Picture this.

It’s a Sunday, the day of rest. The Sabbath, if you will.

You’re reaching the afternoon and your eyes droop heavy. You sit on the sofa and tilt yourself to the left, head on a cushion, but your feet stay planted because you still have your shoes on.

You leave them on because taking them off would make the nap official.

Keeping your shoes laced feels like proof this isn’t really rest, just a pause between two real activities: the one you finished and the one you’re about to start.

Before you’ve even closed your eyes, the tyrant in you has already berated the part of you that is desperate for a little nap.

How long is acceptable?
What still needs doing afterwards?
Does forty minutes now mean an earlier start tomorrow, a longer evening, some quiet debit you’ll be paying off later?

Even worse if it’s sunny outside, because now you’re wasting daylight on momentary horizontality. You can sleep when you’re dead, right?

There’s no obvious reason you’re calculating how many zzzs you’re allowed. You just know you’re not allowed many, and you hope the ones you get are juicy. But this isn’t really about the nap, it’s about why rest so often feels like something we have to justify.

Which is strange, because Sunday was once specifically designed to remove that negotiation. The Sabbath wasn’t rest as a reward for a productive week, rest was a godly mandate. For centuries, there was no way big Tesco was going to be open on a Sunday.

At the same time, though, another idea was taking hold: that how hard you worked said something about what kind of person you were. The Protestant work ethic tied discipline, industriousness and the good use of time to moral worth: idleness became something to be suspicious of. It’s why we ended up with two ideas sitting side by side: rest on Sunday because God said so, but spend the rest of the week proving you’re not lazy.

As Capitalism took hold in the more modern sense, it began to erode our weekends. We know this, as shops opened on Sundays and emails followed us home, but the suspicion of idleness survived.

You no longer need to believe hard work brings you closer to God to feel virtuous for waking up early. If working hard becomes evidence that we are disciplined, useful, ambitious or good, then nobody has to stand over us telling us to keep going - we start doing that all by ourselves.

That’s why we lie on our own sofas calculating whether forty minutes of rest needs paying back later.

Tricia Hersey pushes this history further in Rest Is Resistance, tracing grind culture through racial capitalism and chattel slavery, systems built around extracting value from human bodies. Her work is rooted in Black liberation, but the wider argument is painfully recognisable: when human worth gets tied to output, ignoring the needs of your own body starts to feel normal. She states, “Rest is a form of resistance, because it pushes back and it disrupts capitalism and white supremacy.”

In other words, rest matters precisely because it refuses the idea that every hour and every body has to be made productive.

But that productivity logic doesn’t disappear when we stop working, it has followed us into rest itself.

We care about sleep because it makes us sharper.
We look to taking breaks because they help you concentrate.
We go for movement breaks because we are told they can help you get unstuck creatively.

We end up justifying our rest and stopping work just another way of being better at work, which is how you end up back on that sofa, shoes still on, feeling as though doing nothing requires a defence.

The guilt isn’t evidence that you’re lazy. Rather, it’s the residue of ideas about work, worth and idleness that existed long before you did.

Knowing that won’t suddenly make you immune to this guilt about stopping, because it’s so deeply ingrained in us. You can reject hustle culture completely and still feel a tiny stab of panic when someone asks what you did all weekend and the answer is “not much.”

But it does let you see the guilt for what it is: an inherited rule, not a verdict on your character.

So next time you catch yourself doing the maths before you’ve even closed your eyes, stop mid-calculation. Not because the nap will make you sharper later, or because twenty minutes is apparently optimal, but because rest does not need to earn its place by becoming useful.

And if you’re still lying there with your shoes on, keeping one foot quite literally planted in the productive part of the day, take them off. The guilt was never yours in the first place.