Rest and guilt

I’ve spent the best part of a week in bed with a headache. It’s not the end of the world, sure, but it has been tricky to navigate being unwell with a newborn.

Headaches have been a constant in my life since being a child. I never knew why, but I’d have one most days. Sometimes they’d develop into migraines and they’d wipe me out for days on end, often with various scary symptoms such as facial drooping and numbness in my arms.

Every investigation came back clear and so the mystery of my headaches remained unsolved for years.

After having my older 2 children, my headaches stopped. I can’t explain why. Maybe it was something to do with my hormones, I’m not sure. But then I fell pregnant with my third child in the summer of 2022 and they returned with a vengeance. Had I undone whatever had ‘fixed’ my headaches?

If you have any tips for how to get rid of headaches, come and tell me in the comments:

My most recent episode lasted a few days. On the first day, my husband suggested I head to bed and try and sleep it off. “I can’t possibly!” I said back to him. “I’ve too much to do. I need to take care of the baby, help the children, sort the house out and I need to work!”.

“No, you don’t” my husband replied. And that stopped me in my tracks. No, I actually don’t have to do those things. He was right.

I certainly don’t need my husband’s permission to rest, but it was the wake up call that I needed. The stark reality of the lie I believed for myself had been shattered with the realisation that I could rest. I needed to.

Maybe it’s because I’m a mum or a self employed woman, I’m not quite sure, but I really struggle to truly rest. Even when I’m poorly, which is ridiculous to say!

Rest isn’t something that’s earned. It’s not a reward for cleaning the house or burning yourself out with work. I know all of this, so why did I feel so guilty for heading to bed to get better?

I’ve lived a simple life for many years now, and my life is far simpler than it used to be. I don’t have a to-do list full of tasks, or a diary full of places to be, yet I still have a never ending list of things to do (housework/ cooking/ work emails etc).

The things I do are things that I want to do now. They’re things I enjoy and things that bring me contentment. I don’t dread the things I need to do. Not even the ironing. I quite enjoy it in fact as I like to pop my favourite playlist or podcast on and complete the relatively easy job.

So the first day that I was poorly I headed to bed. I took the baby with me too and it was as if he could sense I needed some sleep. I got three hours!

The second day I returned to bed once the older children were at school, but this time I took my laptop with me too. “I’ll work from bed, it still counts as resting” I thought to myself. This turned out to be a huge mistake because half an hour into starting some work, my headache had worsened.

I listened to my body and took the entire third day off, doing what everyone recommends to do with a newborn and ‘sleeping when they sleep’. This worked and by the fourth day I felt better. I’d also realised that I’d not stepped foot outside the house for the last 4 days so I knew I needed some fresh air.

It was only when I truly rested, truly switched off and unplugged, that I was able to get better, but why did I resist it for so long?

I had inevitably dragged out this headache for days when all I needed to do was stop and truly rest in the first place and it’d have been over with a lot sooner.

Sure the house was much more untidy than what it would usually have been, the ironing didn’t get done and I didn’t do a single piece of work, but nothing drastic happened. It wasn’t the end of the world.

So what’s the reason of feeling guilt?

Maybe it’s something I believe subconsciously from when I first went self employed. I believed the ‘hustle hard’ rhetoric where I always had to be busy working on my business in order for it to keep growing and succeed.

When you leave the safety of an employed job to take your small business full time, there’s lot of pressure to make it work. It has to work. If you don’t work hard constantly, you don’t earn money and so I was petrified to take any time off.

I also think it sprouts from my childhood too. My mum always worked at least two jobs and she was always keeping on top of the house between her shifts. I never saw my mum rest and I soon adopted the view of rest being lazy.

There’s tonnes of research now that proves that rest is beneficial to us. It improves productivity, it helps us focus and it reduces anxiety and depression. So it baffles me that us humans still experience guilt if we rest.

The feeling of guilt I experienced when resting was luckily short lived this time. I was quickly able to recognise it (thanks to my husband) and give myself permission to prioritise my health and to get better. After all, if we don’t take care of ourselves, how can we take care of anyone else?

What are your thoughts about resting? Do you feel guilty? Do you have any tips to overcome the guilty feeling and allow yourself to fully rest? Let me know by replying to this email directly, or leave a comment via the button below