Quick question: I know you’re busy, there’s lots to tick off your to-do list, much to get done – but have you spotted any relaxed women lately? Bear with me, I know it’s a strange question to ask as you sprint through your day, dodging all the curve balls life throws at you, but I am beginning to wonder if they exist. Which is odd don’t you think, given all the years we’ve been debating and discussing wellness, all the hours we have now supposedly devoted to relaxing as women?

Growing up I don’t recall seeing one, there were none in my family, when I worked in an office managing women of all ages and reporting to powerful older women I didn’t encounter any, as a mum-of-four I certainly never saw a parental one and now as a midlifer I still can’t find a woman who has quietly given herself the permission to relax, without guilt, without apology or without having to explain to the world that she has earned the right to prioritise pleasure, play, rest and selfish joy during moments of her daily life.

I’ve really wracked my brains about this because a woman completely at ease, a woman who can be seen to move through the world genuinely, unapologetically relaxed, even in the busyness of her days, would be a helluva role model for my three young daughters wouldn’t she?

And just imagine that; growing up thinking it was ok to relax in front of people without cloaking it in lengthy explanations about how slowing down is good for women’s mental health (we are after all twice as likely to suffer from severe stress and anxiety as men).

And what if we could relax without playing the debit/credit game of having to ‘earn’ our relaxation?

I’m aware I may sound like the grumbling victim of an often self-inflicted Gen X endurance mindset but it is intriguing that so many women find it unusually hard to truly relax, that many of us appear to live in a state of restlessness. Of course, it may be that this restlessness makes women like me blind to visions of relaxation around us but I doubt this – women from all backgrounds I’ve interviewed as a writer tell me they can’t point to a relaxed women in their lives.  When national treasure Dawn French was asked to pick her three biggest failures in life for a podcast recently she listed ‘failing to relax’ as her worst one.

And by relaxing I don’t mean lying down on the couch like those reclining female nudes male renaissance artists were so fond of painting (though that does look dreamy after the day I have just had) or having a hot bath, the alleged cure-all for stressed women. No, I’m talking about cultivating that nourishing feeling of relaxed inner peace we hear so much about but simply don’t see in women around us; we’re all fast walking and fretting; seeking permission to switch off in a self-care culture tilted towards endlessly encouraging us to put more effort into making ‘me-time’.  

Why is something so simple so confusing, where are the women who find this stuff easy? Maybe as Germaine Greer wrote in 2006 women just aren’t listening to ‘the siren call of leisure’.

Obviously society makes it more difficult for us to relax than men: since time began we’ve been harder working because we do most of the domestic and emotional labour alongside our careers, marriages, parenting. It’s ironic that in olden times (the 70s) the big day of rest – a Sunday – somehow dictated that women cook the most complicated and elaborate meal of the week so that everyone else could enjoy relaxing. Yes, I know it is not like that in every house today yadda yadda but the numbers don’t lie and I am too busy to quote all the gazillion respected surveys on inequality but trust me this is a fact; women are doing more and relaxing less than men, especially during holidays, supposedly our peak relaxation window. Just this August a survey of French women showed they came back from the summer holidays more tired than they went (57% of women felt this as opposed to 39% of French men).

It seems to me that as we moved on from the old-fashioned idea that shopping was a form of relaxation for women (while for men it was golf) we may have accidentally made our relaxing purpose-driven and performative: we took to spas where relaxing was a way of ‘improving’ us, making us look better; nowadays it’s all Peloton and bootcamp.  A magazine survey of ‘how the busiest women we know relax’ included CrossFit and ice baths, which may be good for you, but no one looks relaxed during those activities.

We frequently read that women say cooking, driving and journaling are the ways they relax, yet all of these feel, to me, as if women are still being side-tracked by putting things right, solving problems or caring for others instead of relaxing. And we also continue to praise being busy, we hero the hectic, we attach our self-worth to productivity, but we don’t celebrate calmness, quietness when we see it. We don’t value ‘liquid ease’ (my fantasy of a relaxed woman) if we see it; this kind of personality trait is worth less.

A relaxed persona doesn’t have any currency culturally does it – I hardly see relaxed women in films, TV, or music. Yet there is much to applaud and respect in skilfully relaxing, especially if you can cultivate this relaxed feeling while going about your busy day as well as making time to relax by doing nothing.

Yet women really do seek relaxation: I interviewed many midlife women for my book “What’s Wrong With Me? 101 Things Midlife Women Need To Know” who desperately wanted to learn how to relax – not least because it is so good for your health when the firestorm of hormones hits in perimenopause- but they had no role models to copy.  One lady said she had finally worked out why she gave blood so often: it was because she liked a relaxing lie-down.

So what can we do to redress this imbalance? How do we step out into the world looking and feeling relaxed? The answer will of course be different for everyone, but I think it starts not with ‘self-care’ as we may have been taught but rather a mindset change; we gradually learn to relax inside in all the situation we feel it’s safe to do so, we breath into calmness.
It may also start with experts call ‘environmental mastery’ which means deliberately creating situations and circumstances which we like to be in, where we flourish best, this will relax us. We break the habits and routines of being busy and perhaps search for contentment instead: this will take a while, busyness is addictive. We think back to our childhood and remember what brings us joy and dip our toe into that again, we unclench our jaw purposefully, we stop bracing ourselves and smile instead when that urge to brace kicks in.

We learn to say no, we learn to take a moment to do nothing but stare off into the distance to get our hectic minds used to the feeling of slow silence. We shift our mindset slowly and without pressure to be more in the here and now.

I feared the relaxed woman was a figment of my imagination or that maybe she was extinct but the more I think about it as I age, the more I wonder if she is just hibernating inside us all; waiting for the right time to emerge. Perhaps that time is now.

Lorraine Candy: ‘What’s Wrong With Me? 101 Things Midlife Women need To Know’ is out now. Lorraine Candy co-hosts Postcards From Midlife podcast.