Why You Feel Cranky on Your Rest Days (and What to Do About It)
Rest days are a commonly used tool for managing your workload while training. While not technically necessary , they can be a good idea, giving your body extra time to recover between workouts. Even when I’m doing an intense training program, I make sure to give myself at least one full day of rest. Or, more accurately, earlier.
The problem is that on Sundays, the day I scheduled for rest, I turned out to be irritable. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the week, I thought, the fact that I have to go back to work the next day ( “Sunday horror stories” as they are sometimes called). But the same thing happened when I moved my rest day to Saturday. I would be irritable, frustrated, bored, but restless. And it wasn’t just the weekend: I also found myself getting cranky, nervous, and sad whenever I give myself a day to unwind after a vacation, or if I miss a workout because life gets in the way. Is it possible that the rest was something bad for me?
Exercise Helps Maintain Mental Health
Even though I often write about the benefits of exercise on this site, it has taken me way too long to put two and two together in my life: exercise is good for mental health. It is a form of stress relief and self-care in the sense of “real self-care” (not in the sense of “buying bath bombs”). The American Anxiety and Depression Association notes that “a brisk walk or other simple activity can provide several hours of relief [from symptoms of anxiety or depression] like taking an aspirin for a headache.” To be clear, exercise is not a substitute for therapy or medication, but it is a powerful tool that people with and without clinical mental health diagnoses can use.
Thus, by imposing a day of rest, I have deprived myself of one of the easiest and most accessible tools for managing my mental health. Once I put it that way, the answer was obvious. I had to get off my ass.
Doing something is expensive—my body has to expend energy and repair itself—but doing nothing has a price, too . At first I was skeptical about the idea that the problem lies in the rest itself. But one day I said okay. Let’s take a walk on rest days and see if anything changes. Just a walk. No killer workout, no hour on a stationary bike, no extra weightlifting (although I have experimented with all of these as “resting” daytime exercises, and they are all effective for getting rid of irritability). Walk.
What to do on “rest” days instead of rest
First, determine how long your body needs to recover and what activities you can do to allow it to recover adequately. If you only train three days a week, you can definitely go out on the weekends. A five-minute snacking exercise can also help: run up and down stairs, swing a kettlebell, do some burpees. Just five minutes. You won’t force your body to recover from a full workout, so you won’t deprive yourself of the goal of a rest day. Any of the suggestions in our Active Recovery Days post will do: yoga, hiking, or swimming, just to name a few.
One interesting thing about exercise is that the more you do it, the more you develop performance. Someone who spends two hours at the gym every weekday can probably handle a 30-minute light jog on their day off. It’s not rest , but it shouldn’t be; an important factor is whether your body gets the time it needs to recover, which doesn’t necessarily mean a whole day.
The key to achieving the right balance is to remember to consider both your physical health and your mental health. If you train so obsessively that your body never rests, that’s a problem in itself. Compulsive exercise can lead to physical problems such as injury, hormonal issues, RED-S , or increased susceptibility to disease. It can also be a sign of a mental health problem, such as an eating disorder or obsessive-compulsive disorder. I am not suggesting that you constantly exercise, you just have to take care of both your body and your brain, and rest is not the only way to do this.