When did we get so weird about slowing down?

Remember school? Where daydreaming in class wasn't just daydreaming—it was an attention problem that needed fixing. Where learning at your own pace often meant something was wrong with you. Where not hitting arbitrary milestones got you a fancy label and a note home to your parents. Nothing like teaching kids that their natural rhythms are actually disorders that need treating.

And now? Every pause has become something to solve. Look at how we talk about ourselves: I need to fix my motivation issues. I'm struggling with focus. I'm not performing at my peak. Never My system is telling me something important or Maybe this resistance has wisdom in it. We've created an intricate vocabulary for turning pauses into problems, and an entire industry dedicated to solving them.

The wellness industry has perfected this game, cashing in on our inability to slow down. Can't focus? That's not your brain begging for a break—that's ADHD! Here's a subscription to hack your downtime. Shoulders feeling tight? Don't question your workload—that's anxiety! Better download this mindfulness app to maximise your recovery. Even resistance gets packaged and sold back to us: 'self-care' becomes another item on your to-do list, 'setting boundaries' another skill to master in your spare time. Because nothing says 'radical healing' quite like turning your breakdown into a course you can sell on Gumroad.

Here's the real mindfuck: we're not actually fighting a productivity problem—we're fighting our own survival instincts. Every signal our body sends gets treated like a malfunction to fix rather than intelligence to trust. Think about how stress lives in your body: the tight shoulders, the shallow breathing, the clenched jaw. These aren't just symptoms to manage—they're your body keeping score of every ignored pause.

I know because I fell for it too. When I burned out years ago, my first instinct wasn't to actually stop—it was to optimise my way through it. I tried writing more about burnout, trying to launch books and online courses as if I could productivity-hack myself out of a breakdown. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work that way.

Don't get me wrong: burnout is serious. It wrecks careers, tanks relationships, destroys health—trust me, I've been there. But we're missing the point. The problem isn't burnout itself—it's our pathological need to fight it. By treating burnout as the enemy instead of the messenger, we've let it become exactly what we feared.

Look, I'm not suggesting we all quit our jobs and move to a monastery. In an economy where many of us are one missed paycheque away from disaster, "listening to your body" sounds like privilege masquerading as wisdom. Bills exist. Deadlines matter. Your landlord doesn't accept "I'm honouring my rhythms" as payment.

But what if we stopped treating our stops like enemies to overcome? What if—radical thought here—we started treating them like intelligence to trust?

The trick isn't finding better ways to push through. It's learning to work with your stops instead of against them. For me, that means getting curious about what kind of resistance I'm feeling. Sometimes it's just regular tiredness that needs a walk or a coffee.

But other times? It's my system throwing up warning flags—that bone-deep exhaustion that coffee can't touch, that creeping dread about work that doesn't go away after a break, that inability to care about things that usually matter to me. Those are the signals worth heeding.

When you start to notice the red flags, it’s time to hit the brakes. I tend to pick two or three things to focus on each day and let the rest be good enough. In between, I've started building in “buffer blocks” (hat tip to Ettie Bailey-King for this one)—not the fake kind where you block your calendar but work through it anyway. Sometimes they're between calls to let my brain actually process what just happened. Sometimes they're at the end of the day to wrap up loose ends instead of carrying them home. They're not breaks to optimise—they're spaces to breathe.

For those of you working for someone else: what if you normalised showing up at less than 100%? Not because you're slacking off, but because you're playing it smart. When you tell people "I can only handle about half of this right now," that's not weakness—that's keeping yourself alive. It's catching the warning signs early instead of waiting for the crash.

Instead of pretending everything's fine, just tell it straight: "Hey, I'm pretty wiped today, so I'm gonna nail these two things and the rest will have to wait." Or "I can take on one more thing this week, but something else has to give." Simple, factual, no apologies. Sometimes it goes over well, sometimes it doesn't. But it beats burning out.

This isn't about optimisation or wellness or self-care. It's about survival. Your struggle isn't personal failure—it's a rational response to an irrational system that has pathologised the basic human need to pause. When everyone around you is obsessed with doing more, just... stopping feels kind of revolutionary.

Look, I'm not gonna lie—this shit is hard. If you're like me—someone who's always pushed yourself to the limit—taking your foot off the gas feels like career death. Goes against everything that got you here.

But here's what I've learned: those symptoms we're so quick to fight—the brain fog, the lack of motivation, the inability to care about work—aren't failures to fix but signals to listen to. Like a fever fighting infection or pain telling you to rest an injury, they're your body's intelligence at work.

You'll drive yourself crazy at first, wondering if you're just being lazy or if your body's actually telling you something real, whether you’re making excuses or setting real boundaries. But after a while, you figure it out. You can feel the difference between normal tired (nothing a coffee can't fix) and that deep exhaustion that sits in your bones and laughs at your espresso shots. Between normal work stress and your body's emergency broadcasts.

So when did we get so weird about slowing down? I think it happened gradually, as we learned to trust productivity apps more than our own rhythms. As we started treating our natural pauses like problems to solve instead of signals to hear. As we turned even our breakdowns into opportunities for growth.

Maybe the most radical act isn't turning our stops into strategies. Maybe it's telling our productivity-obsessed culture to shut up for a minute—and finally letting our bodies do what they've been trying to do all along.