Is this more of a female-skewed issue, I wonder? Selina Barker, life design coach and author of bestseller Burnt Out: The Exhausted Person’s Six-step Guide To Thriving In A Fast-paced World, thinks so. “Many of my clients struggle with ring-fencing time to be lazy. They say things like: ‘My mother never used to stop; I feel I should do the same otherwise I’ll be a bad mother,’” she says. “But here’s the thing – the people who worry about being lazy are always the least lazy. The idea of doing absolutely nothing for an hour, an afternoon, is actually a massive challenge for these people.”

Perhaps we’re not as lazy as we think. Sociologist Martha Beck talks about a phenomenon in humans called ‘the rage to master’. “When we are interested in something, we become obsessed with trying to figure it out,” she says. “When we are intrigued and curious, we can end up working for 12 hours straight, not really noticing where the time has gone. We love to work and figure things out. But when we are bored, directionless and unappreciated, guess what? We shut down. We don’t want to do it. In this state, we begin to think of ourselves as lazy when we’re simply burnt out.”

Beginning to understand this, I’ve spent the last year teaching myself to rest. I learned how to be lazy from a miniature dachshund pup that I was looking after – she liked to nap with me on the sofa, breathing softly as she drifted in and out of dreams, finding warm patches of sunlit tiles in my gardens and going on leisurely walks but nothing too much. She likes soft things – blankets, sofas, cuddly toys. I never once would consider this dog to be lazy. So why would I call myself that?

In another effort to unlearn my fear of being lazy, I took up swimming and swam in the slow lane, often being overtaken by people I imagined were tutting I was ‘too slow’. Being ‘too slow’ would have been mortifying to me a few years ago, but now I am proud of it. I now remind myself to slow down when I find myself walking too quickly and I don’t use the word lazy anymore. I have naps on my outdoor sofa. I watch reality TV on my lunch break. I’ll happily read a novel instead of doing the laundry. Maybe some people would call me lazy, but part of the challenge is pushing past that and no longer worrying too much about what other people think of me.

Now, I live my life like I’m on a lazy river. I don’t have to move fast or know where I’m going. I can just flow and, to my surprise, big things still get done.

“My fear of being seen as ‘lazy’ led to panic attacks. I had to change my worldview to overcome it”