How to rest

Screen time is not automatically the problem, and not all of it is rest. Two studies show where the line falls.

The first is about guilt. In a survey of 471 people, those who were already worn out were more likely to see their TV or video games as procrastination, something done instead of what they felt they should be doing (Reinecke, Hartmann and Eden, 2014). The guilt that followed went with less recovery from the same entertainment.

A show you chose, and watch without guilt, can count as rest. The same show, half-watched while you feel you should be doing something else, recovers less.

The second is about work. In a diary study, where people answer a few questions each day, 70 employees reported on 4 workdays how much they used their smartphone for work after hours (Derks, van Mierlo and Schmitz, 2014). On days they used it more, they detached from work less, and less detachment went with more exhaustion.

So the useful split is not screens against no screens. On one side is chosen rest: a walk, people, a book, a hobby, a show you picked. On the other is drift, an hour that went to the phone without a decision, and work that followed you home.

1. Set a time when work ends, and log out of work email on your phone. In the meta-analysis above, doing work tasks in free time had a medium-sized link to less detachment.
2. Start the evening with something that is not a screen. A short walk, a call, cooking. The first half hour often decides what the rest of the evening becomes.
3. Choose your show. Pick it, watch it, and let it count. The guilt, not the TV, is what the study linked to less recovery.
4. Do one thing a week that is hard and is not work. Mastery, a challenge outside work, is one of the four recovery experiences. It might be a class, an instrument or a long run.
5. Get outside when you can. The review of recovery research found that recovery seems to be helped in natural environments.
6. Keep one full day a week with no work. The section on rest days below says why.

“Rest means doing nothing.”

Doing nothing can be rest, and so can doing a lot. Mastery, a challenge outside work, is one of the four recovery experiences researchers measure. Physical exercise is one of the recovery activities the review names.

Many pages on this question list seven types of rest. That list comes from Sacred Rest, a book by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, as Harvard Health notes. It can be a helpful way to think about rest, but it is not what the studies on this page measured. The research uses the four experiences above.

“A vacation will fix it.”

A vacation helps, briefly. A meta-analysis of vacation studies found a small lift in health and well-being, an effect size (a standard measure of how big a change is) of 0.43 (de Bloom and colleagues, 2009). The lift faded soon after people went back to work. Rest that lasts is the kind that comes back every evening and every week.

A rest day here means a day with no paid work, not a day off from the gym. In the American Time Use Survey, 29.6% of full-time workers worked on an average weekend day or holiday.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey 2025 results, Table 4, released June 25, 2026. People age 15 and over, averaged over every day of the year.

The clearest evidence for a weekly rest day is old, and about output, not feelings. An economist went back to records of British munition workers from the First World War and found that working seven days instead of six cost about 10% of the week’s output for the same hours (Pencavel, 2014).

A rest day does not have to be empty. The example person’s Sunday, September 20, had a long walk in the park, lunch with their sister, reading on the couch, dinner, a show and a book in bed.

A good way to run this test counts your evenings from what you already write or say about them. A walk, a book and two hours on the phone each land as hours, with no timer to start. Most journaling apps stop at how the evening felt. The word “restless” is in there. The hours on the couch with the phone are not.

One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.

You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: work, reading, walks, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks.

Write my first day

Download on the App StoreGet it on Google Play

Or scan with your phone's camera.

For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.

The test runs three weeks because one restful week can be luck, and because the vacation research says the effect of a single break fades. The habit is what you are testing.

Here is how four weeks went for the example person from the two evenings above.

In week one, the phone took 9h 55m and there was no reading at all. In week four, the phone took 2h and reading 5h 45m, with 3h 45m of walks and runs and 7h with family and friends.

The shows stayed, at 11h 45m in week one and 11h 15m in week four. Rest did not mean giving them up.

Rest that does not help may not be a rest problem. If you rest and still feel exhausted, or cannot switch off however you spend the evening, talk to someone. The NIMH, a US government research institute, advises that if you are struggling to cope, or your symptoms won’t go away, it may be time to talk to a professional.

Start with a doctor. In the US, if you are in emotional distress, call or text 988, or chat online at 988lifeline.org. It is free, confidential and open all day, every day (the 988 Lifeline). This page reports what research found. It is not medical advice. For the workload side, see how to prevent burnout.

Every figure on this page links to one of these sources, read on the date shown or in full.

1. Wendsche, J. and Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2017). A meta-analysis on antecedents and outcomes of detachment from work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 2072.
2. Sonnentag, S. and Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204 to 221.
3. Sonnentag, S., Venz, L. and Casper, A. (2017). Advances in recovery research: What have we learned? What should be done next? Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 365 to 380.
4. Reinecke, L., Hartmann, T. and Eden, A. (2014). The guilty couch potato: The role of ego depletion in reducing recovery through media use. Journal of Communication, 64(4), 569 to 589.
5. Derks, D., van Mierlo, H. and Schmitz, E. B. (2014). A diary study on work-related smartphone use, psychological detachment and exhaustion: Examining the role of the perceived segmentation norm. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 19(1), 74 to 84.
6. Harvard Health Publishing (read October 1, 2026). The 7 types of rest and why we need them all.
7. de Bloom, J., Kompier, M., Geurts, S., de Weerth, C., Taris, T. and Sonnentag, S. (2009). Do we recover from vacation? Meta-analysis of vacation effects on health and well-being. Journal of Occupational Health, 51(1), 13 to 25.
8. Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. IZA Discussion Paper No. 8129, Institute of Labor Economics.
9. Masicampo, E. J. and Baumeister, R. F. (2011). Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(4), 667 to 683.
10. U.S. National Institutes of Health, NIMH (read October 1, 2026). I’m So Stressed Out! Fact Sheet.
11. 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (read October 1, 2026). 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey 2025 results, Table 11A and Table 4, released June 25, 2026. People age 15 and over, averaged over every day of the year.