#191: Pleasure, Rest, & Feeling Good in a Culture of Chronic Stress
If the idea of prioritising pleasure or rest feels foreign—or even uncomfortable—you’re not alone. In a world that celebrates productivity, busyness, and relentless striving, the notion of slowing down and simply feeling good can seem radical. But what if that discomfort wasn’t a personal failing, but a natural response to the culture we’ve been shaped by?
In this post, I want to offer a gentle invitation to reimagine your relationship with rest, pleasure, and feeling good—not as indulgences or luxuries, but as essential components of wellbeing. Because I truly believe that when we stop outsourcing our vitality to achievement and start reclaiming our joy, everything shifts.
We Weren’t Meant to Live Like This
Before I became a relationship coach, before I spoke about attachment and self-worth, I was a corporate lawyer. I lived in the heart of hustle culture: long hours, chronic stress, and the unspoken belief that burnout was a badge of honour. For a while, I played the game. Until I realised I didn’t want to anymore.
Once you see the cost of that way of living, it’s hard to unsee it. And while not everyone is in a position to overhaul their life overnight, I believe we all deserve to question the systems we've inherited—particularly the ones that tell us feeling good has to be earned.
Because the truth is: you don't have to "deserve" rest. You don't have to prove yourself to earn pleasure. These things are not conditional rewards—they’re birthrights.
Why Pleasure and Rest Feel So Hard
There are many reasons we struggle to access rest and pleasure, even when we’re exhausted or depleted. Let’s unpack a few of the big ones:
1. Chronic stress as a baseline
If your nervous system is constantly in overdrive—always anticipating the next thing, bracing for impact—it’s incredibly difficult to slow down and feel good. Pleasure requires presence. And anxiety is the antithesis of presence. If you’re always rushing, mentally elsewhere, or feeling like you need to be productive to be safe or worthy, there’s little room left to feel.
2. Internalised beliefs about worth
Many of us carry deep scripts like: I have to earn rest. I’ll feel good once I finish everything. It’s selfish to prioritise myself. These beliefs often have roots in childhood or cultural conditioning and leave us in a state of perpetual self-abandonment. We care for everyone else first—and often, there’s nothing left over.
3. Hustle culture and identity
In our society, “busy” is code for “important.” We wear exhaustion like a badge of honour. And stepping outside of that can feel like a threat—not just to our sense of belonging, but to our identity. Saying no to overworking can feel rebellious. But it’s also the first step toward reclaiming your life.
Rest and Pleasure Are Not Luxuries
What if rest wasn’t something you earned at the end of a long day, but something you were worthy of—right now? What if feeling good wasn’t frivolous, but deeply regulating to your nervous system?
This isn’t about quitting your job and moving to the forest (although if that’s calling you, go for it!). It’s about small, meaningful shifts:
Drinking your morning coffee in the sun rather than at your desk.
Putting on soft clothes and actually noticing how they feel against your skin.
Pausing to inhale the scent of jasmine as you walk past a blooming bush.
Looking up at the sky. Really looking.
These are moments of nourishment. And they’re available now—not once everything is done, not once you’ve earned it.
Why This Matters (Especially If You’re Anxiously Attached)
For those with anxious attachment, life can feel like a constant scramble for safety and connection. We over-function, over-give, and overthink. We orient our nervous systems around others—trying to earn love, prove our worth, and secure our place in someone else’s life.
When you start to orient back toward yourself—your own pleasure, your own regulation, your own joy—you stop looking outward for all of your needs to be met. You stop outsourcing your sense of vitality. And that, quite honestly, changes everything.
FURTHER LINKS & RESOURCES:
Questions for Discussion & Reflection
What is your relationship to pleasure, rest, and feeling good? Do you find it easy or challenging to prioritise these in your daily life?
How has your upbringing or family culture shaped your beliefs about rest and pleasure? Are there messages you internalised about deserving (or not deserving) to feel good?
When, if ever, do you notice yourself feeling guilty or “lazy” when you rest or prioritise your own comfort? Where do you think these feelings come from?
Can you recall a recent moment when you truly slowed down and savoured something small (like a hot drink, a beautiful sunset, or a comfy pair of clothes)? What was that experience like for you?
Do you ever use busyness or constant activity as a way to avoid being present with yourself? How does this impact your sense of wellbeing?
In what ways might chronic stress or anxiety be keeping you from feeling at ease in your body or accessing pleasure in the present moment?
How does productivity culture show up in your life? Do you wear “being busy” as a badge of honour, or do you resist this cultural pressure?
Are there specific beliefs or stories you hold about what it means to take care of yourself—such as it being selfish or indulgent? Where do these stories come from?
If you could give yourself total permission to feel good for even five minutes a day, what might that look like? What might get in the way?
What small, specific adjustments could you make this week to orient more toward comfort, ease, or pleasure in your daily routine? How might these changes nourish you?
You might also like…
Episode Transcript
[00:00:04]:
In today's episode, we are talking all about pleasure, rest, and feeling good, and how you can use these things as tools to increase your sense of joy, well-being, and vitality. Now this as a topic might seem a little bit random for some of you, but this is actually one of my favorite things to speak about and teach on. And as a little fun fact, when I first started coaching, long before I had a podcast or even really spoke that much about attachment, this was the kind of thing that I was focusing on because I had just come from being a corporate lawyer, and I was perhaps in reaction to everything that I saw in that environment, which was the opposite of pleasure, rest, and feeling good. It was an environment that was characterized by burnout and overworking and hustle, and I had such a visceral reaction to that. As much as I spent a few years participating in it and being very much swept up in it all, as time went on, I really felt like my eyes were opened to how much I didn't want that for myself, how costly it was to operate at that level of chronic stress and busyness and burnout. And I think once you see it, it's kind of hard to unsee it.
[00:01:51]:
And personally, even though I did live like that for probably the better part of a decade, I think that deep down I've always had a baseline orientation towards pleasure and joy and spaciousness and rest and ease. That's a very comfortable home base for me, and so I definitely experienced a level of incongruence in being in that environment, and I'm so grateful that I listened to that and that I made some really big choices in my life to change pace, to reorganize my life around feeling good as a priority. And as we're going to talk about today, for a lot of people that is utterly foreign, And it may be that you have some really heavy conditioning around feeling good, whether that's coming from a worthiness place, like I don't deserve to feel good, or a place of productivity culture, hustle culture, like feeling good is a luxury, and maybe I will make time for pleasure or rest or joy when I finish all of the things that I have to do. And we all know that that probably means never because the to do list is never ending, feeling like those things are selfish or lazy. These things are heavily laden with conditioning and shame and so much density that it can be really, really revealing to examine our relationship to pleasure, to rest, to joy, to feeling good. And the reason I talk about this, I personally think that these are an end in themselves. It is not about using rest as a way to become more productive or some sort of mechanism to achieve more, to increase our capacity to keep pushing. I think that these things are essential just for our sense of well-being, which I think is a very worthy goal and something that deserves prioritization independent of anything else.
[00:03:53]:
But if we were to look at the bigger picture, it is undeniable that pleasure and rest and feeling good are incredible tools for nervous system regulation, for signaling to your body that you are safe. And we know that that is absolutely paramount in our overall sense of well-being, not only within ourselves, but in our relationships as well. And as we'll talk about today, when you struggle a lot with anxiety, it's almost like anxiety and pleasure are separate pedals. Anxiety is the brake and pleasure is the accelerator. It's an imperfect analogy, but point being, when anxiety hits the brakes, it's really hard to access pleasure because pleasure is all about presence, and anxiety is the opposite of presence. Anxiety takes us out of the present moment, out of our bodies, and makes pleasure and feeling good really, really hard to access, and fuels the belief that it's not a priority. Feeling good is a luxury that we don't have time for because we are in danger. Right? So I want to talk about all of the different reasons why pleasure and feeling good might be challenging for you, some of the different ways that we get conditioned around this, and give some suggestions on how you can start to incorporate more of this into your life in a deliberate way, in a really nourishing way.
[00:05:16]:
And I should be really clear, I should have said this at the outset, when I talk about pleasure here, I'm not talking about sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure can obviously be a part of pleasure, but that's not the focus here. I'm talking about pleasure really in the sense of feeling good, things that bring me pleasure, and that might be savoring a delicious piece of chocolate. It might be literally stopping to smell the roses. It might be turning your face to the sun. It might be putting on a really comfy pair of pants and getting into bed when you've just changed the sheets, and it just makes your body go, Ah, how lovely. Right? But so much of the time, we're in such a rush, in such a hurry, or we're so preoccupied with all of the things that are going wrong that we don't actually tune into all of the pleasure that is available in the present moment, and so we rob ourselves of the opportunity to enjoy all of that. Okay.
[00:06:08]:
So that's what we're going to be talking about today. This has been a very long introduction. I feel like I've already done half the episode before I've even started the episode. But before we get into it, I just want to remind you about my Secure Self Challenge, which kicks off in about ten days. If you are someone who struggles with self worth, and what we're going to talk about today absolutely ties into that, the Secure Self Challenge is a really great one. And actually, one of the weeks of the challenge is all about self care and self regulation. And really not in the sense of self care, having a perfect morning routine or whatever, but like, what is your relationship to taking great care of yourself? Is that something that you perceive as being a luxury? How good are you at turning towards yourself and saying, what do I need? How am I today? How could I make little micro adjustments in the direction of more comfort, more ease, more pleasure, more spaciousness, and how might that nourish me today and every day? So that is something that we really work through in the challenge, and you'll be invited to figure out, like, what does that look like for me, and how can I bring more of that in? And I find that when we do that, when we get really well practiced at nourishing and nurturing ourselves in that way, it really does increase our capacity. It really does change the way that we relate to ourselves and other people and makes us less likely to be really dependent on others from this needy, desperate place because our baseline starts to rise.
[00:07:34]:
And when we are accustomed to feeling bad all the time, whether that's emotionally or physically or both, we tend to expect to feel bad, right? When that's the baseline, when we always feel a bit rubbish, then bad things happening or high stress or being treated poorly by someone, that's just part of what we've come to know. Whereas when we really start to orient towards feeling good as our baseline, it becomes clearer what is not in alignment with that and what are the things that bring us down rather than contribute to our sense of well-being. So that's part of what we do in the challenge, among many other things, around self compassion, self respect, self trust. We cover a lot of ground in four weeks in a really nice, easy to consume, digestible way. So if you wanna join us for the challenge, link is in the show notes. It's also on my website. I would love to see you there. Okay.
[00:08:27]:
So pleasure, rest, and feeling good. So let's talk about a few of the reasons why this might be hard for you. I touched on this in the very long introduction that if you are someone who struggles with anxiety, from a nervous system point of view, pleasure and rest and feeling good is really the domain of a broadly regulated nervous system. I mean, there can be some activation in pleasure, obviously, if we looked at a sexual a sexual context, but chronic stress is the opposite of pleasure, rest, and feeling good, because those things really require that we're in that parasympathetic state where we're not mobilized into needing to do something to deal with a threat and deal with pressure and deal with stress all the time. And so if you're someone who spends most of their time in that state of activation, of mobilization, of go, go, go, I need to do something, and even if it's not coming from a consciously anxious place, if you just at that level of constant busyness and constant rushing, constantly needing to be somewhere else, that is mutually exclusive with pleasure and rest and feeling good as far as I'm concerned, because as I said, that takes us out of presence. It takes us out of feeling. We are so disconnected from our bodies and our senses when we're in that mode, and stress, when it's in that state, is a really powerful numbing agent. And that's why some of us can be almost addicted to stress and busyness and work.
[00:09:55]:
Maybe you distract yourself constantly if you do have spare time rather than actually being present and resting, you busy yourself with things, right? You can't actually sit still, you can't actually just do nothing, you can't just be, because all of that doing distracts you from what you might find in the being. And for a lot of us, that's really hard and that's really uncomfortable. Some people might even find that if you are good at just doing nothing, it's still lying on the couch with your phone in your hand and scrolling, right? It's still stimulating something that takes you out of your body rather than being fully present, being fully tuned in. So if that's you, that might be part of the equation for sure, that whether you like it or not, you rely on busyness, you rely on chronic stress, on always rushing from one thing to the next, and that robs you of the ability to tune into pleasure because there's not enough space and presence to be actually, like, here and now in my body in this moment. I'm always thinking about the next thing or rushing to the next thing. I've got 5,000,000 mental tabs open, or maybe actual tabs open, but all of that can really inhibit our ability to tune into pleasure. And as a side note, if we were to talk about sexual pleasure, you'll see the same things. People who struggle a lot with anxiety tend to be really cerebral during sexual encounters.
[00:11:24]:
So you're thinking about the other person. What are they thinking? Are they having a good time? What does my body look like? Your mind's going at a million miles an hour, and I don't know if you've noticed, but that really hits the brakes in terms of your ability to be in your body and experience pleasure in a really embodied way. So this operates on all levels, right? When we're so stuck in our head and so stuck in anxiety and stress, that really inhibits our ability to feel, for better or for worse. So that's one of the the main things that might be getting in the way of pleasure and rest and feeling good. Another one is more of a worthy and deserving thing. So for a lot of people, there can be this sense of I don't deserve to feel good, I don't deserve to be taken care of, I don't deserve to rest, I don't deserve to relax, I don't deserve to feel pleasure. I don't deserve to feel joy. And that can come from deep shame around those things.
[00:12:24]:
Maybe you've got conditioning around what your parents' relationship to those things were, and maybe in your family of origin or your community that you've been raised in, those things are seen as synonymous with laziness or selfishness or indulgence or any number of other things that have strong negative shame based connotations. Or you might have just this sense of, I don't deserve that because I'm not good enough. I am not worthy of that. I deserve to feel bad. I deserve to struggle. I have to do all of that in order to prove myself in some way, and it's only once everyone else is taken care of that maybe I get the scraps. I know a lot of women in particular struggle with that kind of relationship to rest and pleasure, this sense of it's so hard to put myself above anyone else. And you know, if you're operating from that place, there will always be people who could come before you, or things or tasks or to do list items that could come before you.
[00:13:26]:
And so what often happens is that that never arrives, that moment where everything's done and everything's taken care of and everyone's taken care of, and you finally get a moment to yourself. So if you've got this imprinting around taking care of myself, putting myself first, asking for support, asking for some time to myself, if that's selfish, if that makes me bad, if that makes me a bad partner or mother or friend or whatever, then I'm not gonna do that because that feels like it's risking connection or risking belonging or risking some sense of identity that I get from being endlessly selfless and caring and self sacrificial. So you can see there's so much in this, right? There's so much emotion tied in with pleasure and rest and feeling good. The other main bucket that I wanted to speak to is around productivity culture, hustle culture, burnout culture, like really, and I spoke about this earlier in the context of my background in corporate law, it's so normalized. A level of overworking, of pushing ourselves to the brink, and just operating way beyond a reasonable capacity. But because it's normalized and everyone else is doing it, we're looking over our shoulder feeling like, if that person's working that hard and pushing that much, then I have to do that as well. How many times have you run into someone on the street or at the coffee shop and you ask how they are and they answer, Yeah, busy. Good, but busy.
[00:15:00]:
And you say, Yeah, me too. I've been really busy. You know, that that's just expected almost. You're following the script and you talk about how busy you are, and that's the acceptable answer. If you were to answer that question by saying, actually, I haven't been busy at all. I've been taking things at a deliberately slower pace and really enjoying just prioritizing rest and pleasure and taking great care of myself. I'm sure that you'd get a look, right, from that person that would be really departing from the socially acceptable script of we're all busy, and that signifies that we are important and that we are doing well, we're successful, we're ambitious. Busy is worn as a badge of honor in our productivity culture.
[00:15:46]:
And so it is a radical act of rebellion almost to opt out of that system. And for me, to be fair, I still have a lot on my plate. I obviously run a business. I have a baby, but I really actively organize my life around trying not to overextend myself because I have no interest in being chronically stressed. I have no interest in being burnt out. I have no interest in being depleted. I don't think that that serves me. I don't think it serves my family.
[00:16:18]:
I don't think it serves all of you. Right? And I really treat my well-being and my vitality as an absolute priority, very unashamedly. And so I really feel like in the past few years, I have very intentionally unsubscribed from that kind of culture, and it takes courage to do that, but gosh, is it liberating to say, Actually, no, I'm not going to live like that. I'm not going to just run myself into the ground. To say, No, actually, I don't want to work as much as humanly possible. I want to be present enough to actually enjoy my life. I'm not going to work like a dog just to climb a ladder to accumulate stuff so that I can then maybe feel happy and fulfilled. And for me, success looks like being able to take an afternoon nap and have a bath every day and go to the farmers markets at 2PM on a Wednesday and buy fresh flowers and food and cook for my family.
[00:17:22]:
Like, that to me is more a picture of success than working in a high rise building for twelve hours a day and then going home to sleep and waking up and doing it all again. Anyway, I should stop myself because you might be sensing that I feel quite passionately about this, and it really is one of those things that when you take a step back from it, you really see it for what it is, and you can see that we were never meant to live like this. And so maybe the anxiety and the stress and the depletion that you're feeling isn't signaling that there's something wrong with you, but rather that there's something wrong with the way that so many of us live, and that the way we're feeling is a very natural response to the way we are living. And so if all of this is resonating with you and you're feeling like, yes, that's all well and good, but how am I meant to make any changes because this is my life and I have a job and I have obligations and responsibilities. I get it. I know that not everyone is going to make as radical a departure from that system as I maybe did. And the good news is that this doesn't have to be drastic. Bringing more pleasure and slowness and space and ease into your life does not have to be drastic.
[00:18:35]:
It can be as simple as drinking your coffee in the sunshine rather than rushing back to your desk or rushing to get in the car. It can be as simple as stopping and inhaling as you catch a whiff of jasmine in the breeze on a beautiful spring day. It could be the moment when you get into comfy clothes at the end of a work day and just taking a moment to notice how good that feels in your body. All of these things are oftentimes things that you might be doing anyway, but we're in such a rush and we're so mentally distracted that we're not present enough to actually take in the pleasure. And so just trying to be more aware and more present and more attuned to your senses. What can I feel? What can I see? Isn't that beautiful? To look up at a tree as you walk underneath it and look at the sky as it peers through the leaves and just soak in the sense of awe and wonder at how majestic regulating if only you slow down enough to actually take it in. So please know that this doesn't require that you quit your job and completely overhaul your life, although secretly I would be delighted if you did that. It really just does require that you slow down and that you give yourself permission to feel good. And what might that look like to give yourself total permission to feel good even if it's for five minutes a day? Starting small if this feels really challenging for you. And if it does feel really challenging for you, that's super interesting as well, and that's something to reflect on. Why might it be that pleasure and rest and feeling good feels so hard for me? What are the stories that I carry around this? Where did they come from, and how are they serving me? Okay. I'm gonna leave it there, guys. I really hope that this has given you some food for thought.
[00:20:26]:
As I said, it's one of my favorite topics and one that I don't get to talk about enough these days, so I'm hoping that something in that has landed with you, and I'd love to hear from you if this resonated. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing you again next week. Thanks, guys.
[00:20:43]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of On Attachment. If you wanna go deeper on all things attachment, love, and relationships, you can find me on Instagram @stephanie__rigg or at stephanierigg.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd be so grateful if you could leave a review and a 5 star rating. It really does help so much. Thanks again for being here, and I hope to see you again soon.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
pleasure, rest, feeling good, nervous system regulation, anxiety, burnout, chronic stress, productivity culture, hustle culture, corporate law, self care, self regulation, self worth, self compassion, self respect, self trust, busyness, presence, mindfulness, worthiness, shame, conditioning, self nourishment, well-being, joy, spaciousness, relaxation, embodiment, slowing down, work-life balance