Why We Wait for an Outage to Rest

When Outlook went down, a lot of people celebrated. Memes, relief, people openly happy that their inbox had gone quiet.

I understood that feeling better than I’d like to admit.

I was a competitive athlete for years. I won, I was disciplined, and people admired it. Nobody around me ever suggested I stop, because nothing looked wrong. Everything I was doing was being rewarded. Then my own body and mind stopped for me. And alongside everything else, there was a strange relief. Finally, someone else had pulled the plug.

That is why the celebration caught my attention. I don’t think it means people are lazy. Most people I’ve met care deeply about doing good work. I think it means many of us only get permission to stop when something outside us forces it. A server outage. A bad week. A collapse.

Here is what I’ve learned from 20 years in performance and wellbeing, and from writing a book about my own story. Rest that has to be justified isn’t rest. If you need a reason, an excuse or a breakdown before you allow yourself to pause, the problem is rarely your calendar. It’s the belief underneath it: that your worth depends on being useful.

I don’t think the answer is another resilience programme. I think it starts with a quieter question. What would change if you didn’t need a reason to stop?