Hoping for a restful Family Day, Carissa Di Gangi has a vision in mind.
The house is clean. She, her husband and their children, 4 and 6, sleep in. Everyone wakes up in a good mood. The day is easy and fluid. There might be a neighbourhood walk, and running into families they know. Then lunch back at home, followed by a movie. After that, their kids slip into worlds of Lego, drawing and games, giving the adults time for themselves. Later, cooking or baking – “the apartment smells amazing,” Ms. Di Gangi imagines.
In reality, a day of rest like this is a rare luxury. Chores and errands intrude. One parent might need to work. There are colds, flus and moods to contend with. Energy levels peter out, derailing plans.
As their children play in the living room, Carissa Di Gangi tries to read and her husband tries to rest.Cindy Blaževic/The Globe and Mail
In the busy churn of life, Ms. Di Gangi and her husband do their best to preserve the off hours.
They’ve resisted the modern parenting pressure to overschedule their kids; swimming, skating and hockey lessons twice a week are plenty. And they’re realistic about their own rest, which happens mostly when the children are sleeping or vacated from the house. Sometimes one parent takes them out, giving the other a window of time.
“That’s part of how we look after each other,” said Ms. Di Gangi.
For them, rest involves slowing down. Her husband tends to their many house plants, or sits down for a video call with old friends. She gardens and quilts.
“I’m a better mother, partner, friend and worker when I have time away from work and have time to rest,” said Ms. Di Gangi, a non-profit operations leader who reserves a third of her vacation days to take solo, often when no one is home.
Still, for all their efforts, for all the thought and care put into their off hours, rest is always fleeting.
“I don’t know how many of us have seen rest well-modelled in family life with young kids,” Ms. Di Gangi said. “There’s a strangeness to trying to carve out a path that doesn’t have much precedent.”
Families such as Ms. Di Gangi's plan carefully for their leisure time, but all too many Canadians instead postpone that time till they can no longer enjoy it.Cindy Blaževic / The Globe and Mail
Rest doesn’t always come naturally for Canadians. Though we’re tired often, we don’t really ask ourselves why. We push through, not taking rest all that seriously. The idea of “doing nothing” can leave us uneasy. It can feel indulgent, lazy – unproductive. Too often, weekends get framed through the lens of work: we’re recharging for Monday.
Languorous rest for its own sake remains a foreign concept. We have no Spanish siesta. No fika, the coffee break Swedes take with their colleagues, friends and family. No hygge, the Scandinavian custom of embracing comfort – a book, woollen socks and fire crackling on cold dark days. No sprawling 30-day holiday, the way it is in France, land of joie de vivre.
We have different rituals and mantras, many of them revolving around hustle: “Put in the work” and “Sleep when you’re dead.” There’s a sense we need to earn our rest. Somehow, that moment often feels out of reach.
Time-use surveys in this country tell a restless story.
Canadians 15 and older spent an average of just 17 minutes a day resting, relaxing, napping and lying down, according to Statistics Canada data collected from July, 2022, to July, 2023. On average, people spent only 18 minutes a day on relaxing pursuits that fall under a broader category of “active leisure.” Things like being in nature, birdwatching, camping. Going to an art gallery, theatre or museum. Painting or drawing, crafting or collecting. Playing an instrument. Dancing.
Canadians spent much more time each day staring at various screens – one hour and 42 minutes, on average. Predictably, experts find this type of “passive leisure” does little for our well-being.
Even as we’re heavily burned out, we don’t allow ourselves time to surface.
Some 4.1 million workers – more than a fifth of employed Canadians – said their stress levels were high or very high, pointing to heavy workloads and very little work-life balance, according to 2023 data from Statistics Canada.
More than half of Canada’s employees said they felt stressed for much of the previous day, while 22 per cent were angry and 17 per cent sad, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report, which polled 128,278 employees in 2023.
And the strain is deepening: Nearly 40 per cent of Canadian workers said they were more burned out in 2023 than the year before, according to a survey from human resources firm Robert Half. One in five said taking time off felt impossible, citing crushing workloads and fears about job security.
Instead of pausing each day, we put rest off for a distant holiday. Then we deny ourselves that, too.
In 2023, 45 per cent of Canadians failed to take all of their days off, according to Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report. The survey found that Canadians will hoard their vacation days because they’re bracing for a family emergency, then run down the clock.
In this culture of industriousness, people cast rest aside for much of their lives.
Slowly, though, cracks have been appearing in the stories we tell ourselves about rest. The pandemic left many reassessing the role of work in their lives. When the first wave of lockdowns ground nearly everything to a halt, it showed people how intensely they’d overscheduled their waking hours. Today, hybrid work persists, with profound effect on people’s hours and days. Teleworkers saved about 64 minutes a day on commuting, redistributing 33 of those minutes to leisure and 23 minutes back to sleep, according to 2022 figures from Statistics Canada.
When some managers took advantage of the blurred lines between home and work, several countries enacted “right to disconnect” laws to protect the off hours. Today, more companies and jurisdictions are experimenting with four slightly longer work days in exchange for the fifth weekday off.
“We’re at a point where more of us recognize that we need to have – and we deserve to have – a place for rest in our daily lives, and a vision of work, careers and family that make room for rest,” said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of Rest and Shorter, and head of 4-Day-Week Studio, which offers courses and consulting for organizations trialing four-day work weeks.
Dr. Pang sees a number of undercurrents reshaping how we think about and act on rest, including a shift away from the idea that rest merely helps us do more – the operational view of resting, as he sees it.
Today, a movement of thinkers, authors and artists is recasting rest as a many-splendoured thing: as a tonic; a catalyst for different kinds of thought; a community connector; a powerful refusal; a basic human right.
Rest as endangered species
Whenever Lin Phillips is asked to do something on her day off, she does a mental calculation to decide if it’s worth it.
“If I were to charge out my personal time, it’d probably be 10 times the value of my at-work time because it’s so limited,” said Ms. Phillips, a health policy analyst in British Columbia. “It’s irreplaceable.”
More people are applying a scarcity mindset to their time off, and then working actively to protect it.
Witnessing deep burnout in the health care sector, Ms. Phillips said she learned the necessity of safeguarding rest. In those early, bumpy days of remote work, she watched work bleeding into the evenings. She started tracking her hours more closely, taking allotted breaks and setting out-of-office replies on weekends and holidays. Eventually, norms shifted at work, she said, and setting these types of limits became “accepted team cultural practice.”
She then applied a similar approach to her off hours, literally scheduling rest on the calendar. Sundays are now her secular sabbath, reserved for her husband, their three dogs and ancient cat at their Vancouver Island home. On Sundays, the two might have breakfast in bed, read novels for their “two-person book club,” commune with the animals, or nap. They end the day in their hot tub, looking up at the stars.
Doing it their way means shutting the world out a little bit – questioning which social asks are really necessary, and turning more of them down. “You do lose people. You do lose opportunities,” Ms. Phillips said. “But as an introvert, they’re opportunities I really didn’t want in the first place.”
The biggest challenge wasn’t really other people. It was their own habit of bogging weekends down in life administration, all the jobs that went undone through the work week.
“If I wasn’t doing my checklist of all the things, then I’d failed at the weekend,” Ms. Phillips said. “Over the course of a few years starting with COVID, I recognized I don’t have to be productive on the weekend. You don’t have to earn rest.”
Rest as a ‘no’
Setting firmer boundaries is a hallmark of many newer conversations about rest.
In their book Time Off, authors John Fitch and Max Frenzel urged people to carefully develop a “rest ethic” akin to a work ethic. They launched courses on designing this approach: what to subtract from your life (“make room”), what to add (“fill void”) and how to convince the people around you that taking time off is serious business. “Make time for rest or the world will steal it from you,” the Financial Times echoed atop its review of the book.
Instagram is awash with self-help aphorisms that paint rest as a kind of refusal: “No is a complete sentence,” “Self-care is the greatest middle finger of all time,” and the like. On the platform, Los Angeles artist and author Yumi Sakugawa shared an illustration featuring a pink creature who declines a social invite: “I got like 10 things going on,” it says. The creature’s to-do list is enviable: rest, daydream, look at clouds, chill, process life, exist.
When Kimberly Knight took herself on a 10-day “rest-cation” in Bali this winter, there was no sunrise yoga, no tours, no ambitious reading list – no itinerary of any kind.
“I spent the first five days in my villa, not doing anything aside from showering, napping, eating,” said Ms. Knight, who co-owns The Villij, a Toronto wellness studio for women of colour.
She was struck by how absent she’d become in her daily grind, a to-do list forever spinning in her brain. The rest-cation brought life back into sharper focus.
“The wind blew and I felt hairs on my arms stand up,” she said. “I was able to remember what I had eaten that morning, to recall birds that had flown by.”
At her studio, women talk about wanting to summon feelings like that in everyday life.
“At the beginning of the year, there’s a lot of pressure to be doing a lot, setting goals and following timelines to get to a certain destination,” Ms. Knight said. “What I’ve been hearing in our community is they need more rest.”
The young women anticipate their tired refusals will be judged. Some talk about immigrant parents who hustled and don’t particularly approve of sleeping in or taking a day entirely for yourself.
“Even when we know that we need rest and that we deserve it, maybe it’s a practice you keep to yourself because you don’t want to hear what family has to say,” Ms. Knight said.
She’s also noticed studio regulars no longer frame rest through the lens of work: “This girl boss mentality? It’s not working for us. It’s no longer, ‘I gotta rest to do more.’ It’s, ‘I need to rest. Period.’”
So how to balance resting with reasonable expectations from bosses and relatives? First off, do away with notions of steady work-life balance, says Ms. Knight. To her, it’s better to think of these rhythms as an ebb and flow: hard-charging weeks of deadlines and obligations, but also periods of reprieve that should be seized.
Rest as resistance
When restless callers dial the Nap Ministry Hotline (1-833-LUV-NAPS), a recorded message from “nap bishop” Tricia Hersey greets them.
“We are pulling back the veil around the idea of exhaustion. We know the truth and our bodies know better. We will rest,” Ms. Hersey intoned in January to devotees of her Nap Ministry, which hosts popular collective napping events.
The Chicago author and speaker treats rest as a form of resistance. It’s a philosophy more militant than refusing an unreasonable work demand here, an annoying family ask there. And it’s more expansive than disappearing to a silent retreat in the name of self-care.
Rest as resistance targets weightier problems: grind culture, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism – forces that refuse to see the body as human and in need of respite. This rest is political.
Ms. Hersey’s books, 2022’s Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto and 2024’s We Will Rest! The Art of Escape are meant to jolt. Grind culture, she writes, steals people’s time, creativity, their connections and their health. The body isn’t meant to be pushed past its limit, she argues: Burnout amounts to worker exploitation.
Ms. Hersey spoke about her rest epiphany at the 2024 Deem Symposium, which brought together scholars, artists and designers in Chicago around the subject of dignity.
She was studying for her master of divinity degree while juggling work and raising a young son with her partner. She developed debilitating migraines, her body refusing the pace. And so she began refusing as well, taking short naps. She asked her professors for grace: she’d attend every lecture but some of the work might come in a little late. The naps brought mental clarity; her grades rose. It was an early revelation about the potency of rest.
“Exhaustion will not save us,” Ms. Hersey said at the symposium. “Resting and care will.”
A tenet of her movement is that rest isn’t a solitary pursuit but something done with others. She preaches resting locally: Not at a wellness retreat in Tulum, as she likes to say, but connecting with family, friends and community where you live.
She founded the Nap Ministry in 2016 to explore “the liberating power of naps.” At the communal nap-ins, yoga mats and pillows are laid out. A calming soundtrack or sound bath accompany the nap, which ends with words of guidance from Ms. Hersey. The naps have taken over art galleries and public parks in Chicago, showing people what it’s like to rest together.
On Instagram, the Nap Ministry now counts more than half a million followers. In the comments, people talk about taking badly-needed rest, publicly working out their misplaced guilt around hitting pause.
More and more, people are recognizing that just like work and productivity, rest isn’t just a personal conundrum: these are not things we fail or do well at, all on our own.
Rest as privilege
For all the vibes, there are questions. Is the rest movement an exercise in privilege, and can resting be equitable?
Many rest-converts are knowledge workers, a creative class afforded flexible hours, with stretches reserved for focused work but also periods of rest – something low-wage workers rarely enjoy.
On social media, the proliferation of glib self-care maxims – “You can’t pour from an empty cup”; “Me time is essential” – isn’t helping. The most cynical critics see the rest movement as a lucky few slacking off, leaving others working harder.
The reluctance to take rest seriously leaves some experts returning to the pragmatic benefits for productivity and the bottom line. They’re also agitating for more forward-thinking workplace policies that respect employees’ off time. A host of research finds gruelling work hours don’t necessarily equate to brilliant ideas or quality results. When the OECD divided various countries’ GDPs by time spent working, longer hours did not yield more productivity.
Sure, Dr. Pang will quote Seneca on busyness and time (“Busy men find life very short”). But he also recognizes that workaholics and hard-driving employers need clear messaging on the practicalities of rest – a “stealth philosophy,” he calls it.
At the same time, he’s urging people to be more considerate with their flexibility, to resist taking license with the freedom it affords them: “We have a ways to go before we figure out how to use flexibility responsibly … how we translate that into action that allows us to take better care of ourselves, without creating additional problems and strain for our colleagues.”
Instead of treating work-life balance and rest as personal perks, more enduring solutions would consider a wider set of societal realities: parents juggling multiple jobs, unpaid family caregivers.
“The early signal that I see,” said Dr. Pang, “is that the next thing after flexibility should be a rethinking of schedules such that they better serve us, and they better serve all of us.”
Rest for rest’s sake
Other critics are starting to wonder if the conversation is sprawling too far.
“When I’m resting, I don’t want to think about the structure of our capitalist environment,” said Michael Inzlicht, a University of Toronto psychology professor who, as director of the Work and Play Lab, studies effort, rest and leisure.
When the professor rests, it’s a simpler affair. “I want to sit and I want to read,” he said. “I want to be in a hammock. I want to be on a beach. I want to work out. I want to jog. I want to do crossword puzzles. The rest is the end. It’s not a means to something else.”
He finds himself nudging his graduate students to take their breaks and holidays, to stop toiling (and e-mailing him) in the off hours. He watches some colleagues working through their weekends, “for lack of knowing what else to do.” They’ve not cultivated outside interests or a social backdrop for their time off, he observed.
“Work gives us meaning in life. You see that not just with people not taking vacation, but the number of people who don’t retire when they could,” Prof. Inzlicht said. “Some people are miserable when they don’t work.”
But with little variability, novelty or reprieve in their lives, humans risk burnout – a form of depression, as Prof. Inzlicht sees it.
“It’s amazing that we need to be reminded: ‘Hey, enjoy yourself!’” he marvelled. “We have gone a bit too far here. It’s a recalibration now.”
If people can find meaning in their rest, the effects radiate outward.
When Dr. Pang spoke to employees at companies experimenting with four-day work weeks, he noticed people placing special value on their third day off, treating it as more sacrosanct than a normal Saturday or Sunday.
Inevitably, they’ll spend some of those extra hours at medical appointments and haircuts. But people also return to long-abandoned hobbies. The third day off lets them shop, cook and eat healthier, building up energy for people they love.
“They take care of themselves, they take care of family, they do things with their community,” Dr. Pang said. “Looking at how people spend their time, I love to see that.”
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