The Devil's Playground
Why rest feels like a failure in midlife
There are things you only learn by living on the other side of an ocean, in a different time zone from the place you work.
I didn’t plan this part.
Although, to be honest, there was not a great deal of planning that initiated our great midlife adventure, leaping into the unknown a year and a half ago.
We were a couple of 50-year-olds with big passion and unrealized dreams and, as my husband likes to say, saw “a hole in the fence, and jumped” into this unconventional nomad life, leaving the U.S. and living right now in Portugal on the island of Madeira.
This particular side effect of our much bigger decision showed up almost immediately in the quality and quantity of my sleep; I haven’t written about it yet as I am still peeling back the layers of what it feels like to really sleep.
And as a clinician and menopausal woman, what I know to be true is that sleep is a struggle for most women, for a variety of reasons that worsen with menopause.
And living on the other side of the ocean, for the past year and a half, I have never slept this well and this long in my whole life.
WTH is going on?
And as I started processing this myself, I realized many women don’t just have trouble sleeping.
They have trouble believing they are allowed to prioritize sleep, rest, and care for themselves.
Who the world needed me to be for so long…
Most of my adult life, I was known as and nicknamed “Jada 430.”
I started my day at 4:30 am for over a decade.
I rose before the sun got up.
I would start my day running in the dark, either alone or with a gang of other “crazy people” like myself who also started their day with a workout in the pre-dawn hours of a weekday.
On Saturdays we would “sleep in” and start our runs at the reasonable hour of 7 am, then finish with coffee afterward.
I have been an athlete since age 16, when I started running to fit into a pair of acid-washed jeans. My solution was to start running and lose a pound or two so those coveted jeans would fit. It worked, and I was rewarded with the prized blue jeans everyone at school was wearing, because at that time, that was super important.
But what I didn’t see coming was how much better I felt mentally after those runs, and that is why I continued. The weight control was just a side bonus.
And as such, running became part of my life.
I started getting up early to run before high school started so it wouldn’t interfere with band practice after. I always had a busy schedule, so I continued this morning running routine in college and then throughout my early adult years and into my pregnancies.
Getting up early to run was so important to me; sleep was what I was always willing to sacrifice to run.
And by default, alarm clocks were always a part of my life.
But while I have always risen before the sun to run, the time kept moving earlier and earlier to meet the demands of a growing family. Leaving the house at 4:30 ensured no child would miss me. It would not impede my ability to be the mom who was there when my children awoke. It was the only time to leave the house without compromising anyone.
Sleep was the sacrifice and lever to pull, so I did.
Then we moved to Portugal, and the six-hour offset means my workday starts at 8 am in the U.S., which is 2 pm here. My mornings now belong to me in a way they never did before. I didn’t have to finish a run by 7 am to be on camera by 9 anymore.
So I stopped setting an alarm.
And something in me shifted.
What am I going to do with all this idle time, I thought…
But I also didn’t understand how my entire routine would shift to match the rhythms of the culture.
Dinner is a bit later. I go to bed later, following the slower pace. And most coffee shops don’t open until 8 am anyway.
There is no rush- for anything.
Being here is forcing a recalibration on how I have always approached the day.
I was always used to sneaking up on the day in the darkness and getting a head start, feeling proud of my discipline. It made me feel like I had achieved something before the sun even woke up.
Jada one. The day zero.
But life here is forcing a reckoning of sorts. It is asking me to reconsider my relationship with something I would sacrifice earlier in life.
My sleep.
What I inherited
But these were not just my rules to the “sneak attack” to the day. I inherited these beliefs about work along with the disdain for idle time and the dangers of “idle hands.”
I grew up in a house where mornings started early, and staying in bed past 8 am required a reason. You were ill or “coming down with something,” or perhaps you had trouble falling asleep so you didn’t “realize the time.” But there would need to be a qualifier if you stayed in bed when the sun had clearly announced her presence in the sky.
And of course, as soon as you heard footsteps or movement in the kitchen, you popped out of bed like a jumping bean, casually stating that you’d “been awake, just waiting to get up”.
The qualifier of rest.
That’s a hard rule to unlearn, even with an ocean between me and the house that taught it to me.
Sprinkle in the societal “early bird gets the worm” and “you can sleep when you are dead” slogans that keep you believing the more you do, the better, and the earlier you do it, the better still.
So when I lie in bed on an ordinary Wednesday morning, letting my eye mask convince me the sun hasn’t risen yet, sleeping well past 8 am, that’s a new kind of growth for me. And as I try to enjoy the bliss of not waking to an alarm and letting my body sink into restorative sleep, I found something start to creep in I wasn’t expecting.
Guilt.
Now, as a clinician, I know guilt is the feeling of a perceived wrong. If I didn’t believe some part of my sleeping “late” was wrong… why the guilt? Some part of me still believed that resting past a “respectable” hour was a personal failing.
Not restorative or nourishing as I know sleep to be...but
A failing.
I found myself negotiating with myself over why I seemed to crave more sleep now, as well as slower mornings- lingering in bed instead of the instant pop-up.
Welcoming the idleness.
Moving my eye mask to one side to check the time on my watch and my sleep score and hear my inner critic say, “I should get up!”
But did I really need to get up?
I sat with that for a few days.
It’s strange how these old programs keep running long after the life that built them is gone.
Why did I feel guilty for listening to my body and giving it the extra sleep it was asking for?
The first layer revealed
Here’s what I know, both as the woman lying there and as the clinician who studies this for a living: the guilt is lying to me.
It’s lying to me because I never chose it.
It was handed to me by people who needed me to prove I wasn’t lazy, wasn’t idle, wasn’t headed for eternal damnation for lingering too long in a bed.
Growing up, idle time and idle hands were “the devil’s playground,” my southern relatives would say. So in a very real sense, I inherited this belief before I was fully grown.
It was almost a sign of successful adulting to be the first one up. To not “need” as much sleep as anyone else, because you were disciplined, and definitely not lazy. This is where “Jada 430” was created, in the belief that laziness was most certainly going to land you in hell.
So the guilt isn’t information about what I deserve. It’s loyalty. It’s the last living rule of a household I haven’t lived in for decades, still running quietly in a body that moved across an ocean to get away from needing it.
The second layer peaking through
Underneath the belief about being productive was something else: my desire not to inconvenience anyone with my own needs, by continuing to rise earlier and earlier, sacrificing sleep to get up at 4:30 am.
And this belief runs much deeper than simple guilt. It is rooted in identity, attachment, and the social messages many women absorbed over a lifetime.
At its core, it is an internalized belief that “my value comes from what I do for others, not from who I am”.
And for many other women, including me, the challenge isn’t just learning how to prioritize themselves. It is learning to tolerate the temporary discomfort that comes with breaking an old pattern.
That is one of the central developmental tasks of midlife: shifting from proving your worth through self-sacrifice to recognizing your worth is inherent, even when you are sleeping… or idling.
The third layer beneath the others
Lying there without the desire to get up, even though my mind said I should, I realized I was not needed by anyone at the moment.
That’s what shifted something even deeper within me.
I was a woman who had spent her life filling the needs of others on autopilot, sleeping with an almost “one eye open” in a way one does when there is the anticipation that someone will need you in the night.
A baby who needs nursing, so you learn to listen for the first signs of waking.
A dog that whimpers to be let out.
A child who is ill and requires tending to.
A teenager who just learned to drive and is not home yet.
And the accumulated exhaustion that follows with nights of light sleeping on repeat.
But that is not true right now. It is just me, with inherited programming, a lifetime of serving, and the realization I am no longer needed in the ways I was before.
And that hit.
That took some time to wrestle with, and some rewiring.
The unexpected gift of distance and the grief of letting a part of me go that once was very much needed.
And the realization that slowly sank into my bones…
No one needs me right now.
And then a reframe…
I’m not failing anyone by resting.
I am learning to care for myself, to tend to my own needs and to set down the need to perform and fill every minute with something.
Lingering in bed until I feel the need to rise, instead of a reflexive “I should get up!” mentality, is slowly leaving me.
While I still work part-time, my schedule on this side of the world gives me something I now see as one of the greatest blessings: permission to sleep, while most of my previous world and life are still asleep an ocean away… even if I get up at 10 am.
And no one bats an eye when I order my first chinesa at noon.
The fourth indisputable layer that supports our health
Another layer of sleep that I have largely ignored most of my adult life is the foundational role sleep plays in our overall health.
And when I look through a clinical lens, I see the dangers of continuing to deprive ourselves of deep restorative sleep, as well as idleness and moments of genuine rest.
Poor sleep doesn’t just leave you tired.
It raises cortisol.
And elevated cortisol in midlife women is tied to more fragmented sleep, more stubborn weight, and a harder time regulating mood. It’s a loop that runs in both directions. (I’ll be writing more soon about what I’ve been doing about the weight side of that over the last 90 days.)
Sleep isn’t simply recovery. It is one of the most important regulators of hormones, metabolism, and brain health.
Inadequate and poor sleep also contributes to increased belly fat, muscle loss, insulin resistance, brain fog and memory problems, mood changes, increased inflammation, heart health, and faster aging.
Sleep is becoming a non-negotiable for me now, as much as movement or what I eat, and not something I am willing to sacrifice.
In my practice, I make a point of focusing on sleep with all my clients. I know, fundamentally, how important it is for stabilizing our mood and helping us feel our best, but I wasn’t always the best patient myself for a long time.
Sleep researcher Matthew Walker, who spent years calling sleep the third pillar of health alongside diet and exercise, has since revised that. He now argues sleep isn’t a pillar at all. It’s the foundation the other two stand on. Which means all those years of disciplined running and clean eating were still built on something I’d never once protected.
He also said, “The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.”
That is a hard no for me now. Perhaps it is for you too. Idleness and sleep for the win!
So here is my challenge to you all.
We all have waterfalls to chase and grand adventures to go on.
Perhaps there are reasons beyond what I have mentioned that are interfering with your sleep, like stressful jobs, toxic relationships, unrelenting anxiety, or unhealthy boundaries. Things that may require a bigger change.
There can be many reasons that sleep is truncated. The point is, if there are things you can change that will improve your sleep, it will most likely improve (and possibly lengthen) your life.
I am not ready to shorten any part of this one life I have.
If I have to start learning to sleep until 10 or 11 to ensure I’m ready for the next great leap, I’m all in.
That’s true whether you’re the woman finally letting herself indulge in restful sleep or the woman wide awake at 3 am fighting her own nervous system. Both of you are allowed to stop treating rest as something to earn and idleness as slothful or lazy, or as a quick route to hell.
To idle when you need to.
And to linger in bed if your body asks for it.
Maybe there was some truth in the warnings of my relatives that “idle hands were the devil’s playground.” That might have been true in my adolescence. I question if that is the case now in my 50s.
If you are struggling with sleep, whether this is due to permission, guilt, duty, inherited beliefs, or midlife sleep challenges, I put together two companion guides for my paid subscribers: one on permission to rest, and one on the mechanics of sleep itself, called the sleep reset for the nights your body won’t cooperate.
Both guides are included in the Practice vault for paid subscribers, alongside the Bridge card deck already inside the Subscriber Perks.
» If you’ve been thinking about joining, this is a good time.
Happy sleeping, friends.
XO,
Jada
P.S. One more thing before you go: the two guides above are part of something new I'm building, tools grounded in my years as a therapist and PA-C, made for this exact chapter of life. It means I get to keep doing this work because readers like you support it. I'd love to hear what you want more of; just leave a comment.
*Paid subscribers, your new guides are below!
You made it. Here are your two companions: one for the guilt, one for the mechanics. Print them, save them, come back to them whenever the old programming starts running again.
This post is so vindicating. I have plenty of friends who will skip sleep to chase waterfalls, party into the wee hours, and then roll into camp at dark o'clock for a sunrise start—and I'm glad for them (and jealous!) but that could never be me. I need my sleep!!
The line about guilt being loyalty, not information, is the one I’ll keep. That reframe does something a to-do list never could. So many of us hit our fifties still running someone else’s rules about what earns rest, long after the household that wrote them is gone. Retiring the programme is harder than retiring the alarm, but you’ve named exactly where to start.