Why Rest Stopped Working

This is what I hear most often from people in their forties and fifties who have been very good at their jobs for a very long time, and almost all of them read it that same wrong way.

Here's what's really happening. Rest is the cure for being tired, and burnout isn't being tired.

It's three things, not one.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as what happens when long-term stress at work goes unmanaged, and it's worth noticing that they don't call it a medical condition. They call it an occupational phenomenon. It also has three separate parts, which is where most of the confusion comes from.

1. 01

   Exhaustion

   You're running on empty, and sleeping doesn't refill you. This is the part everyone recognizes, and it's the only part that a vacation actually reaches.

   What it sounds like

   You wake up tired rather than sleepy, which is a different thing, and more hours in bed only helps with one of them.

2. 02

   Cynicism

   You start pulling away from the work itself, and you feel negative about it in a way you didn't before. Often about the people in it, too.

   What it sounds like

   You hear yourself making a dry joke in a meeting about a project you fought hard to win two years ago.

3. 03

   Feeling ineffective

   The sense that you're not good at this anymore, and that whatever you put in doesn't seem to turn into anything on the other end.

   What it sounds like

   The work takes three times as long and you couldn't say why, because you've now read the same paragraph four times.

Look at those three again and the vacation problem explains itself. Two weeks of sleep makes a real difference to the first one, and it does almost nothing to the other two, because they were never about energy in the first place. They're about how you feel toward the work.

So you come back rested and still cynical, rested and still flat. And because the tiredness genuinely did lift for a day or two, you now have evidence that resting “didn't work,” which is discouraging in its own quiet way.

What the strain actually does.

The neuroscientist Bruce McEwen gave us a useful way to think about this. Your body is very good at rising to meet what's asked of it, gearing up and adapting as needed, but running that system costs something. When the demand never lets up, the cost accumulates.

It doesn't accumulate evenly, either. Long stretches of stress affect the very parts of your brain you lean on hardest at work: the hippocampus, which you need in order to remember things, and the prefrontal cortex, which handles planning, judgment and holding your tongue. The amygdala, which watches for threat, tends to go the other way and become more reactive.

Put that together and you get the specific, slightly humiliating experience my clients describe. Names vanish. You lose your thread halfway through a sentence in a meeting you're supposed to be running, and an email that wouldn't have registered three years ago ruins the rest of your afternoon.

None of that is your personality changing, and it isn't early decline. It's what a brain under long strain does, which also means it isn't permanent.

Rest and recovery aren't the same thing.

There's a body of research here that turns out to be unusually practical. Sabine Sonnentag and her colleagues found that what restores people isn't how much time off they get, but whether four particular things are present in it. Time off without them does surprisingly little, which is exactly why your two weeks didn't take.

1. 01

   Switching off

   Being away from work in your head, not only away from your desk. A vacation spent checking email gives you very little of this, however long it lasts.

2. 02

   Relaxing

   Genuinely low-demand time. Not achievement in disguise, which is what a race you've entered or a kitchen you're renovating usually turns out to be.

3. 03

   Learning something

   A challenge with no connection to your job. It sounds like the opposite of resting, and yet it's one of the more reliable ways to recover.

4. 04

   Having a say in it

   Choosing how the time gets spent. Being in charge of your own hours is restful all by itself, which is why a wellbeing day that someone else scheduled can leave you flat.

Now score your last vacation honestly against those four. Most senior people do badly on switching off and badly on having a say in it, which means the fortnight was never going to work, however good the hotel was.

The part that isn't in the wellbeing deck.

This is where my work starts, because underneath all of it there's a layer that no company policy has ever touched.

A great many high achievers can't rest. Not won't, but can't. Sit them down with nothing to do and something comes up almost immediately: restlessness, guilt, a low buzzing sense of being about to get caught. They fill the gap, and then describe themselves as bad at switching off, as though it were a skill they somehow failed to pick up.

It isn't a missing skill. It's a belief, and usually an old one: I'm worth what I produce.

If that's true, then rest isn't restful at all. It's exposure. Every idle hour becomes an hour of being worth nothing, and your nervous system responds accordingly. No vacation can outvote that, because the threat isn't waiting at the office. You brought it with you.

You can usually find where the rule came from. Perhaps a parent whose warmth arrived with the report card, or a childhood in which being useful was how you stayed safe. It made you very good at your job, and it's also why the two weeks didn't work.

Where to start.

Before the sabbatical and before the new job, try something smaller and more revealing. Take ninety minutes this week with nothing useful in them, and then pay attention — not to whether you enjoy it, but to what turns up while you're trying.

Boredom is fine. Guilt is information, and so is anxiety. Whatever arrives in that gap is the thing that's been making rest impossible, and unlike your calendar, it's something you can work with.