The Rest Gap: Why Women Must Reclaim Rest as a Wellness Priority

In modern society, rest appears neutral — a universal human need. Yet research and lived experience reveal a more complicated truth: rest is not equally distributed. Women are resting less, and when they do, that rest is often fragmented, interrupted, or burdened with guilt.

This disparity is not accidental. It reflects longstanding societal structures that assign invisible labor, emotional responsibility, and moral obligation to women’s time.

This phenomenon has increasingly been described as the “rest gap” — the unequal access to restorative rest between genders, rooted in historical labor divisions, cultural conditioning, and institutional inequities. The rest gap is not simply about being tired. It is about being systematically denied the conditions that make genuine restoration possible. 

What is The Rest Gap

The rest gap is not a matter of poor time management or personal choice. It is about how women’s time is valued — or devalued — by workplaces, families, communities, and even by women themselves.

Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2020) shows that women globally spend significantly more time than men on unpaid labor — cooking, caregiving, cleaning, scheduling, emotional coordination, and household logistics. These tasks are essential to societal stability, yet they remain economically invisible.

Similarly, UN Women reports that women and girls spend more than 2.5 times as many hours per day on unpaid care work as men worldwide. The result is time poverty — a chronic scarcity of discretionary hours that limits rest, professional advancement, and self-renewal.

Psychiatrist and author Pooja Lakshmin, in her book Real Self-Care, captures the dilemma clearly: “Women often confuse coping mechanisms with self-care. They squeeze in a moment of quiet between tasks but are never truly off-duty.”

A bath between meetings is not rest. Scrolling alone at midnight is not restoration. These are pauses within labor — not freedom from it.

The Mental Load: The Invisible Weight

Beyond physical tasks lies the mental load — the cognitive labor of anticipating needs, tracking details, and managing the emotional ecosystem of a household.

Remembering appointments. Planning meals. Coordinating school logistics. Monitoring moods. These responsibilities are constant and largely unseen. Unlike physical chores, mental load follows women even when they appear inactive. It lingers in the background of “downtime,” preventing true psychological rest.

A 2022 global report by Deloitte found that 53% of women reported higher stress levels than the year before, with burnout cited as a leading reason for leaving jobs. Many of these women were balancing full-time employment with disproportionate unpaid domestic work.

The exhaustion is not simply physical. It is cognitive and emotional — and therefore harder to validate.

Rest and Guilt: A Cultural Intersection 

Even when women carve out time for themselves, rest is often shadowed by guilt.

Across many cultures — including African, diasporic, and faith-based communities — women are socialized to embody strength, endurance, and self-sacrifice. While resilience is celebrated, it can quietly harden into expectation. The “strong woman” archetype leaves little room for softness.

Rest, in such contexts, may be interpreted as neglect of duty or selfishness. A woman who withdraws for a day may be questioned. The one who exhausts herself for others is praised.

Over time, these narratives become internalized. Women do not merely lack time to rest; they struggle to permit themselves to rest.

Rest Is Not a Reward. It Is a Biological Necessity. 

Rest is often framed as something earned — a luxury granted after productivity. But biologically and psychologically, rest precedes performance.

Chronic sleep deprivation — common among women balancing multiple roles — is associated with emotional blunting, heightened anxiety, and reduced positive affect. A 2023 meta-analysis by the American Psychological Association confirms that insufficient sleep significantly impairs emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility.

Rest is not indulgence. It is infrastructure. Without it, resilience deteriorates.

Reimagining What Rest Looks Like 

Closing the rest gap requires expanding our understanding of rest itself. Rest is not limited to sleep or physical stillness. It includes:

• Cognitive rest – reducing multitasking and mental noise
• Sensory rest – stepping away from screens and constant stimulation
• Emotional rest – pausing from caretaking and relational labor
• Creative rest – releasing the pressure to produce or perform
• Spiritual rest – reconnecting with values, reflection, and meaning

This reframing shifts rest from reactive collapse — “I can’t continue” — to proactive protection — “I must preserve my well-being.”

Rest becomes preventative care, not emergency recovery.

From Rest Deprivation to Rest Equity

If meaningful change is to occur, rest must be treated not solely as a wellness trend but as a matter of structural equity.

Imagine policies that:

• Offer paid caregiving leave
• Recognize the economic value of domestic labor
• Normalize mental health days and encourage their use
• Support flexible work structures
• Build community-based care models so rest is not an individual burden

The solution is not to ask women to “optimize” themselves further. It is to create conditions where restoration is possible without apology.

Toward Rest Literacy

Bridging the rest gap requires what might be called rest literacy — understanding when, why, and how to rest, and recognizing it as legitimate.

This demands cultural shifts. We must teach girls that their worth is not measured by output. We must challenge corporate environments that reward burnout as ambition. Faith and community spaces must reclaim rest as sacred, not selfish.

Leadership must model boundaries. Parenting must model balance. Activism must model sustainability.

Without literacy, rest remains abstract. With it, rest becomes actionable.

Rest Is a Human Right

Women have carried families, economies, and movements on their shoulders for generations. But even the strongest shoulders require relief.

Rest is not failure.
It is not absence.
It is not weakness.

It is a conscious, courageous act of reclaiming time, energy, and agency.

When we name and confront the rest gap, we begin dismantling the invisible systems that erode women’s well-being. In doing so, we open the possibility of a more humane culture — one where wholeness is valued over performance, and restoration is understood not as a privilege, but as a right.

In advocacy for women’s well-being,

Dr. Lilian O. Ebuoma,
The Inspirer