How to Take a Rest Day Without Guilt
Do you struggle with exercise?
And I don’t mean is it hard for you to get to the gym, I mean is it hard for you to leave?
Do you schedule your life around your fitness routine?
Does the thought of taking a rest day, even if you know you should, fill you with a feeling of guilt?
Can you skip a workout just because you feel like it?
Maybe you do “give in” and give yourself a rest day, but is your day then consumed by increased anxiety, compensatory behaviors like restricting what you eat, or worry that you’ll gain weight overnight?
If you can relate to any of the above, then I’m so glad you’re here.
Not allowing yourself to miss a workout when you’re tired, sick, injured, or just don’t feel like it is a sign that you might have an unhealthy relationship with exercise.
If you do allow yourself to take a rest day, but you can’t do so without feeling a huge amount of guilt, that is also a sign that something has gone awry.
While exercise can absolutely play a positive role in mental health, obsessive or compulsive exercise is harmful to your physical and mental health.
If what might have begun as an attempt to “live a healthy lifestyle” has now become an obsession that ends up controlling you, then that’s something worth exploring and getting support around, friend.
So today, I’m going to give you 5 tips that will help you repair your relationship with exercise and allow you to take rest days without any feeling of guilt. Your body, mind, and soul will thank you for it.
Tip #1: Reframe Catastrophic & Unhelpful Thinking
Those who struggle with compulsive exercise tend to experience catastrophic and unhelpful thoughts around fitness and their bodies, and these thoughts lead to a tremendous amount of anxiety and distress.
It might be some kind of mental rule like “In order to be healthy I need to exercise X days/week” or “If I don’t exercise, I’ll gain 5 lbs overnight,” or even “Not working out every day means I’m lazy.”
Whatever the belief is for you, start by recognizing it and then just calling it what it is: A thought.
Thoughts are not directives or truths, thoughts are simply thoughts and beliefs are just thoughts that you just keep thinking.
Beliefs often feel like truths, because we think them so often that they’ve become familiar. However, with practice & intention they can change.
When you change your thoughts, your emotions will follow.
So, in order to alleviate feelings of guilt that come along with taking a rest day, we have to look at and reframe the thoughts behind it.
This technique comes from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and while it can be challenging at first, with practice it becomes second nature and your anxiety, guilt, etc. will start to decrease faster and faster.
For example:
Tip #2: Ride the Wave of Anxiety (aka Exposure Therapy)
The gold standard therapeutic treatment for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is something called Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). Essentially this means intentionally exposing yourself to something that causes you anxiety and preventing yourself from engaging in whatever you usually do to make the anxiety go away.
It’s hard, but it’s extremely effective at treating not only OCD, but a range of similar issues, including compulsive exercise.
As we’ve discussed, women who struggle with an unhealthy or compulsive relationship with exercise often experience an intense amount of anxiety and guilt when they aren’t able to workout or even at the thought of missing a workout.
This usually leads to the thought that more exercise is the answer. After all, anxiety must be a sign that’s something is wrong, so we should do whatever we can to make the anxiety go away, right?
Not so much.
One of the most effective ways to reformulate your relationship with exercise is to let yourself ride the wave of anxiety during a rest day without giving in to the compulsion to do your workout.
This means intentionally allowing yourself to feel the discomfort that arises, over and over again, until the guilt begins to dissipate. And if you keep with it, I promise the guilt will dissipate.
Start off with at least one rest day per week and allow yourself to feel the anxiety without trying to fix it.
This means not restricting what you eat, doing a detox or cleanse, or engaging in some other kind of behavior to compensate for not exercising.
Not only will you notice that anxiety and guilt will decrease over time, but you will start to trust that your body is going to be just fine if you miss a day, two days, or even a week of working out.
Unless your doctor has ordered you not to exercise, then the goal isn’t to stop working out altogether. The goal is to be able to listen to your body and respect what it’s asking of you without feeling any kind of guilt when you do so.
Tip #3: Get a Hobby
If you have an unhealthy relationship with exercise, it’s likely that it consumes a lot of your time and a lot of your thinking.
I say this with a lot of compassion, because I know the turmoil that is involved in living this way, but girlfriend you have to get a hobby.
You are not a one-dimensional being whose sole purpose on this earth is to exercise and look a certain way. Find some other things you enjoy doing and prioritize them. Your mental health depends on it!
For example…
Go out for coffee with a friend you’ve been neglecting
Read a new book
Start a crafting project
Learn how to cook or bake
Start gardening
Organize your closet
Journal
Learn calligraphy
Study a new language
Take an online course
Volunteer
Etc.
It doesn’t matter what it is, but find something you love besides exercise and start doing it.
Hard Truth: A life that revolves around the gym is a boring one and no one besides you cares about how many days a week you workout.
Tip # 4: Use the Sweet Spot Method
The Sweet Spot Method to exercise is something that I teach in my guidebooks and workshops.
Most women engage in exercise not because they enjoy it, but primarily because they think it will give them results.
The problem with this is that it keeps the focus on how your body looks, rather than how your body feels.
If you are so preoccupied with how your body looks, it’s going to be a lot harder to take a rest day without guilt because you’ll be prone to thinking that rest is laziness and will compromise your results.
However, when you use the Sweet Spot Method, you’ll learn the key ingredients to creating a fun, healthy, and sustainable relationship with exercise that will encourage you to listen to your body’s cues rather than push through.
Tip #5: Get Professional Support
Not being able to take a rest day without a feeling of guilt is a sign that there could be a more serious underlying mental health issue.
Whether you are using fitness to achieve a certain look, avoid your emotions, or mentally escape something much deeper (like trauma), exercising for reasons like these can be extremely damaging to your physical and mental health.
If you find yourself not being able to even fathom implementing the first 3 tips, please seek out the support of a licensed mental health professional with experience treating eating disorders or compulsive exercise. Support is available and you deserve it!
Fitness should be fun and should support our mental health, but it should not be abused. You deserve to live a life that isn’t ruled by your workouts. <3