rest. However, remember that resting isn’t only a physical issue, it’s also a mental and social one. If you establish your priorities, you’ll find it easier to identify times when you can rest. It’s all in your hands.

Work in harmony with yourself

We all work with a definition of who we think we are today and with the people that we’d like to be. If there’s a significant difference between the two, it can generate great anxiety.

Increasing coherence, based on self-knowledge, means that you can take better advantage of inertia when the circumstances are favorable. Also, you’ll have more strength and resources when they’re not so positive. This kind of attunement makes you more powerful.

Self-regulation is key to your development as a human being. It leads you to establish a coherent list of priorities and to get rid of what only represents a burden. María Del Carmen González and Javier Touron, in their book, Autoconcepto y Rendimiento Escolar (Self-Concept and School Performance) explain the relationship between self-knowledge and motivation.

Allowing yourself to rest contributes to your well-being

Allowing yourself to rest, as well as being in tune with yourself and establishing your priorities, gives you a space to improve your health. Abraham Maslow, the renowned American psychologist, devised a pyramid of needs. At the base, he placed our basic needs. Resting is one of them. In fact, it’s seen as a biological issue, because when you don’t rest, you overexert your body.

However, rest goes beyond sleep. It also means giving your mind a space to disconnect from your routine, allowing you a space for yourself, and not being busy all the time with your social commitments. In other words, permitting yourself to rest means letting harmony flow between your body, mind, and emotions.

It’s a real commitment to gradually build what you want to achieve, leaving aside anything that causes you harm and those who are toxic to you. Make self-regulation your best ally. Open your consciousness toward your own reality in a world of endless possibilities. They’ll always be there.