Choosing Stillness Over Productivity: Why Rest Feels So Hard for Women

I know I’m not the only one who’s caught herself creating a grocery list during meditation or justifying “just one more text” during dinner. But the moment I wondered if it would be inappropriate to pause during sex to change the laundry- that’s when I knew I had a problem.

I wasn’t comfortable being present.

Doing just one thing felt lazy. My brain was constantly strategizing about all the ways I could get more done in less time.

This wasn’t a new pattern. Back in my corporate days, I felt guilty for not spending enough time with my kids. And when I was with them, my mind was at work, ticking through deadlines. No matter where I was, I could only see where I was falling short.

I became the queen of life hacks: listening to audiobooks on 2x speed while walking the dog, checking emails while working out, half-listening to my partner while scrolling Instagram, turning date night into a logistics meeting.

When I told a friend about this urge to maximize every moment, she nodded and said, “It sounds like you’re being strategic so you can create space to rest.” That sentence stopped me cold because there is no rest stop on this road. As soon as one project was mostly “done,” I was already spinning into the next three.

Why does stillness feel so hard? Why does doing one thing at a time feel like standing still?

Productivity Culture and Why Women Struggle to Rest

The obvious answer is cultural. We live in a productivity-obsessed world where busyness is the badge of honor. Our calendars, inboxes, and endless to-do lists become proof that we matter. Burnout in women is on the rise because rest isn’t seen as a natural rhythm of life it’s treated like a luxury, something we earn only after giving ourselves away.

How Burnout in Women Is Fueled by “Busy = Worth”

For women, the pressure runs even deeper. From childhood, many of us were taught that our value comes from what we do for others. Be the good daughter, the reliable friend, the one who holds it all together. In adulthood, that morphs into over-giving, over-proving, and over-functioning. We pride ourselves on being able to juggle it all even as it eats away at our joy.

As I sat with the discomfort of “not doing anything” one day, I felt it. After years of running in “go mode” wire my nervous system equated motion with safety. Sitting still felt unsafe like something was about to collapse.

And this isn’t just personal. Research from the American Psychological Association shows women report consistently higher stress levels than men, with burnout especially common for those juggling careers, caregiving, and household roles. If you struggle with stillness, you’re not broken, you’re conditioned.

 Workplace Burnout: When Achievement Never Feels Like Enough

At work, it often looks like never being satisfied. You finish a big project and instead of celebrating, you’re already onto the next. Promotions and recognition never feel like enough because the bar keeps moving. Over time, resentment builds as you carry more than your share and colleagues coast. What started as proving yourself leaves you feeling invisible.

Parenting and Hustle Culture: Passing the Pressure to Our Kids

With children, the cost shows up in presence. You’re physically there, packing lunches, driving to practice, sitting at the table, but mentally somewhere else. Planning, texting, thinking about work. Kids notice. And without meaning to, we pass along hustle culture, modeling that doing more is always better than being present.

Intimacy and Presence: How Busyness Impacts Relationships

With partners, intimacy gets stripped away. What begins as teamwork, splitting responsibilities, managing schedules, becomes the only mode of relating. Conversations turn into logistics. Connection becomes transactional.

Clients often tell me they realize sex has shifted into another item on the checklist fit between laundry, homework, and yoga class. Softening feels unproductive, receiving feels impossible, and desire has seemingly vanished (it hasn’t, I promise!). Intimacy and presence require space. A nervous system that’s wired for constant doing simply can’t exhale enough to create it.

The Guilt of Rest: When Stillness Feels Like Wasted Time

And perhaps most painfully, this pattern shows up inside ourselves. When a coach recently directed me to do a 20 minute silent walk each day, I felt the panic creep in. How would I finish my audiobooks? Why would I want to waste that time?! (spoiler alert – it didn’t take long to start craving the silence on my walks) Maybe you’ve even experienced this by jumping up to look busy when someone walks into the room, grabbing dishes, shuffling papers, opening a laptop, just to prove you’re not slacking.

Stress and the Nervous System: Why Our Bodies Resist Rest

Part of what makes this cycle so exhausting is how our bodies crave completion. As Emily Nagoski explains in Burnout, every stressor activates a stress response in the body. Unless we close the loop, that response lingers. That’s why checking off tasks feels so good it signals to the body that the stressor is over.

But when life is built on endless to-dos, the loop never truly ends. The finish line keeps moving. Rest feels unsettling because our bodies are braced for the next surge of adrenaline, waiting for another task to close the loop. Stillness feels unsafe because our nervous system hasn’t learned that rest itself can be a form of completion.

The Cost of Constant Productivity: Burnout, Resentment, and Disconnection

Living in perpetual motion comes at a steep price. Burnout is the obvious one, but so is disconnection from loved ones, from intimacy, from ourselves. Over-functioning breeds resentment, and fulfillment slips further away the harder we chase it.

Stillness as a Radical Self-Care Practice

Here’s the invitation: stillness is not laziness. Stillness is power. It’s a quiet rebellion against productivity culture. Choosing presence allows us to reclaim energy, intimacy, and joy.

Simple Stillness Practices for Women in Burnout

It doesn’t require a total life overhaul. It begins with small, intentional practices:

• Celebrate small wins: ritualize endings instead of rushing to the next.
• Create micro-moments of presence:   a deep breath before email, eye contact at dinner, a quiet pause before bed.
• Notice when “doing more” is just fear whispering you’re not enough.
• Drive or walk without audio: let silence feel safe again.
• Finish one task before starting another:  retrain your nervous system.
• Say no more often  so your plate actually has space.
• Create rituals before intimacy: leave the day behind and allow desire to breathe.

My mastermind group jokes, “How hard can this be? Men do it all the time.” Our husbands have no trouble making space for golf or watching TV guilt-free. Maybe it’s time we learn from them: ask for help, get clear on what really matters, and practice letting enough be enough.

Rest as Medicine: Why You Are Already Enough

The good news is that when you create space to pause, to slow down and truly be, you’ll feel the reward sooner than you expect. My silent morning walks have become a surprising source of inspiration and clarity. I notice myself procrastinating less, because I can actually sit with the discomfort of not having an answer right away. In those moments of stillness, my body softens. I become easier to receive, to connect, to allow intimacy in. Relaxing into receiving mode makes it possible to experience not just productivity, but presence and pleasure.

Stillness isn’t a luxury. It’s medicine. It’s what reconnects us to joy, intimacy, and ourselves.

So if you feel the pull to slow down, take this as your permission slip: you don’t need to prove your worth by doing more. You are already enough.

And while stillness can begin within, it deepens when we experience it together. That’s why our New Moon Ceremonies are such a powerful practice. Join us for an evening where we gather in community, set down the constant doing, and remember what it feels like to be held by ritual, silence, and collective breath.

If your body is craving rest, presence, or simply space to receive, this circle is your invitation. You don’t have to create it alone. Come be with us under virtually under the dark sky & let yourself be nourished. New Moon Link HERE.