🎙️ S2 E7: Why Rest Feels Like Cheating (And What That Says About Us)

Rest can feel like cheating, even when you’re running on empty, and that uncomfortable truth says a lot about how we’ve been trained to measure worth. We’re coming off a bank holiday weekend and we thought a couple of nights away near Sherwood Forest would mean proper downtime. Instead, we caught ourselves doing what so many self-employed people do: packing the laptop “just in case”, checking scheduled posts, grabbing b-roll, and turning a break into a softer version of work.We share what finally helped us drop into something more restorative, what we call Star Child energy: wandering the woods, using the Merlin app to notice bird song, watching tiny wildlife in the undergrowth, and letting ourselves feel wonder again. We also talk about that modern habit of seeing everything through a phone lens, and why being present is sometimes the most rebellious productivity choice you can make.Then real life lands. A call about mum going into hospital snaps the nervous system straight back into alert mode, and it raises a bigger business question: does your business have your back when emergencies happen? We dig into rest guilt, ADHD brains, hustle and grind conditioning, and why “stopping” is often harder than starting. We also explore practical ways to ring-fence empty days, build genuine recovery time, and even create outdoor workshops that get people out of the office and back into creativity.If this hits home, subscribe, share it with a fellow business owner, and leave a review. What would you change this week to protect real rest?Something you’d love us to know? Send us a message - we’d love to hear from you. Support the show✨ Unfiltered. Unedited. Awesomely Off-Topic. New episodes every Tuesday.Follow us on Instagram for more rants, rambles and random brilliance: 👋  @AwesomelyOffTopic, plus our co-hosts @thetazthornton + @ashaclearwater