Lazy days. How do I feel about them? Do I find the restful or do I find them unproductive? Do I really ever have them anymore? All interesting questions for me.
I used to love a lazy day. About 20 years ago, this was my ideal lazy Sunday:
Get up a little bit later than usual
Long walk with the dogs
Have a nice breakfast with good coffee
Watch Gilmore Girls on TV
Lounge around all day, reading and watching rubbish TV
Have a nice dinner either at home or in the local pub
Go to bed early and be ready for the following week
Blissful. I didn’t think that day was unproductive, I felt it was necessary because I was holding down a very responsible, very busy, very pressurised job. It didn’t happen every Sunday, but when it did I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I have often looked back on those Sundays with real nostalgia. They were wonderful.
I don’t know when things changed. Was it when I had my son? When I got married? I don’t really know. I had a responsible job when I had lazy Sundays, a senior management role so I don’t think it was a work thing that meant things shifted. But lazy days certainly began to feel unproductive. When did I feel the need to be always doing things? Maybe when time seemed so much more precious because there was always so much more to do. In the ‘old’ days, I had a small house and no one else to look after. My housework was done very quickly. Before we lost our house, it was a large house the cleaning of which took an entire day. In the days when I enjoyed a lazy day, I only had my clothes to clean and iron, now I have three people’s clothes to clean and iron which takes exponentially longer.
All of these things start to add up in terms of time. And as I type this, I can’t help but wonder how many women start to think that lazy days are just that, lazy rather than restful. Because there is simply so much to do. Doing a full-time job as I did, having a lazy day meant I would also be thinking about all the things I wasn’t doing that needed doing so the lazy day simply didn’t end up happening. When I was made redundant, I felt guilty at the thought of having a lazy day. Despite the fact I was either applying for jobs, looking for jobs, writing my book, being interviewed for jobs, I felt lazy. I was cleaning, cooking, washing, ironing, supermarket shopping, doing school runs, organising our lives, walking the dog…in short, doing everything around the house, but because I wasn’t working, I felt somehow as though I was lazy. So the idea of a lazy day was an anathema to me. I continuously felt I should be doing something I think to prove my worth to myself.
I do think that lazy days are really important to our wellbeing. The ability to relax is so very important, whatever relaxing means to you. For some people that’s baking (not me!), for someone else it’s exercise, for another person it’s reading or listening to music. For our mind, body and soul, however we choose to do it, it is vital. In modern life we can operate for far too long on fight, flight or freeze so the ability to shift into rest and digest is something we have to get better at doing and doing consistently. And I need to remind myself that the time doing it isn’t ‘wasted’ as I have often thought, that doing so doesn’t define my worth or otherwise, but that for my health it is a non-negotiable to myself.
Writing this has been really thought provoking for me, and I am going to spend at least one day a week having a restful day. Let’s not call them lazy days anymore because it has negative implications, let’s just call them R&R days, or R&D days, from hereon because that’s what they are. And we would all be significantly better physically and mentally for it.
Louisa Simpson 