How to Relax When You Don’t Know How to Relax

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don’t grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. – Alan Watts

Relaxing is very important for our physical and emotional well-being. When we live without enough rest and relaxation, it wears our bodies down, keeps your brains anxious and exhausted, and also makes us less creative, less able to solve problems. Relaxation is what keeps us afloat. But different people can find different ways to rest and knowing what works best for you is essential.

Relaxation and recreation are not the same thing

The first thing to understand in regards to relaxation is that it’s not the same thing as recreation. Relaxation usually involves activities that allow your body to recuperate and heal, while recreation can be much more active. Going for a walk can be relaxing; going for a jog is probably recreation.

Both are important to include in your leisure time. However, if you do too much recreation, you might not be getting enough rest. On the other hand, too much relaxation can mean that you have a sedentary lifestyle, which comes with its pitfalls. Identify which activities are relaxing for you and which, while fun, require a certain degree of effort.

Pay attention to your body

It’s important to pay attention to your body. While there are many activities that can be fun and enjoyable, these can also leave you feeling tired and needing rest from the break you just took. The best way to identify them is by paying attention to how you feel.

Ask yourself whether you feel more energized or drained of energy after doing something. This will help you identify whether this is restful for you or not. In your leisure, you should have a good balance of restful and recreational activities, so that your body has the chance to recuperate.

Plan for the things that you enjoy the most

There are many restful activities you can try. People enjoy napping, cooking, reading, watching shows, meditating, and so on. But you might not enjoy them equally or find them as recharging. Some people get bored while meditating. Others find that watching TV leaves them feeling tired.

It’s important to identify the best activities for you and include them in your daily schedule. Make sure that you leave time in your week for your favorite kinds of relaxing activities, and even fifteen minutes are better than none.

Let go of the guilt

An important obstacle when we try to relax is the feeling of guilt or shame over not being productive or not doing enough. When we have the chance to rest, we might not always take it because we feel like we should be doing something else. We push for productivity and end up not doing so well in the long run.

An important factor here is being able to let go of the guilt and shame of not being productive. When we allow ourselves to rest, we do make ourselves better able to be more creative, solve problems, and simply do more work. But we have to give ourselves these breaks. While at first it can be tough, over time we should make our peace with the need for rest.

Make relaxation a priority

Even if we let ourselves rest, we might consider it as something to do when there’s nothing else. We often don’t make it a priority. But we should. When we don’t pay attention to this aspect, it’s easy to let it slip and decide to leave it until tomorrow, until the weekend, or until an unspecified future time, which might never come.

Instead, we should treat rest as any other important issue. Make space for it in your calendar and make sure you have a space every day or as frequently as possible to just relax. Sometimes, it does mean we have to stop doing other things in order to prioritize rest. But it is very important that we do. Without rest, we wear ourselves down and can perform much worse. It leads us to making mistakes and having accidents. Rest is what helps us be at our best and most productive, so by prioritizing it, we ensure better results across different areas of our life.