I had a conversation with a client recently that stuck with me. She told me she felt guilty for spending Sunday afternoon on the couch reading a book. Not scrolling her phone. Not watching TV. Reading an actual book.

“I just felt like I should have been doing something,” she said.

And I thought: this is the problem, isn’t it? We’ve somehow built a culture where rest feels like something you need to earn, justify, or apologise for.

The Productivity Trap

Australia has a complicated relationship with rest. On one hand, we pride ourselves on being laid-back. On the other, we work some of the longest hours in the developed world. A 2024 report from the Australia Institute found that Australians worked an average of 6.1 weeks of unpaid overtime per year.

We talk about work-life balance constantly, but the cultural signal is clear: busy is good. Rest is suspicious. And if you’re resting, you’d better be doing it “productively” — a concept that makes no sense when you think about it for more than 10 seconds.

Productive rest. Active recovery. Optimised downtime. We’ve even turned not-working into a performance metric.

What Rest Actually Does

Rest isn’t the absence of productivity. It’s a biological necessity with specific, measurable functions.

Sleep is the obvious one. During deep sleep, your brain clears metabolic waste, consolidates memories, and regulates emotional processing. Chronic sleep deprivation is linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and impaired immune function. This isn’t wellness fluff — it’s well-established medicine.

Waking rest matters too. When you’re not focused on a task, your brain shifts into what neuroscientists call the default mode network. This is when you process experiences, make connections between ideas, and work through problems in the background. It’s why your best ideas often come in the shower or on a walk, not at your desk.

Physical rest is essential for tissue repair, hormone regulation, and preventing injury. Every decent training program includes rest days, because that’s when adaptation actually happens. You don’t get stronger during the workout. You get stronger during recovery.

The Guilt Problem

Knowing rest is important and actually allowing yourself to rest are two very different things. Most of the people I work with intellectually understand they need downtime. They just can’t do it without a running commentary of guilt in the background.

That guilt usually comes from one of three places:

Identity. If your sense of self is tied to being productive, useful, or busy, rest feels like a threat to who you are. Resting means confronting the question: who am I when I’m not doing things?

Comparison. Social media doesn’t help here. Everyone else appears to be running businesses, raising perfect children, training for marathons, and meal-prepping elaborate lunches. Resting feels like falling behind.

Economics. Let’s be honest — for many Australians, rest is a privilege. If you’re working two jobs or caring for family members around the clock, guilt isn’t even the main barrier. Time and financial security are.

Reframing Rest

I think we need to change the conversation around rest from permission to practice.

Rest isn’t something you do after everything else is done. If you wait for that, it never comes. Rest is something you build into your week the same way you build in meals and sleep and work.

It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It doesn’t require a wellness retreat or a float tank or a digital detox in the Daintree. It can be:

• Sitting in your backyard for 15 minutes without your phone
• Taking a full lunch break away from your desk
• Going to bed 30 minutes earlier than usual
• Saying no to weekend plans when you’re running on empty
• Doing nothing — literally nothing — and letting that be enough

The Cultural Shift We Need

I’m not naive enough to think we can fix hustle culture with a blog post. But I do think the conversation is starting to change.

More workplaces are recognising that burnout isn’t a badge of honour. More research is showing that overwork leads to worse outcomes, not better ones. And more people are quietly pushing back against the idea that their value is measured in output.

If you’re someone who struggles to rest without guilt, here’s what I want you to hear: rest is not the opposite of effort. It’s what makes sustained effort possible.

You are not lazy for needing downtime. You’re human.

And the couch on a Sunday afternoon? That’s not wasted time. That’s exactly where you’re supposed to be.