Micro-Rest When You’re Exhausted

When the fatigue is deeper than sleep and you've still got loads to do, here's what I've learned.

The exhaustion around me is palpable. It’s deeper than just needing more sleep—it’s driven by overwhelming workloads, stress about job security, rising costs of living. Add to that the rapid pace of change in social media, AI, news, global conflicts, and the isolation of modern living. People are overwhelmed and burned out.

You likely know this feeling. You feel it in your bones.

So what can we do about this exhaustion?

I’ll make a confession that feels strange to say, but I know is important: Once a week, I stay in bed for a late morning. Not on the weekends—those are typically filled with kids waking up too early and starting dance parties. But during the week, I give myself permission to rest. It’s hard to do, especially for someone like me, who was trained in the corporate world where productivity is the gold standard.

Hustle culture teaches us that if we’re resting, we’re ‘lazy’ or ‘underperforming.’ We’re told to maximize every hour of the day, become more efficient, and pack our mornings with multiple habits to ‘win.’

Maximize all hours of your day, productivity experts shout.

Increase your efficiency and output, systems experts tell us.

If you’re not doing 5 things in your morning routine, are you even winning?

I learned, painfully, that if you push all the time, your body will demand rest. Constantly pushing ourselves leads to burnout, illness, exhaustion, and apathy. At some point, more coffee, cold plunges, habits, or routines won’t repair the 100+ hour work weeks that people do trying to balance parenting, care taking, life, and work.

The solution is to carve out rest in more unusual ways.

cozy curled up in bed reading a book in my pajamas happy

Good rest is the unlock to real productivity.

Our culture doesn’t prioritize rest. It asks people to push harder, and then replaces people when they burn out. In today’s world, prioritizing rest is a radical act.

The biggest fallacy of rest is the idea that it will happen later. Only after you finish this big project will you take a vacation. The problem with this thinking is that most of the time it doesn’t work. There’s always another project or deadline. When you finally get that big break or vacation, often people get sick — it’s shown that when people push themselves too hard for too long, their bodies collapse afterwards.

Rest needs to happen every day. It’s like earning money: sure, it’s nice to think about winning the lottery, but it’s almost always a better strategy to set up an automatic savings that happens in small, regular amounts.

This is where micro-rest comes in.

MICRO REST: the small, daily practices to add rest and recovery back to our lives as part of our long-term leadership, life, and wellness strategy.

Micro-rest is the small, daily practices that help us recover and sustain ourselves over the long term. These practices don’t require big chunks of time, but they add up to better long-term wellness and productivity. What does micro-rest look like?

• Stretching after back-to-back meetings

• Taking a slow morning once a week

• Doing deep exhales and stretching your eyes every couple of hours

• Setting a timer to roll your shoulders back twice a day

• Doing a quick gratitude journal in the morning

• Pausing in your car for a few minutes of silence before or after meetings

• Taking a social media or news break for the day

• Enjoying a leisurely lunch

• No-meeting Mondays

The key to micro-rest is that it’s small enough to start today. It’s the kind of rest you can stack with other habits—like stretching while waiting for your coffee to brew. Over time, these practices help you feel better immediately and leave you less exhausted at the end of the day.

The mindset shift that need to happen

The hardest part of building this practice is breaking the cycle of constant productivity. When you're in "hustle mode," the brain tells you to keep going—"Just one more thing!" But the art of micro-rest is learning to stop, even for a moment. It’s about developing the muscle of pausing and checking in with your body before pushing forward.

Constant productivity is like an invisible “Dopamine Stairmaster” that gets a reward for checking things off the list. This monster tells you not to stop. It’s this moment, when you’re in the middle of the push, that you learn to pause and say, right now, let’s take two deep breathes. Let me check in with my body. This is the key practice. For many, this “rest muscle” is atrophied and out of practice.

This isn’t easy. The first 30 days are the hardest, but micro-rest becomes more natural over time. You’ll begin to notice that these small shifts add energy back into your life, instead of draining it.

Every time you push harder, you also need to rest.

• It means unpacking the scripts that we’ve been sold about hustle culture, working overtime, and pushing harder at all costs.

• It means testing and iterating to find the ways that we can rest effectively so that our capacity actually improves.

• It also means understanding the long game, and being honest about the real consequences are when you force yourself into overdrive for too long.

Tiny micro-shifts that add up

We are humans, not machines. Rest is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it’s not just for founders, entrepreneurs, or high-powered execs—it’s for everyone. Parents, caregivers, and those juggling multiple roles need to build rest into their lives as a non-negotiable practice.

For me, it’s about taking one midweek morning to rest and reset. After getting the kids off to school, I jump back into bed, sip tea, and relax. It’s a simple act, but it’s my way of resisting the pressure to constantly push. Rest doesn’t have to be a luxury reserved for vacations. Through tiny—sometimes rebellious—acts, we can make it part of our daily lives.

How do you carve out moments of rest in your own schedule? What are your favorite downtime practices, especially if they go against conventional wisdom? I'd love to hear how you incorporate rest and recovery into your daily life.

— Sarah K Peck
CEO & Founder

To read more about the seven types of rest we need, and why social time, creative time, and community activities matter, check out The Seven Types of Rest We Need →

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👋 I’m Sarah K Peck and I’m the founder of Startup Parent, where we think about building businesses, lives, and families differently than the norm. My motto? We don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. Join me if you want to imagine (and build!) better futures for work, life, and parenting — I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky.

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