Why Is It So Hard to Relax When Nothing Is Actually Wrong?

While I haven’t ever officially aimed to have this part of my week itinerary, I’ve realized that the majority of my Sundays are “lazy”. More often than not, most of the day is spent at home, ordering or making something easy to eat, watching TV, playing video games, and basically avoiding any responsibility that isn’t dire that day. In theory, this sounds like the perfect day and something I should look forward to all week, and for the first few hours on Sunday it definitely feels great.

Then the afternoon arrives, and my brain starts to keep score.

Sometime around 2 or 3 pm, I usually look at the clock and realize that half the day is gone at that point. This normally wouldn’t be an issue to most people, but I start to think about the writing I could have done, the cards I could have photographed & listed for sale, the jobs I could have applied to, or completing the random tasks that have been sitting on my to-do list for the past few weeks. Technically nothing has gone wrong, and for all intensive purposes I’ve had a pretty damn good day. Still, the more I relax, the more I start to feel like I have wasted my time and opportunity to get ahead. Even worse, the feelings are stronger lately given where I’m at in my career.

When you’re working full-time, lazy Sundays are easier to justify given that you could argue with yourself that you earned the right to sit on the couch after multiple days of grinding it out. My problem is that I currently have a quiet voice reminding me that I technically have more time than most people, which needs to be used for applying to jobs, networking, writing, improving my website, looking for consulting work, or just generally creating something of value that will make my gap time feel more productive. This doesn’t just happen on Sundays either, as I’ll find random weekdays that disappear in a way that is difficult to explain. I may answer some messages, shoot off a few applications, even have an interview, but there are points in time where I’ll reach the end of the afternoon without being able to point to one meaningful thing I completed in the last few hours. This can feel worse than my “Lazy Sundays” because I didn’t make a conscious effort to rest and instead I was simply existing.

It’s honestly funny to think about how exhausting it can be to accomplish nothing, while thinking about everything you SHOULD be accomplishing. That’s one of the products of our hustle culture we’ve developed in North America.

The source of dread doesn’t end with me either. I can open LinkedIn and see someone announce a new role, consulting client, promotion, business launch, or just an impressive project, and I start to spiral. Ultimately, I am happy for them, but part of me immediately begins calculating whether I am doing enough. While they were advancing their career, I spent three hours playing Kingdom Hearts and another hour deciding what Isa and I should watch. I recently wrote about the feeling that we’re behind in life, and this is another way it manifests. Even when we understand that everyone is on their own path and timeline, it’s difficult not to compare, especially during quiet & uncertain days. I have to remind myself that I’m not seeing the mornings where they struggled to get started, the opportunities they got rejected for, or their own version of a “Lazy Sunday” that they’ve had multiple times. For all of us, we need to remind ourselves that there is more than just the LinkedIn announcement.

Something I’ve realized that may be helpful to us all is that there is a difference between resting and avoiding your life. Binge watching your favourite show, immersing yourself in a video game, or whatever hobby you choose to destress with is definitely rest. Using those hobbies to ignore job applications, postponing difficult conversations, or avoiding tasks I need to get done is not rest. I think we all need to question the guilt we feel to realize if it’s telling us something important, or if it’s manifested from societal norms. My personal problem is that I’ve never been good at recognizing when enough is enough. There’s always going to be another job to apply for, another person I should probably call, ideas to explore, appointments to schedule, or just something in my life that could be improved. It’ll never end. Adulthood doesn’t really provide satisfying moments when everything is complete, and it definitely doesn’t give you permission to relax. I just need to remember that rest isn’t necessarily earned by finishing every responsibility on the list.

That leads me to a bigger realization about most of us in 2026: we confuse productivity with momentum. A lot of us feel like a day is only valuable when you can show something for it, but the hard truth? Not every day is going to produce a visible result. Sometimes we need to distance ourselves from a problem before we can think clearly enough to solve it. Sometimes watching TV, going for a walk, playing video games, or doing absolutely nothing actually makes the following day easier. I’m starting to think that the point of free time is not to prepare myself to work harder later, but simply to experience life while it’s actually happening. The problem with that? It seems obvious to me now, but it’s something I need to get better at reminding myself of at 4:30 pm on Sunday when my anxiety starts to creep in.

I’m also not trying to become someone who never feels guilty, or spends every weekday pretending that rest = productive. We all have responsibilities, goals, and things that we care about and want to achieve. There’s going to be a balance of days where discipline matters more than how I’m feeling. With that, I’m just trying to stop treating every unproductive hour like it’s evidence I am failing. Lazy days don’t erase the work I’ve done. Slow weeks don’t mean that everyone else is moving forward while I am just stuck.

I’ll leave you with a better question to ask yourself. Most of us question whether we’ve earned the right to relax, but maybe we need to ask ourselves whether we’re actually capable of enjoying life before all of the work is finished? Something to think about.