Welcome to the Black Girl Burnout podcast, Kelly here.

And I want you to tell me if this sounds familiar.

You finally take a break.

Maybe you sit down, maybe you put your phone away, you close your eyes for five minutes,

and almost immediately you feel it.

That nagging thought, I should be doing something.

Maybe it's work, maybe it's laundry, maybe it's checking in on somebody,

whatever it is, the moment you stop moving, guilt creeps in.

And if it's not guilt, a lot of times in the past, I misidentified this as anxiety, that the minute

my body rested, I could not stop myself from thinking about doing something else or doing

something else, period. Opening my phone, doom scrolling, calling someone, thinking about

fixing a project that has already been fixed, quote unquote, about a billion times. Learning to rest has been honestly the journey

of my life. And today I want to talk about how to get at one of the enemies of rest, which we

know is essential for healing. And that is that guilt, that anxiety that comes with it.

Because the truth is, and we've said this a million times, and say it with me one more time,

rest is not laziness. Rest is not selfish.

Rest is necessary.

But it's important that we think about where does guilt come from?

How do we unpack years of learning that to stay still is somehow to be lazy or you're missing the boat on

something or you just don't feel comfortable in rest. And from that place of discomfort,

comes a little anxiety, comes maybe a whole lot of guilt. So how do we unpack the lies around guilt? And I want to focus on kind of three areas where we have learned this lie. We've been programmed and conditioned to believe that we should feel guilty when we rest. We're going to talk about societal expectations and the notion of hustle culture.

We're going to talk about generational, intergenerational trauma and cultural conditioning.

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