Rest guilt might be one of the strangest feelings a student can experience. You are not necessarily doing anything wrong, you are simply just doing nothing. You arrive at home and finally sit down, and instead of feeling relieved or calm, you start to feel super restless. Automatically, your brain starts thinking about the things that you probably should be doing, and everything you need to finish: studying for an upcoming test, cleaning your room, planning your weekend, maybe going to the gym etc. As exhausted as you can be, resting can feel like you are falling behind.
One reason why we feel so guilty when we decide to take a rest is because showing people you are productive gives you some sort of status. Being busy can sound impressive, or like you have accomplished something, and the people around you stress as if it proves that they are important, treating the word “lazy” as if it’s an insult. So taking a break starts to make you think you are not up to date at school, and in life. When you look around, you see everyone doing something way more productive, going out, training, study, accomplishing things. Even if you do not know the full story behind it, it still creates pressure for you. Rest then starts to feel like your losing a race you never seemed to manage to start.
Another reason is that some believfed rest needs to be earned. Many of us have grown up to think we only can get a break once we have completed our tasks. The problem with this is that nothing is ever finished. There’s always just one more thing to be completed, another deadline, another message needing to be answered. If you wait for everything to be perfectly finished before you can rest, you will never end up resting. But your body is not a machine that can run forever, occasionally rest is what we neeed to make productivity possible in the first place.
Social media makes it worse too. While resting, you can see that somebody else is doing something “better” or “more productive”, someone is revising with friends, someones doing a marathon, someone is working out, or someone is posting their perfect routines. Even tough you know they are only posting their best moments without showing the otherside of things, it can easily make you feel smaller or like you are doing something wrong. You start comparing your quieter moments to some elses highlights and best moments, and this small comparison can just take away you small bit of peace.
Of course the solution is not to completely stop caring about all your responsibilities, but to try and find a right balance between rest, and taking on your work in a responsible manner.
