When Rest Doesn't Restore You
Why some women sleep, holiday, take breaks and still feel depleted.
Over the last few months, I have spent more time resting than ever before. For example, when I have been on my period, I have deeply rested for three days. I’ve also had the best bedtime habits.
Yet sometimes I still feel depleted.
This made me think about the women who would sit in the cabin and say they didn’t know why they felt tired when they had what they needed rest-wise.
I’d noticed it in myself, but when you pause and feel everything so viscerally in a van with children— that’s when you really notice.
The thing is, we know there is a particular kind of exhaustion that rest sometimes doesn’t touch.
You took the holiday. You slept in. You had the weekend away, the lie-in, the spa afternoon. And you noticed you returned from X, Y or Z feeling exactly the same. Sometimes even worse.
It’s like when you have a bad night’s sleep, but the next night doesn’t restore you; it’s the night after that one where restoration takes place.
The other day, I committed to a Hammam and massage. My nervous system was on high alert, and I was dealing with low-level nausea for about two weeks. I thought I would try to soothe myself with some mothering. An hour after I left, I began feeling sick.
Waves of sickness this time.
I returned home and lay on the bed. My nervous system had been screaming at me, and this was the culmination of that. Either way, my body had something to say in the form of vomiting all night. Non-stop vomiting.
When we are moving and dancing in life from the Ventral Vagal, this is the state of genuine safety, connection, and ease. The state where digestion works, where sleep restores, where pleasure is accessible, where you can be present with your children without the low-level noise of everything you haven’t done.
Most high-functioning women who are running households, careers, invisible logistics, and emotional labour for everyone around them are not spending much time there in this VV state.
We often land deeply into the Sympathetic. The doing state. The perpetual readiness. Scanning, managing, micromanaging, waiting for whatever we need to be ready for. It’s not obvious that we’re in survival mode, but we are stressed.
What is your body’s default setting when you finally stop?
Because here is what happens when a woman who has been in Sympathetic for months/years finally takes a holiday: she lies on the sun lounger, she opens a book, her body does not relax. It’s waiting. For the next thing. For the problem. For someone to need something.
Her nervous system has learned that stillness is temporary. That rest is a gap between demands, not a real state. That she is, at her core, responsible, and responsibility doesn’t go on holiday.
So the rest lands on a system that cannot receive it. A woman who is ready to get up at any minute.
Sometimes, when moments drop into calm, like when children are in bed, when there is genuinely nothing left to do, we as women don’t always feel relief. We often feel numb. Sometimes flat. Lost.
We move into shutdown (Dorsal) because we are just so tired from being hypervigilant.
This was where I was for a few weeks, and that’s when I would feel the nausea—in my meditation practice or lying in bed.
When you land in rest do you feel numbness or something else instead of the joy of rest?
This is why pausing is so useful. It tells you loads about where your system actually is.
The cultural solution to an exhausted woman is more rest in the conventional sense. Sleep more. Do less. Take a break. Book a Thomas Cook.
But if the nervous system cannot receive rest because it is either too activated to land or too collapsed, then more of the same rest will not work.
The cycle of trying to force rest on ourselves is just, well..mean.
What actually begins to shift the system is rhythm.
Repetition.
Sensory grounding.
Activities that ask the body to be present without demanding anything from it.
Knitting. Walking without a destination or a podcast. Baking something slowly. Sitting in sunlight.
Small, deeply regulating things. Not a spa weekend. Not a productivity reset. Not a digital detox that begins with a long Instagram post about your digital detox.
What actually brings you back into your body? Not your head’s idea of rest, but your body’s.
A woman who has been in Sympathetic for years by gripping, managing, and holding everything often carries that in the pelvic floor.
Bracing.
Some questions worth sitting with:
Is there pain during sex?
Are your periods more challenging than they used to be, and what was that month like when you reflect back?
Can you feel aroused with ease, or is it challenging?
Is there any leaking, or more than usual?
Does your discharge follow its usual pattern?
One of the red flags before the nausea was the most painful period I’d received in years. On day five the pain became searing which is unheard of for me—if pain is present it’s always only on day 1-3. The pelvis will communicate your needs.
When we begin to work with the pelvis, not with exercises or kegals, but with breath, attention, with honest, slow curiosity, we are not releasing just tension.
It is exhaustion women didn’t know they were holding. Because the body has been working, even in rest.
It’s not: how do I get more rest?
But: what would my body need to actually receive rest?
The holiday isn’t the problem. The lie-in isn’t the problem. You are not failing at resting. Your system is doing exactly what it learned to do.
The work is building the conditions for rest to become possible again.
That’s what the pelvic floor journey I have created is built around. Not fixing.
The journey focuses on the conditions you need to gently unfurl into this life you are building.
What is your body’s default setting when you finally stop?
When you land in rest, do you feel numbness?
What actually brings you back into your body? Not your head’s idea of rest, but your body’s?
What would your body need in order to actually receive rest?
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