Pivot #62: The World Won't Stop When You Pause. So Why Can't You?

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Hi Friend,

Did you notice my absence from your inbox over the last four weeks?

Honestly, I didn’t expect you to. And that’s not a criticism—it’s simply where today’s conversation begins.

I didn’t plan to disappear. In the past, I’ve always made a point of letting you know when I’m stepping away with a brief note.

But life doesn’t negotiate with your editorial calendar. Sometimes it simply takes over, and when that happens, you must prioritize.

For four weeks, that meant recovering from a viral infection that drained my energy to near zero, showing up for loved ones navigating their own losses and illnesses, and protecting whatever was left for the clients who count on me. Everything else stopped.

Though I didn’t fully realize it until a few days into my hiatus, I was stunned that it all stopped without guilt and without shame.

It surprised me because that has not always been the case.

I noticed this when I was walking with a dear friend who has been taking intermittent sick leave to manage a chronic illness. Though her absences are legitimate, well documented, and necessary, she admitted that she’s not truly resting.

Instead, she’s thinking about the emails piling up, the cases she hasn’t reviewed, and the persistent possibility that someone is questioning whether she’s really sick at all.

She didn’t use the word shame. But I heard it running beneath the words—a low current of I should be able to do better. I should be stronger than this.

I knew that current. I’d swum in it for years.

And I think you might know it too. So let’s talk about it.

Guilt and shame are often the exhaust fumes of a corrupted sequence, a sort of corrupted program in a computer, except the computer is your brain. It’s a program that originates from external stimuli (voices or systems) and is approved by repetition.

Consider the young nurse who graduates full of purpose and compassion. Within months she’s picking up extra shifts, skipping breaks, answering messages on her days off because the environment she entered consistently rewards self‑sacrifice and inadvertently frowns on rest.

She absorbs the message. Her nervous system learns the sequence. And before long, pausing doesn’t feel like recovery. It feels like a moral failure.

This is happening everywhere. In hospitals. In corporate offices. In the homes of working parents. In the lives of entrepreneurs who left their nine‑to‑five only to build a more demanding one inside their own heads.

We carry it privately because that’s what we were trained to do. But it burns. And over time, it burns us out. The choice is clear: do nothing or do something about it.

The Power of Automaticity

So let me offer you a concept that helped me make sense of it. Automaticity is a term I first heard from Author and Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Susan Peirce Thompson, whose research centers on addiction and whose own struggles inspired her work to address food addictions.

She uses automaticity to explain why willpower fails us around food, without having to default to “addiction” language. The term immediately made me think of every person I know who can’t stop mentally working on a sick day.

Here’s the short version:

Your brain has a region built for decision‑making and resisting temptation. It’s powerful, but it exhausts quickly, sometimes in as little as a few minutes of hard use. Modern life depletes it constantly. Every notification, every email decision, every small judgment chips away at it throughout the day.

That’s why it’s so hard to resist a temptation, including the temptation to punish yourself when you deserve a rest.

But your brain also has another region entirely, one that runs automatic behavior sequences without any willpower or conscious decision at all. This is the part that drives you to work on autopilot while your mind is somewhere else. It just fires. Effortlessly. Repeatedly.

Here’s what nobody told us: guilt is automatizable too.

If you spent years or an entire career in an environment that rewarded pushing through and penalized pausing, your brain didn’t just develop a bad habit. It wired a sequence:

Rest → danger.
Stillness → failure.
Pause → prove your worth or lose it.

That loop doesn’t ask your permission before it runs. It just runs.

So when your body desperately needs to stop and your mind absolutely will not let it, that is not a character flaw. That is conditioning. The sequence is firing exactly as it was trained to fire.

That distinction matters more than it might seem.

The Failure of Guilt, Shame, and Willpower

You cannot guilt or shame yourself out of a wired sequence. You cannot willpower your way past it. When the part of your brain that would help you resist guilt and shame is depleted, your capacity to shift your thoughts is gone too.

What you can do—over time and with intention—is wire a new sequence, one where rest is not a reward you have to earn or a weakness you have to hide. One where pausing is simply part of how you function, guilt‑free.

The Pivot: Change the Sequence

First, awareness. 

Examine the sequence below. Is it yours? If it sounds different, write it down exactly as it runs in your head. The bolded words represent the internal narrative or the story you tell yourself that acts like code, programming your behavior whether you’re aware of it or not.

Rest → danger.
Stillness → failure.
Pause → prove your worth or lose it.

Second, own your capacity to edit the sequence.

The sequence was built through repetition of thoughts and behaviors. It may be true that a demanding boss or a relentless workplace wired it in. But today, this is about your capacity to rewrite it. Because the stories you believe and act on win, whether they are objectively true or not.

Let me say that again:

What if the sequence looked more like this?

Rest → renewal.
Stillness → strength.
Pause → productive, efficient, creative.

The Hard Truth and the Good News

The hard truth is that changing the sequence takes time. Repetition is key and intention is paramount.

The good news is that peace is the reward. Returning with renewed energy, creativity, and increased performance, effortlessly. That’s where I am today, though I had nearly forgotten the work of the last fifteen months that delivered me to this moment.

Your Turn

Here are some scripts that help. Read them. Write them. Say them out loud, especially when guilt and shame show up uninvited. Borrow what fits. Discard what doesn’t. The best scripts are the ones you eventually write yourself.

• I am trustworthy. I know when I need to rest.

• Rest will make me come back stronger.

• This pause will make me sharper, more creative, more present.

• I owe this pause to those who depend on me.

• I need to refuel because I can’t give from an empty cup.

• The best version of me shows up rested.

• I trust the pause.

The key is not to wait until you’re drowning to reach for them. Write them down now, before you need them. Post them somewhere you’ll see them when the guilt shows up, because it will show up. That’s the sequence doing what it was wired to do.

Your job is simply to interrupt it. One script at a time. One pause at a time. Until the new sequence becomes the one that runs automatically.

Repetition and intention—not willpower, not external validation—are the key to enjoying the peace of rest.

Wherever your mind is, you are. And if your mind won’t let you rest, neither can your body, no matter how many sick days you log or vacations you schedule.

Rest well, my friend!

Talk soon.

P.S. One more thing. Just One Pivot is no longer on a strict Sunday schedule. It arrives when it’s ready, which means when something worth saying well is ready. For a newsletter about pivoting well, it feels too harsh to do it any other way. Stay subscribed. The good stuff is coming, and my hope is it will land as a welcomed and timely gift.

P.S.S. You might want to also revisit my piece on The Shinrin Yoku Principle, which is a relevant companion to help you stop ruminating on fear, guilt, and shame.