You know how sometimes you wake up on a Saturday and just feel this sense of unease and low-key dread, because you know you’re supposed to be relaxing but you’re worried you won’t be able to take full advantage of your free time and will squander your weekend? That’s relaxation stress for you! That anxiety around not being able to relax when we think we’re supposed to or in the way in which we’re supposed to. And even though relaxation stress sounds like an oxymoron, it’s very real.
The reality is that, even though relaxing sounds great on paper, it can also cause stress if we pressure ourselves into doing it or doing it perfectly.
I’ve found that there are three main beliefs behind most relaxation stress:
1) Relaxing is supposed to be easy;
2) Relaxing is supposed to look a certain way; and
3) Not relaxing during our free time is wasteful.
Put those in one big “conventional wisdom” package, and you get the perfect recipe for relaxation stress.
This week, I’ll talk about the first of these beliefs. Next week, I’m unpacking beliefs 2 & 3.
Relaxing is supposed to be easy and to come naturally:
Thinking that something is supposed to be easy is usually a surefire way for us to feel terrible. Whenever we tell yourselves “task X should be easy,” the logical leap that our brains take is: “if I ever find this task difficult in any way, then something must be wrong with me.” And then, we never get curious about why task X may be harder for us than we thought and how we can learn or adapt in order to get better at it. Instead, we get into self-deprecation mode and feel ashamed that the thing that is supposed to be easy is actually not. And shame just makes us want to hide and avoid the thing we’re ashamed of, because it feels terrible. In other words, thinking something should be easy is a great way to make ourselves dread and avoid it.
The truth is – relaxing is often anything but easy. We have thousands of thoughts each day of our lives, and each of these thoughts evokes a certain emotion in us. Those emotions are sometimes pleasant and sometimes not so fun. And that’s all super OK and very normal. But that process does not stop the second we pick a time for relaxation (if anything, it might end up being amplified, if we pressure ourselves to get away from unpleasant feelings during relaxation). And relaxing in the midst of all that brain activity is rough. Relaxing requires us to navigate and be able to sit with the unpleasant emptions that will inevitably come up, rather than to ignore, avoid or resist them (which is neither pleasant nor helpful). And that takes practice, self-compassion, and patience.
This is why a lot of us have a somewhat complicated relationship with weekends and vacation days. We love those days because of the downtime we have, but we also put a lot of pressure on ourselves to feel relaxed, and joyful, and present at all times. And since we are not robots and we inevitably have a variety of human emotions, even on our days off, we beat ourselves up over those emotions and think that something wrong happened or that we ruined our downtime by not being good enough at relaxing.
The bottom line is that, learning how to relax while having a human brain is neither easy, nor natural (although it may sometimes feel easier than others). But developing a long-term sustainable and healthy relationship with relaxation requires some practice. So let’s ditch the belief that relaxing should be very easy at all times, and allow ourselves to find relaxation challenging sometimes. We may surprise ourselves with how much that improves our relationship to our time off.
