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Key points
- Being good at working can make us bad at relaxing.
- Unfortunately, trying to relax can trigger sadness, anxiety, and guilt.
- Build your relaxation skills by starting with the basics, like allowing emotions to run their course and practicing your leisure skills.
Are you unskilled at relaxing? Do you spend months looking forward to your vacation time, only to find yourself completely unsure of what to do with yourself? You wander around aimlessly, with a growing awareness of your sadness and anxiety. You know you’re supposed to be relaxing, but you don’t know where to begin.
In this moment of panic, it’s easy to backslide into worker mode. You attribute your anxiety to the fact that you need to be more productive during your vacation, that you should have planned something more interesting and fun to do. The solution, you think, must be doing. You're so very good at doing!
May I remind you, in this moment, that being productive is exactly what your vacation was designed to escape? Maybe you don’t need a productive vacation project. Maybe you’re just bad at chilling out because you have so little practice.
Relaxing is a skill that can be built like any other. Put down the workout plans. Back away from the tools.
Here’s a beginners’ guide to relaxing for the Extremely Tense and Busy Person.
Don’t Abandon the Basics
Physiologically, it is very difficult to relax if our basic needs aren’t taken care of. Hunger and sleeplessness make us grumpy and on-edge. But when you’re first attempting to go schedule-less, these things can be the first to fall by the wayside, leaving you feeling unmoored.
To lay a strong foundation for your relaxation, I suggest beginning with a strong basics needs a base. Remember to eat your three meals a day, get eight hours of sleep, and attend to your hygiene. These are your only daily requirements.
Allow Emotions to Run Their Course
If you’ve been overscheduled and stressed recently, you may have suppressed your emotions to simply get through the day. This is a perfectly natural short-term solution during busy times. But when we become too adept at using work to squash our feelings, we start to feel unable to regulate our emotions without work.
As a result, once you stop working, your emotions may rebound on you. Imagine your emotions as a rubber band, pulled tighter and tighter by every day you’re too busy to feel. When you go on vacation and let go, it snaps back painfully.
My suggestion is: Don’t panic if you feel out-of-sorts emotionally for the first few days of your vacation. Resist the urge to push your feelings down by making new work for yourself. Allow sadness, anxiety, and anger to pass in their own time.
Practice Your Leisure
As with all things, relaxing takes practice. Just because you’re bad at it at first doesn’t mean you’ll be bad at it forever. Practice builds competency! Try laying on the couch and watching a movie or sleeping in an hour or two later than usual. Allow feelings of guilt to arise and pass—remember, you're not doing anything wrong. You're supposed to be resting!
Resist the urge to use this time for self-improvement. You’re not meant to be improving. You’re meant to be sustaining your life through rest. All creatures, big and small, need rest, you included. Read a book of no literary importance. Take an athletically unchallenging walk. For the moment, practice simply allowing yourself to be in the world with no particular goal.
Select Activities Wisely
Now, of course, during your relaxation time, it may occasionally be necessary or desirable to do something. Assess the suitability of these activities by first asking: Is it necessary for me to do this thing? If not, feel free to say abstain.
Secondly, ask yourself: Does this activity sound fun to me? Do not ask: Is this activity supposed to be fun in general? Do not ask: Do I want to be the kind of person who does this activity? The activities you do, if not necessary, must sound enjoyable, specifically to you, today. If not, I suggest taking a nap or having a lovely lunch instead.
