“Why am I so tired all the time?” 5 Reasons You’re Burned Out

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 If you feel like you are constantly tired, struggling to slow down, or guilty every time you try to rest, you are not alone.

For many women in midlife, exhaustion is not just physical. It is emotional, mental, and deeply tied to how we have been conditioned to think about productivity, worth, and self-care.

If you find yourself asking “Why am I so tired all the time?” but then you tell yourself:

• I’ll rest when everything is done
• I should be doing more
• I can’t relax until I earn it
• I’m falling behind if I slow down

The real issue is that you were never taught how to rest without guilt.

This conversation explores why rest feels so hard, why burnout is so common, and how to start rebuilding a healthier, more sustainable relationship with rest and self-care.

5 Reasons You’re Burned Out

If you constantly feel exhausted, overwhelmed, or like you can never fully “catch up,” it’s not just a scheduling problem or a lack of discipline.

Burnout is often the result of long-term patterns like ignoring your body’s signals, pushing through fatigue, and relying on external rules instead of internal needs. In this post, we’ll break down the real reasons you feel burned out and why rest still feels so hard even when you know you need it.

RELATED: Start Here: What it Means to Get “Results Without Restriction”

Rest is not something you earn

One of the biggest misconceptions about rest is that it must be deserved.

Many people operate under an invisible rule:

“I can rest once I have done enough.”

The problem is that “enough” is never clearly defined. So rest gets pushed further and further out of reach.

This creates a cycle where:

• you keep working past your limits
• you delay recovery
• you only stop when your body forces you to

Rest then becomes reactive instead of intentional.

The shift is simple but powerful:

Rest is not a reward for productivity. It is a requirement for functioning.

Most people are following borrowed rules for rest

Another hidden issue is that most people are not actually choosing how they rest.

Instead, they are copying what they think rest “should” look like:

• spa days
• naps
• scrolling on the couch
• bubble baths
• doing nothing at all

But what is marketed as ‘self-care’ is not always what actually restores you.

For some people:

• scrolling makes them more anxious
• lying still increases mental overwhelm
• spa environments feel overstimulating rather than relaxing

This is where the disconnect happens.

Real rest is not about performing self-care activities. It is about what genuinely restores your system.

Burnout is often a delayed response, not a sudden event

Burnout does not happen overnight.

It builds slowly when you consistently override your internal signals:

• ignoring fatigue
• pushing through stress
• dismissing the need for pause
• staying “productive” at the expense of recovery

Many people only recognize burnout when they are already forced to stop.

That stopping point can look like:

• emotional exhaustion
• physical illness
• loss of motivation
• complete overwhelm

At that stage, rest is no longer optional.

The important realization is this:

Burnout is often the result of delayed rest, not lack of capability.

‘Rest guilt’ is learned, not natural

If you feel guilty resting, that guilt is not proof you are doing something wrong.

It is often a learned response from:

• productivity culture
• hustle mentality
• workplace expectations
• long-term conditioning around worth and achievement

Over time, many people internalize the belief that:

Your value is tied to what you produce.

So when you rest, it can feel like you are doing something wrong, even when you logically know you need it.

But guilt is not a reliable guide for your well-being.

It is a signal of conditioning, not truth.

Real self-care is personal, not prescriptive

One of the most important shifts in rebuilding your relationship with rest is recognizing that there is no universal formula.

What restores one person may drain another.

For example:

• scrolling may feel numbing for one person and restorative for another
• movement may feel energizing or exhausting depending on the context
• silence may feel grounding for some and uncomfortable for others

This is why copying self-care routines rarely works long-term.

The real question is not:

What should I do to rest?

It is:

What actually restores me?

That answer will change depending on your life, your stress level, and your nervous system.

Shift From Rules to Awareness and Permission

At the core of this conversation is a larger shift.

Most people are trying to rest using external rules.

But sustainable rest comes from internal awareness.

Instead of asking:

• What is the right way to rest?

Start asking:

• What is my body asking for right now?
• What actually helps me feel better afterward?
• What drains me versus restores me?

This is where rest becomes sustainable instead of performative.

Speaking of Rules, are you stuck on the diet rollercoaster and ready to get off?

3 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Start Another Diet

Ready to Stop Asking “Why am I so tired all the time?”

Feeling tired all the time is not just a time management issue.

It is often a sign of:

• long-term overextension
• disconnected self-care practices
• learned guilt around slowing down
• and a lack of permission to truly rest

Relearning rest is not about doing less. It is about doing what actually supports you instead of what you were taught you “should” do.

When rest becomes something you are allowed to do without earning it, everything else starts to shift.

FAQ: “Why am I so tired all the time?”

Why am I so tired all the time even when I sleep enough?

Constant fatigue is often not just about sleep quantity. It can be linked to mental overload, chronic stress, emotional burnout, or never fully recovering during your waking hours. If your nervous system is always “on,” sleep alone may not feel restorative.

What is the difference between burnout and being tired?

Being tired is temporary and usually improves with rest. Burnout is deeper and more persistent. It often includes emotional exhaustion, loss of motivation, irritability, and feeling disconnected from things you used to enjoy.

Why am I so tired all the time but then I feel guilty when I try to rest?

Rest guilt is usually learned, not natural. Many people are conditioned to associate worth with productivity. Over time, this creates an internal belief that you must “earn” rest, even though your body needs it regularly to function well.

How do I rest when I feel like I don’t have time?

Start with small, intentional breaks instead of waiting for long periods of free time. Even 5 to 10 minutes of genuine pause, a short walk, or stepping away from stimulation can help your nervous system recover over time.

What does real rest actually look like?

Real rest is not one specific activity. It depends on the individual. For some people it is quiet and stillness. For others it may be movement, nature, creative activities, or low-pressure tasks that help the mind reset. The key is whether it restores your energy afterward.

Why is it so hard for me to slow down?

Difficulty slowing down is often tied to habit, identity, and learned pressure to stay productive. If you have spent years equating productivity with safety or worth, slowing down can feel uncomfortable even when you need it.

What Research Says About Burnout, Stress, and Rest

The experience of chronic exhaustion and difficulty resting is not just personal. It is well documented in psychology, occupational health, and public health research. Burnout, stress overload, and recovery patterns have been studied extensively, and they consistently show that fatigue is often the result of prolonged stress and insufficient recovery, not simply lack of sleep or poor time management.

The World Health Organization officially classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon linked to chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. This highlights that burnout is not a personal failure, but a response to sustained pressure and lack of recovery support.

The American Psychological Association explains that chronic stress affects both the body and mind, contributing to fatigue, emotional exhaustion, and difficulty concentrating. Over time, this can impact sleep quality, emotional regulation, and overall energy levels.

Sleep research from the CDC and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute also shows that while sleep is essential, it does not fully offset the effects of ongoing stress, emotional load, or mental overactivation. This is why many people still feel tired even after a full night’s sleep.

In addition, occupational health psychology research shows that recovery is not just about time off, but about the quality of psychological detachment from stressors. In other words, rest is most effective when the nervous system is allowed to truly disengage from pressure, obligation, and overstimulation.

These findings support a key idea in this post: exhaustion is not only physical. It is often the result of accumulated mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns that require intentional recovery, not just more sleep or occasional breaks.

References

• World Health Organization (WHO). Burn-out an occupational phenomenon (ICD-11)
• American Psychological Association (APA). Stress effects on the body
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Sleep and Sleep Disorders
• National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency
• Harvard Health Publishing. Understanding the stress response
• Mayo Clinic. Job burnout: symptoms and causes

Meet Anastasiya Rudis

Episode Transcript

Welcome everyone. I am here with Anastasia Rudis, who is a rest coach who turned her life experiences and passions into a mission of helping women integrate a sustainable self-care routine so that they can enjoy guilt-free rest. Welcome Anastasia.

Now, I am so glad that you are here and I am excited to dive right in. I like to start with my guests and talk about kind of like your origin story and what brought you to the place where you became a rest coach and why this is so important to you. A short version of who I am.

So I’m Ukrainian. I’m Ukrainian and right now I’m living in San Francisco, in California, in the U.S. I’ve always been a traveling wanderer soul who have been all over the place. I’ve moved to the U.S. eight years ago.

Now we have a three-year-old and she changed my life. You know how they say kids change it like they really do. Before my child, I was never one of the parents like I am 37 years old.

We had her before COVID was 2019 and everyone was like, you’re going to have so many like magical friendships that you’re going to build with the same like aged kids. And then you know what happened? COVID came. And all those friendships that you were just starting to build out at six, seven months old, they were gone because everyone was in hiding in San Francisco.

I don’t know if you’re many of us in the snow, but it’s not it’s a wonderful city to be in, but you don’t get as much space as in other parts of the country. Like you’re precluded to this like, this is me, right? My one bedroom is my space. And that’s it.

I don’t get a backyard. I don’t get anything. She was born.

I was like, oh, these new friends. And then they were gone. And I was like, I need people.

And so to me, I was really missing people. And with COVID she actually started working at 10 months, which was a lot with the day cares closed, was reimagining working from home. I am a corporate worker.

I’ve been up until this May, a corporate worker for 13 years. And with her being there, I was like, I’m not sure I’m enjoying this whole thing that’s called life, work-life balance as much. And I started thinking of new ways of doing things.

And it hasn’t gotten me yet to like the rest coaching that I do right now. But it started me on a path of completely like resetting my brain. You know, for my whole life, I told myself a story that I’m not an entrepreneur, because I don’t see ideas sprouting out of my head.

And so I was like, okay, if I don’t do that, then I’m not an entrepreneur, I should not even try. And so for 13 years, I wasn’t really trying. And then the first year of COVID, I realized that something needs to change for me, because I no longer see value in waking up when other people tell me to, because that’s what happens when you work for a multinational company that’s across the coast and you’re sitting on the Pacific.

And somehow people like to call you at 6am Pacific, but they don’t like to call you at 6pm Pacific. I’m like, yeah, I prefer those calls, like let’s talk 5pm, let’s no, no, but somehow 6am is so much better. And so I started really racking my brain.

In a way, I call it now, I started exercising my idea generating muscle. I’ve heard it somewhere that’s like anything we do, we can learn it to a certain point, right? We can wire our brain to give us what we are focusing on. And so I started doing that, I started generating and I started looking around and being like, okay, what could be my business? Because I didn’t want to do the same thing I was doing in corporate just for myself.

In my corporate, in my professional life, before I started the entrepreneurial journey, I am a risk manager. You know what would be the first thing I would do at any job I would take? I would look for how much PTO time I get. That would be one of the main questions I would be asking of the recruiters before even getting to the job interviews.

I need to know that I’m not trading off certain things from my current position to my new position, because to me, money is important. But the number, like the amount of time I get for myself to do the things that I want has always been my priority. People called me PTO expert.

Seriously, when new people join, they’re like, talk to Anastasia because she’ll tell you all about the benefits. Do you know these people who like, oh my God, it’s a holiday. I never realized it.

And it’s like coming up tomorrow, you know, or on Monday. And you’re like, I haven’t planned. And I’ll be the person who is like at the beginning of the year, I know where all the holidays hold.

I know where I’m doing with them. I know how much time I have. I was like, where do I get more time? I literally was that person who would be looking for more time.

So when I learned that only around 25% of corporate workers in America in 2021 used all of their paid time off, that’s it. All of it to the zero, only 25% of corporate America. So what does it mean? It means that 75% of those who are working, which is the majority of people, including, probably including the entrepreneurs, because we don’t really allow ourselves any time off, because why would we, we tell our business, they would have to be going all the time.

Otherwise it’s not going to work. Great. 75% of people leave money on the table for others to pick up because this is basically you giving your time off away.

You’re leaving your time on the table because you’re like, I don’t care about this, why would I need that? And finally, you’re leaving that energy that everyone talks about where for you to operate in a certain way, for you to function, for you to come up and show up every day, you need to have that cup full cup, half full cup, something. But you need to have energy going out of you. So you’re not just like, I mean, you can crawl to a job, right? Is that how you want to live your life? No, only 25% used full extent.

And that’s, I’m also sure because COVID started happening, but at the same time, COVID triggered that into thinking, Oh, can I go anywhere? It’s like, it’s COVID, I cannot fly. I’m like, yeah, but for those of your listeners, most of them are in the US, right, you have this whole continent. You get so much exploration space.

And while it might not give you the historical ruins of Rome or the Eiffel Tower of Paris, you can still find the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas. You can find things the same way we think about vacations, the same way we think about rest, it’s either all or nothing. And when I realized that I was like, it’s not sustainable.

That’s, that’s the word you might hear me say. And that’s the word I kind of say in my mission is I’m here to help people integrate sustainable self-care because what is sustainable? It’s something that works for you. It doesn’t work for me.

Like I can tell you all about how I like to rest, but what it would do, it would just make you feel like, okay. And what do I do with that? When I work with my clients, we figure out what is your rest?

What is your self-care? What brings you joy? It’s one of the pillars of my framework is like figuring out your joy and figuring out what, what replenishes your energy. For me, for example, it’s listening to music, reading books, staring out the window, you know, walking by the ocean or someone else, it can be something like, I know there are people who enjoy running.

I’m like running, enjoying. This is just sounds terrible, but when we look at the big picture, we always like set this goal of I need to exercise or someone said, I need to wake up early. That’s my favorite one.

When people are like, you should wake up early to get more done or to get something. I’m like, you should not do anything unless you agree to that. And that’s paid for.

You shouldn’t really do anything. Whatever I tell you, whatever Lori tells you, your listener, you should not do anything if you don’t want to. If it doesn’t sit with you, if it doesn’t feel right, because that’s the biggest thing I see and hear.

I, you know, one of my questions I once asked my like audience, I was like, if you had a choice, you got a gift card between a spa and a, and a movie. What would you choose Lori? I would probably choose the movie. Okay.

Awesome. I love that. So majority of the moms who responded to that question, they said spa.

Obviously spa, spa, spa, spa, spa, spa. And then there was this one mom who was like, I really enjoy a movie, but I should probably choose a spa. I’m like, you should not do any, like because the crowd says spa.

Doesn’t mean spa. Like I love spa, but I love a certain type of spa. Like I don’t go for facials.

I like a foot massage or a head massage. You know, that’s my type of spa. Like I would look for those things versus like, Oh, they do a great fish.

I’m like, I don’t like people touching my face, but my point here is like, there is this shoot, there is this perception of, Oh, someone else thinks I need to be doing this. And so I should be doing this. So we are not dating into none of us do unless we intentionally try to none of us realize that, Hey, there’s this baggage that comes with us.

Let’s call it social media. Let’s call it news. Let’s call it just like we grew up like that.

And it, and it’s covered in those shoes and those shoes, they direct our life. And so I usually ask my question, I ask my clients is like, do you, does this practice habit thoughts serve you or do you serve it? Because when someone tells you that you should wake up early to exercise because your kid is waking up at six, so you should wake up at five and you are an owl, you would feel so energized. It would just make you feel so excited to fail at that.

And then you get to beat yourself up for that. Yay. Because you’re like, Oh, I said this goal and now I don’t get to achieve it because I hate it because it’s not you because it’s not me.

Like my husband hates waking up early. I wake up early. But even then when my daughter would wake up at seven, I would never tell myself like, Oh, I should wake up at six 50 so I can get a cup of tea.

Sometimes I think that, but it’s like, does it feel well? No, like I wouldn’t intentionally make myself put an alarm earlier than my body wants to wake up because we all discount. That’s, that’s one of the things I see for myself as well as for others. We wait until something really burns up down up our ass before we start really listening to our body to rest and rest doesn’t always have to mean spots, right? Or manicures or self-care means just that it can be anything.

And it is as unique as each one of us. It is as magical. It needs to be discovered as it is for each one of us.

All right. Here’s what I want to do. I want to go back for a second and kind of recap how you got to that.

So I can summarize it and just kind of give, give like a little quick synopsis.

So you started as a corporate worker, you did something that you didn’t really want to do as a business for yourself, but when, you know, 2020 hit and you kind of were like, okay, I’m, you know, I have, I just became a mom and I’m really not seeing, oh, but you were also, you, it sounds also like you have always, even as a, as a, an employee, you prioritized rest, self-care time for yourself and you maximize whatever, you know, that is part of your compensation package is PTO.

So, you know, you are, you are taking advantage of every opportunity to, to care for yourself outside of the workplace.

And I love that. So that sounds like one of your values that you carried over into your business and, and you actually made it your business to help other people prioritize this as well. So when 2020 hit and you were like, okay, I’m, you know, I’m a mom now and I’ve had this corporate, this corporate career doing this kind of work, but I’m really seeing a need for, for people to do something that I know I can help them with.

I know this is so critical to long-term health and just, you know, enjoying the present, it’s not even about what they’re going to get 20 years from now, but just right now, how are we can, how we can take care of ourselves. So that kind of launched you into being a rest coach, but let me add, this is something we kind of glazed over, but one, I’d never heard of a rest coach before I met you. Like I did not know that was a thing.

Um, this is amazing. And that’s because I made it a thing. You made it a thing.

You, you flexed your idea generating muscle and you said, you know what? This is an important thing. I’m going to launch this and I’m going to put it out there because I know it’s important. So you became a rest coach.

And as far as I know, you’re the only one in existence, which is great. Um, and I just, and I submitted a trademark protection for that. It’s, it’s filed.

So I am, I officially have a TM next to my rest coach thing. Now you are, you are officially the only rest coach that we know you have cornered the market on this practice. Fantastic.

But here’s what I want to dive into a tiny bit here. Yes. What, and you’ve, you’ve kind of gone into, when you work with your clients, you talk about creating a sustainable rest practice, but what does it look like in just, um, like logistically to work with a rest coach? Like, what does that mean for me? If I’m like, I need, I know I need to hire somebody.

How do I know it’s a rest coach that I need? And then what does that look like? So the reason why I created a rest coach practice, right? And what, and I created this designation of myself is I realized that there is a lot of, you might see similarities in people calling it productivity management, productivity coaching, where people focus on you need to rest to get more done to me, it like the logic is not there to me. It’s like, you need to rest to rest.

And then because you rest and because you start valuing yourself more and you start valuing your time more, you get more done, it’s a by-product, like productivity to me is a by-product of resting because rest, we, I don’t say we vilify rest, but we vilify the idea of how can I rest? Like I need to be doing something all the time, especially for mothers, but at the same time for, for entrepreneurs, we feel like we cannot stop because as soon as we put our child or our business down for a second, it’s going to die.

And guess what? It’s not, especially the child I checked. You tested that theory personally. Everybody lived.

Yes, exactly. Everybody lived. And so is like, and the same for businesses is like, we don’t allow ourselves to take a pause, take a breath, and then we work out of exhaustion and that just shows up differently.

But to your question, Lori, as to how do you, how do you realize that you need a rest coach is when you, I want to say when you come through some things where you’re like, okay, I’m either seeing all this wonderful affirmations, you know, but I’m realizing I’m not doing it, or I’ve tried certain things because we all try all the time, right? We, we see information coming at us and we’re like, oh, I should do this or I should do that. I should do it. And, but those shoots, again, they don’t work because they’re not your shoots.

They’re someone else’s shoots that are external. And so in a way, I’m hoping, like, I’m looking for the people who come to me that they have a little bit of awareness that, Hey, there were certain things they’ve tried, but they’re realizing they need more, they need deeper and they need very individualized attention and kind of in a way, it’s like, can we do it alone? Sure. We can do anything alone, right? Can you like, you can move the countries.

You can do, you can move the mountains alone, but it is so much easier when you have support and accountability. And that’s, that’s why people come to me, because I feel like when you have someone else to celebrate with, when you have someone else to hold you up a little bit and support you when you’re feeling down, that’s when people come to you, right? When they’re realizing that, Hey, and, and for some of them, it’s like, they waited too long, they haven’t listened to their body and their body went into this like, total burnout, mental health, exhaustion.

It can show up differently in bodies, right? It can be that your body is like, let me twist an ankle so you don’t walk and you have to sit down and you have to pause or let me do something else, you know, so that’s, I don’t know, uh, last winter, this Christmas, my Christmas vacation was stopped by universe giving me non, uh, no symptom COVID we had to cancel everything before we flew that the day of the flight, I got the, that you have COVID.

I didn’t have any symptoms. I, my whole family didn’t have any symptoms, but we were sitting at home for 10 days to quarantine. It was wonderful, but at the same time, I was like, okay, what is the situation trying to give me? The situation was trying to give me that if I didn’t know, I would be stuck down in my destination place for more time, feeling stressed out because they COVID shows up 10 days later.

And you don’t know that you’ve just had it for 10 days and it’s gone out of your system. It continues for 90 days. And so coming to me is, I don’t want to call it a last resort.

Nothing is a last resort, but when your body tells you, when you’re like, I want something to change. And I want it to be different because everything that I’ve done before, whether it’s reading, talking to others, trying it myself, maybe trying it like, like you say, scheduling it. A lot of people try scheduling rest and while it is an option and while it works for some, when you have a volatile thing, that’s for example, call the child, you can’t really schedule anything.

Like you can put a placeholder, you can make an idea that, Hey, I would like to do that. But when we, when we do it in our heads and we call it scheduling and then we don’t do it at that time, that starts you back on that like, Oh, I’m a failure thing. Oh, I can’t get even this one small thing for me done.

So maybe I don’t deserve it. So I work with my clients to reimagine the, the idea of self-worth as well as in a way, mom guilt when we’re talking to moms, right? But the self-worth says to do I deserve to rest because throughout our lives, we’re told we have to earn the right to rest. We get to raise our hands at school to go pee.

We get to negotiate for the amount of time you get when you work for a corporate. And then when you get into entrepreneurship, you get zero because you’re an entrepreneur of yourself. So you negotiate yourself down to zero because why would you take a break? What people call work-life balance.

I’m like, why do we put work in front? We don’t put life in front. We put work in front, right? It’s work-life balance. We all try to achieve the work-life balance.

Why aren’t we trying to achieve life balance? Why aren’t we trying to achieve and find that in ourselves? Because it all starts with our own insides, right? Like our kids learn from us. They don’t learn from the books first. They learn from us.

They learn from seeing from us. And so I started the rest coaching practice to give an example to my kid. I grew up in a household where my mom would feel bad about watching a movie.

So she would need to iron, let’s say, at the same time, because like, that’s just a waste of time. We need to talk about the need to multitask. Okay.

As a rest coach, you’re working with your clients to create a sustainable and a personalized approach to what works for them as rest, not what works. You know, cookie cutter, like here you go. Here’s a prescription.

Here’s like the blanket statement that qualifies as rest. Because I know if you leave me to my own devices, right? Things that in my mind in a moment might be sound restful or not, and things that may not actually sound like something I want to do are actually very restorative. For an example, if I’m exhausted and I’ve been doing a bunch of stuff and I’m like, Oh, I really need to take a break and I’ll just collapse on the sofa and I scroll Facebook.

Guess what? An hour goes by. I don’t feel any better. If anything, I feel worse.

If I take that half an hour and I go for a walk, if I vacuum, if I straighten up something in my house, it’s not rest, but it’s restorative. But if I went and I took a walk, that is not rest, but it is rest from work. Does that make sense? It is rest.

You know what? Rest can be anything you want it to be, and rest can be active or it can be passive, right? Anything can be rest. It’s your life. It can be anything we want it to be because it’s ours and we don’t have to justify it to anyone.

And that’s where like the kind of the trick and trap for a lot of people is, is that you’re like, oh, rest is this. I need to be like lying down and I don’t find that restful at all. I’m like, great.

What do you find restful? Maybe a walk, maybe a run, maybe a swing, maybe just a, a knitting session, right? Or a, I don’t know, I love puzzles. Is this, is this rest? Is this an active thing? Like your rest and your definition and your kind of, I want to call it practices of rest change and they should change just as you do because this new normal, right?

Since, since COVID we all are trying to either find the new normal or come back to the old normal or whatever, like we change the world changes, life changes, and then we expect, oh, I was 14 and I was good at that, or I enjoyed that. And now that should be my thing.

No, if you, you were 14 and you enjoyed that and you want to try it, go try it, but don’t hold yourself to this like thing that if I did it once or if I said that I want to do this, this is the only thing I want to do. Same with careers, same with anything, right? It’s like when we grow up, we stop allowing ourselves to fluidly change with, with the wind because we’re like, well, this is not how adults behave, right?

This is not what we do. And when we prioritize rest for rest, when we prioritize ourselves and we say, I Anastasia deserve rest for the sake of rest that way, then I’m like, Oh yeah.

And now I have an hour and let me do a lot of productive work in that time, because then I want to do something else. And then I want to do something for myself again, because again, I deserve that. And it’s also my life.

It’s my life. So I get to decide how it goes and so do you. Can I recap then the, the mistakes that I’m hearing that you’ve, that you’ve either witnessed observed, um, or made yourself in terms of like prioritizing rest and getting rest.

So one is one thinking we need to earn it. Um, you know, two is operating under the assumption that only certain things can be called rest. Like rest has to be laying down quiet, look out the window, don’t talk, sleep, um, you know, not working rest can, but you’re saying rescue rest is very individual.

Like for me, things that are restorative and restful are things that clear that, that, uh, give me kind of peace of mind that allow my brain to relax a little bit. That’s, that’s a rest for me or moving my body outside getting in nature. And then that is restful for me.

Another mistake is not even recognizing that they don’t have one. Maybe they think they have one and they don’t, maybe they think they’ve been doing the things that they should, and it’s not restful. They’re doing the things like, Oh, I went to the spa because I felt like I should.

And that didn’t, that didn’t, like that would not be restful for me. Right. So I’m recognizing that that is not a rest practice for me.

And then the other, the last one would be waiting too long to incorporate one. And now I’m already burnt out, but now I’m already burnt out. So now I’m far behind, but now I’m so far behind, I can’t take the time.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this called the exercise paradox, where exercise is shown to be a very good stress reliever, but if your stress level gets so high that you feel like you can’t take time to exercise, you can never get to the point where reaping the benefits of exercise as a stress reliever, because you can’t take the time to exercise because you’re so stressed, but you’re so stressed because you can’t exercise and it goes around and around. In a way that actually, uh, so this book that I was reading here, it’s called “The Choice”, and I know you’ll put it in the notes.

It talks about how we create this prison in our own heads, the prison of ideas that we, even when you’re free, when you think you’re free to do whatever you want, you create this prison in your own head of like recurring thoughts, like the exercise paradox, right, where you think you have to exercise and when you don’t exercise, you’re a bad person or whatever the, the narrative goes for you, whether you are a failure, you are, um, just can’t stick to your plans or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All those things create a reality for you where you perpetuate the truth for yourself versus realizing that that’s what you’re doing. Because I talked to a lot of fitness people and they’re like, even one small movement today is better than no small movement, right? So we think again, we think about exercise as this big, encompassing thing, right? Like I have to go there. It has to happen for an hour.

Then there has to be this, there has like, what if you just put on socks and you do two stretches or you do two pushups or whatever it is, like it’s one, two, one of the fitness coaches I talked to, she’s a friend and she’s like, our bodies are meant to move. And so changing the position is what is important.

And yes, later on, when you get better at exercising the muscles of moving, you can build on that because it’s so much easier to build on one, one second, you know, breathing exercise or five second breathing exercise versus saying, and now Lori, let’s meditate for an hour where you’re like, I can’t, I can’t sit still for that long.

Okay. You don’t have to sit still. You don’t even have to really do that because it’s not for you.

But the biggest thing, the biggest really, well, there are two biggest things, biggest mistakes people do is one, you, you set this tremendous goal of I call it, you haven’t run, you haven’t walked in a while and now you’re like, I need to be running a marathon today. So you show up at a gym expecting to run a marathon on day zero before you started like even walk into that gym. Right.

And so at the same time, the second one I was talking to earlier is that we try to do it alone. We sit in our own heads of, oh, it’s just me. I’m the only failure in this house.

And yes, I need to exercise, but I cannot really exercise. And so I’m this bad person. But, uh, even when I try, I, like people would, people would laugh at me for how long I’m exercising.

People would laugh at me at how I look exercising people, whatever, whatever we create. Again, it’s the prison on our own heads of the stories we tell ourselves. We think that someone else cares.

No one around you cares how you look in your leggings. No one around you cares how you look pulling up.