You close your laptop, slide onto the couch, and tell yourself you’re finally taking a break
Forty-five minutes later you’ve watched eight disjointed videos, glanced at three apps you don’t care about, and your jaw is still clenched. You haven’t worked but you also haven’t rested. As you stand up there’s an uncomfortable residue of guilt and fatigue.
Most people will diagnose the problem as a lack of willpower or a failure to properly relax
The real problem is most often one of confusing rest with avoidance
They look strikingly similar from the outside, both entail a remove from a responsibility, and both often happen in the same environment (horizontal surface, television)
but one is a means of replenishing your body and mind and the other is a particularly damaging form of consumption
The Mechanism: Relief vs. Restoration
One key difference between rest and avoidance is the nature of your autonomic nervous system while you’re engaged in one of the two
In psychology, avoidance is usually characterized as a behavior fueled by negative reinforcement. An outstanding task, a difficult conversation, or a frustrating work project creates an unpleasant stimuli (typically a mix of anxiety, boredom, and self-doubt) and the avoidance of this stimuli provides a brief relief.
The issue is that relief is not synonymous with rest.
When organizational psychologists Sabine Sonnentag and her colleagues were investigating what elements of a non-work time made it restorative, they noticed four key dimensions of psychological recovery. These were: psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery, and control.
The most pertinent discovery was the importance of psychological detachment from work and how avoidance was failing this test.
When avoidance is occurring, your attention is not fully free from the domain of work. There is often a background process constantly monitoring the avoided object to ensure it hasn’t appeared again, because the threat of it reappearing is always there. Your autonomic nervous system is only mildly activated but it’s enough to keep you in a state of low-level stress.
Resting, on the other hand, should have the opposite effect. It’s not an absence of stress, it’s a down-regulation of your autonomic nervous system.
The Useful Distinction: The Exit Check
The easiest way to distinguish the two is not by what you’re doing but the nature of the emotional exit you’re taking.
Avoidance is always reactionary. It’s an attempt to escape an unpleasant stimuli (anxiety, dread, etc.)
Rest is always rejuvenating. It’s a movement towards replenishing your physiological and psychological stores.
When you’re doing the latter your attention is free to fully engage with whatever medium you’re using (a book, a nap, etc.). When you’re avoiding however, your attention is bifurcated: a part of it is on the task at hand and another part is on the avoided object. That’s why you will feel guilt creeping in when you avoid: your threat detection system is reminding you that an unfinished demand was put down rather than dealt with.
The Five-Minute Park: A Small Experiment
Telling someone to “just stop feeling guilty” when they come to you in this state just doesn’t work. Your neural architecture requires proof that a threat has truly been extinguished before switching off your threat detection system. The next time you feel the urge to move away from a difficult task and suspect you’re in the throes of avoidance try the following exercise before you leave your workspace:
Name the friction
Say out loud or write down the specific feeling that is causing you want to run away, it will usually be specific. “I don’t know where to start this section”, or “I’m scared this draft sounds bad”.
Park the task with a re-entry point
Don’t try to solve the problem you just write down the one specific micro-action you want to do once you get back to your task. “Write the first sentence of paragraph three”, or “Open the spreadsheet and sort column B”
Set an intentional container
Decide how long you’re going to step away for (twenty minutes) and what you’re going to do
By defining the re-entry point you’ve created a “safe space” for your autonomic nervous system by delineating a landing strip for your working memory, once you’ve engaged with this landing strip your executive function will feel safe allowing you to fully engage.
Now, when you want to step away from a task it won’t be as an act of avoidance but a scheduled recess.
The Caveat
This distinction between rest and avoidance applies to friction in your focus and work rituals, it doesn’t apply to the physiological exhaustion of burnout and depression. When people are in a state of severe burnout or depression their task initiating faculty can be so impaired that any attempt at work feels like an impossible task. In these cases, the line between avoidance and required physiological rest can become extremely fuzzy, and the best course of action may not be a self-directed intervention but seeking professional help.
The Shift
Rest is not a reward that you unlock once you’ve finished every demand life has placed upon you. If you want to truly recover your mind, body, and spirit, you need to create boundaries around your work and allow yourself the space to recover. Avoidance is not a morally fraught activity, it’s a sign that your working memory is overwhelmed and needs to offload. You’re not meant to fight through the tiredness, you’re meant to make your rests deliberate enough that your mind will understand it’s in a safe place.
The research
Sonnentag, S., & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204-221. DOI: 10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204
