But I had learned over the years that I must plan rest days around high-activity days. So, the day after seeing the ships, I stayed in my jammies and hardly got out of bed. Because that’s what my body said it needed.
For a long time, rest was not something I could access without conflict. When I first started working with my Alexander Technique teacher Imogen Ragone, I could not tolerate rest. It felt unsafe in a way that was hard to name at the time. I resisted it because I could not settle into it. My system did not know how to feel safe while resting.
Seven and a half years later, rest is now part of my daily pattern. Thanks to the influence of Imogen’s Construcive Rest sessions, I rest for at least twenty minutes most days. Sometimes it becomes much longer. There are days when I take a two-hour nap.
Still, the day after the Baltiomre visit, there was still a small familiar thought in the background questioning whether this was laziness. That is common in a culture that treats constant output as the default measure of value. But my experience has also given me a more important reference. My body makes it clear when rest is needed. When exhaustion is present, rest is not optional, even if it is still negotiable in story.
Mainstream culture tends to treat rest as something that has to be earned or justified. It is often framed as recovery from overwork rather than as a basic condition for functioning. There is a strong emphasis on pushing through, optimizing output, and finding ways to override signals of fatigue in order to continue producing. The underlying assumption is that capacity should be extended regardless of internal state.
From a Relational Neuroscience perspective, this misses how closely regulation is tied to experience over time. The ability to rest is not just a decision. It is shaped through repeated experiences of safety, attunement, and permission to pause without consequence. When those conditions are not present earlier in life, rest can initially feel unfamiliar or even threatening, because the body has learned patterns of continuity under strain.
Over time, those patterns can shift when new experiences consistently contradict older expectations. Through small, safe, frequently repeated experiences, rest becomes something that can be entered and left without losing stability. It becomes part of the body’s rhythm rather than an interruption.
I now recognize that rest is one part of how function is maintained. When it is absent, everything becomes more effortful. When it is present in sufficient amounts, there is more clarity and less strain in ordinary activity.
The idea that people should continuously override their own signals does not account for how much those signals are already shaped by history and environment. It assumes that persistence is always the solution, when persistence without restoration leads to reduced capacity over time.
Rest is not a reward for productivity, but one of the conditions that make sustained living possible. When those conditions are recognized, the question shifts from how to do more to what actually supports continuation without depletion.
For me, that shift came gradually. I learned it through experience rather than instruction. And it has changed my experience of daily life, measurable in my own body in the difference between strain and steadiness.
