How to Rest Well in Summer Without Feeling Like You're Falling Behind
For many high-achieving women in leadership, the anxiety of summer rest sounds something like this:
“If I slow down now, I will fall behind. If I take the full week, something will unravel. If I genuinely
stop thinking about work, I will miss something. If I actually rest really, fully, without the laptop
open on the side, I will pay for it in September.”
This anxiety is not irrational. It is the accumulated weight of professional environments that have
rewarded constant availability and punished genuine absence. It is years of evidence that the
leader who steps back, even briefly, often returns to find that the culture she was holding did not
hold itself.
But it is also, in many cases, a lie. A sophisticated, well-evidenced-feeling, highly convincing lie.
And in this post, I want to dismantle it carefully not with reassurance, but with a more
accurate picture of what rest actually produces and what the alternative actually costs.
The True Cost of Restless Summers
Leaders who do not rest in summer do not maintain their performance through to December.
They erode it.
The research on sustained cognitive performance is consistent: the brain's capacity for creative
thought, complex decision-making and emotional regulation degrades without genuine recovery
periods. Not gradually, in ways that can be managed. Significantly, in ways that eventually
cannot be hidden.
The leader who pushed through summer arrives in September technically present and
functionally depleted. She is less creative, more reactive, more likely to make decisions from
anxiety rather than wisdom, less available to her team in the ways that actually matter.
The rest she deferred does not disappear from the ledger. It accumulates into debt.
Reframing Rest as a Leadership Investment
The most useful reframe for leaders who struggle with rest is this: rest is not time stolen from the
work. It is time invested in the person doing the work.
The woman who comes back from a genuine summer rest who has walked, read, cooked,
worshipped, laughed, been present with her family without half-attention on her phone
returns with something that cannot be manufactured in any productivity system.
She returns whole. And wholeness, in a leader, produces a quality of presence, decision-making
and care that no amount of accumulated output can replicate.
The Practical Architecture of Summer Rest
For leaders who need a structure to make rest feel safe, here is one that works.
Define Your Non-Negotiables Before June Ends
What are the actual responsibilities that require your direct attention across the summer? Name
them specifically. Everything else is eligible for delegation, deferral, or deletion. Most leaders
who feel they cannot step back have not done this naming they are carrying a vague,
anxiety-shaped sense of what needs them rather than a clear, specific list.
Create Protected Rest Windows, Not Just Leave Days
Annual leave is not the only vehicle for summer rest. A Friday afternoon that is genuinely
protected no meetings, no email, no output is a rest window. A Sunday morning that
belongs entirely to worship and stillness is a rest window. A week in which the working day ends
at 4 pm is a rest window. These micro-protections, held consistently, compound into genuine
recovery.
Build the Transition Back into September
One of the reasons leaders resist summer rest is the fear of the re-entry. What they are often
really fearing is not the rest itself but the moment after the rest, when everything that was
deferred arrives at once.
Build a re-entry week into your planning: a week in early September that is low in new
commitments and high in reconnection. The first week back is for listening and orienting, not
launching. This makes rest sustainable because the return need not be traumatic.
What to Do When the Guilt Arrives
It will. The particular guilt of a high-achieving woman who is doing something restorative rather
than productive is almost guaranteed to arrive at some point in the summer rest.
When it does, it helps to name it accurately. The guilt is not evidence that you should be
working. It is evidence that you have been so long in a culture of constant output that rest has
come to feel irresponsible.
It is not irresponsible. It is one of the most responsible things a leader can do for the people who
depend on her. A leader who rests leads differently. She leads from a place where there is still
something left to give, and that difference is felt by everyone she leads.
Summer as the Season of Becoming
I want to offer a final reframe. Summer is not the season when leadership pauses. It is the
season when leaders become.
In the slower pace, in the family time, in the volunteering and the weekend trips and the bike
rides and the community work in all of the places where the title recedes and the person
remains, something is being formed that the formal work cannot produce.
The leader who returns from summer having genuinely inhabited her whole life — not just her
professional role returns with a wisdom and a humanity that will show up in every room she
walks into for the rest of the year.
That is not falling behind. That is exactly what leadership is supposed to look like.
Reflection Questions
• What specific responsibilities actually require your direct attention this summer, and what can
be genuinely delegated or deferred?
• What is one rest practice you could protect this summer that would genuinely restore you
rather than just pause you?
• What does the anxiety about falling behind actually cost you in terms of the quality of rest you
are able to access?
• What version of yourself do you want to bring into September, and what does she need from
this summer to be there?
