Here’s Why So Many of Us are Afraid of Our Own Free Time

By Rob Cross

When free time makes us anxious, the answer isn’t to fill it more efficiently, but to understand what our discomfort is trying to tell us.

We spend much of our lives longing for more free time, yet when it finally arrives, many of us struggle to enjoy it. We check our phones, invent tasks and feel guilty for doing nothing. This is leisure stress – the discomfort that arises when constant activity stops and we are left alone with ourselves. According to Rob Cross, leadership development coach and author of Ask 3 Questions: How to Live Well in a Distracted World, the solution is to become comfortable with the space it creates.

Michelle had spent months longing for a break.

As a senior executive, her working life was relentless. Her diary was full, her phone never stopped, and most evenings ended with unfinished tasks still circling in her mind. Amid this frenetic busyness, Michelle held onto the belief that she just needed to survive until the break, imagining that a quiet week away would bring immediate relief.

Instead, when the break finally arrived, she felt strangely uncomfortable.

With no meetings to attend or problems to solve, Michelle became restless. She repeatedly checked her emails, invented small jobs and filled every available moment with activity. Even sitting beside the pool felt difficult.

“I should be enjoying this,” she told me. “But I feel as though I’m wasting time.”

Michelle’s experience is increasingly common. Many of us say we want more free time, yet when it appears, we do not know how to inhabit it. Instead of feeling liberated, we feel anxious, guilty or unproductive.

This is leisure stress: the discomfort we experience when activity stops and we are left alone with ourselves.

Why stopping can feel so uncomfortable

Busyness is often presented as something imposed upon us by demanding jobs, family responsibilities and an always-connected world. These pressures are real. But they are only part of the story.

For many high-performing people, busyness also serves an important psychological purpose. It provides structure, validation and a sense of control. It reassures us that we are needed and moving forward.

Over time, productivity can become more than something we practise. It becomes part of who we believe we are.

When this happens, free time presents a hidden threat. Without a task to complete, a problem to solve or somebody requiring our attention, we may be confronted by an unsettling question: Who am I when I am not being productive?

Free space can also allow thoughts and feelings that have been suppressed by constant activity to surface. We may notice dissatisfaction with our work, distance in a relationship or uncertainty about the direction of our life. Reaching for a phone, opening a laptop or finding another job to do becomes an effective way of pushing that discomfort back beneath the surface.

This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Busyness prevents reflection, while the absence of reflection makes busyness feel increasingly necessary.

The result is that even our leisure becomes another form of work. Holidays are packed with itineraries. Weekends become lists of tasks. Exercise must produce measurable improvements, and hobbies become side hustles. We optimise the very time that is supposed to release us from the demand to perform.

Learning to tolerate the empty space

The answer is not to make free time more productive. It is to become more comfortable with space that has no immediate purpose.

At first, this may feel unfamiliar. If your mind is accustomed to constant stimulation, stillness can resemble withdrawal. You may feel restless, reach automatically for your phone or experience guilt about what you could be doing.

Rather than treating this discomfort as evidence that you are bad at relaxing, become curious about it. Notice the urge to fill the space without immediately acting upon it.

Start small. Take a walk without listening to anything. Sit with a cup of coffee without checking your phone. Leave part of a weekend unplanned. Spend ten minutes doing nothing that can be measured, shared or crossed off a list.

The objective is not to achieve perfect calm. It is to discover that you can remain in an unoccupied moment without needing to escape from it.

Gradually, the nervousness begins to settle. Beneath it, something valuable emerges: the capacity to hear yourself think.

This matters because free space is not empty. It is where perspective, imagination and self-awareness can return. Once we stop automatically filling it, it creates an opportunity to consider whether the life we are living is still the life we want.

Three questions can help.

Question 1: Who am I?

Most people answer this question with their job title, relationships or responsibilities: “I’m a manager”, “I’m a parent” or “I’m the person everybody relies upon.”

These things describe important parts of your life, but they do not fully describe you.

Ask instead: Who am I beneath my roles and achievements? What do I value? What brings me alive? Which parts of myself have I strengthened, and which have I neglected in order to fit in or succeed?

This is not about discovering a fixed, hidden identity. We are continually becoming who we are. But unless we pause to examine the influences shaping us, we risk constructing a life around other people’s expectations.

Free space gives us the distance to notice where our lives feel authentic and where we are merely performing an identity we have inherited.

Question 2: Why am I here?

This question can sound impossibly grand, as though everybody must uncover a single, extraordinary purpose.

A more useful approach is to think about purpose in life rather than searching for one purpose for life.

Purpose is experienced through the contribution we make. It appears in how we help, create, care, lead and leave situations better than we found them. It does not need to be dramatic, but it does need to matter to us.

Consider: Who do I want to make a difference to? What do I want my presence to make possible? Where does my energy feel connected to something beyond my own status or success?

These questions shift purpose from a distant destination to something that can be lived each day.

Question 3: How will I live?

Insight without action changes very little.

Once you understand more clearly who you are and why you are here, the final question is how that understanding will shape your choices.

How will you invest your finite time and energy? What will you say no to? Which relationships need more of your presence? What habits support the person you want to become, and which keep you trapped in distraction?

This does not require abandoning your career or transforming your life overnight. Often, meaningful change begins with smaller decisions: protecting time with family, doing work that reflects your values, reviving a neglected interest or creating regular space to think.

The aim is not to design a perfect life. It is to live with greater intention.

Free time as an invitation

Michelle eventually recognised that she was not afraid of having nothing to do. She was afraid of what she might discover when she stopped doing it.

Learning to remain in that space allowed her to see that her life was full but not entirely her own. She did not resign or make a dramatic escape. Instead, she began changing how she worked, how present she was with her family and what she allowed to matter.

Leisure stress is not solved by becoming better at keeping ourselves entertained. It is eased when we no longer need constant activity to protect us from ourselves.

Free time offers more than recovery from work. It gives us room to encounter who we are, consider why we are here and decide how we will live.

The challenge is to resist filling the silence long enough to hear what it has been trying to tell us.

About the Author

Rob Cross is the author of Ask 3 Questions: How to Live Well in a Distracted World and an experienced leadership development coach who works with senior leaders and organisations to build high performance through clarity, purpose and effective leadership.