The Decibel - The case for prioritizing rest in the age of burnout

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Canadians are not particularly good at resting. According to Statistics Canada data collected between July 2022 and July 2023, people over the age of 15 spent an average of 17 minutes a day resting, relaxing, or lying down, and an average of 18 minutes a day on relaxing pursuits known as “active leisure” (think: birdwatching, camping, or going to an art gallery). That’s translating into stress – more than a fifth of employed Canadians said their stress levels were high or very high. On top of all that, Expedia’s 2024 Vacation Deprivation Report found that 45 per cent of Canadians left vacation days on the table in 2023.Zosia Bielski is the Globe and Mail’s time use reporter. Today, she’s on the show to challenge the idea that down time needs to be earned, and to talk about some of the different approaches people are taking to prioritize rest in their lives.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Between a federal election campaign, the high cost of living, and a trade war with the U.S., there's a lot on our minds these days. And even without those additional stressors, Canadians aren't getting enough rest. No. Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. We asked people why it's so hard to get the rest they need.

Right when I get home from work I'm like cooking and then it's already 9 p.m. I feel like and I'm like okay well it's time to go to bed. Especially nowadays with the economy people just want to be able to make the most of their time. I'm a person that has a lot of passion so I'm constantly doing something. My work, I start at 6 so I have to wake up like 530, and then the rest of the day I have things to do. My girlfriend, my dog. Just the culture is so much like, yo, like work, grind, like sleep when you're dead type of thing. And when people do slow down,

it's often because they've gotten to a breaking point. I need to be insanely tired and just feeling burnt out. It's like a tug of war in my own brain. I think it's hard to switch off sometimes. What if we treated rest as something we didn't have to earn? That's Zosia Bielski, a reporter for The Globe who writes about how we spend our time. Rest is a crucial part of health and wellbeing,

but Canadians aren't particularly good at resting. 2023 data from Statistics Canada talks about 4.1 million workers, which is more than a fifth of employed Canadians, saying that stress levels were high or very high. And human resources firm Robert Half says 47% of workers report feeling burnt out. So ahead of the long weekend,

Zosia joins us to challenge the idea that downtime needs to be earned and to talk about some of the different approaches people are taking to prioritize rest. I'm Maynika Ramen-Welms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Sojsa, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I know that you write about how we spend our time. Can you just tell me a little bit about your

relationship with rest? Yeah, absolutely. So in our family and in sort of the circle of my parents' friends, it sort of became clear to me that life never really took a backseat to work. So you worked. You met your commitments. You worked well. But then the off hours really were your own. So I don't really recall many days

when my family would talk about work at the dinner table or obsess about what had gone wrong at the office. There was a real clear mark between work and rest. And the same went sort of for our holidays. The holidays weren't about like optimizing or actualizing. It was about experiencing life together as a family and just really being there. Now mind you, I'm 45 years old, so this is like the pre-screen era, so I think it was a lot easier back then. But of course we were always learning,

but it wasn't about this sort of like skills acquisition and using your rest time to somehow become better. And really my parents did sort of treat the weekends and the holidays as a sacred time. It seems quite different from some of the holidaying I do today where my friends will bring a laptop or check in with work or complain about work. It just seems like a very different world. And I don't know if that's cultural or just, you know, that the fact that I grew up in the 80s, but it's

something I've been giving quite a bit of thought to in my own off hours. Yeah, it's an interesting observation here of this kind of, you know, encroachment in a way of work onto, as you say, like vacation time even. If we look broadly, like how would you describe Canadian attitudes towards rest as a whole? One thing that comes up a lot are the words Protestant work ethic. This really still is very baked in in Canada. And I'm saying that just, you know, based on observations living here, but also speaking to time use scholars, Protestant work ethic comes up a lot. Basically, this idea that by working,

you somehow get kind of closer to God, it's kind of a it's a good thing, right? Inherently good thing. Yes, yes. And that is a a moral thing and then that we, we should work hard in the on hours and in the off hours that the off hours should be productive. And this is sort of unspoken, but sort of like rest for its own sake, or languorous rest or rest that's like unproductive or unambitious. There's a sense that maybe it's a bit wasteful or lazy or it's time that's kind of squandered that could be used to, again, better ourselves or our homes or our children.

These are cultural attitudes that sort of come through. They might not be spoken out loud, but there's a sense and a feeling that if you've sort of just had a lazy afternoon, I have some people in my life who, you know, that feels good for them, but I find sort of an uneasiness around that kind of lazy, quote unquote, unproductive rest time. Do we have a sense of how much Canadians do actually rest or I guess not rest is the other side of that question? One thing I wrote about was that the Canadian attitude toward rest, like this is really merited in some of our statistics around time use.

And Statistics Canada has been doing a really good job of tracking some of that time use. So some numbers from 2022, basically they found that people will spend just 17 minutes a day on a broad category that includes resting, relaxing, napping, lying down. 17 minutes a day, okay, not that much. For those who do it.

So that includes both those who do it. So that includes both people who do it and don't do it, which is a lot of people who don't give themselves that kind of relaxing time. And then the other category is something called active leisure. So that's like relaxing pursuits done offline, whether that's nature or going to an art gallery, singing, dancing, playing an instrument, drawing, crafting, collecting. So that broad category gets just like a paltry 18 minutes a day. And you can compare that to one hour and 42 minutes for the time that people spend staring at their

various screens every day. So that's not counted as that kind of active leisure then? That's sort of counted as passive leisure. But what time use experts will tell you is that that kind of passive leisure is rarely restorative, as we know, when we sort of counted as passive leisure, but what time use experts will tell you is that that kind of passive leisure is rarely restorative, as we know, when we sort of stare at our screens and scroll. Yeah. So it's interesting, Statistics Canada seem to have these kind of broad categories they're measuring. Do they track rest, I guess, as a whole, like as a term?

So I looked at these categories and I was very curious to find that they had lumped resting, relaxing, napping and lying down in this one category. And it was very hard to tease apart and that category included things like sick in bed, convalescence, insomnia, sleeplessness. And I found that curious, but it also speaks to sort of the ways we de-prioritize rest in this country and even the statistics tell the same picture. The fact that it's been

lumped in with some of the most restless activities you could imagine that would leave you exhausted and not restored at all. Yeah, that's kind of a telling thing that those aspects are all lumped together then. Zosha, we've been talking about rest as kind of an inherently good thing in a way, but I imagine some people might be a little skeptical about it. As you said, you know, we prioritize productivity in Canada and kind of this attitude of going all the time. What actually are the benefits of slowing down and taking a rest? So people like Alex Pong, who's really sort of a pioneer in delving deep into rest and

its benefits. He's the author of Rest and in delving deep into rest and its benefits. He's the author of Rest and Shorter, and he's also the head of Four Day Week Studio, which offers courses and consulting for organizations that are sort of trialing four-day work weeks. Alex talks a lot about the brain needing to reboot, the brain needing to repair, and it can't really do that when it's sort of on go-go mode all the time. But he also talks about periods of rest as being really integral to some of our brightest ideas.

You can sort of think of like the shower epiphany. You're working through a problem. Maybe staring at a screen for eight hours isn't going to get you there. But maybe you give yourself a break and go for a walk. Or you have the shower the next morning, and it suddenly comes to you. So there's something unpredictable and mysterious

maybe in terms of some of those really brilliant ideas coming to us when we give our brain a moment to pause. So there's that productivity camp, and Alex sometimes is a part of that. Basically, there's the argument that giving yourself a chance to rest actually boosts your productivity when you're back in on Monday. And Alex's philosophies on rest go far deeper than that, but he's talked about how he uses this line as sort of a stealth philosophy. For like the workaholics in the room, you know, you got to get them on board with something like productivity

and the benefits of rest for productivity before you get into the deeper stuff. And some of the deeper stuff is that you know rest simply also just feels good and allows us to sort of experience life around us and sort of live in the present moment. And that can be sort of a tougher sell for hard-charging workaholic types. Yeah this is interesting because I imagine there must be some pushback on you know I don't have time to take a break. Like I, you know, have so many demands on my plate. But what you're kind of saying is that maybe this is actually kind of an antidote to feeling

a little burnt out. Actually take the rest and you might actually be doing your work better. Exactly. And, you know, there's also a pushback to this idea that, think about how many people say they need a weekend after their weekend, right? Or the idea that we're sort of resting to restore ourselves for Monday, we're resting to do more. There's certainly a philosophy that really rest can yield to more productivity, but there's

also increasing pushback that rest shouldn't be about doing more, right? And here we are again in this Western culture, it's sort of instrumentalizing rest again for something other than its own sake. So we've been talking about Canadian culture, Western culture, how it doesn't prioritize rest. But when we look at other places in the world's OSHA that actually do value rest more, what are they doing differently? So I think with, you know, when we talk about other countries, there's a sense that people can rest for rest's own sake. The rest doesn't have to be productive.

The rest doesn't have to be ambitious. Think about the siesta in Spanish culture, or think about the fika in Swedish culture, which is sort of taking a break in the afternoon, having a coffee, maybe a pastry, and not doing it, you know, hunkered over your desk, but actually doing it with colleagues or maybe even family and friends. It sounds lovely, right? Yeah, just sort of sane. And the idea that you deserve rest, it's not something that

you need to earn first. There's a real cultural acceptance around that that you probably notice when you travel. And then it's a pretty stark reminder when you come home that things are different here. I mean think about France they mandated four weeks of holidays so and when I was sort of going through my files I had written about sort of people untethering themselves from work. This was around sort of people writing more and more aggressive out-of-office replies and I spoke to a really interesting professor of organizational behavior at Queen's his name is Matthias Spitzmüller. And he told me this, quote, in burnout cultures, people are judged by the sacrifices they make. Hobbies, vacation, even family time are viewed

as distractions to penalize. But in healthy cultures, it is celebrated that people have interests outside of work and stay connected to these interests. A little bit earlier, you mentioned vacations too, specifically in France. And I guess I wonder about that. Can we look at vacation time in North America compared to maybe parts of Europe? And what does that tell us about how we rest?

When I was going through some of the data on vacations, Expedia actually puts together a very depressing report titled the Vacation Deprivation Report, which is like how much vacation people leave on the table. It's a survey about sort of our attitudes towards holidays and one thing they track is how much vacation people leave on the table every year. And in the case of Canadians,

45% of us will leave vacation days on the table every year. Wow, almost half of us. Almost half of us. And the reason for that is we are very fearful of family emergencies, so we will hoard some of those vacation days until the 11th hour and then end up forgoing them because the clock runs down on the fiscal year. And at the same time, when the report looked at how much vacation time people wanted, Canadians often topped the list in terms of how many long weekends they wanted. So there's a there's a desire for time off and then at the same time you're squandering what you're given. So

I think we have to question where that's coming from. – Yeah, it seems to kind of represent this maybe a value of rest within the culture. Is there something about rest and this idea that it's okay to take rest being ingrained and you know the people around you the world around you that maybe makes it easier to do them? I think you know anytime you have a large group of people doing something together it makes it easier to do. When I spoke with someone named Michael Innslicht, he's a professor at U of T, he runs the work and play lab, so he looks at effort, leisure.

He talked really about how cultural this is and what is culturally acceptable will really vary from place to place. He really alighted telling me about flying over Quebec City. He's from Montreal and he saw like a ton of backyard pools, even though Quebec City is so much colder than Toronto. And that told him something. And he sort of talked about, you know, the Catholic mindset of you can sin, then you take your confession, you're absolved, and then you can enjoy yourself and drink the wine. And so he was speaking in very broad philosophical terms, but he was saying the Protestant work ethic isn't as thick there. And, you know, he talked about Quebecers at all inclusive resorts and taking more holiday time and these pools. It's all anecdotal, but you clearly see a cultural shift there. And I think you get a lot of that in Europe

and in other places where we sort of don't have to beg forgiveness for our rest and it's just culturally acceptable. We'll be back after this message. So Zosia, I know you also spoke to some people who are working to prioritize more rest in their lives. What are some of the ways that they're actually doing that? – Yeah, I spoke with someone named Lynn Phillips. She works out in BC, she crafts health policy, and so she sort of had a front row seat in the health sector through the pandemic to sort of the vast burnout that persists in this sector. And she was not on the front lines. She was working from home in the pandemic as a health policy analyst and she really noticed work bleeding into the off hours.

There were no sort of boundaries between work and rest and home. And so she sort of started to feel this need to start drawing those boundaries between work and home. And then she started applying some of this stuff to her Sundays. So she's sort of practicing a secular Sabbath where aside from her many pets, her cats and dogs and her husband, like basically the doors are closed on that rest time. So she will decline social invitations, family obligations on those Sundays in sort of a bid to keep burnout in check and and really sort of prioritize rest in her relationship and at home. She's also sort of an introvert, so really needs that time to reboot. And not surprisingly, this can be controversial. She said she's sort

of come up against pushback, maybe alienated some people. And of course, there's the risk that all of this sort of sounds a little bit obnoxious in terms of this fierce protection of your off time and your rest but you know if you really think about it asking for one day a week and in a seven day week for some time that truly feels like restorative to you this shouldn't be controversial. Yeah so it sounds like she's figured out what boundaries she needs to set in order to get the rest that she needs. But I imagine it's maybe different for everyone.

Like some people actually might get rest by hanging out with friends or family. So it's kind of you have to figure it out for yourself then. Exactly. And this is all very subjective. Like what's restful for me may be a nightmare for someone else. People are introverts, people are extroverts, different things recharge them. And part of that gets into the idea of rest is something you do alone or the idea of rest is something you do in community. And there's sort of a growing number of people considering how we sort of rest together. I spoke with Kimberly Knight, who co-owns

the Village, which is a wellness studio in Toronto for women of color. And a lot of the women that do yoga, Pilates there, they also sort of have salons and discussions about issues in their lives. And a lot of the women talk about that time being exceptionally restful time with others talking about life. So these women don't see rest as self-care. That's a notion that maybe is going by the wayside a little bit.

It's not like the bubble bath that you do alone or the mask you put on in the bath. Increasingly in these conversations around rest, I'm seeing that people sort of thumbing their nose at that a little bit and really questioning the idea of how do we do this communally. Yeah, it sounds like a more community-oriented approach to rest than actually getting that rest in

with other people either around you or kind of a communal experience. And even just talking about the concept of rest, one of the things the women were discussing was how much pushback they get from some family members, like when they try to take their own form of Sabbath, not sort of serving as the family butler, quote unquote. So even some of this communal rest, you know, they're literally talking about how to rest and how to do it

in such a way that it is encroached upon constantly by sort of different asks, whether it's work in the off hours or family asks or social asks, balancing the responsibilities of life with eking out some of this restorative time in the week. So of course the ability to set those boundaries is in a way kind of a privilege though, right? I think we should maybe talk about how the ability to prioritize rest

isn't always necessarily possible for everyone, right? Like if you're working a service job, if you've got caregiving responsibilities, if you have? Like if you're working a service job, if you've got caregiving responsibilities, if you know you have multiple jobs that you're working, I guess how does how does that factor into this equation? Yeah and certainly this is a discussion that's sort of been criticized as a bit precious and privileged. A lot of the discussion sort of centers around knowledge workers, the creative class, people who have a bit more flexibility

with their employer. So I think a lot of the people working in this sphere acknowledge that. Trisha Hersey is a scholar who looks at the concept of rest as resistance. So this is about resting as a pushback to sort of grind culture, capitalism, white supremacy, ableism. Rest is sort of really political. And for her, these questions of class really loom large. So she really sort of chafes against the idea that rest is, you know, a silent retreat into loom. Something you do far away from home, something that requires like wads of cash, something you do far away and then drop when you get back

to your real life here. So her big push is sort of to rest in community, to rest locally, to take naps. She's a big proponent of naps. She hosts these collective napping experiences where people lie out on blankets and yoga mats, and there might be a sound bath or calming music, guidance from her. Quite a bit of it is sort of letting go of the guilt around taking a break.

And she really sees this as something that should be accessible to everyone in her own life. She was juggling work with seminary, with raising a six-year-old, and she allowed herself to sort of take naps here and there, which is obviously cheap and free and local and doesn't require a passport. And she just really preached this idea of resting where and when you can. And increasingly scholars are acknowledging that this is a conversation often reserved for a certain class of worker. But what they're also advocating for is just questioning our ideas around rest,

the idea that we have to earn it, the idea that we don't deserve it, the idea that endless hours do make us more productive or yield higher quality ideas. It sort of starts with questioning the messaging that we're getting. And increasingly, we're seeing evidence of this kind of pushback in various workplaces since

the pandemic. So this is not just scholarly talk, but we're seeing pushback to overwork and work bleeding into our off hours through policies and work culture itself shifting. Yeah. Let's talk about that then a little bit, because it does seem like a lot of this conversation is around how we work, right? So how is this push for more rest actually playing out in the workplace? Yeah, and I think what's interesting is every time I would talk to sources about rest, the conversation would come back to work because they're inevitably intertwined. But you know, since the pandemic, we've seen myriad examples of these small shifts.

So we obviously had quiet quitting, which is sort of people doing the work that is required of them and not much else. We had the rise and sort of staying power of hybrid work, which involves some office work and some work at home. And that's sort of often is tied to sort of having more schedule control. Statistics Canada has all kinds of data on the time we spend commuting and what we do with that time. Often we pour that time back into work, but we also get more sleep. We also have a little more time for child care and leisure

and exercise. So the link to hybrid work and rest is clearly there. We also have the rise of the four-day work week, which sees employees working longer days over the rise of the four-day workweek, which sort of sees employees working longer days over the course of four days and then taking the option of a third day off, usually a Monday or a Friday. And we hear a lot from scholars about what people do with that time, which often involves caring for family or friends, social time, all of that under the banner of rest. So yeah, we've got right to disconnect laws enacted

in Ontario, places like Australia, France. Those are laws meant to sort of curb, you know, your boss pinging you after hours. And one of my favorites is sort of the increasingly like aggressive out of office reply, which is the out of office reply you get when people are on holiday. I think we've all experienced this

where people are really demarcating their holiday time and maybe sort of urging others to do the same and to respect each other's time when we're on holiday. And they're small shifts, but when you pull them all together, they signal an emerging attitude around sort of protecting those unpaid off hours. So, Zosha, after looking into all of these ideas about rest, I wonder, are there any changes that you've actually incorporated into your own life in order to try and prioritize rest?

In the pandemic, we were part of a health team that was covering the pandemic, everything from vaccines to sort of the sociology of the pandemic. And it was a very hard-charging few years. the pandemic, everything from vaccines to sort of the sociology of the pandemic. And it was a very like hard charging few years and sort of at the tail end of that, I took Mondays off. And that was really kind of crucial for sanity, I think. So that gave me sort of a three day weekend and meant that my domestic, you know, obligations were fulfilled. I could sort of restore and recharge my brain

for an intense four-day work week, but it also meant I could see much more of my family in that time of crisis. And through the winter months, I basically would go downhill skiing or cross-country skiing once things started to open up a little bit with my dad. And I'll forever sort of remember those Mondays. I think it certainly benefited

my work in terms of clarity of ideas and just being restored for the Tuesday. And that time was unpaid. So it's a conversation of privilege because I was able to sort of do that and take the financial hit in exchange for the time. In my own life, I did the calculus and the time was certainly more important than the time. In my own life, I did the calculus and the time was certainly more important than the cash. Zosia, this has been so interesting. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. That was Zosia Bielski, who reports on how we spend our time for the globe.

That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Thanks to our former intern, Amber Ranson, for production help on this episode. Our intern is Olivia Grandy. Our associate producer is Aja Souter. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and we hope you have a restful weekend.