We’re constantly reminded to slow down, unplug, and prioritize rest.

While that advice is well-intentioned, and it’s backed by science…it can also feel inaccessible and even guilt-inducing. Because for many people, rest isn’t something they simply forgot to schedule.

Solo parents. Caregivers. Entrepreneurs in the middle of launching a business. Academics teaching intensive summer courses. Healthcare workers pulling night shifts. People working multiple jobs to keep food on the table. And those navigating grief, where silence often amplifies pain rather than softens it. For them, conversations about rest can feel strangely alienating.

I learned this the hard way, long before I had language for it. For years, I was a caregiver. At first, it was choosing to be present for Dad after Mom passed away and traveling to India twice a year. Later, when he got sick, I went back a few times a year. I had a day job, Ayurvedic coaching clients, deadlines from editors, a book deal, a doctorate program that I was completing while navigating life in two continents. My days didn’t follow a clock so much as a person’s needs—made sure I spent quality time with Dad and then traveled to another city every few days to see my in-laws. I worked nights so I could attend meetings at work in NYC in real time. I wasn’t responsible for anyone’s medication times or doctor visits, but I constantly navigated sleepless nights and bone-deep exhaustion with the sheer responsibility.

People often told me, “Make sure you get some rest.” I know they meant well. But their advice assumed a version of my life that didn’t exist. It assumed there was an off switch. There wasn’t.

Ironically, I didn’t fully recognize how deeply our culture misunderstands rest until I was editing my upcoming book, Rhythms of Resilience: An Ayurvedic Guide to Managing Stress and Bringing Balance. My publisher pointed out something I’d missed entirely: I hadn’t written about the people who work night shifts, the emergency workers, the ones whose schedules are erratic not by choice but by necessity. Nurses who sleep while the sun is up. Line cooks who finish a shift at 2 a.m. and still must be present for a child’s breakfast six hours later. The people who keep hospitals, grocery stores, public transport, and power grids running while the rest of us are told to unplug. Their bodies don’t get a season of ease. Their lives don’t pause for wellness trends. Their bodies don’t suddenly become exempt from exhaustion simply because someone suggested a morning meditation practice.

His feedback was uncomfortable, but it was necessary. Most of what we call “rest culture” quietly assumes privilege. It is written for people with free weekends, disposable income, flexible schedules, a peaceful home, or an uninterrupted evening to light a candle, stretch, journal, and disconnect from technology. For many people, that life simply isn’t available.

When rest is presented as a universal prescription without acknowledging different realities, it stops feeling compassionate. And when people who can’t access that luxury hear the message anyway, what lands isn’t inspiration. It’s guilt. Another way to feel like they’re failing at something everyone else seems to manage.

As an Ayurvedic practitioner, I’ve come to think differently about what rest actually means. In Ayurveda, rest isn’t merely the absence of activity. It extends beyond simply doing less. It is a conscious practice of restoration through nidra (restorative sleep) and ananda (a state of ease and contentment), helping us replenish our energy in ways that are realistic, sustainable, and deeply personal. Neither asks for perfection.

Nidra isn’t measured only by how many hours someone sleeps. It also considers the quality of that sleep, whatever hours are available. Four protected hours can nourish the body more deeply than eight restless ones.

Ananda isn’t a vacation—it’s a moment of ease a person can find inside a hard season, not instead of it. Sometimes it arrives in surprisingly ordinary moments: a deep breath before opening the front door. Warm tea after a difficult conversation. Music during a long commute. Five quiet minutes sitting in a parked car before returning to responsibilities. A walk around the block. A laugh with someone who understands.

Ease isn’t always the absence of difficulty. Sometimes it’s simply finding one small place where your nervous system remembers that it is safe.

That distinction has changed how I work with clients, and how I live.

The night-shift nurse may not get eight consecutive hours, but she can protect the four she has by darkening the room, guarding the silence, treating her sleep as sacred rather than stolen. The solo parent may not get a quiet morning, but they can find two minutes of ananda in the car before they unlock the front door, letting their shoulders drop before they walk back into the noise. Restoration, understood this way, isn’t a single practice everyone must perform identically. It’s a question each person answers differently, season by season.

I think often, too, of the people grieving because grief teaches its own lesson about rest. When my caregiving ended, so did the person (my father, my confidante, my safe space, my critic, and my buddy) I had been caring for. People assumed rest would naturally follow. But grief doesn’t always make room for rest. Sometimes it makes quietude unbearable. Slowing down didn’t automatically bring peace. It simply brought me face-to-face with everything I had been carrying.

What helped wasn’t silence—it was small, structured points of ease inside the noise: a walk, a phone call, cooking, stretching on the yoga mat, writing, or small rituals that gave my hands something to do while my heart slowly caught up.

Those moments weren’t the kind of rest social media celebrates. But they restored me little by little.

That’s why I’ve stopped asking people whether they’re resting enough. The question assumes we all have the same lives. The same responsibilities. The same nervous systems. The same access to time. We don’t. For the caregiver, the shift worker, the new business owner, the grieving person, that question can feel like one more thing to fail at.

Instead, I find myself asking something different. “What does restoration look like in this season of your life?”

That question doesn’t demand stillness. It doesn’t require a weekend, a vacation, or an empty calendar. It asks something smaller and more honest: What, today, inside the life you actually have, would help you come back to yourself? For some, that’s eight hours of sleep in a dark, quiet house. For others, it’s four hours protected fiercely, or a car ride in silence, or letting the dishes sit one more night. Sometimes it’s laughing with a friend when you thought you couldn’t. Sometimes it’s saying no to one more obligation. Sometimes it’s allowing yourself to cry without apologizing for it.

And sometimes, restoration isn’t found in stopping at all. It’s found in discovering a gentler way to keep going. Perhaps that’s what rest has been trying to tell us all along. Not that everyone should slow down in the same way.

Maybe true rest begins when we stop measuring it by someone else’s schedule and start honoring the life we’re actually living. Restoration was never meant to look the same for everyone. It was only ever meant to help us find our way back to ourselves.

~