THE RELAXED WOMAN
RECLAIM REST AND LIVE
AN EMPOWERED, JOY-FILLED LIFE
NICOLA JANE HOBBS
‘A balm for the woman who feels she has to earn her rest’ –ANNA MATHUR
THE RELAXED WOMAN
The Relaxed Woman
RECLAIM REST AND LIVE
NI C OLA JANE HO bbS
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May we become relaxed women together
Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman.
Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? At ease women? Women who weren’t afraid to take up space in the world? Women who prioritised rest and pleasure and play? Women who gave themselves unconditional permission to relax – without guilt, without apology, without feeling like they needed to earn it? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a woman like that. But I would like to become one. I would like us all to become one.
IntroduCtion
2 I spent much of my adult life as the opposite of a relaxed woman. For years, my days were a frantic blur of stress, urgency and exhaustion as I tried desperately to juggle multiple responsibilities, driven by both financial necessity and a deep sense of unworthiness.
The Relaxed Woman
I wasn’t like this as a little girl. I was sensitive, curious, playful and wild. My sister and I would spend our days reading stories, climbing trees and making daisy chains that stretched from one end of the garden to the other. Resting and playing came naturally to us. We lived moment to moment with no sense of urgency, no concept of productivity or perfection, no desire to perform or people-please. And then, at some point on my way to womanhood – somewhere between the ages of eight and thirteen – I stopped resting and playing and started basing my selfworth on who I pleased and how much I achieved. As I absorbed society’s message of what a ‘good girl’ and ‘successful woman’ should be – self-controlled, self-silencing and self-sacrificing – I lost touch with my inner wisdom, my intuitive voice, my authenticity. I no longer trusted my feelings, my needs or my body. My relaxed, curious, playful self was buried beneath a mountain of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts’ and patriarchal conditioning. It no longer felt safe to be me.
Like many women, I lived much of my adult life as if I was a machine. I overworked, traded sleep for productivity and stayed compulsively busy, pushing through anxiety and exhaustion, all the while plastering on a smile and pretending I was fine. Until, one day, I couldn’t pretend anymore. Whether it was a result of burnout or depression or what was later diagnosed as posttraumatic stress – or a combination of all three – I reached my breaking point. I had to find another way of living, another way of being.
As I journeyed through this dark, shadowy place of exhaustion and trauma, I sensed the subtle call of a more authentic,
intuitive, compassionate self – a self I recognised from childhood; the archetype of what I now call the relaxed woman. She called to me in dreams and in poetry, in an inner voice that was both my own and something beyond me. On the days when I was frantic and exhausted, lost in a trance of busyness, she would whisper in a voice that was soft and silky and slightly wild, ‘Relax, my love. Take a deep breath. It’s safe to slow down. It’s safe to rest.’
As I listened to this loving inner voice, I felt the relaxed woman begin to awaken within me. I don’t use the word relaxed here in its modern, commodified sense of expensive spa trips and luxury wellness products, but in its original sense from the Old French relaschier, meaning ‘to release; to liberate; to set free’.
The relaxed woman is a woman who is free: free to rest; free to cry; free to make mistakes and ask for help; free to experience bliss and pleasure and delight; free to feel her emotions and choose her values and respond compassionately to the unavoidable stressors in her life; free to trust herself, to care for herself, to be herself.
The relaxed woman is the mother with postnatal depression who has the courage to ask for help. She is the daughter who sets loving boundaries with her parents in order to protect her mental health. She is the colleague who takes a lunch break and leaves work on time. She is the partner who speaks openly about the mental load and the need for a fair division of labour at home. She is the personification of our authentic self, our intuitive self, our wild self. She knows her worth, embraces her power and trusts her inner rhythms of hard work and deep rest, of inner healing and outer contribution, of holding others and letting herself be held. She feels safe and free in her body and in the world.
The relaxed woman lives within all of us. Becoming her is the journey of unshackling, untaming, uncaging; of setting ourselves – and each other – free.
No Time to Rest: Why I Wrote This
Book
Working as a psychologist and therapist, I sensed a similar story to mine rippling through the lives of the hundreds of women I have had the privilege of supporting. While no woman’s experience was the same, there was an echo of exhaustion, overwhelm, loneliness, guilt and shame, a sense of being trapped, of being lost, of being betrayed by false patriarchal promises of happiness and success, a deep longing for slowness and stillness, for authenticity and intimacy, for true healing and deep rest.
As I listened to the voices of women and heard the collective cry of overwhelm and fatigue, I began asking, why are so many women so exhausted? What drives our shared anxiety and guilt around relaxing? What are the consequences, personally and collectively, of women not getting the rest they need? How can we set ourselves and each other free?
Wanting to learn more, I dived into the research and discovered a void. For decades, science has been silent about the things that matter to women – menstruation, menopause, matrescence, motherhood, the cyclical, the rhythmic, the intuitive, the soulful, the wild. Women’s bodies and minds have been misunderstood for centuries, and the majority of psychological theories embody the voices of white men. The psychology of rest and relaxation was entirely absent from the literature. So I began my own research (a feminist-immersive study on women’s relationship with rest),1 and in 2022 founded The Relaxed Woman – an online community devoted to supporting women to recover from stress and burnout through coaching and workshops. I spoke with hundreds of women from all over the world about the archetype of the relaxed woman, the barriers they face in getting the rest they need and how we can begin creating a world where women
feel safe enough and worthy enough to rest. While I thought I was doing research on rest, what also unfolded were stories of guilt, shame and unworthiness, stress, trauma and burnout, and healing, freedom and delight, each thread intimately intertwined.
The result is the book you’re holding in your hands, inspired by working with hundreds of courageous women over the last 15 years who have come seeking respite and healing, and, more recently, those women who have generously and vulnerably shared their stories as part of my research. It is also inspired by the work of the women who have come before me – from Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ stunning storytelling (which first awakened the archetype of the relaxed woman within me almost two decades ago),2 Mary Oliver’s poetry reminding us of the beauty of being ‘idle and blessed’3 and Saundra Dalton-Smith’s TED Talk on the different types of rest,4 to Tricia Hersey’s battle cry of a book, Rest is Resistance and the words of Elizabeth Gilbert, who has written about how hard is it is be free and relaxed in a female body (and who, during my research, was the only person I could find speaking publicly about the need for more relaxed women in the world).5
Ultimately, this book is about how we can become relaxed women. Together. A never-ending journey of being and becoming women who can trust, surrender and delight. I am on this journey with you. While I feel a million miles away from the frantic, exhausted woman I once was, and most days I am able to listen to my body, honour myself enough to say no and let go of my desire to please, perfect and control, I still feel stressed, anxious, worried and exhausted sometimes. The non-negotiable responsibilities and unavoidable stressors of life are still there. But what are gone are the unrealistic expectations, the internalised rulebook of ‘shoulds’, the self-judgement and self-sacrificing and self-silencing, the fear of being criticised and disliked and misunderstood. Naturally, I am highly sensitive and I am deeply affected
6 by the pain and beauty in the world, which means that some days my inner weather is calm and tranquil and other days it feels a little more stormy. The beautiful thing since starting this journey is that even when the storms arise – shame, fear, stress, grief, regrets, worries, painful memories – I don’t get stuck in them. I am able to relax, to trust, to keep my heart open. I still feel free.
What We Gain by Becoming Relaxed Women
This book isn’t about trying harder or doing the ‘inner work’ or adding ‘become relaxed woman’ to your to-do list (I’m sure your to-do list is long enough!). It has nothing to do with effort or striving or working harder or tolerating distress or pushing through. Rather, it’s about harmony, surrender, ease, freedom, acceptance, pleasure, trust, comfort, joy, hope, calm and vulnerability – words that feel somewhat foreign in our goal-oriented, productivityobsessed culture. And yet, when we read them, it can feel as though our whole body exhales in recognition of their beauty and necessity. Becoming a relaxed woman comes from learning how to trust ourselves, how to release control, how to let ourselves be fully seen. When we were little children, all these things came naturally. So, in many ways, we’re not learning, we’re remembering. Relaxation is an instinct, an innate reflex that, for many of us, has been wounded due to stress, trauma and cultural conditioning. Becoming a relaxed woman means remembering how to relax, how to release, how to receive.
Here is a small sample of what we gain by becoming relaxed women:
• a deep sense of inner freedom
• the capacity to rest without anxiety and guilt
• an untangling of our self-worth from our productivity
• freedom from compulsive busyness, ruthless striving and excessive people-pleasing
• compassion for ourselves and everything we have endured
• the ability to release control and surrender to the unknown
• reconnection with our bodies as sources of wisdom
• the capacity to listen to our intuitive voice and live according to our own values instead of conforming to societal expectations
• acceptance of our imperfections, limitations and vulnerabilities
• a deeper sense of connection and intimacy in our relationships
• the ability to make space for painful emotions and honour the wisdom they hold
• confidence that we can cope with the unavoidable stressors of life
• a desire to take care of ourselves, each other and the world around us
• a feeling of becoming our authentic selves
• a deep sense that our needs matter, our voices matter, our dreams matter – that we matter
How the Book Is Organised
In the chapters that follow, I’ll be interweaving science, spirituality and storytelling. We’ll be meandering through the psychology and neuroscience of stress, rest and healing before beginning our slow and unhurried journey of transformation
8 and liberation, resting every so often to be fully present with what is alive in each moment. Each chapter opens with a ‘restful reminder’ – a little quote to awaken a sense of calm so that you can explore each chapter with a feeling of peace and ease.
The Relaxed Woman
I’ve divided the book into two parts. In Part One, we’ll explore who the relaxed woman is and how she offers us another way of being to counter the prevailing archetypes in our culture such as the rushing woman, the selfless woman and the superwoman. We’ll look at why it’s so difficult to relax in modern life, how the patriarchy serves no one (including men) and how relaxation is a form of liberation – a pathway to healing the wounds of patriarchy and setting ourselves, and each other, free. We’ll also draw on neuroscience and psychology to deepen our understanding of stress and trauma, and learn how we can tap into our brains’ natural capacity to rewire themselves – known as neuroplasticity – so that our brains and bodies can recover. We’ll explore some of the common factors keeping our nervous systems stuck in survival mode and experiment with simple, science-based practices to help us become unstuck so that we can cope with stress more effectively, pursue the goals that matter to us with more joy, trust and ease, and reawaken the innate capacities that so many of us lost after childhood – the capacity to play, to wonder, to live in the moment, to have fun and get excited and be silly. In Part Two, we’ll begin the relaxed woman journey – a neurobiologically sensitive process involving six steps:
1. Restore your inner resources
2. Regulate your nervous system
3. Nurture your relationships
4. Release your limiting beliefs
5. Realise your dreams
6. Join the relaxed revolution
I’ll talk about this model in more detail in Chapter 1. As we initiate healing in one area, this will inevitably ripple out to affect the whole of our lives.
This is a heroine’s journey, a feminine journey, that, while rooted in science, is soft, soulful and sacred. With each tender step, we not only deepen our understanding of the relaxed woman, we awaken her. We embody her. We become her.
Science, storytelling and self-discovery
Throughout the book, I’ve drawn on diverse fields of science, including relational neurobiology, psychophysiology and evolutionary psychology, to help explain the science of becoming a relaxed woman and offer us a foundation of understanding that can feel grounding, helping us to trust in the healing process as it unfolds. However, science has its limits, and it can only ever offer us glimpses of the complexity and mystery of what’s going on within our brains, bodies, psyches and societies. In science, as in most areas, there’s never going to be 100 per cent agreement on anything, so I’ve done my best to offer what is the emerging consensus, although this may change as research evolves and new wisdom is unearthed.
There are also concepts in this book that don’t depend on scientific data, including stories and spiritual practices, poetry and archetypes. I’ve shared some of my own experiences, along with the stories of the women who generously offered to share their experiences as part of my research. To protect their identities, these are composite narratives, stories woven together from the voices of different women in a way that captures their essence.
10 While I found common threads woven into women’s experiences, it’s important to note that not every bit of science or every story will resonate with you. It’s impossible to capture the full diversity of women’s experiences in a book and I will always have blind spots that come with my age, race, class, privilege and history. If anything doesn’t feel true for you, feel free to leave it behind.
How to Read This Book: Relaxed Reading
A book is a relationship between writer and reader. And as you begin this journey towards becoming a relaxed woman, I hope you can sense that I am with you on each page. You might also like to embark on this journey with other women by reading this book with a reading partner – a sister, friend, colleague or loved one – or with a community of women, such as in a book group or healing circle. While this is a book about rest and relaxation, it’s also a book about trust, tenderness and togetherness, and there is something deeply healing about sharing our experiences and discovering we are not alone. As we come together and read together and rest together, our individual journeys become part of something bigger: a sisterhood; a movement; a revolution.
As you read, I’d encourage you to highlight and underline, to write notes in the margins or in the dedicated notes section at the end of the book (pages 282-89), to scribble down questions and insights, to really make this book your own. This not only helps to challenge any perfectionist tendencies you may have as you slowly transform your book into something unique and messy and wild, but it will also help you to engage with the book in a slower, deeper and more embodied way.
If, like over 54 per cent of women, you find it difficult to stop yourself from reaching for your phone when you would like to be
reading or focusing on other things, you might like to put your phone in another room so that you can give your brain a rest from the attentional overload we so often experience in everyday life.6 Even if we can resist the pull of emails and social media when our phones are in the same room, we tend to experience ‘brain drain’ simply by having them close by because our brains are using their limited cognitive resources to stop us from picking them up.7
Throughout the pages, I’ve woven in opportunities for you to rest and reflect. These are invitations for you to pause and deepen your connection with the concepts we are exploring, to feel how the words on the page resonate in your body and to create space for new insights to emerge. Many of us spend most of our days stuck in our heads – thinking, planning, analysing, worrying, intellectualising – and so this more embodied way of reading reconnects us with our sensations, emotions, intuition and imagination as sources of truth and healing.
You’ll also find practices sprinkled throughout the book that will support you in becoming a relaxed woman by tapping into the power of neuroplasticity. Some of these are body-based, ‘bottom-up’ practices involving breath, rest, rhythm, movement and touch that help calm our physiology and offer our bodies a sense of safeness, relaxation and ease, which allows us to experience the opposite of the feelings of stress, anxiety and struggle that so many of us live with. Other practices are ‘top-down’, tapping into the power of our prefrontal cortex – our ‘thinking brain’ – and empowering us to choose our own values and make our own meaning, to challenge the status quo, question the self-limiting beliefs we’ve internalised from society and replace our energydepleting habits with life-enhancing ones. There are also some relational, collective practices to explore and share with those you love – because none of us can do this alone.
Becoming a relaxed woman happens within the contexts of our everyday lives and so these practices are simple things you
12 can weave into your day. Treat them as a menu rather than a todo list. Explore the ones you feel intuitively drawn to and allow the rest to plant seeds that can blossom over time. Together, the practices in this book will not only support you in recovering from the stress and trauma you’ve been through, they’ll also increase your capacity for rest and joy, play and pleasure, curiosity and delight.
The Relaxed Woman
And it is with this energy – of joy and wonder and delight – that I hope you read this book. In doing so, the process of reading becomes a practice in itself. A practice in slowing down, in being present, in allowing yourself to receive. It’s so easy for ‘read book’ to become just another task on our to-do lists, or for us to skim read in an attempt to consume as much information in as little time as possible as if we’re cramming for an exam. But there’s no exam at the end of this book. There’s nothing you need to remember, nothing you need to achieve. There’s no rush. You can simply relax and let yourself receive.
As we read like this – relaxed, embodied and at ease – reading becomes less about consuming information and more about a process of transformation. As we read, we are awakening new ways of seeing, practising new ways of being and cultivating qualities of loving presence, compassionate openness and deep tenderness that will ripple inwards in how we take care of ourselves and outwards into the world.
Let’s begin. I am with you every step of the way.
Part One
DiSCoverinG the Relaxed Woman
Chapter One Have You Ever Met a Relaxed Woman?
We’re not designed to live in survival mode. Our bodies need safeness. Our souls need rest.
As women, we are soft, strong, fierce, fragile, vulnerable, resilient, embodied, intuitive and deeply interconnected with one another. We are also stressed, overwhelmed and exhausted. Our desire to care and nurture has been exploited by our culture. Our capacity for kindness and compassion has been abused. Our hope for empowerment and equality has been manipulated into exhausting obligations and unrealistic expectations, leaving us feeling like there is never enough time and always too much to do. We have become a society of rushing women. Overburdened women. Exhausted women. Without seeing other women role model what it means to be relaxed, to be at ease, to be free, many of us have felt anxious, apologetic, afraid and ashamed all our lives. When the women who love us are unable to rest, relax and honour their needs, it can be very difficult for us to do so ourselves.
In a society dominated by patriarchy, full of inequality and obsessed with productivity, the relaxed woman is a rare being. Most of us have never met one and becoming one can feel like an impossibility. We may have absorbed the manipulative cultural messaging that ‘relaxation’ signifies laziness, lack of ambition, indulgence, selfishness, resignation and complacency. When we are scared of judgement and criticism, it can feel safer to conform to expectations of perfectionism, self-sacrifice, people-pleasing and toxic productivity than to explore a more relaxed way of living.
And yet, even though we may never have met a relaxed woman, when we hear the words relaxed and woman together, they often resonate deep within us, reawakening a way of being that we know intuitively. Like a magic spell, they open a secret door, revealing to us a new hope, a new paradigm, a new possibility.
The Pain of Being an Unrelaxed Woman
Often, we begin becoming relaxed women by becoming aware of where we are unrelaxed. Where we are not at rest. Where we are not at ease. Where we are not free.
She is so rare that it can be easier to get to know the relaxed woman through what she is not rather than what she is. We could call her opposite the stressed woman, the exhausted woman or the burned-out woman; the rushing woman, the over-controlled woman or the disempowered woman; the hyper-independent woman, the self-silencing woman or the overburdened woman. Maybe the best way to describe her opposite is simply as unrelaxed – defined as ‘tense, stressed, not at rest or at ease’.
What are some of the signs of being an unrelaxed woman? In the words of the women I have worked with and interviewed:
Feeling chronically unsafe, being stuck in survival mode, judging our worth by our productivity, living with a constant sense of inner urgency.
Feeling anxious, ashamed, guilty, exhausted, lost, trapped, powerless, depleted, overwhelmed, unworthy and unseen.
Experiencing insomnia, dizziness, migraines, gut issues and chronic fatigue.
Always looking for permission from someone outside of ourselves, doubting our strengths and abilities, treating every mistake like a catastrophe.
Being afraid of disappointing anyone, being a burden, rocking the boat or appearing lazy.
Striving ruthlessly for perfection, overriding our inner rhythms, ignoring our intuitions and treating ourselves like machines.
Suppressing our emotions, hiding our vulnerabilities and bypassing our needs.
Overworking, overthinking, over-planning and overachieving.
Silencing our voices, hiding our truths, masking, performing and people-pleasing.
Finding it impossible to relax after a hard day working, caregiving and mothering.
Feeling both over-controlled and out of control, yearning to rest yet staying constantly busy.
Being easily influenced by other people’s opinions, feeling the need to do what is expected and spending energy pursuing goals that don’t truly matter to conform to society.
Feeling alienated from our bodies, our emotions, our hopes and our dreams.
Wanting to hide and yet longing to be seen.
The costs of being stressed, exhausted, unrelaxed women – to ourselves, our families and our societies – are vast. Emma, a therapist and mother of two, captures the pain of being an unrelaxed woman powerfully:
I woke up one morning and just collapsed. My body was debilitated. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My kids were really little and it was terrifying. I’m a therapist, so I knew the impact stress has on your body, but I just didn’t see this coming. I was trying to give 100 per cent to my kids and 100 per cent to my clients and do everything else 100 per cent, and it was too much.
18 I was in denial that I had any limits. I thought I was superwoman. I didn’t realise how exhausted I was. My body had been whispering to me through headaches and anxiety and difficulties sleeping, but I was too busy to listen. And then, one day, it shouted, ‘ STOP.’
There are many reasons why so many of us are unrelaxed, why so many of us feel unsafe and unfree. And we are all going to experience seasons of our lives when we feel tired and anxious, moments when we lose ourselves in busyness and urgency. We just don’t want to get stuck there. If you identify with the signs of being an unrelaxed woman, there’s nothing wrong with you. It makes complete sense that you’re stressed and exhausted given what you’ve been through. Our minds are tricky, and we can so easily turn ‘not being a relaxed woman’ into another stick to beat ourselves with, another judgement or criticism. The last thing I want is for any part of this book to leave you feeling guilty for not being ‘relaxed enough’ or ‘regulated enough’ or ‘good enough’ in any way. Instead, my hope is that this book will awaken hope and possibility while giving you the tools to nurture a more relaxed way of being.
As you read, see if you can release any shame and any ‘shoulds’ – ‘I should be more present,’ ‘I should people-please less,’ ‘I should rest more’ – and approach this journey as an invitation, not even as ‘inner work’ but as ‘inner play’ – an opportunity to play with a new way of seeing, a new way of living, a new way of being.
Awakening the Relaxed Woman
The relaxed woman is free and wild and difficult to define. She manifests differently for each of us and at different times in our lives
as we get to know her and to become her gently over time. She doesn’t require us to be a certain age or race or class, and she doesn’t depend on us being able to do a certain amount of self-care each day. She cannot be identified by external achievements or privileges because what looks like freedom and success on the outside often feels like unsafety and unworthiness deep down. We can’t force ourselves to become her by ‘hacking’ our nervous systems or copying someone else’s morning routine. Rather, we become her by integrating and embodying what feels true and matters deeply to us. Becoming a relaxed woman is less about what we do and more about how we attend to the world – carefully, lovingly, vulnerably. The relaxed woman is who we are when we live by our values, take off our masks and relax into our most authentic selves.
As I am getting to know her in my own life, I am discovering that the relaxed woman is the self we have been taught to hide and despise – the sensual, wild, passionate, playful self that knows her worth, embraces her power and trusts her intuitive voice. Below is a list of qualities of the relaxed woman that have unfolded over the years as I have listened to women’s experiences and witnessed them begin to embody her. This list doesn’t prescribe how a relaxed woman should be; rather, we can use it to awaken us to the possibility of another way of being.
As relaxed women we:
• feel safe and free in our bodies and in the world
• believe we are worthy, regardless of our productivity
• honour our needs for rest and silence, for intimacy and support, for peace and ease
• live with an increasing inner stillness
• prioritise authenticity and intimacy over performing and peoplepleasing