Your Rest Doesn't Count If You Feel Guilty About It

The Guilt I Expected Didn't Show Up

What surprised me: the guilt was barely there.

There was a faint voice in the back of my mind. You could be reading ahead for next semester. This would be a good time to outline those blog posts. But it was quieter than I expected. More like background noise than the loud alarm I'd braced for.

I call it my optimizer voice, but that makes it sound more rational than it is. Really, it's guilt that sounds logical because I'm an engineer. The feeling that rest is wasteful, that downtime needs to justify itself, that every moment should produce something.

And when that voice showed up, I did something I hadn't done before: I recognized it for what it was and told it No. Not aggressively, not guiltily, just clearly. This is what I actually need right now.

I've taken breaks like this before. I've played video games, read books, watched TV, gone to restaurants. But I always felt guilty about it and I never pushed back on that voice. I just let it run in the background, undermining everything.

The activities were restful. The guilt made them useless.

You can't actually recover when half your brain is calculating what you should be doing instead. Previous breaks left me exhausted not because I didn't rest, but because I spent the entire time fighting with myself about whether I deserved to.

I think something shifted after writing all those papers on burnout last semester. When you spend weeks researching how burnout is systemic, not individual, when you dig into the literature on recovery and learn that rest isn't something to earn but something your body requires, it becomes harder to ignore what you know.

I was tired. The deep exhaustion that comes from running at capacity for months. And some part of me understood: this wasn't optional. This was necessary.

So when the impulse came to pick up a textbook or get ahead on assignments, I just... didn't. I chose the novel. I chose the video game. I chose the spontaneous restaurant trip. And critically, I didn't spend those moments arguing with myself about the choice. When the optimizer voice piped up with suggestions for "better" uses of my time, I acknowledged it and kept playing anyway.

I hear you. And no. This is what I need.

What Actually Resting Looks Like

I didn't set out to conduct an experiment. I was just following what my body was telling me it needed.

Some days, that meant working through my reading list (a mix of novels and nonfiction) while my daughter played Sonic on her iPad beside me. Other days, we played Story of Seasons together, the kind of play where naming the animals mattered more than progression. We raced through Rainbow Road over and over that week, both of us laughing (or yelling, depending on how hangry we were) when we inevitably got inked or hit by a blue shell. It meant saying yes to restaurants without feeling like I should be cooking something instead, even though we'd "just" eaten out two days before.

It meant not cooking an elaborate Christmas dinner. I made a pie. That was it. No hosting, no multi-course meal planning, no proving I could do it all. Just a pumpkin pie.

I knocked the crust protector into the middle while baking, leaving a huge gash in what had been a perfect custard surface. I grumbled: "Ah, shit." And then... I was fine with it. It would still taste the same. Not lingering frustration. Not the urge to fix it or redo it or spiral about how I'd ruined it. Just acceptance that imperfect was fine.

And it meant disconnecting from work completely. Not checking in, even though rationally I knew everyone else was on break too. Not opening GChat. Actually, genuinely, not working.

It meant watching TV with my husband without a laptop open, without drafting discussion posts in the background, without splitting my attention between the show and my coursework. Just watching. Just being there. When the familiar urge came to "maximize this time" by multitasking, I actively chose not to. I'm watching TV with my husband. That's the task. That's enough.

But the biggest shift was in how I played video games: without my usual obsessive lens. Normally, when I game, I'm optimizing. Researching the most efficient strategy. Planning my progression. Treating play like another system to master.

This time, I just... played. I died 27 times trying to get through level 3 of Crash Bandicoot and wanted to launch the controller at the wall. But instead I took a breath and modeled staying positive for my daughter. The optimizer in me was screaming that I should get all the boxes, collect all the peaches, do it right. I told it No. I just skipped the boxes that were too hard and moved on. 

In Mario Kart, I let go of needing to win. My husband had shown me a different way to play: let our daughter get out front, then hang back and destroy everything in her path. The computer players would blast each other half a track behind while she cruised to victory. It felt better than optimizing my own performance. 

One Sunday morning while I was sleeping in, she won for the first time using this strategy with my husband. She was so excited she immediately wrote a note about it and slipped it under my door so it would be waiting for me when I woke up. I'll never forget how happy she was in that moment. It felt like watching a core memory form, the kind that matters more than any first-place finish of my own ever could. Inefficiently, imperfectly, cooperative instead of competitive.

I wasn't white-knuckling my way through rest, fighting the urge to be productive. I was too busy being present to argue with the impulse. The guilt couldn't get traction because I was genuinely engaged with what I was doing, not performing rest while mentally elsewhere, but actually there.

Even when it was frustrating. Even when I was bad at it. Even when the optimizer in me was screaming that there had to be a better way.

The System That Breaks When You Stop Optimizing

There's an irony in realizing that optimization itself can be the problem.

I've spent years treating my life like a system to debug. When I felt burned out, I tried to optimize my recovery: more efficient sleep schedules, better morning routines, exercise, strategic energy management. 

Fall semester was a masterclass in optimization. Listen to textbook chapters while writing code so I don't "waste" my work hours. Draft discussion posts while half-watching TV so I'm not "just" relaxing. Stack tasks, maximize efficiency, squeeze productivity into every available moment.

It worked, technically. I got through the semester with a 4.0. But somewhere along the way, I stopped having experiences and started having productivity metrics.

But humans aren't systems. We need inefficiency. We need unstructured time. Moments that produce nothing except the experience of being alive right now. We need to die 27 times on the same video game level and keep trying not because it's productive, but because it matters to us in that moment.

My daughter doesn't need optimized playtime where we maximize learning objectives. She needs me to be silly with her, to lose track of time, to not have one eye on the clock calculating when we need to transition to the next activity. She needs me to lose at Mario Kart and laugh about it. She needs to see me get frustrated at Crash Bandicoot and choose to take a breath, skip the hard parts for now, and keep playing anyway.

My husband doesn't need me physically present but mentally absent, half-watching a show while typing away at coursework. He needs me actually there, making dumb jokes about the plot, engaged with what we're sharing.

This connects to something I've been learning in my counseling studies: Person-Centered therapy's radical trust in the organism. Carl Rogers believed that humans have an innate tendency toward growth and healing when the conditions are right. But you can't force that growth. You can't optimize it. You have to create space for it and then get out of the way.

Maybe that's what I did this break. I stopped trying to engineer my recovery and just... recovered.

What Changed

I started my second semester this week. The assignments are already piling up. Spring semester seems intense, especially with a research course that has a reputation for being brutal. The deadlines are on the calendar. A new sprint kicked off at work with the usual flurry of planning and tickets.

But something feels different.

I have energy I didn't have before. Not the manufactured, caffeine-fueled kind, but actual reserves I'd forgotten I could build. The kind that comes from genuine recovery.

After one semester of constant output (juggling full-time work, graduate-level coursework, and parenting) I finally gave myself permission to stop producing. And in that space, something replenished that all my previous "efficient rest strategies" never could touch.

Maybe it's because I'd just spent weeks writing about burnout as a systemic issue. Maybe it's because I'm learning therapeutic frameworks that emphasize being over doing. Maybe I was just tired enough that my body overrode my usual optimization impulses.

Whatever the reason, it worked. And now I'm sitting with what that actually means. 

The Real Lesson

Here's what I'm taking from this experience, and it's not what I expected:

Rest isn't about what you do. It's about what you stop doing mentally.

I could have read those same eight books while feeling guilty that I wasn't reading textbooks. I could have played those same video games while mentally cataloging all the more productive ways I could be spending my time. I could have eaten at those same restaurants while calculating the opportunity cost.

I've done exactly that on previous breaks. The activities looked like rest. They just didn't feel like it. And they definitely didn't restore me the way this break did.

The difference wasn't the activities. It was the absence of the running internal argument about whether I deserved to be doing them. And more than that, it was my willingness to actively redirect that argument when it started.

The optimizer voice didn't disappear. It just learned that I wasn't negotiating anymore. When it suggested I should be doing something more productive, I didn't engage with the suggestion or try to justify my choices. I simply acknowledged it and returned to what I was doing. 

I've realized that voice isn't really about efficiency or productivity. It's guilt. The belief that I don't deserve rest unless I've earned it, that every moment needs to produce something, that simply being isn't enough.

I know you think there's a better use of this time. But this is what I'm choosing.

This matters because so much of the advice around preventing burnout focuses on what to do: take breaks, practice self-care, set boundaries. But if you're taking breaks while feeling guilty about them, if you're practicing self-care while mentally defending your right to it, if you're setting boundaries while second-guessing whether you should, you're not actually resting. You're just adding "feel guilty about resting" to your already overwhelming to-do list.

The guilt is the barrier. Not lack of time. Not lack of knowledge about what rest looks like. The constant mental negotiation over whether we're allowed to stop producing.

And maybe the skill isn't eliminating that voice. Maybe it's learning to hear it and choose differently anyway.

The Question I'm Carrying Forward

I don't have a neat conclusion here. I'm not going to tell you to "just stop feeling guilty" because that's not how feelings work. I can't give you five steps to guilt-free rest because that would be, once again, optimizing something that maybe doesn't need optimization.

But I am sitting with something: What if the engineering mindset that serves us so well in our work is the exact thing preventing us from recovering from that work?

What if rest isn't something we need to get better at, but something we need to stop interfering with?

I'm back in the rhythm now: work, school, parenting, repeat. Spring semester is already intense. The guilt will probably come back. I'll probably find myself listening to textbooks while coding again, drafting posts during TV time again, optimizing my way through life again.

But I'm carrying this experience with me. Not as a new system to implement, but as evidence that there's another way to exist that I keep forgetting is possible. And as proof that I can recognize the optimizer voice and choose not to follow it.

I'm one semester into learning how to help people navigate burnout, stress, and sustainable living. Turns out, I'm still learning how to do it myself.

And maybe that's the point. Maybe the learning doesn't happen in the textbooks or the research papers. Maybe it happens in the moments when you finally stop optimizing long enough to notice what your body's been trying to tell you all along.

Sometimes while dying 27 times on level 3 of Crash Bandicoot, wanting to scream, and choosing to breathe instead.

And sometimes, most importantly, while hearing the voice that says you should be doing more, and calmly telling it: No. This is what I need.