Belonging Project Podcast

Fiorenza (00:00)
Here’s a strange fact about me, and maybe about you too. I’m better at pushing through than I am at sitting still. In the gym, I’m the one who is happy to push through five more reps. And it also means that I’m the one super happy to jump on a new work project or opportunity. And while five more reps doesn’t have a long-term impact, a new work project might.

I’m aware of this tendency and I consciously make an effort to be aware of what I’m saying yes to. So sitting on the couch for 20 minutes with nothing to fix, no email to answer, no kid who needs something right away, or no colleague or team member waiting on a decision, not watching TV, is actually quite hard for me. Give me a deadline, school pickup that I need to quickly

run to and yeah, I’m fine. But give me an actual empty hour where I don’t have the kids to look after or entertain, where I have nothing to do, and then there is something that starts to itch. If that sounds familiar, there’s nothing wrong with you.

You’re actually running a very specific piece of psychological software. One that got installed by doing two jobs at once, career and parenthood, both of which taught you that stopping is what other people do, not what you do. So as this episode is going live as school breaks for summer here in the UK, today I want to open that up and look at how it was built.

This is the episode that I’ve wanted to make for a while. Because it’s one that I need to hear for myself. So here’s the premise. For a lot of us navigating career, leadership, parenthood at the same time, rest isn’t relaxing. It tends to be uncomfortable. We say that we want a relaxing day,

And then we spend it mentally rewriting a work meeting or a work situation or feeling guilty that we’re not fully present with our children while we are there next to them. So we feel caught in between and we’re actually not resting. So today, three things I want to talk to you about. Number one is the data on just how widespread this discomfort actually is for working parents specifically.

Number two, the psychology underneath it, why rest gets coded as a threat when your identity is split between leader and parent. and number three, a few reframes that don’t involve “just relax”, because if

Saying that to someone worked, none of us would be listening to this episode right now. Okay, let’s get into it.

let’s start with the numbers because I think that we underestimate how widespread this is. We tend to experience a guilt about resting as something that is private, perhaps something that we are failing at privately. And for working parents specifically, the data is there. Mental Health UK’s 2026 burnout report, which is a YOUGOV survey of over 4,500 UK adults.

Found that only 4 in 10 said that they can actually switch off from work when they need to. A US national survey run around the same time on about 2,000 American adults

Found something similar, but from a different angle. 78% said that they currently need a break. 40% said that they feel guilty when they actually try to relax, when they actually get a break. And 72%, so nearly three in four, said that they believe is something that you have to earn. Let’s sit with that phrase for a second. Relaxation

Is something that you have to earn. why is that? Why does it feel like it’s something that you have to unlock? Like a level in a video game. so first you have to produce and then you have to unlock it, right? So we start to see a pattern here. We have service done in two countries, but we start to see the same pattern, perhaps the same belief. If we

Narrow both of those data to parents specifically. We have a report by Deloitte UK working with YOUGOV who surveyed over 2,000 working parents and found that 57% feel mentally exhausted or burnt out.

Meanwhile, a KPMG survey of working parents made off a mix of US professionals

found that guilt, specifically about not spending enough time with kids or enough time at work, is the second biggest challenge that working parents report, right behind time management. 43% named it directly, and it splits by gender. 50% of women report this guilt compared to only 38% of men. So, this is it in terms of data.

Most working parents on both sides of the Atlantic need rest, know that they need it, and are structurally prevented by workload, by caregiving, by guilt running in two directions at once from actually getting it. So we are not talking about a time management problem here. I think really it’s a belief system.

Okay, so psychology. Why does this hit working parents in leadership roles especially hard? First, busyness has become a status symbol. So there is a well-known study from researcher at Columbia and Harvard Business School, published in the Journal of Consumer Research. I’ll link it in the show notes, that looked at how people read

Busyness in others. For most of history, leisure was a mark of status. If you had free time, it meant that you didn’t have to work. That was the mark of status, right? Aristocrats didn’t have side hustles. That study found the opposite is now true in much of Western achievement-oriented cultures.

A busy, overworked schedule reads as a signal that you are in demand. you are someone that others are competing for. Being booked solid isn’t a complaint anymore, right? It’s it’s a sign of status.

Researchers found this effect was strongest among people who believed that hard work is what separates people who make it from people who don’t. So if you’re ambitious, your brain has been busy learning an equation. Busy = valuable, idle = replaceable. So rest doesn’t just feel

Unproductive to you, it feels like evidence against your own importance. Okay. Second, identity fusion with output. A lot of ambitious people or career-driven people don’t just do work, their sense of self is fused with it. And this might also be the case if you own your own business or if you founded a company. Psychologists sometimes describe this as contingent self-worth.

Worth that depends on continued performance rather than you existing unconditionally. If your value as a person is tied to your output, then a day with no output isn’t actually just a day or isn’t actually neutral. It’s a day where you personally are worth less. That’s how you’re processing it emotionally. Stopping doesn’t feel like pausing a task.

It’s feeling like you’re pausing yourself.

Three, the visible versus invisible payoff problem. Work gives you instant tangible proof of progress. An email sent, a box checked, a number that went up. Rest gives you almost nothing to point to. You can’t hold up a completed project at the end of a weekend spent doing nothing. Right? There’s no there’s no data.

Psychology writers describe this as one of the core reasons relaxation gets quoted as wasting time by some people. The benefits are real. You know that it’s lowering anxiety, that it’s giving you better emotional regulation, better decision making, but they’re invisible in the moment. So the discomfort of not producing is immediate and loud. Ambitious, career-driven people are often especially reward-sensitive.

reward sensitive to visible progress, which means invisible progress barely registers as progress at all. Okay. So have I found a workaround? I think I may have because I actually love to relax by doing something creative. and my creative outlet is really it feels like rest to my body.

Or even I would say that on some days, if I start with doing something creative, so something manual, that’s what it means for me. Then once I’m kind of tired in a different way, so it’s not, you know, kind of my head being tired, then I’m able to lie down, perhaps, and and rest. It gives my mind a break, right? but yeah, it’s true. I’m doing something.

Number four, the promise of the next milestone. So Harvard psychologist Tal Ben Shaha coined this term for a specific trap. The belief that once I hit the next milestone, then I’ll finally feel okay resting. Then I’ll relax. Except the goalpost moves the moment that you reach it. So this connects to something researchers called hedonic adaptation.

We adjust to new levels of achievement fast. So the promotion, the launch, the win, they stop feeling like enough almost as soon as it happens. If rest is conditional on arriving somewhere or to something, and your arrival keeps receding, rest becomes permanently deferred. Okay, so have I found a solution to this? Yes, I think. I keep track of my goals in writing.

And also of my progress. It helps me make sure that I’m not creating another goal or milestone for myself as soon as I hit the initial target, right? Or at least if I do, I’m more aware of it because it’s written down. Number five, rest as a mirror. This is maybe the least talked about piece. When you’re moving fast, you don’t have to feel things. Okay. Deadlines are excellent emotional anesthesia.

The moment you actually stop, really stop, even so not doom scrolling on on the sofa type of stopping, that’s actually when you are emotionally catching up with dissatisfaction, with the relationship that’s not been working for you, with a career question that you keep postponing or even with grief. A number of clinicians who write about this describe unstructured time as something that surfaces what

busyness has been covering. For someone whose ambition partly functions as a coping strategy, stillness actually is quite hard.

It’s actually feeling exposed. This is something that you perhaps have seen or have noticed around you. Someone might say, I’m focusing on work right now.

If they are going through a tough breakup or a tough personal situation, maybe they’ve they’ve lost someone who’s close to them. I’ve noticed how I’ve been working more since I’ve been grieving for my 13-year-old family cat who passed away. so I’m very much aware of this and I’ve experienced it and it really feels like being exposed. Number six, loss framing.

There is a finding in behavioral economics called loss aversion. That is when we feel losses twice as much intensely as the equivalent wins. career driven people often unconsciously frame rest as a loss.

lost hours, lost momentum, lost ground to competitors, to to send in that tender deck or pitch. even if the actual cost is small, it gets processed with outsized emotional weight because we are coding it as something being taken away rather than something being restored. Have I found a workaround again?

I keep a written track of my achievements and work in progress and also what didn’t go well. And this really helps me see the full picture in a more balanced way than if I’m not writing things down, just you know what my mind would create as a picture for me. Number seven, and this one specific to you if you’re a working parent, the double ledger.

Most people who feel guilty resting are managing an internal accounting system. Am I being productive enough? Working parents in leadership are running two accounting systems at the same time and they don’t share the same currency. There’s the work ledger, did you deliver? Did you lead well? Are you pulling your weights on the team? And there’s the parent ledger. Were you present? Did your kids get enough of you today? And were you there while actually being physically in the room?

So yeah, rest doesn’t pay down either debt. Worse, it can feel like it’s stealing, it’s stealing from both at once. If you’re resting, you’re actually not working and you’re actually not being present with it with your child. Yeah, so that’s a guilt with two creditors, and it’s part of why rest can feel harder for working parents than it does for people without that second ledger.

So yeah, put those seven things together and you get a fully explainable reason for why smart, loving parents who say they want rest will unconsciously sabotage it. It’s not a discipline. So we’re not talking about a discipline situation here. I believe this is actually a belief architecture built over years, usually rewarded the entire way at work and at home.

Okay, I’m not going to tell you to just relax because if guilt were solvable with a suggestion, this wouldn’t be a widespread pattern affecting the majority of working adults. A few things that address the actual mechanism instead that I’ve tried and tested. Number one, separate rest from earning. Try and replace, I have done enough to deserve this by rest is a maintenance requirement for the machine, not a reward for the machine’s output.

Athletes don’t see recovery days as earned, they see them as part of the training programme.

Number two, give stopping a container. if unstructured time is what triggers the anxiety, sometimes a scheduled bounded stop, for example, a specific two hours or a specific day, is more tolerable than open-ended relaxation.

Number three, notice the loss framing and replace it. When you feel that flash of I’m falling behind during downtime, try explicitly relabeling it. This isn’t lost ground. It’s recovery time for the next four days of work and my productivity depends on it. When you name the distortion, you actually lose the grip a little bit.

Number four, let the discomfort be informative, not just annoying. If stillness surfaces something, a feeling, a question about your life you’ve been avoiding, that’s not a malfunction, it might actually be the point of it. Try not to immediately fill that space. Number five, watch what you signal, not just what you do. If you catch yourself in performing busyness in conversations, so bringing up how busy you are.

Just it’s worth noticing. It might be less about the actual workload and more about a status habit. So just be aware. And finally, let your kids see the second ledger getting paid down. Not just the work ledger. Your kids are watching how you treat rest far more than they’re listening to what you say about balance. A parent who is modeling, I worked hard and now I’m genuinely stopping.

Teaches something that 100 lectures about work-life patterns can’t. So please don’t attempt to be perfect. yeah. I hope this episode was helpful as always. And a closing note from me here. A muscle that never rests doesn’t get stronger. It tears. The same is almost certainly true of whatever part of you is trying to hold career and family together at once.

and maybe the smallest useful thing to take from this episode is just this. The discomfort you feel when you stop isn’t a sign that you’re doing rest wrong. It’s a sign of exactly how deep this conditioning runs. And now that you can see it, you get to decide how to play it. Alright, that’s the episode. If this one landed, send it to the working parent in your life who’s currently too busy to listen to a podcast about being too busy.

And I mean that with love.

Okay, before I let you go, I want to mention about my summer coaching intensive that I have on at the moment. This is for the working parents who feel they are behind on their career goals that they had set in January or who would like support on working on a specific challenge. The summer coaching intensive includes two one-to-one sessions. The first one is a 90-minute coaching session where we untangle what’s really going on, we clarify your priorities and identify what’s been getting in the way.

You will leave the session feeling energized with a roadmap. And the second session will be a 45-minute follow-up where we review what’s shifted, we tackle new challenges and create a practical plan for the months ahead. There are only five spots open, so get in touch via email, which will be in the in the showcase notes if you’re interested. And this is up at the moment at a bargain price, so I hope you don’t miss it. Bye for now.