The Rest Test: Leave The Desk. Change Everything.

By Tricia Scott.

Let me tell you how I justified leaving my MacBook at home.

Not because I deserved a break. Not because the research said so (though it does — more on that in a moment). I left it behind because I was genuinely worried about it getting wet near the spa facilities. That was the logic that worked. A 46-year-old business founder, who has built a global platform, needed to convince herself her laptop might get damp before she could grant herself permission to rest. I'm leaving that little confession in because I suspect you know exactly what I mean.

This is what The Rest Test is exposing, one trip and experience at a time. Not that we need rest - we know that, abstractly, the same way we know we should drink more water and go to bed before midnight. What it's exposing is how deep the resistance runs, and how specifically it runs in us - in women who have built something, who carry the weight of it, who are somewhere in the complicated middle years of doing the work and being the person who does it.

The Voice on the Drive

The whole three-hour drive down to Rutland, she was at it. 

You’ll get there and immediately wish you’d brought your MacBook. You’ll end up checking your emails in the spa loo like you’re smuggling contraband.

And somewhere on the M1, I realised I was bracing for rest to feel like withdrawal. Not relaxation — withdrawal. That's what chronic overwork does. It reframes stillness as a threat rather than a resource and convinces us that the business will fall apart the second we look away.

Here's what the data says about that particular lie: 63% of women founders name burnout as their biggest challenge. Women report burnout at rates 10 percentage points higher than men. And for those of us navigating perimenopause or menopause while simultaneously running companies - a detail the business world still largely pretends doesn’t exist in, like, 50% of the population - the picture sharpens further. Research from the Seattle Midlife Women’s Health Study found that cortisol levels increase markedly during the perimenopause transition, meaning the body’s stress response is already working overtime before we’ve sent a single morning email. Layering a relentless work pace on top of that hormonal landscape isn’t resilience. It’s a full on leak.

And the cost isn’t just personal. Studies consistently show that high burnout correlates with 18–20% lower productivity. Employees and founders with genuinely good recovery habits are 21% more productive. The hustle is, in the most literal sense, counterproductive.

The Barnsdale

The Barnsdale sits in Rutland, England’s smallest county, on the edge of Rutland Water and it has the particular quality of a place that knows exactly what it’s for. It’s a boutique hotel and spa that doesn’t try to be anything except beautifully, unhurriedly itself. Characterful rooms. Countryside rolling in every direction. A Signet Spa with wood-fired hot tubs and an outdoor heated pool that has views of the kind that make your nervous system visibly exhale. The 1760 Brasserie serves the sort of food that reminds you eating is supposed to be an experience, not a task you fit between calls.

I had a suite. I will not pretend otherwise, and I will not pretend it wasn’t spectacular. The kind of room where you walk in, put your bag down, and stand there for a moment longer than necessary because this is your actual life and you are actually here. The kind of room that makes you feel like someone thought carefully about what rest requires: space, quiet, beauty, and absolutely no reason to be anywhere else.

I sank into a wood-fired hot tub at dusk with the English countryside unfurling in front of me, surrounded by roses in full colour, and not one ding or ping within reach.

Something shifted. I can’t tell you exactly when, but somewhere around late Sunday afternoon the noise in my head went quieter. Not gone - I’m a founder, not a monk - but turned down. Like this place had finally found the volume button I’d been jabbing at for too many years to mention.

Why Your Brain Needs This

There’s a reason clarity doesn’t arrive when you’re chasing it round your desk at 11pm. Neuroscience calls it the Default Mode Network - the part of the brain that activates when you stop. It’s associated with creative thinking, problem-solving, and those insight moments that show up, rudely, in the shower or mid-walk or in a wood-fired hot tub in Rutland. The brain needs genuine rest to access it. Not a scrolled-through lunch break. Not ‘quiet’ evenings with one eye on Trello. Real rest, in a real different space, away from the triggers your desk has been firing at you for months or more.

Changing your physical environment is part of the mechanism. There’s a reason the answer never comes at the desk where you made the problem. New space. New inputs. Permission to be somewhere with no agenda except your own recovery.

The Proof, It Turns Out Was In The Pudding (Or, More Precisely, The Pool)

I didn’t check my emails. The world kept turning. And when I did check them on the Tuesday after I got home, I found out that The Female CEO had been named Leading Women’s Leadership & Visibility Businesswoman 2026 (UK) by Acquisition International.

I won an award for visibility in the exact days I deliberately made myself invisible.

I know that’s not a randomised controlled trial. I know correlation and causation are not the same thing. But I also know what it felt like to read that email standing in my kitchen with a coffee I’d actually let go cold, thinking: what if the showing-up that gets noticed is the kind that comes from someone rested enough to really mean it?

Your Rest Test

The Rest Test is my six-month experiment in taking my founder wellbeing as seriously as I take my business. Not performing fine. Actually fine. I am reporting back honestly, in these pages and over on the Foundher blog, for the duration. No filter, no highlight reel, no pretending I’ve cracked it when I’m thirty emails deep on a Tuesday at 11pm (those weeks will come).

I am not asking you to book a hotel stay, though I will say that The Barnsdale is worth every consideration if you’re looking for somewhere to actually land (and they have fabulous women’s networking there too with Queen Bee & Co). The Signet Spa’s monthly wellness package is, in my opinion, the kind of thing a founder with an hour and a desperate need for hot water and silence might consider her most productive monthly expense.

But what I am asking is smaller and more immediate than that. I’m asking you to get away from your desk. Not permanently. Not even for long. But physically, genuinely, deliberately away. A different space. A different pace. Permission to let your brain do the part of its work it can only do in the quiet.

Because rest isn’t the reward you get for finishing. Sometimes, it is the work.

I believe in you. Always.

VISIT THE BARNSDALE

The Barnsdale, The Avenue, Exton, Oakham, Rutland, LE15 8AH

barnsdalerutland.com