The Vacation She Couldn't Enjoy

When rest feels like failure and relaxation becomes work

Hi friends,

Michelle had been planning this vacation for months. A week in Costa Rica—no work emails, no deadlines, just beach time and reading and the kind of rest she'd been craving for years.

She came to our telehealth session the week after she got back, and I expected to hear about how refreshed and rejuvenated she felt. Instead, she looked more exhausted than when she'd left.

"I couldn't relax," she told me. "I kept thinking about all the things I should be doing at home. The emails piling up. The projects waiting for me. I felt guilty for every minute I wasn't being productive."

Michelle had taken her first real vacation in three years, and she'd spent most of it feeling anxious about not working.

When productivity becomes identity

This is something I see constantly with high-achieving women: we've become so addicted to productivity that rest feels like moral failure.

Michelle's brain had been trained to equate worth with output. Sitting on a beach felt lazy. Reading a novel felt indulgent. Even though she was physically in paradise, mentally she was still at her desk, calculating all the ways she was falling behind.

"I kept thinking about how much I could be accomplishing if I were home," she said. "Like, I could be organizing my closet or meal prepping or catching up on industry articles. Instead I'm just... lying here."

The guilt that steals rest

Michelle had fallen into what I call the productivity trap: the belief that your value as a person depends on how much you accomplish each day.

She'd learned early that busy equals important, that rest is something you earn only after everything else is finished, that relaxation is selfish when there are always more things you could be doing.

So even on vacation—especially on vacation—her nervous system was convinced she was doing something wrong.

This connects to what I explored in my newsletter about the importance of rest and maturity—how we've somehow convinced ourselves that rest is something we have to justify rather than something we simply need as humans.

"I felt like I was wasting time," she told me. "Like, people would ask what I did in Costa Rica and I'd have to say 'Nothing.' How embarrassing is that?"

But here's what Michelle couldn't see: her inability to rest wasn't a character strength. It was a symptom of burnout.

The productivity performance

What became clear as Michelle talked was that she'd been performing productivity for so long, she'd forgotten how to just exist without producing something.

Every day had to have achievements. Every hour had to have output. Every moment had to be optimized for some greater purpose.

She'd turned herself into a human doing instead of a human being.

"I realized I don't actually know how to relax," Michelle admitted. "I know how to collapse from exhaustion, but I don't know how to rest on purpose."

The practice that changed everything

I asked Michelle to try something that felt completely foreign to her: treating rest like an important task instead of the absence of tasks.

What if, instead of feeling guilty about lying on the beach, she approached it with the same intentionality she brought to her work projects? What if relaxation was something she could be good at, instead of something she was failing at?

We started with fifteen minutes. Michelle would set a timer and commit to doing absolutely nothing productive for that time. No mental planning. No problem-solving. Just existing.

"It felt impossible at first," she said. "My brain kept trying to fix things or organize things or think through things. But gradually, I started to remember what it felt like to just... be."

What rest actually does

Here's what Michelle discovered: rest isn't the absence of productivity. It's what makes real productivity possible.

Those weeks when she was constantly busy but never rested? She was going through the motions of work without actually being effective. Her creativity was flat. Her problem-solving was sluggish. She was working hard but not working well.

But after she started building real rest into her life—not just collapsing at the end of overwhelming days, but intentional restoration—her work actually improved.

"I have better ideas now," she told me. "I can think more clearly. I solve problems faster because my brain isn't running on fumes all the time."

The permission you might need

Michelle's story makes me think about how many of us have internalized the message that rest is lazy, that relaxation is selfish, that we only deserve downtime after we've completed some impossible list of tasks.

But what if rest isn't something you earn? What if it's something you need, like food or water or air?

What if the most productive thing you can do sometimes is absolutely nothing?

What I'm curious about

Do you struggle with feeling guilty when you rest? Do you find it hard to relax without immediately thinking about all the things you should be doing instead?

Hit reply and tell me. I think there are a lot of us who've forgotten that we're human beings, not human doings. We've forgotten that our worth doesn't depend on our output.

Michelle is learning that she can be a high achiever who also knows how to rest. That she can be ambitious and also give herself permission to do nothing sometimes. That productivity and rest aren't enemies—they're partners.

What would change if you treated rest as seriously as you treat work?

Maybe you'd stop feeling guilty about relaxing. Maybe you'd have more energy for the things that actually matter. Maybe you'd remember that you're valuable just for being you, not for what you produce.

Talk to you soon,
Mary

---

---

---