We celebrate discipline in almost every area of life.

The 5am alarm. The meal prep. The workout streak. The inbox zero. We admire the woman who does it all, who never stops, who somehow finds time to build a career, maintain a home, nurture relationships, and still show up looking polished.

But there’s one form of discipline we rarely talk about, and even more rarely practise.

The discipline of rest.

Not rest as collapse. Not rest as the thing you do when you’ve finally burned out. But rest as a deliberate, strategic, non-negotiable part of how you build a sustainable life.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: hustle culture taught us that rest is earned. That it’s a reward for productivity. That slowing down is the same as falling behind. But what if rest isn’t the opposite of ambition? What if it’s the infrastructure that makes ambition sustainable?

The Lie We Were Sold

Hustle Culture’s Hidden Cost

Somewhere along the way, busyness became a status symbol. We started measuring our worth by how packed our calendars were, how little sleep we could survive on, how many things we could juggle without dropping.

For ambitious women, this messaging hits especially hard. We’ve fought for seats at tables that weren’t built for us. We’ve learned to outwork, outperform, and out-hustle just to be taken seriously. Slowing down can feel like giving up ground we’ve worked too hard to gain.

But here’s what that relentless pace is actually doing to us.

Chronic stress keeps our nervous systems locked in fight-or-flight mode. Cortisol stays elevated. Our bodies never get the signal that it’s safe to recover. Over time, this leads to what researchers call HPA axis dysregulation, essentially, a stress response system that’s been overworked for so long it no longer functions properly.

According to research published in Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily and Amelia Nagoski, this chronic activation creates a dangerous pattern. The stress response has a beginning, middle, and end, but most of us never complete the cycle. We deal with the stressor (the deadline, the difficult conversation, the endless to-do list), but we don’t discharge the stress itself from our bodies. It gets stuck. And accumulated stress leads to exhaustion, weakened immunity, and eventual burnout.

The symptoms? Exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix. Brain fog. Anxiety. Weakened immunity. Hormonal imbalances. The very things we push through, hoping they’ll resolve once we’ve “made it.”

They won’t. Because the problem isn’t that we haven’t worked hard enough. The problem is that we’ve been working without recovering, and the bill always comes due.

The very thing we think makes us successful is undermining our capacity for it.

What Rest Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Scrolling Isn’t Rest

Let’s clear something up: rest isn’t just the absence of work.

Collapsing on the couch after a long day and scrolling through your phone for two hours might feel like rest, but it’s not restoring you. Neither is numbing out with Netflix, a glass of wine, or mindless online shopping.

These activities might provide temporary escape, but they don’t complete your stress cycle. The Nagoskis explain that dealing with the stressor (turning off your email) is not the same as dealing with the stress (the cortisol and adrenaline still coursing through your system). To complete the cycle, you need to signal to your body that you’re safe — through movement, breath, physical affection, laughter, crying, or creative expression.

True rest is about nervous system recovery. It’s the deliberate process of shifting your body from a state of activation to a state of restoration.

This can look like:

Passive rest — sleep, lying down in silence, stillness without stimulation.

Active rest — gentle walks, stretching, swimming, anything that moves your body without depleting it.

Mental rest — boredom, daydreaming, unstructured time without inputs or demands.

Emotional rest — being with people who don’t require you to perform, or having solitude when you need it.

Here’s why rest is a discipline: it requires intention. It requires you to choose it before you’re depleted, to protect it against the demands of everyone else, and to sit with the discomfort of not being “productive.”

In many ways, rest is harder than hustle. Hustle keeps you distracted. Rest asks you to sit with yourself.

The Science of Strategic Rest

Why Your Brain Needs the Downtime

If the cultural argument doesn’t convince you, perhaps the science will.

In Why We Sleep, neuroscientist Matthew Walker presents research showing that the percentage of the population who can survive on six hours of sleep or less without any cognitive impairment is essentially zero, less than one per cent, based on genetics. Most people who claim they need less sleep are not aware of how impaired they’ve become.

The data is stark: ten days of sleeping just six hours per night causes the same level of cognitive impairment as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight. And a meta-analysis of 61 studies found that sleep restriction significantly impairs cognitive processing across all domains, executive functioning, sustained attention, and long-term memory.

Sleep isn’t passive. During sleep, your brain consolidates memories, processes emotional experiences, and clears metabolic waste through the glymphatic system. This cleansing process removes toxins, including amyloid-beta, the protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Research shows that 36 hours of sleep deprivation increases amyloid-beta in cerebrospinal fluid by 25 to 30 percent. Additionally, sleep deprivation causes a roughly 30 percent drop in natural killer T-cell activity, which is critical for immune function.

But it’s not just sleep that matters. Waking rest is equally important.

When your brain isn’t focused on a specific task, it activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network (DMN). This is the state associated with daydreaming, self-reflection, and, crucially, creative problem-solving. Research published in the journal Brain found that the DMN is actively engaged during both mind-wandering and creative-thinking tasks, and that disrupting DMN function through direct cortical stimulation limited original or divergent responses.

A large-scale study across ten independent samples from multiple countries (N = 2,433), the most extensive creativity neuroscience study to date, found that creativity can be reliably predicted by the number of times the brain switches between the default mode network and the executive control network. In other words, the ability to toggle between focused work and unfocused rest is what drives creative thinking.

Ever notice how your best ideas come in the shower, on a walk, or right before you fall asleep? That’s your default mode network at work. If you’re constantly stimulated, always on your phone, always in meetings, continually consuming content, you never give this network a chance to activate.

Rest isn’t lost time. It’s when integration happens.

Elite athletes understand this intuitively. A study of elite versus sub-elite athletes found that sleep, nutrition, hydration, and rest were rated as having a “major effect” on both training and competition recovery. Overtraining syndrome, which affects roughly 60 percent of elite athletes and 30 percent of non-elite endurance athletes, leads to increased body fat, mood disturbances, and performance decline that can be difficult to reverse.

The adaptations that make athletes stronger happen during rest, not during the workout itself. The same principle applies to cognitive and emotional work. Your nervous system needs time to shift from sympathetic activation (fight-or-flight) to parasympathetic restoration (rest-and-digest). Without that shift, you’re running on stress hormones, effective in the short term, destructive over time.

Rest as a Discipline

What It Actually Looks Like

Schedule it like a non-negotiable. If rest only happens when everything else is done, it will never happen. Put it in your calendar. Protect it the way you’d protect a meeting with your most important client, because in a sense, you are that client.

Protect transitions. The moments between activities are where we often lose our rest. Instead of filling every gap with email or scrolling, build in buffer time. Five minutes of stillness between meetings. A slow morning before the day demands begin. A wind-down ritual before bed.

Build micro-recovery into your day. Rest doesn’t have to be a holiday or even a full day off. Two minutes of breathwork between calls. A ten-minute walk after lunch. A moment of stillness before you start your car. These small deposits add up.

Complete your stress cycles. Physical activity is the most efficient way to complete the stress response cycle. Even a 20-minute walk, a dance break, or a body shake can help discharge the stress that’s accumulated. Deep breathing, where the exhale is longer than the inhale, signals safety to your nervous system.

Say no to protect energy, not just time. Some commitments are technically brief but energetically expensive. Start evaluating demands not just by how many hours they require, but by how much they take from your reserves.

Let yourself be bored. This might be the hardest one. We’ve become so accustomed to constant stimulation that boredom feels uncomfortable, even intolerable. But boredom is where your default mode network activates, and your brain does its most important background processing. Resist the urge to fill every quiet moment.

A word of honesty: this will feel uncomfortable at first. If you’ve spent years tying your worth to your output, resting can trigger anxiety, guilt, or a nagging sense that you should be doing something. That discomfort is the discipline. Sitting with it, not numbing it, is how your system learns that it’s safe to rest.

The Woman Who Rests

A New Definition of Success

Imagine a version of your life where rest isn’t something you collapse into when you’ve got nothing left. Where your energy is steady, not a cycle of caffeine-fuelled pushes followed by crashes. Where you’re present in your life, not just enduring it until the next holiday.

This isn’t a fantasy. It’s what becomes possible when rest stops being a reward and starts being a rhythm.

The woman who rests isn’t less ambitious. She’s playing a longer game. She knows that sprinting leads to collapse, and she’s building something that lasts.

She has clarity because her brain has space to think. She has patience because her nervous system isn’t constantly activated. She has capacity for others because she isn’t running on empty.

This is what it looks like to redefine success, not as how much you can do, but as how sustainably you can do it.

Your Permission Slip

Rest is not the opposite of ambition. It’s the foundation of sustainable ambition.

You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to wait until you’re burned out to give yourself permission. You don’t have to apologise for prioritising your own restoration.

The discipline is starting now, before you need it. Choosing rest when there’s still more you could do. Protecting your energy before it’s gone.

This is the work. And it might be the most important work you do.

Rest isn’t a reward. It’s the infrastructure.

Ready to build rest into your daily rhythm?

Our free Daily Wellness Reset Guide walks you through morning, afternoon, and evening practices designed to regulate your nervous system and restore your energy, without overhauling your life.

Download your free guide here and start building the foundation today.