The week between Christmas and New Year’s has a strange quality to it, suspended between what was and what’s coming, when the world slows down but your mind doesn’t quite know how to follow. Its often a time high achievers struggle to stop working.
If you’re someone who runs fast all year, this stretch can feel disorienting. You might find yourself checking email when no one’s responding, organizing things that don’t need organizing, or planning next quarter when you’re supposed to be resting. There’s a low-grade hum of anxiety that settles in when the structure falls away, even when you desperately need the break.
You know rest is supposed to be restorative. You tell yourself you’ve earned it. But when you actually try to stop, something inside you resists.
That resistance isn’t a character flaw. It’s a signal.
High Achievers and Productivity: When Rest Feels Dangerous
For high achievers, rest often triggers a quiet but persistent form of identity threat.
When you’ve built your sense of self around productivity, execution, and results, slowing down can feel like losing ground. The internal narrative goes something like this: If I’m not producing, am I still valuable? If I’m not solving problems, who am I? If I stop moving, will I lose momentum I can’t get back?
This isn’t about laziness or lack of discipline. It’s about safety.
Your nervous system has learned that achievement equals security, emotional, financial, relational. Over time, rest starts to feel like risk. Downtime becomes something to get through rather than something to inhabit. You treat vacation like a strategy problem: How do I rest efficiently so I can get back to what matters?
But here’s the truth most high performers don’t want to hear: if rest feels unsafe, your relationship with work is already unsustainable.
Burnout Prevention for Leaders: Recognizing the Patterns
When I work with leaders who struggle to unplug, the same patterns show up:
Guilt. The feeling that rest is something you have to earn through exhaustion, and even then, you’re only entitled to a very specific amount before it becomes self-indulgent.
Hypervigilance. The compulsion to stay “available” because part of you believes that letting go, even briefly, will result in something falling apart or someone being disappointed.
Productivity bargaining. The internal negotiation where you tell yourself you can rest after you finish just one more thing, check one more item off the list, get ahead on next week. The goalpost keeps moving.
Identity confusion. The unsettling sense that without your role, your title, or your output, you’re not entirely sure who you are or what you’re worth.
These aren’t signs of ambition. They’re signs of fragmentation, a disconnection between who you are and how you’re operating.
Executive Rest Strategies: What Rest Actually Requires
Real rest isn’t about doing nothing. It’s about releasing the internal monitoring system that stays activated even when your body stops moving.
It requires letting go of the part of you that’s constantly measuring, evaluating, optimizing. The part that treats your own experience like a performance review.
Rest is a practice in being enough without proving it.
That sounds simple, but for someone whose nervous system has been conditioned to equate stillness with danger, it’s one of the hardest things to do. It asks you to trust that your value doesn’t disappear when your output does. It asks you to stop managing your own worth.
Here’s what that might look like in practice:
Noticing the compulsion without obeying it. When the urge to check email or start a project arises, pause. Ask yourself: Is this actually necessary, or is this my nervous system trying to self-regulate through productivity?
Letting yourself be inefficient. Read a book with no takeaways. Take a walk without tracking it. Cook something that takes longer than it should. Practice doing things that produce nothing measurable.
Naming the discomfort. If rest feels wrong, say it out loud, to yourself, to someone you trust. “I feel guilty for not working.” “I don’t know what to do with myself.” Sometimes just naming the feeling reduces its grip.
Remembering that restoration isn’t optional. Your capacity to lead, create, and decide well doesn’t come from relentless output. It comes from a nervous system that knows how to regulate, a mind that can think clearly, and a body that isn’t running on fumes. Rest isn’t a reward for hard work. It’s the foundation that makes hard work sustainable.
Leadership Identity and Work-Life Balance: The Critical Question
If you find yourself struggling to rest this week, ask yourself this:
What would have to be true for me to believe I’m still valuable when I’m not producing anything?
That question will tell you everything you need to know about where the real work is.
Because here’s what I know after 13 years of working with high performers: the leaders who burn out aren’t the ones who work hard. They’re the ones who never learned to stop without losing their sense of self.
Rest isn’t the absence of work. It’s the presence of trust, in yourself, in your worth, in the idea that you don’t have to earn your own existence.
And that kind of trust? It’s built in the moments when you choose to stop anyway, even when every part of you is screaming that you shouldn’t.
Sustainable Leadership: Building a Healthier Relationship with Rest
If you’re realizing that your relationship with rest is actually a symptom of a deeper pattern, one that shows up in how you lead, decide, and define success, you’re not alone.
The work of rebuilding from the inside out starts with recognizing where the disconnection is. And it continues by learning how to close the gap between who you are and how you’re showing up.
That’s exactly what we’ll be exploring in my upcoming free webinar on January 8th: The Inner Advantage — How to Lead with Clarity When Everything Feels Uncertain. We’ll walk through the Identity G.A.P.™ Framework and what it looks like to make decisions, set boundaries, and build momentum from alignment instead of survival.
If this holiday season is surfacing questions about what comes next, that’s the conversation we’ll be having. Reserve your spot here.
About the Author:
You’re reading insights from Shakirah Forde, LCSW — Licensed Therapist, Executive Coach, and Alignment Strategist. I work with high-achieving leaders who are ready to close the gap between external success and internal clarity.
If this post resonated, forward it to someone who needs to hear it. And if you want to go deeper, explore The Inner Advantage or reach out about 1:1 coaching.
