Post by Amanda Moses

As we move towards the end of the year, there’s always a lot of talk about self-care and rest. I’ve been thinking less about rest as a set of activities, and more about what it feels like to come out of a year of sustained intensity. Stepping away from constant responsibility, decision-making, and holding space for others, and trying to settle back into the much quieter, more mundane rhythms of everyday life, is something I often find harder than I expect. As psychologists, we spend much of the year holding complexity, intensity, and other people’s emotions. Moving out of that space deserves care in its own right. For many psychologists, the end of the year doesn’t just bring relief. It brings a sudden quiet. Fewer demands, fewer decisions, less structure. That change can feel uncomfortable before it feels restful, and sometimes it just feels a bit strange. There can be a sense of flatness or unease that sits alongside the relief, rather than replacing it. I don’t know if this is a universal experience, but I know for myself, and for some others, that sudden pause can feel genuinely jarring. Rest also isn’t one thing, and it’s certainly not evenly available. What feels restorative for one person might feel inaccessible or unsettling for another. Caring responsibilities, financial pressure, health, and context shape what rest can realistically look like, regardless of how much we might want something different. For some, this season actually brings more pressure and more burden, rather than any real sense of rest. For me, ethical self-care at this time of year is mostly about taking some of the weight off. I’m planning to spend time with my kids, build Lego, go for swims, potter around at home, and see whether I can get absorbed in a fiction book for more than a few pages at a time. Having days without demands attached to them, and being able to choose how I spend my time, is what usually helps me settle. Whatever the next few weeks look like for you, I hope there’s some room for steadiness, for gentler rhythms, and for rest that fits your actual life, rather than an idealised version of what rest is supposed to be.