Rest days are a commonly used tool to manage your workload in an exercise routine. While they’re not technically necessary, they can be a good idea, giving your body extra time to recover between workouts. Even when I’m doing an intense workout program, I make sure to give myself, at minimum, one full rest day. Or, more precisely: I used to.
The problem is that I would find myself cranky on Sundays, the day I had designated for rest. Maybe that’s the rhythm of the week, I thought—the fact that I had to go back to work the next day (the “Sunday scaries,” as they’re sometimes called). But the same thing happened when I shifted my rest day to Saturday. I would be irritable, bummed out, bored yet restless. And it wasn’t just the weekends: I also noticed myself getting moody, antsy, and sad whenever I gave myself a day to decompress after a vacation, or if I skipped a workout due to life getting in the way. Is it possible that relaxing was somehow bad for me?
Exercise helps with mental health
Despite writing often about the benefits of exercise on this very website, it took an embarrassingly long time for me to put two and two together in my own life: Exercise is good for mental health. It’s a form of stress relief, and of self care in the “actually taking care of yourself” sense (not the “buying bath bombs” sense). The Anxiety and Depression Association of America points out, “a brisk walk or other simple activity can deliver several hours of relief [from anxiety or depression symptoms], similar to taking an aspirin for a headache.” To be clear, exercise is not a replacement for therapy or medication, but it’s a powerful tool that can be used by people both with and without clinical mental health diagnoses.
So by enforcing a day of rest, I was depriving myself of one of my simplest and most accessible tools for managing my mental health. Once I put it that way, the answer was obvious. I had to get off my butt.
Doing things has a cost—my body has to expend energy, and will need to repair itself—but doing nothing also has a cost. I was at first skeptical of the idea that rest itself was the problem. But one day I said, fine. Let’s go for a walk on rest days, and see if that changes anything. Just a walk. Not a killer workout, not an hour on the spin bike, not an extra weightlifting session (although I have experimented with all of these as “rest” day exercise, and they are all effective at banishing the crankiness). A walk.
What to do on your “rest” days instead of resting
First, determine how much recovery your body needs, and what activities you can fit in while still allowing it to adequately recover. If you only exercise three days a week, you can certainly go for a walk on your off days. A five-minute exercise “snack” can also help: run up and down the stairs, swing a kettlebell, do a few burpees. It’s only five minutes. You aren’t making your body recover from a full workout, so you aren’t defeating the purpose of your rest day. Any of the suggestions from our post on active recovery days would work, too: yoga, hiking, or swimming, to name a few.
One cool thing about exercise is that the more of it you do, the more work capacity you build. Somebody spends two hours in the gym every weekday can probably handle a 30-minute easy jog on their rest day. It’s not rest, but it also doesn’t need to be; the important factor is whether your body is getting the recovery time it needs, which doesn’t necessarily mean an entire day.
The key to striking the right balance is remembering to consider both your physical health and your mental health. If you exercise so obsessively that your body never gets a rest, that is a problem in itself. Compulsive exercise can lead to physical problems like injuries, hormonal issues, RED-S, or increased susceptibility to illness. It can also be a sign of mental health problems, in the same vein as an eating disorders or obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m not suggesting that you should exercise constantly, just that you should take care of both your body and your brain—and rest is not the only way to do that.