Contaminated Leisure: Yep, It Has a Name!

2025-06-16

~A follow-up to “Permission to Pause” If you've ever stepped away to “rest” but came back feeling just as drained, this episode is for you. In this powerful follow-up to Permission to Pause, we name and unpack a concept that deeply resonated with listeners: contaminated leisure — the kind of downtime that looks like rest but still carries the weight of responsibility, guilt, and multitasking. And naming it matters. Because once we recognize what’s happening, we can begin to reclaim the kind of rest that actually restores. This episode dives deep into:

~A follow-up to “Permission to Pause”

If you've ever stepped away to “rest” but came back feeling just as drained, this episode is for you. In this powerful follow-up to Permission to Pause, we name and unpack a concept that deeply resonated with listeners: contaminated leisure — the kind of downtime that looks like rest but still carries the weight of responsibility, guilt, and multitasking. And naming it matters. Because once we recognize what’s happening, we can begin to reclaim the kind of rest that actually restores.

This episode dives deep into:

What contaminated leisure really is
The neuroscience behind why it’s so exhausting
Why ambitious women are especially affected
What the research says about emotional labor and the “leisure gap”
How to reclaim rest as a biological, psychological, and cultural necessity

If rest has ever felt like another item on your to-do list, tune in.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

The origins of the term contaminated leisure and how it shows up in everyday life
Why “just relaxing” often doesn’t work — and how pseudo-recovery tricks our brains
How true rest activates the Default Mode Network (DMN), the brain’s key to meaning-making, emotional regulation, and creativity
How internalized expectations and the "casualty of competence" leave ambitious women especially vulnerable to burnout
Five science-backed strategies to create space for real, uncontaminated rest

Manifestatement: Rest doesn’t make you less ambitious, it makes your ambition sustainable.

#ContaminatedLeisure #RestIsResistance #AmbitiousWomen #PermissionToPause

References

Bianchi, S. M., & Mattingly, M. J. (2003). Time, Work, and Family: What Do We Know? Social Forces.

Immordino-Yang, M. H. – Research on the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) and emotional processing.

Shockley, K. M. – Studies on psychological detachment and pseudo-recovery.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Hochschild, A. (1989). The Second Shift – On invisible labor and emotional management.

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