October 28, 2025
One of the first things I do each morning, before slinking quietly out of the dark room to avoid waking my still sleeping husband, is open the drawer under my bed and remove the workout clothes on top of the pile. Exercise has long been a part of my routine, a thing I get done early for a strong start to the day. I like to push myself, watch the numbers climb on my Apple watch. I like the feeling of having done what is hard.
Yesterday, dressed and ready for some huffing and puffing, I pulled up the App that tells me what to do each morning and found a surprise: recovery week. What? I was mentally gearing up for leg day. I nearly jettisoned the plan I faithfully follow for some rogue squats, when something in me paused. My five-year-old daughter had entered the room where I work out to ‘participate,’ ie lay on the couch with her lovey and watch. Something about her contented form, completely at ease doing nothing while I prepared to work so hard, drew me.
“Well,” I told her, “surprise. It’s recovery week.”
“Re-COV-er-y we-ek!” she echoes, surprised without knowing why. “What’s that?”
“Honestly, I’m not entirely sure,” I reply, who have never known a recovery week I didn’t try to minimize or avoid. “Let’s find out.”
I scoot next to her and together we watch a video where the coach makes an impassioned plea to people like me to let this week be different from the others. A Sabbath rhythm of sorts: seven weeks we work hard, but on the eight week we rest. She offers a scientific explanation, promises what it will do for my body. This is not laziness, not an excuse, not giving up. The strength you cultivate, the weight you seek to manage, your functional health—your resting does not risk it, she promises her followers, each of whom may be afraid in different ways of the risk it nonetheless seems to present.
In the face of that fear she invites an act of faith: You desire to be well? Give your body this time to recover.
Do I dare believe it could be possible?
Perhaps you have no such problem, accepting without question the invitation to abstain from exercise.
But perhaps you can resonate with the underlying fear. It is the same underlying impulse that crams our schedules, takes on too much, burn candles at both ends. You may experience it differently—but at its core it is familiar fear of not being enough—and that being enough depends entirely on you. If that’s true, who can afford recovery week?
(If you still don’t resonate, again, good! What peace you can share with we sorry lot who tremble in the shackles of the fear of inadequacy! Keep reading if not for you, for the friend who needs you.)
Personally, I know those fears well.
You’d think after taking a sabbatical I’d be a pro at recovery week, but that experience simply illuminated the challenging contrast to my normal way of being. I was mildly aware in real time, but as I review my journal from the opening stage of sabbatical, my own obsession with making the time count is apparent. I didn’t immediately slow down, just switched tracks, leveraging “recovery weeks” for active productivity in a different sphere. Fix this, clean that, organize here–I bustled about as a compulsive housewife.
On the surface I was tending to long-neglected areas of our personal life with this rare treasure of vast free time. Yes—but wasn’t I also barricading myself against an emptiness of identity, who we are when we do not do?
I felt in my bones I was not fully accepting the invitation of recovery week, but to truly stop doing was harder than merely stepping down from a job. It took two full months for me to be ready to take that risk. Even then, I sought to place the nothingness in a manageable time-bound package, dedicating a few weeks in July between family travel to the experiment of non-productivity. For these three risky weeks, I would accomplish nothing. I would allow myself to be inactive. I would accept the invitation to recovery week.
Would the world fall apart?
A ridiculous question, right? We can laugh and say no, of course not, even as we drive ourselves ever harder out of an internalized belief it might.
Perhaps the better question is personal:
What if the world doesn’t fall apart but ticks on just fine without me, and I’m not so critical after all? What if standing on the sidelines, I miss out on the big play? What if I don’t produce or accomplish the things that might have won me praise or admiration? Who might I be then?
Because it’s true, in a simple factual equation: if we rest, we likely miss out on some doing, miss an opportunity or achieve less visible success. The real question isn’t whether we “miss out,” but what that means, what it says about who we are and our significance.
I, for one, want to be a person who lives from the belief that I am not what I do.
Perhaps I become that by . . . not doing.
Those three weeks in July? They were magnificent. No world fell apart, though we’ll never know if my current lack of stardom and fantastical riches is the fault of those three weeks of dropping the ball.
What I know is ‘recovery weeks’ turn out to have done work from within, reshaping me toward the kind of person I want to be, who more easily believes what I suspect is really true, who can live while working actively as if this work does not define me.
The more I resist the fear and accept the risk of recovery week, the more I live in the joy of contentment and security. But so far, I haven’t attained perfection, alas. I keep finding new tunnels into my soul where the fear creeps back in.
I want to keep resisting.
This week, I will do so not by trying so hard, but by accepting the invitation to stop trying.
Perhaps you, too, need a recovery week? Maybe after a spell of pushing and striving you’re feeling the wear? Maybe you notice a stubborn belief about where your value lies that is at odds with what you desire to hold true in your enacted life, and not simply your mind?
Let the recovery week begin.
