By Tracy Wilder, RP — Founder & Clinical Director, ReFresh Psychotherapy
7-minute read
By the time summer arrives, I am genuinely grateful to be back on the water.
The winters here are long, and I notice what they do to me. More time inside, more time on my phone, more time consuming news and scrolling through things that don’t make me feel better — and yet reaching for them anyway. By March I can feel it: a low-grade gloominess, a restlessness, a sense that I’m having trouble properly relaxing even when I have the time to do so. I’ve come to recognise that a meaningful part of that is screen time. Not all of it, but enough.
Summer changes something. With Luna — our clinic’s Chief Snuggle Officer, in her hot pink life jacket — we settle into the kayak and we both love the easy rhythm of being on the water. No notifications, no agenda, nowhere to be. I come back from those mornings with my nervous system genuinely reset, feeling quiet and present in a way that winter evenings on my phone simply don’t produce. And those long scrolling nights feel, thankfully, very far away.
I’ve been thinking about why that is — not just personally, but clinically. Because why rest doesn’t feel restful for so many people turns out to have a straightforward answer, and it matters quite a bit for how we spend our downtime. The short version: most of what we reach for when we’re tired isn’t rest. It occupies the brain rather than restoring it. And increasingly, the research suggests it’s doing something worse than just failing to help.
The Myth of Passive Rest
Most people think of rest as the absence of activity. Stop working, sit down, put on something to watch, and the tank refills. It’s an intuitive model. It’s also not quite how the brain works.
There’s a network in the brain called the default mode network, and it becomes active when we’re not focused on external demands. It’s associated with daydreaming, memory consolidation, self-reflection, and the kind of quiet mental wandering that feels like doing nothing but is actually doing quite a lot. This network is genuinely restorative. It needs low-stimulation, internally directed experience to function well.
Social media, news feeds, and streaming content don’t activate the default mode network. They do the opposite. They keep the brain in a continuous reactive state — attention pulled outward, toward the next thing, and the next. It feels passive because you’re not doing anything effortful. But the attentional system is still working.
This is why you can spend three hours on your phone on a Sunday afternoon and feel oddly worse by evening. You weren’t idle. You were continuously processing. The tank didn’t refill — it just got used differently.
Scrolling Isn’t Neutral — It’s Working Against You
Here’s where the research has become harder to ignore. Passive screen use — particularly social media — isn’t just failing to restore us. There is growing clinical evidence that it is actively making things worse.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his research on social media and mental health, documents how the constant stream of comparison, outrage, and interruption that characterises social media use is causally linked to increased anxiety, reduced attention span, and a diminished capacity for the kind of sustained, focused engagement that makes rest actually work. The mechanism matters: every swipe trains the brain to expect novelty and stimulation at a pace that real life — including restful real life — simply cannot match.
The result is a kind of attentional erosion. The more time we spend in high-stimulation, low-depth content environments, the harder it becomes to tolerate the slower pace of genuinely restorative activities. A walk feels boring. Reading feels effortful. Sitting quietly feels almost impossible. And so we reach for the phone again — not because it helps, but because it matches the state the phone itself has created.
This is worth naming clearly: if you find it genuinely difficult to be offline for an hour, that difficulty is information. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a pattern — and patterns can change.
What Rest Actually Requires
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, in his book Rest, makes the case that truly restorative rest tends to share a few consistent qualities: it’s chosen freely, it involves low or self-directed stimulation, and it usually includes some combination of physical engagement with the environment, absorption in something genuinely enjoyable, or social connection without performance pressure.
That last phrase is worth pausing on. A lot of social activity carries a degree of performance — you’re managing how you come across, tracking the dynamic, staying alert. That’s not rest. Genuine connection with someone you feel completely comfortable with is different. It’s one of the few social experiences that actually restores rather than depletes.
The activities that tend to show up consistently in research on rest and recovery include time in nature, unhurried physical movement, creative engagement without a goal, reading (particularly fiction, which activates imagination rather than reaction), and anything absorbing that keeps the hands busy and the mind quiet.
Notice what these have in common: they’re not particularly stimulating, they’re not optimised for productivity, and most of them require stepping away from a screen.
The Guilt Problem
There’s something else that gets in the way of rest, and it comes up regularly in the therapy room: guilt. A lot of high-functioning people experience a low-level unease when they’re not being productive. They rest, but they do it while mentally tracking everything they should be doing instead.
That background activation keeps the nervous system slightly on alert even during downtime. It’s the reason a holiday can feel exhausting, or why Sunday evenings carry a particular dread that has nothing to do with Monday itself.
Real rest requires permission, not just time. And permission is often the hardest part.
If the guilt around rest is something you recognise — and if it’s connected to a broader pattern of pushing through regardless of how depleted you feel — it may be worth exploring in therapy.
Reach out to ReFresh Psychotherapy to book a consultation — we’re currently accepting new clients with no wait times.
What This Looks Like in Practice
For me, it’s the kayak. Luna in her hot pink life jacket, no podcast, no phone, just water and movement and a Cockapoo who treats every outing like the greatest adventure of her life. I come back from those mornings clearer and more settled than almost anything else I do. Long walks produce the same thing — low stimulation, no agenda, fully present.
For other people it’s cooking something from scratch on a Saturday morning, an afternoon with a novel, an hour of gardening, or a slow conversation with someone they genuinely enjoy. The specifics vary. What tends to be consistent is the quality: low stimulation, self-chosen, absorbing without being demanding.
The question worth asking — honestly, not aspirationally — is: when did I last finish something and feel genuinely restored? Not just less busy, but actually better. What was I doing? Most people can answer that without much difficulty once they sit with it. The harder part is protecting time for it.
Two Tools to Try This Week
| Tool 1: The Restoration Reflection Think about the last time you finished an activity and felt genuinely restored — clearer, calmer, more like yourself. Ask yourself: — What was I doing? — Is this something I make regular time for, or was it a one-off? — What do I typically reach for when I’m tired or depleted? — Is it the same thing? For most people there’s a gap between what actually restores them and what they default to when exhausted. Identifying that gap is the first step to closing it. This week: protect one hour for the thing that genuinely works — before the week fills up and the default takes over. |
| Tool 2: The Screen-Free Window Choose one 60-minute block each day — ideally in the evening — and make it fully screen-free. During that hour: — Put your phone in another room, or turn it face down and out of reach — Choose one low-stimulation activity: a walk, reading a physical book, cooking, stretching, sitting outside, or a conversation with no devices present What to expect: the first few times will feel uncomfortable. You may feel the pull to check something. That discomfort is the attentional system adjusting — it’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. Start with one hour. Notice how you feel afterward compared to an equivalent hour on a screen. Most people find the difference is more noticeable than they expected. If one hour feels like too much, start with 20 minutes. The goal is to create a daily experience of genuine downtime — not to set a record. |
If this resonated and you’re finding that rest, burnout, or chronic depletion is something you’d like to explore further, therapy can be a useful space for that conversation.
Contact ReFresh Psychotherapy to book a consultation — we’re currently accepting new clients with no wait times.
You might also find our resources page useful — it includes books and tools we recommend regularly on stress, burnout, and nervous system regulation.
References
Pang, A. S. K. (2016). Rest: Why you get more done when you work less. Basic Books.
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
Buckner, R. L., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., & Schacter, D. L. (2008). The brain’s default network: Anatomy, function, and relevance to disease. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124(1), 1–38.
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.
