What depletion taught me about listening to my body.
There have been a few phases in my life when I was deeply depleted. Not tired. Not “I need a good night's sleep” tired. I mean bone tired. The kind of exhaustion where you feel like you could sleep for days and still not quite catch up.
One of those seasons was when I knew I needed to leave my marriage but couldn't yet reconcile it within myself. Another came after I finally did leave, when I was navigating a long divorce while trying to keep life as steady as possible for my young children.
Looking back now through the lens of the work I do, I understand something I didn't fully understand then: inner turmoil itself is exhausting. There is an enormous amount of energy involved in knowing something deep inside yourself while simultaneously resisting it, questioning it, fearing it, or trying to figure out how you could possibly survive what following that knowing might require.
The body feels all of that.
And sometimes what we call exhaustion isn't simply about needing more sleep. Sometimes we've been bracing for too long. Holding too much. Staying hypervigilant. Overriding what we're feeling because there are children to care for, jobs to do, decisions to make, and lives that still need to be lived. We can be incredibly functional and incredibly depleted at the same time. I certainly was.
During those years, I had a few places where I could finally let my system release some of what it was holding. One was my weekly therapy and Brainspotting session, where I often found myself accessing enormous amounts of anger. Another was Al-Anon, where I began learning something that would become foundational in my life: how to stop abandoning myself while trying to manage everyone and everything around me.
And then there were the much smaller things.
Sometimes I took a bath in the middle of the day and decided I was simply starting the day over. And sometimes I put myself to bed. Literally. When I felt completely depleted and I had an opportunity, even if it was only twenty minutes, I would climb into bed, wrap myself up, and let myself stop. I wasn't meditating perfectly. I wasn't doing some elaborate nervous-system practice. I wasn't trying to figure out my life. I was tired, so I put myself to bed.
Looking back, I see how somatic that actually was. I was beginning to notice what my body was asking for and, instead of immediately overriding it, sometimes I responded.
That is something I talk about often in my work now. Nervous-system regulation doesn't always look like being calm. It isn't about forcing ourselves into some perfectly regulated state or using another tool to make an uncomfortable feeling disappear. Sometimes regulation looks like movement. Sometimes it's crying. Sometimes it's anger expressed safely. Sometimes it's breath, nature, connection, therapy, or simply allowing ourselves to stop. And sometimes it's getting under the covers for twenty minutes.
The practice is learning to notice.
What is happening in my body right now? Where am I bracing? What am I overriding? What do I actually need? And can I respond to myself with even a little more care?
There will be seasons when life requires a lot from us. We may not be able to remove the circumstances creating the stress. We may still have children to raise, relationships to navigate, work to do, grief to move through, or enormous decisions to make. But somewhere inside those seasons, we can begin learning how not to leave ourselves.
I didn't have that language back then. I just knew that sometimes I needed to put myself to bed.
If this resonated, I recorded a short video this week about how getting out of survival mode starts with baby steps, and how those tiny moments of stillness can add up. You're always welcome to watch it here.
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