The inspiration for this article is brought to you by one of the nastiest colds I’ve ever had. You know, the kind of cold that makes your head feel like a balloon, your eyes won’t stop watering, you can barely breathe out of your nose and your whole body feels like it was run over by a truck. A cold that no doubt was brought on by my own inability to allow myself to rest – in refusing to have a night in and ignoring the signs from my body that it needed a few extra hours of sleep on the weekend.

It almost feels a little silly to be writing this, because for the most part I feel like the majority of people have no trouble taking a night for themselves to curl up in bed and indulge in a much-needed netflix binge. But it wasn’t until this cold forced me to skip the gym, cancel all my plans and left me in bed with a cup of tea and watching Sex and the City reruns that I realized just how terrible I am at with taking time for myself to rest.

I find that I often feel like if my planner isn’t filled to the brim with back-to-back appointments, gym sessions and running errands that I’m not being productive; that if I end up without exciting plans on a Friday night or have downtime in the middle of the week that I’ll clearly be missing out on something. And it’s a constant pressure that only seems to intensify as the holiday season approaches.

I don’t know when this “I’m-so-busy-I-barely-have-time-to-breathe” mentality became so glorified, but it’s something I constantly encountered in my college classrooms and in small talk with previous colleagues. It almost seems like people like bragging about how little sleep they got because of how much work they had to do or about all of the occasions they were forced to go to that weekend but didn’t really want to attend.