Rest revolution: Why women need to reclaim the right to recharge 

To mark Nollaig na mBan, Suzanne Harrington looks at how work deadlines, digital overload, domestic responsibilities, disrupted sleep rhythms, and poor diet often leave women running on stress hormones and on the brink of burnout

Rest is different from sleep. Rest can be active —like yoga, or running — as well as passive, like reading or listening to music or staring blankly out the window. The key part of rest is allowing ourselves to do something relaxing, something that helps our bodies reset. Picture: iStock 

Like snowploughs, we push through. Like dated comedies, we carry on. Like marathon runners, we keep going. We, women, seem to have trained ourselves to think that rest is for wimps. And that being busy makes us better humans.

This relentlessness climaxes at Christmas, when we take it upon ourselves to please everyone, convinced that if we don’t, our families will fall apart and our children will need therapy. (Spoiler: They won’t). 

No wonder so many of us yearn for the cold grey peace of January. But this issue isn’t particular to Christmas. Women are just not great at allowing themselves the rest they need, no matter what time of year it is.

In 2016, researchers at Durham University oversaw the Rest Test, the largest-ever survey on rest, involving 18,000 people across 134 countries. Two-thirds of respondents felt they were not getting enough rest, with more women than men saying they needed more downtime. Yet when asked to describe what rest meant to them, a significantly higher number of female respondents associated rest with ‘guilt-inducing’, ‘stress-inducing’, and ‘rare’.

Rest is different from sleep. Rest can be active —like yoga, or running — as well as passive, like reading or listening to music or staring blankly out the window. The key part of rest is allowing ourselves to do something relaxing, something that helps our bodies reset.

When we are stressed and tired, our sympathetic nervous system is in charge: That’s the fight-or-flight response, historically activated when encountering, say, a bear in our cave. We’d get a massive burst of adrenaline, escape with our life, and then calm down again as the stress hormones dissipated and our body returned to rest-and-digest mode, which is run by the parasympathetic nervous system.

There is always some kind of ‘bear’ in our cave: Work deadlines, digital overload, domestic responsibilities, broken sleep rhythms, poor diet. This means we often run on stress hormones. And stress hormones burn us out.

“Hormones control everything,” says consultant endocrinologist Dr Mary Ryan, author of It’s Probably Your Hormones. “If you are constantly going and pushing your adrenal glands, you’re inflaming the body.”

Ryan describes how our hormones influence sleep, mood, digestion, appetite, libido, and other core functions, in a continuous feedback loop, travelling from endocrine glands around the body via the bloodstream to our organs.

“If you’re going to bed with high cortisol levels, you won’t be able to relax,” Ryan says. “You’ll have a pounding heart and wake at 3am. So, before bed, you want your parasympathetic nervous system to be ‘on’: If you’re going to bed at 10pm, start winding down around 8pm; lower the lighting, which will start converting your serotonin to melatonin; turn off your phone; and avoid caffeine.”

Ryan emphasises the importance of the body being in tune with natural light and dark for maximum rest and repair. “Getting up early and going to bed early suit the hormonal system,” Ryan says.

“Being a night owl who stays in bed late the next day means missing a lot of the natural light which fuels hormone production.”

Ryan reiterates the importance of diet for gut health, because the gut is the body’s hormone factory. “Avoid processed food and eat a wholesome Mediterranean diet,” she says. “Women need 24g of fibre a day. We need to stay hydrated.”

All of these factors help maximise our ability to relax, rest, and reset, as well as sleep. If you’re running around sleep-deprived, fuelled by double espressos with four sugars, you may be a bit twitchy in your restorative yoga class.

Best ways to relax

Aside from the importance of hormonal regulation, the multiple benefits of regular rest are reported in a 2020 study Rethinking Rest. These include reduced stress and anxiety; improved mood; decreased blood pressure; relief from chronic pain; improved immunity; increased cardiovascular system strength; improved critical thinking; and increased creativity.

The Rest Test research showed how the top-10 most popular restful pursuits are simple, uncomplicated, and, crucially, often solitary. Our favourite restful activity is reading, followed by spending time in nature, being alone, listening to music, doing nothing in particular, going for a walk, having a hot bath, daydreaming, watching television, and practising mindfulness. None of these activities involves sleep.

“Rest is separate from sleep,” says occupational therapist Eithne Hunt, who lectures at University College Cork on healthy habits. “I encourage everyone to think about work, play, rest, and sleep — all the activities we do across the full 24 hours of the day. Sleep is essential, but so, too, is rest.

“There is no one ‘prescription’ for what type of rest will suit everyone, or even suit one person for their whole life.

“Our need for rest changes across the day, the week, the seasons, our lifetime.”

Endocrinologist Dr Mary Ryan says “if you’re going to bed with high cortisol levels, you won’t be able to relax.” Picture: Brian Arthur

Hunt’s next step is getting to know the body’s signals. “This is called interoception,” she says. “When we are in tune with ourselves, we can respond flexibly and tweak what we need.

“When we think about our time use across the full 24 hours of the day, it’s helpful to think of how these activities deplete or recharge our energy.”

We often put ourselves under pressure to stick to a rigid schedule of exercising, eating, meditating and so on. “But our needs are constantly changing,” she says. “For example, some days a short walk might be what is needed, or some company, or the opposite — perhaps some quiet time is needed. Routines can be helpful as long as we hold onto the capacity to be flexible to our needs, too.”

This is important for women, because our hormonal cycles are in constant flux, not just monthly, but across our entire lifespan.

“It’s helpful to think of the seasons of our life, and adapting our rest to our circumstances and our real life, not to some idealised version of reality that we may be chasing,” Hunt says.

She urges us not to put further pressure on ourselves to add ‘more rest’ to our to-do list, as this is counterproductive.

“‘Must rest’ doesn’t make for a great restorative experience,” she says. “In fact, it may be about doing less. There is pressure to optimise our time, and it can be easy to get caught up in a mode of being that defaults to ‘busy’.”

Hunt often observes people waiting at bus stops staring at their phones. “Where is the opportunity to just daydream nowadays?” she wonders, adding how our brain needs time when it isn't focused on anything, but while still awake. To stare into space, rather than at a screen.

“Some time ago, I gave up the habit of checking my phone when I was walking from A to B,” Hunt says. “Now, I am just walking. And looking around. It’s a little breathing space for the brain. Restful experiences are more likely to be about the quality of the experience, rather than the quantity of time.”

Peace lies within

Not all of us can down tools when we need to rest; not all of us can slip away to a peaceful retreat if we have children, jobs, and bills to pay.

But we can bring the magic of the retreat to us by ‘retreating’ into ourselves at regular intervals.

“Slow down, press pause, have a mindful cup of tea, take five minutes of mindful breathing to bring you to yourself,” says Miriam Hussey, pharmacist, co-founder of Soul Space, and author of Light Up.

Soul Space co-founder Miriam Hussey says it’s common, but not healthy, to become addicted to stress. Picture: Gareth Chaney

“Our sympathetic nervous system is always ‘on’,” Hussey says. “So our body is flooded in stress hormones, we’re double jobbing, pulled and dragged in all directions. We can become addicted to stress hormones — it’s common, but it’s not normal. Our nervous system is revved up on caffeine and sugar. Our peace is disrupted, and that manifests as symptoms in the body.”

Hussey says that “the biggest missing pillar” in modern health is not being aligned to what she terms “the soul script”.

“We look at food and fitness, which are, of course, important, but we don’t look inward,” she says. “We need silence and solitude to access our own internal well of peace.

“That way, instead of stress, strain, and struggle, we can have more ease, grace, and peace.”

To reclaim this inner peace as our own, we need to shrug off millennia-old messaging that a woman’s work is never done. Make it done. Put it down. Step away. Put your own oxygen mask on first.

“Good hormonal health is linked with higher self-esteem,” says Ryan. 

“Listen to your body. If you’re tired, stop. When men are tired, they put their feet up, but women keep on going. Stop with the female guilt complex, stop with the generational conditioning. Relax. Go to bed.”