‘No time to rest’: A feminist-immersive study on women’s relationship with rest

Introduction

Despite being one of most natural and essential components of human life, critical for both wellbeing and performance, rest has been a long-neglected topic by both researchers and practitioners that is also undervalued in everyday life. This undervaluing of rest is especially relevant to women who, due to deep-rooted social norms and gender stereotypes, experience excessive demands to meet expectations and responsibilities at the cost of ignoring their need for rest. In this feminist-immersive project, I seek to fill an empirical gap within the study of rest and to harness the power of stories to help women adopt rest as a health behaviour, inspire cultural shifts in performance-orientated sport and open doors to broader social change. This research practice involved immersing myself in social settings where I could develop a shared understanding of women’s relationship with rest before interviewing 40 women on their lived experience of rest by creating a safe space for rest-full conversations through a care-full feminist ethos. Based on these conversations, I share ten composite narratives along with diffractive questions to offer readers a glimpse into the realities of women’s lives and their experiences of and barriers to rest and to evoke an embodied and empathic awareness of what it is like to be a woman with ‘no time to rest' and ‘no place to rest’. The process and findings of this research have implications for transforming our own restful and caring practices and I offer recommendations for how we can use these composite narratives and diffractive questions to support healthy rest practices at individual and system levels so that rest is no longer the long-overlooked and yet desperately awaited experience it is for many of us.