In The Great Rest Experiment, Sarah sits at the kitchen table at the end of a long day. The coffee cup has already broken. The manifesto is half-written. And then she sees a photo on the windowsill. Herself on a beach, eight years ago, head thrown back, laughing at her husband’s dad joke about seagulls.

She looked light.

I miss you, she whispers to the woman in the photo. And the words, welling up out of nowhere, surprise her with how true they are.

That scene sparked my own curiosity, and I did something I hadn’t planned to do.

I went looking for old photos of myself.

I wanted to see if I could tell, just by looking at my face, whether I had been rested.

It turns out you can. With a bit of squinting.

It also turns out it’s not always the photo you’d expect.

There’s one from a family wedding.

My son was three. He was the page boy, in the cutest little suit, cheeky smile, and the chaotic energy of an Energizer bunny on a sugar high. My daughter was four months old and she wasn’t sleeping well. She would only sleep face-down on my chest, which meant I was, for the duration of the wedding, a vertical bed on legs.

I was still carrying the post-baby weight I had not yet made peace with, in a dress I was not entirely comfortable in.

In the photo, I am smiling, and you’d be forgiven for thinking I was having a perfectly nice day at a perfectly normal wedding.

What the smile hid was an exhausted woman, with two young kids, managing the entire day on her own.

I was not a rested woman. I was just doing a very good impression of one.

So, I kept looking.

And I’m going to be honest: I couldn’t find one, not at first.

I went back through about twenty-two years of photos, and I couldn’t find one where I looked properly rested. Not one where I had managed to get enough sleep for one night. Rested rested. Me with shoulders down, face soft and a genuine smile on my face.

Don’t get me wrong - there were lots of photos of me smiling. Holidays, parties, school functions, family events, Christmases.

And looking at those photos now, I could see it.

I looked like a woman having a perfectly normal life.

Turns out I was carrying far more than I knew.

The first photo I could find where I looked properly rested was taken in my mid-forties, post-separation, at the end of a five-day Kahuna massage training in Queensland. I’d been massaged within an inch of my life by total strangers for the better part of a week (although they certainly weren’t strangers by the end of it!).

It took forty-something years and a small army of massage therapists in training to get her into a photograph.

And if I’m honest, it’s not the most attractive photo of me. No makeup with unwashed hair pulled back into a messy bun.

But that’s not the point. The point is, I look rested. I am glowing and relaxed. My smile is genuine.

I’m telling you because I think a lot of you will go looking through your own photos and find the same thing.

That some of the smiling photos aren’t always the rested ones.

You may not have a photo of rested one yet, because nobody photographs you when you’re properly resting. You’re usually on a couch in tracksuit pants and fluffy socks, and the last thing you want is your photo taken.

Sarah whispered, I miss you to the woman in the photograph. Looking through my own photos this month, I realised:

I wasn’t missing a younger version of myself.

I was missing a rested one.

The scene this comes from sits in The Coffee Cup Rebellion in my book, if you’d like to sit with Sarah at the kitchen table yourself.

That’s this week’s field report from inside The Great Rest Experiment.

(The seagull joke, for the record:
Q: Why do seagulls fly over the sea?
A: Because if they flew over the bay, we’d call them bagels.

Sarah’s husband was right. It’s a good one.)

See you next Sunday.

Carolyn x

If looking through old photos this week has stirred something up, the audio practice below is a short guided reset. It’s for sitting with the woman in the photograph, whether you found her or not. Paid subscribers, come on in.

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New dispatches from the experiment land on Sundays.
Come and see what happens.

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This practice also lives in The Rest Lounge - a growing library of short recorded rest practices. Come on in x

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Towards the end of last year I was reading the local paper. Yes, the real paper, the one that still leaves ink on your fingers (and on the table, and apparently on my nose) and came across this gem. Frances Whiting wrote:

To be honest, I am ending this year so tired I can barely lift my head. I have not finished any of the jobs I was meant to do. I feel like I finish one domestic task only to start another, when all I really want to do is sprinkle some rose petals over a persimmon salad. In fact, I want to spend my whole life just sprinkling petals on things. I don’t care what. I want to float around my house wearing white linen and gold hoop earrings. I want to smell like a scented candle, and I want one of those baskets that drape over your arm and then fill it with flowers I have just snipped from my own garden with a pair of attractive scissors.

Honestly, I felt it. Who doesn’t have fantasies of floating around the house in white linen, smelling like a scented candle, clipping flowers from your lush garden with attractive scissors, sprinkling rose petals on everything in sight?

I also snorted because… white linen? Please. Think of the dirt and, don’t get me started on the wrinkles.

But then I laughed because, well. I have the same fantasy (with slight variations). Mine includes a particular kind of late-afternoon light (I call it Goldilocks light), a couch that has soft squishy cushions, a mug that does not have a chip in the handle, and a real book (not one on my phone) that I am, in this fantasy, actually reading instead of going through in my head the 20 gazillion things I could be doing instead.

And then this week, I thought about that quote and caught myself.

The version of rest in Frances’s column, the white-linen-persimmon-salad version, isn’t just a fantasy. It’s a particular kind of fantasy.

The kind that lives in the future, where it’s always just out of reach, but vaguely possible if we tried a little harder.

This photogenic, Pinterest-perfect version of rest is doing a job we don’t admit it’s doing.
It keeps rest at a polite distance and at arm’s length. Always close enough to believe in, but far enough away to never actually choose.

When it’s hovering just out of reach, we can keep nodding at it without ever sitting down. We can imagine what the perfect linen and lighting and mug will be like, while the perfect-for-today afternoon, couch and cat sit there waiting.

I caught myself doing this on the weekend.

Couch.
Trackie pants.
Boobs down to my waist.
A random mug full of hot tea and a bowl of grapes.
A book on my phone.
The cat trying to negotiate her way onto my lap which meant I’d have to move my legs.

By every reasonable definition: I was resting.

I just wasn’t enjoying it.

Not because rest wasn’t happening. It was.

I was, technically, doing the thing. I was not moving. I was not doing. I was simply there.

But my brain kept looking for a version that was nicer. It was as if some internal director was hovering just out of shot, muttering: This is fine, but could we get a softer cushion? A different angle? Possibly a charcuterie board with soft cheeses? You know what, let’s just do this whole scene again with better mood lighting.

I was resting while simultaneously pulling holes in it for not being aesthetic enough, and while treating rest like a reward for achieving just the right atmosphere.

I had become (gasp!) a rest snob!

The lighting must be soft, warm white, not white white, not overhead
The cup must match the saucer (we do not own saucers… or cups… or cups AND saucers)
The book must be the right book (not the one I’m actually reading)
The cat must sit next to me, not on me
The temperature must ideally sit between 21 and 23 degrees C
I must be tired, but not too tired that I fall asleep and miss my rest
The room must be tidy enough that I can see it without spiralling (or be at least out of my line of sight)
I must have snacks, but the good kind
I must not have had too much water so that I have to get up and pee
Nobody in the house must require anything from me for at least the next forty minutes (and that includes the cat)
The dog next door must not be barking
The toddler next door (other side) must not have a tantrum outside
I must, ideally, look like someone who is resting well

I read that list back and I would like to state for the record:
I am aware that this is absurd.
It is fairly obvious that these conditions were never designed to be met, because they were designed to keep rest at a polite, well-lit distance.

Which is much safer than the alternative.

The alternative being… lying on the floor in your tracksuit pants and accepting that this is what it looks like.

It is much, much less impressive.
But it is also the one that works.

What rest actually looks like, in real life, in the actual conditions of an actual weekday afternoon:

Five minutes in the car before you walk into the house, because the stereo is playing something really good and your shoulders have just dropped half an inch and you don’t want to lose the feeling.

An accidental Sunday nap on the couch with a thriller novel face-down on the floor, waking up with cushion-creases on your cheek and the cat’s smug satisfaction radiating from its perch on your chest.

Five minutes in the break room with a glass of fancy filtered water, while a colleague raises a single eyebrow and you say I’m taking a break like you’re announcing a career change.

Sitting on the kitchen floor in slippers you should have replaced two years ago, watching the coffee soak slowly toward the gap under the fridge.

None of these are Instagram-worthy.
None of them require white linen and rose petals.
Some of them are weirdly specific.

I’m not saying I’ve made peace with this yet as I haven’t.

The internal director is still hovering (and shouting ‘cut!’ all over the place).
I will be sorting out my mug cupboard… soon.
The tracksuit pants are objectively not doing me any favours, but they are sooooo comfy (and they stretch).

But I have started, just barely, to take rest as it actually is.

Trackie pants rest.
Chipped mug rest.
No good snacks rest.
The dog next door is barking and I am still here rest.

My body, annoyingly, appears willing to rest under fluorescent conditions.
Badly. Briefly. In socks and no bra.

So, that’s this week’s field report from inside The Great Rest Experiment.

See you next Sunday.

Carolyn x

If rest this week has felt like one more thing to get right, the audio practice below is a short guided reset. For the rest that doesn't need to be tidy. Paid subscribers, come on in.

Subscribe now

New dispatches from the experiment land on Sundays.
Come and see what happens.

Join the experiment here

This practice also lives in The Rest Lounge - a growing library of short recorded rest practices. Come on in x

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Would you prefer to listen? Here is me reading this week’s article. One take.

Last week I wrote about a different kind of resistance.

The lights-off kind.

The kind where rest doesn’t even arrive to be declined because you were never really in the room when the option appeared.

Small update from inside the experiment: apparently I live there now.

I sat down to write this and realised I had nothing to report. There was no clear moment where I could point my finger and say: There. I rested there.

I actually went looking for at least one moment through the week too. It reminded me of when you go looking for the remote: pulling up cushions, retracing your steps, accusing everyone in the house of stealing it, and hoping it somehow got put back in the place it should be (it wasn’t).

Those moments weren’t there.

There was just a full week of doing. Busy, low-level, let’s-just-get-through-this-week energy. The kind where you’re technically occupied all day but, if someone asked what you actually did, you’d wave your hands around and say ‘Oh, you know, stuff… life… the usual’ or worse, ‘Oh, nothing much… same ol’, same ol’’.

And here’s the slightly mortifying part:

I had time.

Quite a lot of it, to be honest.

There were gaps between clients, including a large one on Tuesday when someone cancelled. There was open space on my days off. Most evenings were free.

But somehow the space kept filling itself before it could become anything intentional.

I know I was at my computer a lot. Tweaking things. Rewriting things. Doing small tasks that didn’t feel urgent but somehow kept breeding like rabbits.

Then there were the usual suspects: errands, life admin, client notes, YouTube, replying to one email and accidentally acquiring four more, YouTube (again).

Just for fun, here’s a partial list titled: ‘What I did instead of stopping this week’

- Reorganised my Google Drive folders
- Watched multiple YouTube videos about how to moonwalk and how soon can I retire?
- Rebooted my computer a number of times because it wasn’t talking to my printer
- Took 6 bags of ‘stuff’ to Red Cross
- Researched shower heads (1. Because I need one and 2. Because research is always a good thing)
- Cleared and cleaned my desk (which is actually my dining room table) and put all my notes away so I can’t see them (they’re creeping back in)

None of this was dramatic.

And to be fair, it wasn’t all go-go-go.

I did rest a little, in my own way.

I went dancing a few times, which genuinely felt good in my body. Got my hair done (this is surprisingly not as restful considering you sit down for at least 90 minutes). My youngest and I went to a 90s silent disco in the Anglican Cathedral which, if you’re wondering, was exactly as good as it sounds.

But all of those things were already decided.

Scheduled. Booked. Paid for. Expected. Held in place by other people.

The one small decision I’ve just thought of is I did have a bath last night. Not to rest though, but because it was cold and my muscles were aching after dancing 2 ½ hours on a tiled floor in a packed cathedral. Certainly not intentional: more a reaction to how I was feeling at the time. Maintenance maybe? Less rest, more servicing.

The unscheduled moments — the ones last week’s post was actually talking about — disappeared under the low hum of doing.

Which, honestly, was a bit confronting.

Because last week, when I wrote about resistance, I still thought I was talking about choice.

As in: I could rest here… but I won’t.

But this week didn’t feel like that.

This week felt like a blur. Like I had an app running in the background. Automatic. On autopilot.

I’d look up and realise it was dark outside (not hard when it gets dark at 5.45pm, but still)

My body was already moving toward doing something else before my brain even caught up.

Rest never even entered the building.

The door was open. The comfy chair was ready and waiting. Nobody arrived.

And I think that’s the part I’m only just starting to understand:

You can’t change a pattern you’re not even present for.

Last week, I noticed the moments and skipped past them anyway.

This week, I could barely find the moments at all.
(Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.)

(The experiment, as you may have gathered, is not going smoothly. And I am, as always, the experiment.)

Still.

Now that I’ve named it out loud, it feels like the Spotto game (for those not in Australia, this is a game where, when you see a yellow car, you call out ‘Spotto!’). I could call it ‘Resto’ (Yes? No?)

And maybe that’s where this starts.

By noticing the opportunity to rest before I disappear into another unnecessary administrative task involving a drawer, a Google drive, or a very expensive visit from the plumber.

Anyway.

That’s this week’s field report from inside The Great Rest Experiment.

One final thing before I disappear back into the experiment: Going forward, I’m settling into one Sunday letter a week: the long, slow read this experiment has always wanted to be (I got caught up in the hustle for a bit there). The Wednesday posts will fold into Sunday from now on. (Less from me, more depth in each piece. What do you think?)

See you next Sunday.

Carolyn x

If your week has been a low hum of doing too: where rest didn’t get refused, it just never made the agenda, the audio practice below is a short guided reset. For the moments when you’ve been in motion so long you’ve forgotten stopping is even an option. Paid subscribers, come on in.

Subscribe now

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New dispatches from the experiment land on Sundays.
Come and see what happens.

Join the experiment here

Would you like to listen to me read this? (One take)

Read

Apparently there’s more than one way to not rest.

The first kind is the one you can see happening.
An appointment/catchup/meeting/lunch date gets cancelled. There’s thirty minutes (or more if you’re lucky) of unscheduled time sitting right there, looking at you with puppy dog eyes. Pick me, pick me.

And you choose…
The inbox.
Or your phone.
Or reorganising a drawer that absolutely did not need reorganising but suddenly feels critical to the functioning of modern society (or at least your household).

You saw the available time. You knew you had plenty of time to rest. You thought about it for two seconds. You picked Door C.

Rest is somewhere below reply to obscure Medicare email and find out why the freezer suddenly has an annoying buzz.

That’s resistance with the lights on.

But there is a second kind, and it’s sneakier because it doesn’t even show up to be declined.

The second kind is the day you look back at 6pm and try to find the moment where stopping might have even been possible.

It isn’t there.

There was time. There might have been quite a lot of time, in actual fact. But you were never in the room when the option came up.

There was no moment of Ooh, I could sit down here… but I won’t. There was just… doing. A flat, hummy, low-grade doing. The kind where you’re technically busy all day but, if someone asked, you wouldn’t be able to tell them what you did.

And the whole point is that you don’t notice it happening.

You strap on your metaphorical running shoes, take off at a sprint, and never slow down long enough to spot it.

You can’t refuse a thing you didn’t see arrive.

This is also resistance. And to push the analogy further… resistance with the lights off.

Where did the unscheduled time go?

It went into the small tasks. The bins. The laundry. The slightly important but not actually urgent email about domain name renewals that expire next month. The quick scroll that turns into a YouTube rabbithole into Swedish death cleaning. The just-one-more-bill-to-update for your parents. The cat, who needs nothing.
(But you check anyway.) Again. For the fifth time. As if she really needs watching while she sunbakes on the deck.

We call this productivity. Or getting things done. (Which sounds much nicer than: remaining in motion so you don’t accidentally make eye contact with your own exhaustion.)

…the possibility that if you stop moving, you might actually feel how tired you really are.

The second kind of resistance is a default setting. Like an app running in the background that drains the battery and is surprisingly hard to delete.

It has nothing to do with willpower or mindset. It’s a body doing what bodies do when they’ve spent years (decades) learning that being busy equals safety, and stillness equals uncertainty.

Or worse:
Awareness.
Which feels a bit bolshy for a Wednesday afternoon.

I know this because, as I wrote about a few weeks ago, I can lose an entire afternoon to tasks that technically count as life admin.

There’s no clever solution for this, unfortunately. But there is one small move — possibly the only one that matters — and that is to put yourself back in the room when the option comes up.

Sometimes the first step isn’t even about choosing rest at all.

Sometimes it’s just catching yourself halfway to reorganising a drawer you did not care about thirty seconds ago.

On Sunday I get a bit more honest: the inside-the-experiment version, which I’ll warn you in advance is messy. There’s also a guided rest practice tucked in for paid subscribers, for when you’d rather be walked into rest than just read about it. (Reading about rest while not resting is, I can confirm, an art form.)

See you Sunday.

Carolyn x

New dispatches from the experiment land on Wednesdays and Sundays.
Come and see what happens.

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Would you prefer to listen? Here is me reading this week’s article. One take.

We’re one week in. Here’s where I am.

My left knee has been writing me letters, on and off, since around October last year. When my knee is good, there’s a blissful silence, but when it’s not, it writes short, pointed sentences with things like please, and oi mate, I’d like a word, and most recently excuse me, you appear to have forgotten I exist. (Is it just me, or did you read them in different accents? It was just me? OK then.)

I have been receiving these letters with the cheerful optimism of a woman who fully intends to deal with them… just perhaps not today. Today I have a lot on. Today is busy. Today I’m just gonna slip on my knee brace and crack on.

The thing about writing a book on rest is that you could be excused for being tired in an interesting way. A ‘frisson of ennui’ tired. The kind of tired that looks good in an author bio photo.

What you are not supposed to be is the woman who has been ignoring her own knee for the better part of a year because she’s too busy writing about how to ‘listen to your body’.

Here is a partial list titled ‘Things I Try to Ignore About My Knee’:
- Wincing internally then acting like nothing happened
- Cursing under my breath on the stairs to dance classes
- Forgetting to stretch (which implies there are actually times I remember; there are not)
- Hoping I can sleep it off
- Stretching discreetly between dancing like it’s deliberate
- Noticing the throbbing only after finishing a paragraph about body awareness

Somewhere between writing about rest and tightening my knee brace before dance class, I made the assumption that understanding myself counts as taking care of myself.

Annoyingly, it does not.

So this week, in the interests of science, I sat down and read one of the letters.

It wasn’t a long one, but my knee has been saying the same thing in slightly different ways, with varying degrees of impatience, for months.

October was gentle. December was follow-up emails. By March my knee had moved into the realm of passive-aggressive calendar invites and texts in ALL CAPS.

You’re bracing every time you stand up.
You don’t need to.
We’ve been over this.
REALLY? You’re doing that without warming up first?
All of it was perfectly reasonable.
I just kept ignoring it.

I think part of me knew the letter wasn’t asking to be read politely and then forgotten.

It was asking for something to change.

And honestly, I did not feel like I had room in my life for another thing that needed care.

I think I was afraid that if I listened properly, it would ask me to stop (and I just can’t atm).

I’d like to tell you that reading the letter fixed the knee. I wish! My knee is still sore.

What shifted was that I finally acknowledged it instead of ignoring it and hoping it would just fix itself. Like the way a child stops tugging at your sleeve the moment you crouch down and look at them. (Except I wouldn’t crouch because my knee hurts when I do that, so this analogy really doesn’t work, does it?)

That’s all the noticing was. Sixty seconds of: you’ve been writing, I’ve been pretending not to see. Just by opening one envelope.

I’m telling you this because if you have just arrived at the experiment and you’re already wondering:
am I doing it right?
am I noticing the right things?
is anything supposed to be happening yet?
does everyone else have a more expressive body…?
please know that I, the one writing the experiment, spent this weekend apologising to my knee.

The only thing Week 1 is asking of you is to read one letter. Not the whole stack. One.

Yours might also be the knee. It might be the jaw. It might be the small, persistent twitch under your left eye that drives you crazy. Or maybe it’s the sigh you keep doing in the kitchen that bursts out of you when you’re not looking.

Whichever one it is, it has been writing for a while.

It has been very patient with you, all things considered.

The odd thing is that my knee did not seem angry once I finally listened.

Mostly, it seemed relieved to be acknowledged.

That’s this week’s field report from inside The Great Rest Experiment.

I’ll see you next week.

Carolyn x

If you’d like to be guided rather than just read about it, the audio practice and this week’s Anchor card are below. The audio is short (about six minutes), designed for the kind of week where even rest feels mildly ambitious.

Anchor Card

P.S. This first week is for all subscribers.

Going forward, the audio practice and anchor card will be for paid subscribers only in The Rest Lounge.

Subscribe now

New dispatches from the experiment land on Sundays.
Come and see what happens.

Join the experiment here

What is The Sunday Reset?

The Sunday Reset isn’t a series of one-off thoughts. It’s a year-long experiment, moving through nine different types of rest, one month at a time. So the writing is grouped accordingly:

→ Foundations is where the always-there bits live: what this whole thing is, who it’s for, and how it works.

→ Rest Articles is the deeper background: the why of rest, the science, the cultural baggage, the bits that don’t fit neatly inside a monthly theme but are worth knowing.

→ Months 0 through 9 are the experiment itself. Each month has its own room, with its own theme, its own posts, and its own quietly chaotic discoveries.

Month 0: Arriving is where we are right now: the long deep breath before the experiment proper begins.

You can read in order if you’re that way inclined, or skip to whichever month sounds like the one you need this week. There’s no wrong way in.

It lands on Sundays… too obvious??!
It’s short enough to read with a cup of tea.
It comes with a short audio version too, so you can listen on the way to work, the dog walk, or while pretending to do admin.

A small heads-up

This is a living experiment, some rooms are incomplete (no audio, but I may come back to them), or rooms further down the corridor may still be empty when you arrive. (Some of them I haven’t written yet. Some of them I haven’t lived yet.) With new posts landing on Sundays, the rooms will fill up as we go.

Looking for the rest practices, not the writing? The Rest Lounge is the other half of this space: short recorded rest practices for when you’d rather lie down than read. The door’s always open.

Carolyn x

Prefer to listen? This is a recording of me reading the article.

Read

There is a particular kind of tired that doesn’t show up in the mirror.

It’s the kind of tired where:
Your shoulders hover somewhere near your earlobes (for so long it feels normal).
Your jaw lives in a permanent low-grade clench that could cut diamonds.
You stand in front of your wardrobe most mornings and can’t choose between two navy shirts that are, on closer inspection, identical.
You sigh… a real, ribcage-emptying, what-is-even-the-point sigh, and you don’t know what it is for.

Your body is giving you signs… correspondence, memos, notes, messages, hints.

It’s been writing you letters for months (probably years), and you’ve been filing them under ‘I’ll deal with that later.’

The thing about later is that it has a way of arriving on Murphy’s Law time. Usually around 11pm on a Thursday, when your coffee mug (the favourite one you use all the time) stages its own small rebellion against gravity.

So, before any mug-related drama unfolds, I need you to know: the signals come long before the dropped mug.

The shoulders, the jaw, the wardrobe paralysis, the charger left on the kitchen counter while you sit in the car wondering what you’ve forgotten: these are the early letters.
The polite ones.
The ‘I don’t mean to interrupt, but…’ ones.
Formal letters written in your body’s neatest handwriting, hoping you’ll read them before it has to start using a louder pen.

And most of us get very, very good at not reading them.

We ignore the tight shoulders the way we ignore the petrol light when we’re already running late.
We override the I need a glass of water with another coffee.
We push through the I need to sit down for five minutes because we promised we’d get the job done before lunch.

We treat our bodies as wonky shopping trolleys: useful when they cooperate, really annoying when they don’t.
We stuff those letters down the back of the couch and hope they will go away.

What if, this week, you read one of the letters?

Not the whole stack (sheesh). And definitely not the one at the bottom that’s been there since 2017 and is probably load-bearing at this point.

Just the first one your body sends today.

You don’t have to journal it, breathe through it, fix it, talk to it, talk about it, or schedule a massage.

In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all except let your body know that you received the letter (thankyou very much), and someone is finally home to read it.

Anchor

On Sunday I’ll go deeper: the honest, slightly-less-tidy version.

Paid subscribers also get a short audio rest practice, because sometimes what you really need is a voice in your ear telling you it’s okay to lie down.

See you Sunday.

Carolyn x

New dispatches from the experiment land on Sundays.
Come and see what happens.

Join the experiment here