Do you ever catch yourself thinking, “I can relax later” - when work calms down, when the kids are older, when you’ve lost the weight, later when you’ve finally earned it?

This episode is a loving call-out of that little lie (because yes, I tell myself it too). I’m unpacking why we keep living in that “waiting room” where ease and balance feel so close… but never quite arrive. And the truth is: if your peace is conditional on you achieving something first, you’ll spend your life chasing a finish line that keeps moving.

I break down what’s really underneath the “I’ll relax when…” pattern and share simple, practical ways to start bridging the gap now. Because letting go doesn’t mean losing progress and rest is NOT a reward.

Key takeaways

1. Why “I’ll relax later” is more to do with safety than lack of time.
2. Why if ease is conditional on weight loss / success / productivity, it stays out of reach.
3. Why letting go doesn’t derail progress but usually speeds up the results you actually want.

RESOURCES:

Secret (& Free) Limited Podcast: Confident As F**k (Even When You’re Not There Yet)

Work with me: www.lifeeditcoaching.com

Instagram: @lifeeditwithalix

There's definitely this pattern that I fall into sometimes, which I'm sure you are all so familiar with.

That one where you tell yourself you can relax later.

Maybe it's that you can relax around food once you've hit your goal weight.

Maybe it's telling yourself you'll add in some self care once things are less busy.

And you know what?

A bit of that is inevitable in life.

But what if it's starting to feel like Groundhog Day?

Like you're spending your life in that particular waiting room, convincing yourself the ease and balance you actually want are almost close enough to touch without ever actually getting there.

We're going to get into the relax a lie that you've been telling yourself, get to the bottom of why it keeps happening, and talk about a few simple strategies to start to bridge the gap to the other side.

Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to well Being, the podcast for women who are done with the hustle and are ready to feel at home in their own skin.

I'm your host, Alex Life, therapeutic and fitness coach for busy women who want to do less, live more, and feel good from the inside out.

Every week I'm going to help you to cut through the noise, challenge the shoulds, and find ways to live and move that actually feel like you.

Hello.

Hello.

A huge welcome back this week.

Always good to have you here.

And today we're getting into this particular pattern that I know we all get into around telling ourselves we'll relax later once the work has been done.

And as I sat down to record to create this episode, I realized that this week I was getting into that pattern myself, especially around work.

And it's something I've very consciously been working on because I realized that I was always holding off, being able to relax, always holding myself at arm's length from joy or gratitude, because I constantly felt like I just needed to do a little bit more and get to a certain place before I was actually allowed to fully relax.

And it's something that can really hold you in this kind of animated suspension where you're moving, you're doing, you're being productive, but behind it you're just a bit tired.

You kind of want to be able to let go for a little while.

You want things to stop feeling so urgent, so important all the time.

But at the same time, it sort of feels like you haven't quite earned that right to relax yet.

So what happens is you keep telling yourself that little white lie that says, once I've done this, then I can relax.

Now, like I said before, a little bit of this is probably inevitable in life, but for me, at one point, it was running the show with everything.

And if it's something that you tell yourself a lot as well, while also finding that your reality is that you're constantly on edge or you're constantly waiting for permission to relax, but you're never quite getting there, then today we're going to explore a few few ways to get yourself out of that cycle and maybe to start finding a little bit more peace.

So let's start with a few examples of where this might be showing up in your life right now.

And I think I take some of these from my own personal experience, quite possibly.

Little hint there.

So I think the first example is I'll relax around food once I hit my goal weight.

And this is a classic, right?

I definitely fell into this trap for the longest, longest time.

And it's this.

This thing that just essentially keeps you trapped in that loop.

And I'm not gonna go into a load of detail on this one because I have other episodes around our relationship with food.

But suffice to say that for as long as your ability to relax around food is conditional on you reaching a certain goal weight, it's never gonna happen.

It has to be the other way around.

I will literally, I will die on this hill.

If you are spending your life saying, I will relax around food when it's never gonna happen, you're never gonna let yourself get there.

Because when I was in that trap, I would get to my goal weight, and I'd think, hmm, okay, yeah, still not quite enough.

And so I'd stay there, or I'd say to myself, okay, great.

And then I'd start panicking that I was gonna start putting the weight on if I did not keep controlling things, if I did let myself relax around food, right?

So if that's what you're telling yourself, it's never gonna happen.

So either forget that and just say, well, I'll just have to control what I eat for the rest of my life, or say, well, maybe on this letting go around food first, that might be the thing to do.

So that's the first example, the second example, the one that I fell into this week or I've fallen into lately, I'll slow down when work is less busy.

So last year, I took a bit of time out.

Not time out as in I didn't work for ages, but as in I allowed myself to slow down a little bit.

I realized that I'd spent a couple of years Pushing hard, trying hard, doing all the things.

And it wasn't necessarily always getting me anywhere.

And so I felt that I needed to just let go a little bit.

I needed to allow myself to just slow down a little bit around work.

And so I allowed myself probably a good three or four months where I said, well, I'm not gonna sit down at my desk till half nine.

I'm gonna make sure that I go out for a walk every morning.

At some point, I'm gonna make sure that I am finished work by five.

I am gonna make sure that if I'm sitting at my desk and something is starting to feel really stressful, I walk away from it for a bit, and I let myself just relax away from that thing.

And you know what?

It was amazing.

It was so, so nice.

After 12 years of just pushing myself really hard, it was amazing to give myself a couple of months where I just let go of stuff.

I stopped posting on social media for a while.

I let myself do that, and nothing terrible happened.

I stopped kind of promoting anything that I was doing.

And I just really allowed myself time to get creative, actually, because at the time, I was looking at rebranding and doing everything that I launched back in the autumn with, with the new brand.

And so I needed that time, I needed that space because I knew that that could not be created to the best of my ability when I was feeling stressed about things.

So I had that time out.

But now I am back into promoting the new brand, launching new offers.

I'm in that building stage, which means a lot of work without necessarily necessarily seen the results yet.

I know that it's going to take a good few months to really build this up to the point that I start to see the results that I want to see.

And so this is a tough bit to be in when you're.

When you are running your own business.

Any of you out there that do this will know this.

There are times in your business where you are reaping the rewards, but there are also times in your business where you're not and you are having to rebuild or change or move in a slightly different direction, where you are building and you're doing lots of work, but you're not seeing the results yet.

And that has kept me feeling lately, like anytime I'm not with my clients, I must be at my desk.

I must be getting content done.

I must be doing marketing.

And I realized the other day that I was going back.

I was going back to where I had been previously, which was telling myself, I just need to get this bit out of the way, and then I can relax.

And I could feel my anxiety rising as a result of it.

And so I did.

I took a step back and I was like, right, come on, this is not what you want.

This is not why you decided to build a business.

Yes, there are going to be times that are busier than others, but this is not why you're here.

So take the pressure off a little bit.

It's all going to be okay.

Everything gets done eventually.

So, yeah, I really realized that I was just keeping myself busy, busy, busy, busy, busy.

And I've had to make a conscious decision to slow down again.

Because slow, the slowing down is never going to happen by itself.

There's always something that needs to be done.

You know, if I've posted on Instagram four times this week, I could probably do five.

If I've spent an hour and a half planning an episode of the podcast, I could probably spend an hour and a half, and then I could spend another hour and a half writing the show notes.

Right.

And putting the SEO keywords in it.

And, and, and, and, and making it into a blog post.

And, and, and right.

So there's always more that could be done.

So I, it, it's never gonna slow down by itself.

I have to make a conscious decision to slow it down.

And so again, I was getting into that pattern again, I'll slow down in a couple of weeks.

I'll let myself relax in a couple of weeks when this is all done.

And I was feeling anxious because of it.

So that's the second example.

A third example.

I'll feel good when I've dropped a dress size.

And again, this is a really common one where we're withholding joy.

We're withholding feeling good about ourselves.

We're making it conditional on something else happening.

We're only allowing ourselves to feel happy or confident or feel good about ourselves when we get to a certain size, when we hit a certain criteria, which, by the way, are completely subjective and random.

That's the thing about some of these conditions we set out for ourselves.

They're random.

We've chosen them just because, not because they have any basis in actually improving our lives.

We just think that they're going to improve our lives.

And so again, we hold off on things.

We hold off on feeling good about ourselves.

We hold off on joy until we have reached a certain status.

Could be a dress size, it could be your success at work, it could be lots of different things.

But yeah, holding off on that.

And I'm sure you can think of other places where this shows up in your life too.

But essentially what is happening is that you are making ease, relaxation, joy, confidence, all of those things completely conditional on you achieving something else.

And that often means that we never actually reach a stage of ease or relaxation or confidence or whether ever other emotion you want to achieve yourself.

And here's why I think we do this, because I think it gives us a sense of control.

I know it gives us a sense of control and that in turn gives us a sense of safety.

And I've spoken a lot about this idea of our sense of safety because it's so, so important to us because so much of what we do is tied up with that.

In this case, it's as true as ever, right?

You know, rest feels unpredictable, whereas structure rules.

Doing things feel safe, particularly when you've built a lot of your identity on doing things and achieving things, on progressing, on moving forward on all of those things.

So we postpone rest and ease in order to hold onto that sense of control.

Because slowing down, accepting where you are, feels like you're dropping the ball.

And my example from earlier on this year when I made myself slow down was that there are lots of times in my life where I would have let that mean that I had dropped the ball.

I would let that mean I was not being successful.

I would let that mean that there was something wrong with me.

I didn't let that mean that.

And that's what allowed me to let go.

That's what allowed me to go to the other side and actually step into, oh, okay.

I am allowed to rest when I want to.

That is available to me.

I don't have to get to a certain point of control before I'm allowed to do that.

So yeah, we do it because we like the sense of control.

It makes us feel safe.

And if we are in that familiar place of I'll rest later, I'll rest later, I'll rest later, then we feel like we're in control somehow.

Even though we're not necessarily feeling great about it, we also stay in that place because keeping going is part of our identity.

Right?

We build identities on being reliable and capable and in control.

So relaxing starts to feel really off brand.

You know, we have this sense of always needing to do more and to be more.

But while we hold onto that, there is never an end line.

We just keep pushing that line further and further and further away.

We're never going to reach it, let's be honest.

And you know, this achievement becomes internalized as our identity.

It feels like an integral part of who we are.

So who are we if we're resting?

Who are we if we make peace with our body as it is?

Who are we if we take half a day off at work just because those things feel uncomfortable?

Because we've equated achievement, we've equated being reliable and capable and always doing as part of who we are.

And so when we're not doing those, we're starting to question, well, who am I?

And I think that's a really important and under considered part of this is the identity piece.

And the thing is, when I ask my clients, you know, who do you want to be?

How do you want people to see you?

This stuff, this busy stuff that is never part of it.

They never go, oh, I want people to see me as always busy.

I want people to see me as always doing stuff.

I want people to see me as always reliable.

I mean, maybe we do a little bit of that, but actually more than that, we're like, well, I want people to see me as a good friend, as a good mum.

I want people to see me as a fun person.

I want people to see me as somebody that's nice to hang around with.

I want people to see me as somebody who is, you know, calm and capable, right?

It's never.

I want people to see me as somebody who's always bloody busy.

I think that we, we think that other people think about us way more than they actually do because I think that's why we worry.

Like, well, if I'm resting then does that make me lazy now if I'm resting, what does that mean about me?

Nobody else cares whether you're resting or you're going, going, going.

You're the only one who cares about that.

So, yeah, the identity piece is a really important part of this and it's a really important part of why we hold ourselves in that space of I'll relax when, and I think the final reason or one of the other reasons.

I'm sure there are others as well.

But rest has become reward, right?

Society teaches us that rest is the reward that we earn when we work hard enough and when we achieve enough.

So getting that is conditional on all of the other stuff that we've done.

But the problem is we also never feel like we've worked hard enough to deserve it, right?

Rest and acceptance, they start to feel lazy, they start to feel like we're giving up on ourselves.

So we start to make those things mean something about us.

We're not Worthy.

We're lazy.

We haven't earned it yet.

A client said to me the other day that sometimes it feels lazy to listen to her body and rest.

Now, this is an amazing woman.

She's achieved so much in her life.

She works really hard.

And I said to her, do you honestly think that that makes you lazy?

She was like, well, when you put it like that, no.

Listening to my body and resting because it says it's tired is not lazy.

Of course it's not.

But we make it mean that because rest has become reward.

And so this thing we do of persuading ourselves, when I have reached that goal, when I have got there, when I have got through this busy period, then I will rest, is us kidding ourselves that at that point, or there will come a point where we will feel like we've earned it.

We never will.

So we have to start understanding it's our right to be able to rest.

There's not a single one of you listening right now that doesn't deserve to rest.

And yet I bet 99% of you are saying, oh, I haven't done enough yet.

And really what this is all about is your peace, your happiness, your joy, whatever it is, has become conditional on your labor.

And for as long as that remains the case, it's always going to stay at arm's length.

So how do you go from here to a place where you are able to rest, where you are able to feel confident as you are, where you are able to eat with more freedom, because it encompasses all of these things.

It's not just about rest, but it's about acceptance.

It's about allowing yourself to be who you are right now without being a certain dress size first.

Doesn't mean you've given up.

Doesn't mean you can't be that dress size.

Just means, hey, let's take this from a different angle.

So I think the first thing to remember is you're actually at your best when you're not depleted.

When I started to work on this, when I started to work on actually consciously bringing rest into my life, I was able to let go of feelings of anxiety and pressure that I'd been holding onto for a really long time.

And what came out of that time earlier on this year was a new brand, a new website, a new offering for my audience, and a new lease of life.

It's been really exciting to have this new brand here.

Yes, it's been hard work.

It is hard work.

Right now, I'm in the.

Put the hard work in before you get the results bit of this journey, but that's fine.

Doesn't mean I can't still let myself rest.

Doesn't mean I have to wait until I get to that point, until I let myself rest.

I'm allowed to do that now.

And that's the thing.

Because I wasn't depleted, I was able to have the space to come up with that new brand, to come up with a new name, to come up with a new offering to re engineer everything within my business.

And I've had so many lovely, lovely comments on it all, on the brand, on the messaging and I honestly feel that that would not have been possible without me taking a step back.

And you know, some days sacking off work at lunchtime and watching a film in the afternoon, that would not have been possible if I had carried on just putting pressure on myself all the time.

And particularly as an entrepreneur, as someone with my own business, I'm acutely aware of the fact that the way that I show up in my business determines the results that I get.

And if I turn up stressed and anxious and trying to prove myself all the time and never allow myself rest when I need it, then I am going to get a very different result to the one that I get when I listen to my body.

But the same goes for you as well.

Our energy is going to be at its best when we are not depleted.

And if we never allow ourselves rest, if we feel like we've always got to achieve more, we're never going to get there.

Second thing I want you to think about is doing some little micro check ins.

So notice when that voice comes in saying you can rest later or you can relax when you've lost the weight.

What's one thing you can offer yourself now right now that you don't have to wait for?

And this isn't about forcing change or telling yourself something completely different, but just giving yourself a choice.

Sometimes for me it's literally a matter of telling myself right, enough, now you're starting to get a bit stressed here.

Step away from the laptop for five minutes, go for that walk for 10 minutes, do what you need to do.

But you've got to recognize that first.

And you know, that took me a while, I will admit.

It took me a while to notice, I will admit, because I needed to reconnect with my body.

But now when I find myself going down that road, I just give myself permission, right, we're done here.

I'm going to stop work a little bit earlier than I planned.

I'm going to go out For a quick walk, to clear my head, I'm going to go and do the shopping.

I'm going to go do something else.

Because at the moment, this.

This energy that I'm getting into of having to prove myself and work harder and do more is not helping me right now.

When the voice comes in, just think about what is one thing you can offer yourself now instead?

What's a reframe you can offer yourself?

So if it is, you're realizing, you're saying, I can relax when I've lost the weight, what's the reframe that you can offer yourself right now?

What's something different you could think, think about or do?

Maybe it could be, do you know what?

I'm gonna go and do something that allows just because.

Just because I enjoy it, rather than because it's going to help me to lose weight, or I'm going to go and put on that outfit that I know always makes me feel good.

What's that one little thing that you can do that you can offer yourself in that situation?

The final thing to think about is let's bust the myth that rest and being okay with yourself is just about either lying in a darkened room or suddenly learning to love yourself overnight.

It's often about the smaller things.

It's about the conscious decision to not put anything in the diary next weekend.

It's the conscious decision to think about the reasons you're actually grateful to your body, for example, and reminding yourself again and again and again that these things do not have to be conditional on you achieving a certain thing.

You're allowed to have them now, even in small ways, even in really, really simple ways.

So I think one of the key things that I want you to take away from this is that letting go doesn't mean losing progress.

Allowing yourself to take your foot off the pedal to have a rest through it doesn't automatically mean everything's going to fall apart.

Accepting yourself for who you are now and how you look now doesn't mean you're giving up on yourself.

Doesn't mean you can't still lose the weight.

It's just going to make it a hell of a lot easier and a hell of a lot more pleasant when you do allow yourself to do that now.

And in fact, doing all of those things, it's probably going to get you more close or closer to the things that you want anyway when you allow yourself to let go.

That's certainly what I've learned for myself.

I get closer to what I want and the way that I want to feel in life when I flipping well let go now, not when I wait, not when I make it more conditional.

So if you want more ease, if you want to feel more free around food, if you want to have more time for yourself, then those are things that you have to consciously choose now.

They're not going to appear at the other end of the rainbow.

They're not going to appear at the other side of whatever arbitrary time or condition that you you've set yourself.

They will happen when you commit to making them happen, when you're ready to make the changes to your identity and to the beliefs that you have around the idea that you're going to rest later.

So choose that for yourself, decide that you're not waiting anymore, and then do the work you need to not only bring them closer to you, but to make them a reality.

I promise you, if I can do it as a serial overworker, overthinker who has always tied her identity to being the dependable doer, then you absolutely can too.

So if I can let go of some of that, if I can stop making my rest, my being okay with myself, be conditional on something else happening, then you can too.

You absolutely can too.

I have faith, right?

Don't forget to join me over on Instagram.

Lfeditwithalex.

I have just started to offer some no obligation flash coaching in my stories every couple of weeks.

So go check that out.

Make use of my coaching brain on your current challenges.

But for now, I'm going to love you and leave you and I'll see you back here again next time.

Thank you as always for joining me.

If this episode has hit home, share it with another woman who needs to hear it and come connect with me on Instagram @lifeeditwithalex for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.