Rest has an image problem right now. On one side, people are told to slow down, protect their energy and stop glorifying busyness. On the other, a full day spent under the covers scrolling, known online as bed rotting, has quietly become shorthand for self care. The trouble is, these two things are not the same, and mixing them up can leave people feeling worse, not better.

Genuine rest restores you. Bed rotting, especially when it stretches across days rather than hours, tends to do the opposite. It can flatten motivation, disrupt sleep and make the next attempt to get moving feel even harder. For anyone already carrying stress or grief or a rough patch at work, that cycle can quietly deepen.

When Rest Turns Into Retreat

There is nothing wrong with a lazy Sunday. The shift happens when staying in bed stops being a choice and starts being the only option that feels manageable. Days blur together, meals get skipped or eaten in bed, and the body’s internal clock, which relies on daylight and movement to stay steady, starts to drift. Sleep at night suffers as a result, which makes the next day even harder to face.

This is where resilience building rest matters. It is not about forcing yourself to be busy. It is about resting in a way that leaves you with a bit more capacity than you started with, rather than a bit less.

The Fall, Feel, Rise Approach

World Resiliency Day’s Fall Feel Rise framework offers a useful way to think about tough stretches, because it does not ask anyone to skip the hard part.

Fall. Something knocks you down. A stressful week, a loss, a diagnosis, a deadline that broke you. Naming that clearly, rather than pretending you are fine, is the honest starting point.

Feel. This is the part bed rotting often tries to numb rather than process. Give the feeling somewhere to go. That might be a few lines in a journal, a phone call to someone who listens well, or simply sitting with it for a while without judging yourself for struggling.

Rise. This is where small, deliberate action comes in, and it does not need to be dramatic.

Thirteen Ways to Rise

World Resiliency Day frames the Rise stage as small, deliberate action rather than one big leap. These thirteen ideas are a practical starting point for that stage, reshaped around genuine recovery rather than escape.

Getting Yourself Up

Some mornings the hardest part is simply leaving the bed, so make it slightly harder to stay there. Put your alarm on the other side of the room, ideally somewhere like the bathroom, so switching it off means you are already up and moving.

Once you are up for a valid reason, such as a bathroom trip, use it as your jumping off point. Have a shower if you can, and swap the pyjamas for daytime clothes rather than climbing straight back into bed. A change of clothes genuinely shifts your outlook for the day.

If none of that feels possible yet, start smaller again. Put both feet flat on the floor. That alone counts as a win. Give yourself somewhere to walk to, whether that is the kitchen or the letterbox, and open the curtains on your way past so natural light can start resetting your body clock.

Once you are moving, commit to just five minutes of something you actually enjoy, a song, a stretch, a few pages of a book. Five minutes is a low enough bar that it rarely feels like too much to ask, and it often stretches into more once you are underway.

It helps to make the bed itself a little less appealing to linger in too. Keep your phone or tablet in another room overnight, so reaching for your devices means getting up first. And where you can, let the first thing you do be something genuinely enjoyable rather than a chore, since starting the day with a small dose of pleasure makes the next task easier to face.

Building the Next Ten Minutes

Momentum tends to come from tiny wins, not grand plans. Choose one small task rather than a full to do list, something like making the bed or answering a single message, so you get an early sense of achievement.

A short morning ritual helps too. A few minutes of deep breathing, a proper breakfast built around whole foods, and two lines in a journal noting what you managed and how it felt, can be enough to set the tone for the rest of the day.

Step outside if you are able to. Daylight and movement together lift mood more reliably than either does alone, and a short walk around the block counts.

From there, habit stacking is what turns single wins into a routine. Once getting up and making the bed feels manageable, add your bathroom routine straight after it. The following week, add a short walk. Each completed step tends to make the next one a little easier to start.

Making It Stick

Give yourself something to look forward to once a task is done. Finish a walk at a favourite coffee spot, or save an episode of a show you enjoy for after the chores are done. A small reward at the end makes the whole sequence worth repeating.

It also helps to protect your sleep and wake times, even on hard days. Bed rotting tends to blur day and night together, which throws off your circadian rhythm and makes the next morning even harder. A consistent bedtime and wake time, even if imperfect, keeps that rhythm steady.

The final piece, asking for gentle accountability, matters enough to get its own space below.

A Word on the Numbers

Struggling to get moving during a hard stretch is common. Research from the Australian Bureau of Statistics has found that around two in five Australians will experience a mental health condition at some point in their life, which means the person next to you at work or at the school gate has very likely faced something similar. Note for the editorial team: please verify this figure against the latest ABS National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing before publishing, as I was not able to confirm it against a live source in this session.

You Do Not Have to Rise Alone

Some of the strongest resilience comes from letting someone else help you get moving. Ask a friend or family member to check in with a call or message each morning, simply as encouragement to get up. If that is not available, a warmline can help too, a low pressure support line staffed by people trained to listen, some of whom have faced similar struggles themselves.

If getting out of bed feels impossible for more than a couple of weeks, that is also worth raising with a GP or another trusted professional. Resilience is not about pushing through alone. Sometimes the most resilient step is asking someone else to help you find your feet again.

That is the idea behind Fall Feel Rise. Falling is not a failure. Feeling it properly is not weakness. And rising again, one small step at a time, whether by yourself or with someone alongside you, is where real resilience is built.

Source: webmd