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The Difference Between Resting and Avoiding
How to tell whether you’re recharging your energy or escaping discomfort.
As someone who is struggling with avoidance behaviour, I know a thing or two about the difference between resting and avoidance. In the past, I always thought that I worked well under pressure, which is why I often leave everything until the last minute.
Soon enough, I realized that taking “rest” and starting a 16-episode-long K-drama in the midst of exam season was actually an avoidance behavior. The pure thought of starting the assignment or learning for the exam made me feel anxious, so I would just mask it by taking a break.
In my years of dealing with avoidance behavior, I learned that the key difference is intention and what happens afterward. Here is what you need to know.
1. What Healthy Rest Looks Like
Some people think of rest as being unproductive, but that is actually false. The real rest is productive, even when it looks like we’re doing nothing. When we take rest, we do it intentionally. That implies that before we took a rest, we did something, either physically or mentally draining. Rest is a way to recover the energy we need to function properly. There are different types of rest: physical, mental, and…
