With lockdown days and weeks becoming a blur, the benefits of stopping to rest are more important than ever. Whatever your spiritual framework, setting aside a day that’s different to the other six offers an essential space to re-frame the seemingly endless swirl, and giving your brain a change of scene works wonders for your resilience.

I’ve worked from home for almost 10 years now. Pre-pandemic there was still a chunk of my world following ‘office hours’ a definition that held our days in a shared pattern of time. I might chose to work late, or burn through my emails at 6am, but the important thing is the choice. Now everyone has flexed beyond their usual boundaries, it can feel like it’s all blurred into one and work has been pushed into all sorts of nooks and crannies where it really doesn’t belong.

Stretched to respond to multiple urgencies while our nervous systems are jammed with surge-capacity hormones, it sometimes feels like we’re getting nothing done.  But your right to rest isn’t determined by your productivity, and pushing past fatigue only makes things worse. So even if you feel like you squandered the past week, you still deserve to rest today. Next week will thank you for it.