About This Episode
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, where I help people like you to achieve success without the burnout. In this episode, I’m unpacking the uncomfortable truth about rest: for many overachievers, me included, taking a break often doesn’t feel relaxing. Instead, it can trigger feelings of guilt, unease, or even the sense that we’re risking something by slowing down.
It’s not really about laziness or not having enough time. Through years of working with high-achievers, I’ve seen that these feelings actually come from deeply held beliefs about self-worth and productivity. I’ll explore the ways we struggle to switch off, why downtime can feel like wasted time, and how we sometimes justify rest as something we have to “earn.”
I also share the crucial difference between rest and recovery, explaining that real restoration requires letting go of those internal expectations so we can truly recharge. In this episode, I invite you to reflect on what rest means to you, where those beliefs come from, and how you can start to change them.
If rest makes you feel uneasy or undeserving, I’ll give you practical insights and compassionate advice to help you reclaim balance and build more sustainable success. Join me in exploring a healthier way to achieve your goals, starting with learning how to rest well.
Key Themes
- Rest, discomfort, and unease
- Overachievers’ identity linked to productivity
- Learned beliefs drive rest avoidance
- Difference between rest and recovery
- Poor rest undermines sustained success
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Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. If rest makes you feel uneasy, guilty, or like you should be doing something else, this episode will help you to understand why. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Because success shouldn’t cost everything.
Hello, I’m Keith Blakemore Noble, the Mindset Master. I work with people who carry a lot. In the last episode, we explored the overachiever trap, how capable people end up carrying more and more on often without realising it. Today builds directly upon that, because once you’re caught in that trap, rest doesn’t feel neutral anymore.
It starts to feel uncomfortable. Sound familiar? For overachievers, that discomfort is rarely about time or laziness. It’s actually about identity, their own self-identity. Here’s the surprising problem with rest. On the surface, rest sounds simple. Stop working. Slow down. Take a break.
Sounds simple. But for many overachievers, rest doesn’t feel restful. It feels itchy or unearned. It even feels irresponsible. Perhaps you notice when you try to rest that your mind stays busy or even gets busier. You might notice when you try to rest that you start to feel a bit on edge. Or maybe you notice when you try to rest that you’re aware of everything else you could be doing if you weren’t wasting time resting. Any of those ringing any bells? That discomfort often gets mislabeled.
We often tell ourselves, “Hey, I’m just bad at switching off,” or, “I’m not very good at relaxing.” That is not what is actually going on, however. What is going on? Well, let’s take a look. You see, rest itself is not the issue. Here’s the key thing to understand: the problem isn’t rest. The problem is what rest represents. For overachievers, rest often triggers an internal alarm. An alarm that says, “You’re falling behind!” or “You’re being lazy!” or you should be doing more. And that alarm didn’t appear by accident.
It was like most things that we do, it was learned. And you know what, at some point when you learned it, it was actually useful, it was helpful. But that’s the thing— just because it was useful in the past doesn’t mean it’s useful now in the present. So how does all of this show up in real life? Well, I’ve seen this pattern countless times over the years. Someone finally creates space. Perhaps it’s a well-deserved evening off. Or maybe it’s they finally managed to schedule and arrange for themselves a day without obligation, a day off where you’re, you’re not required to do anything. There’s nothing in the calendar.
It’s your day to relax. Or maybe even it’s just a rare moment when nothing urgent is demanding attention. A nice little gap in the calendar where you can just relax for a little bit. But see, here’s the thing. Instead of feeling relief, they often feel restless. They’ll – and let me know if any of these ring true for you – they’ll check emails, or they’ll think about unfinished tasks, or they’ll mentally rehearse what’s coming next. Or just for the fun of it, they’ll create a to-do list of all the things they could be doing instead. And they don’t do this because they enjoy it.
Heaven knows they don’t. They’re doing it because being on has become their default state. Rest doesn’t feel like safety. Rest feels like risk. And not to put too fine a point on it, they don’t actually know how to rest. They’ve long forgotten how to rest, forgotten how to handle downtime. They’ve forgotten that it’s okay, you don’t have to be doing things the whole time. It is okay to take a little time out to rest, to recover.
They forget all of that, so rest doesn’t feel like safety anymore. It feels like a risk, a risk to be avoided. Here’s something for you. I’d like to invite you to pause for a moment and just notice something. When was the last time you rested mentally without justifying it first? So when was the last time you mentally rested without justifying it first, without telling yourself that you’ve earned it, without telling yourself, oh, I’ll make up for— I’ll just have a rest now, I’ll make up for it later. When was the last time you rested mentally without justifying it to yourself? Just note, take a moment or two to pause and consider that. And just notice what comes up when you ask yourself that. No judgment.
Don’t judge whatever’s coming up. Just notice, be aware of what comes up for you when you ask yourself, when was the last time I rested without mentally justifying it first? For many people, underneath discomfort with rest there’s often a belief quietly running the show in the background. And that belief, it says things like, my value comes from what I do. If I’m not doing things, I’m of no value. Or my worth is measured by my output. If I’m not constantly outputting things, I have no worth. Or even worse, If I stop, the belief says, if I stop, things will slip. Now, that belief is very rarely a conscious belief.
We don’t consciously think that. It’s running in the background unconsciously underneath all this we’ve got going on. And the awful thing is that belief gets reinforced over the years, gets reinforced when we get praised for being reliable. That belief gets reinforced when we get praised, um, for being the one who copes. And that belief gets reinforced every time we feel needed. And as a result of all of that, rest itself, it no longer feels natural. It feels almost like we’re stepping away from who we think we need to be. And that’s the point.
We’re not stepping away from who we are. We’re stepping away from who we think we need to be. Very often, because of those ingrained beliefs that tying our worth to our output, and the belief that if we’re not doing something, then we’re being lazy, we’re wasting time, it’s all going to go horribly wrong, Because we’ve got those, those unhelpful beliefs going on that causes us to have strange belief in who we think we need to be, all of which makes rest feel unnatural, undeserved, makes us feel unworthy of it. Now, there is a point— at this point, I’d like to make an important distinction between rest and recovery. It’s a very important distinction. Rest is not the same as recovery. Rest rest is, is the absence of effort, whereas recovery is the restoration of capacity. I’ll say that again.
Rest is simply the absence of effort. Recovery is the restoration of capacity. So when we rest, we’re just not doing something, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re recovering. Recovering lets us build back our capacity to do whatever it is that we do. You can stop working and still never recover. How? Well, your nervous system stays alert. Your mind keeps scanning for threats, keeps scanning for things to do. Your sense of identity stays switched on.
If any of those – all of those or any of those happen – if your nervous system’s staying alert, if your mind keeps looking around for threats, if your sense of identity stays switched on, switched on – all of those can stop you from recovering even though you’re resting. And for overachievers, true recovery also often feels unfamiliar because it requires letting go, completely letting go, not of tasks, not just of tasks, but letting go of self-expectation. And this matters This letting go of self-expectation, this matters because sustainable success depends on recovery. You need that recovery not as a reward. Recovery isn’t a reward, it is a requirement, absolute requirement. Without recovery, over time creativity will drop, decision-making will narrow, it’ll get harder and harder, you’ll make poorer and poorer decisions. Your resilience will erode over time without recovery. Your ability to bounce back from things that happen.
And here’s the danger with all of this. When rest feels uncomfortable, people don’t tend to rest less. They tend to rest badly. They, they only half switch off. They distract themselves but keep themselves really busy with the distraction, all of which prevents them from fully recharging. So they’ll grudgingly take rest, but they won’t switch off properly. They only half switch off. They’ll keep half an eye on everything that’s going on.
They distract themselves so they’re not resting. They’re now fully engaged in something else. They never fully recharge, and over time That takes a real toll. In the next episode of the Overachievers Podcast, we are going to take a look at how responsibility quietly expands for overachievers and why it’s so hard to put it back once you’ve picked it up. We’re going to take a look at that in the next episode, and that goes hand in hand with this one. Because when rest feels unsafe, responsibility leaps in and fills the gap. So next episode, kind of like part 2 of this one. For now, however, for next week, as you move forward, just hold this question gently.
What does rest mean to you? What does rest actually mean to you? And where did you learn that? What does rest mean for you? And where did you learn that? What taught you that that’s what rest is? Now, you don’t need to answer this. You don’t need to answer it fully. Just notice what the question stirs up when you consider it. Over the next few days, I invite you to notice how you respond when you stop. Again, there’s no fixing, there’s no judgment, there’s no force at rest, just awareness of what happens for you how you feel and how you respond when you stop. That’s it for this episode. Thank you, as always, for joining me on the Overachievers Podcast. If this episode resonated, follow the show, give us a like, a comment, a share, subscribe on your favourite platform, give us a review on your favourite platform.
That really helps to spread the word of the show and make it available for other people who are going to also benefit share it far and wide as well. Stay with me for the, for the next episode and for the future episodes, because of course the next one we are exploring how responsibility quietly expands. And we’re going to look at why overachievers find it so hard to put responsibility back down again. That’s coming up next time. For now, I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Mindset Master, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
