By Tessa Ogle Wellness 25.03.2026

I Thought I Had to Earn Rest – This Is How I Unlearned My Addiction to Being Busy

For years, writer Tess Ogle thought productivity meant sleeping less, until she was forced to rethink it.

At 2:08am, I was staring at the ceiling, trying to remember if I had replied to an email. Not an urgent one, one just important enough to resurface in my mind when the day had slowed to a halt and my brain finally had space to catch up. The room was dark and my laptop was closed, but my mind kept moving, cycling through the same list. Follow up with the photographer. Tighten the headline. Send that message you meant to send earlier.

For a long time, this felt like a fairly normal way to fall asleep.

I worked in magazines – an industry shaped by tight deadlines and the expectation of constant availability – and for most of my twenties, I treated sleep as something flexible. Late nights felt productive and early mornings felt virtuous. If I was tired, it usually meant I had been working nearly hard enough. I didn’t realise, at the time, that I had stopped knowing how to rest.

Exhaustion carries a kind of authority in creative industries. You hear it in the way people talk. It’s been a crazy week. My inbox is out of control. I barely slept. The tone is apologetic, but not entirely. There’s an undercurrent of pride, a sense that being busy, even overwhelmed, is evidence of importance. Busyness can be mistaken for relevance, as though being seen to be working matters more than the work itself.

It was inevitable I would absorb that logic. Sleep became something I negotiated with, and rest felt like something to earn after the work was done, rather than something that made the work possible in the first place.

But both philosophy and science suggest a different way of thinking – not just about productivity, but about how we live. As far back as ancient Greece, Aristotle understood a ‘good life’ as a balance between effort and recovery – what he described as eudaimonia, or human flourishing. And more recently, neuroscientist Matthew Walker outlines in Why We Sleep that sleep underpins cognitive function – memory, emotional regulation, creative thinking – and that the brain remains highly active during rest, consolidating and processing information.

The brain doesn’t stop working when we do. It simply shifts modes.

The difficulty is that this work is invisible. It doesn’t translate easily into metrics, outputs, or anything that can be quickly communicated in a meeting, which makes it easy to discount in environments that reward output above all else.

It’s been nearly a year since I stepped away from my full-time role as an editor into freelancing. Entering a life where I set the pace, I expected to feel relief. What I hadn’t anticipated was how long it would take for my body to register the change, and how much of my identity had been tied up in that level of functioning.

For the first few months, my nervous system continued as if nothing had shifted. I woke up early without needing to, reached for my phone without thinking and carried a low, persistent restlessness with an origin that I couldn’t place. Even without deadlines, my body behaved as though something urgent was about to happen.

The absence of pressure didn’t immediately translate into rest.

If anything, the quiet made it clear how unfamiliar rest had become. Burnout is described as emotional exhaustion, detachment, and reduced capacity – a response to prolonged, unrelieved stress. For me, it felt more like a system that had been running at a high frequency for so long it no longer knew how to power down.

The shift came slowly, through a series of small recalibrations. Sitting in a café without reaching for my phone. Walking without turning it into a call. Falling asleep without mentally drafting the next day. Mornings began to feel calmer too – coffee I didn’t sip with urgency as if it was simply fuel, or noticing the morning creep through the blind without panicking about what I should have already achieved.

What I began to understand over the course of that year was that rest is not a single act. And it’s not just sleep, though sleep is part of it. It’s also about reducing the mental load, something increasingly difficult in environments where attention is constantly fragmented. It requires the ability to move through time without continuously trying to optimise it.

Research supports this distinction. Alongside sleep, psychologists point to “waking rest” – low-stimulation states that allow the brain to consolidate information and form new connections. I’ve noticed it’s often in these quieter moments that clarity appears — not through effort, but through space.

Over time, I stopped thinking of rest as something I needed to justify, and started understanding it as something I needed to actively maintain.

A year on, the lessons are simple: exhaustion is not a reliable measure of effort, clarity comes more easily from a rested mind than a busy one and creativity requires space as much as discipline. A nervous system pushed too far doesn’t immediately know how to slow down, but it can learn.

And perhaps most importantly: rest is not the reward for productivity. It is the condition that allows thought to happen at all.

I still care deeply about my work. That hasn’t changed. But my understanding of what it requires has. I now think more about sustainability. I consider whether the pace I’m working at is one I can maintain without slowly eroding myself.

Sleep is no longer something I negotiate with, nor is rest. I treat it as foundational – not indulgent, but essential to everything else: the quality of my thinking, the sharpness of my writing and the way I show up.

It took me a year to understand that productivity isn’t about doing more – it’s about being able to think clearly, and to do things well, over time. And for that, rest is essential.