Why Rest Is Not Enough to Overcome Emotional Exhaustion & the 1 Technique You Need to Replenish Your Energy

 By the end of this episode, you’ll discover a powerful way to address emotional exhaustion when you can’t rest.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People. A podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts, and you guessed it. I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover why rest alone is often not enough to free you of emotional stress, how to address the deepest roots of emotional imbalance to find peace again. And a strategy for combining the power of rest and deeper work so you can get your energy back. Again, this is an addition of strategy Fridays where we think about specific things you can do to help manage stress as a highly sensitive person.

Have you ever gone to bed early but couldn’t sleep? Have you ever taken a vacation or a weekend and were unable to rest? In theory, rest is what you need. But you can’t always get there, even when you want to. The problem is that we can’t rest when we feel like we’re in danger. We can’t rest when we feel like there’s something important we have to finish.

We can’t rest for a number of different reasons. Maybe we’re still processing some stressful event, an argument or something that triggered you in some way. And so even though we want to rest, and rest would be good for us, it becomes almost stressful to try to rest because this mind is looping and is stuck.

On a simple level my dad used to say, finish your homework and then go out and play. And I took that literally, I think in many ways. I, first of all did my homework and then usually there wasn’t much time for play. But I think in life in general, I tend to do that. And it may be an HSP trait because we are very conscientious and try to do a good job with our work.

And that can show up in different ways when you’re trying to rest oh, okay, I’ll rest once the job is done, or I’ll rest once I’ve worked through this stressful feeling that I’m dealing with, I’ll rest when my relationship is in a more peaceful place. I’ll rest when, and it becomes not only hard to do because the mind is caught on this idea that it has to finish something else first, but then we just keep pushing rest aside and then it becomes a vicious cycle. On top of all this, as highly sensitive people, we take longer to do things and we need more rest. So this can feel really frustrating.

In fact, it can feel impossible because. If we need more rest and it takes longer for us to do things, we have to do less things than other people. And and that yeah, can make us feel like it’s almost not fair in a way. I used to say I could rest full time. I can make rest my full-time job. In fact, that’s what I did when I lived in the ashram for those years, is I meditated a lot.

I went to bed early, I did yoga. And I cooked and ate and walked a little bit. That was my life. So I was, I know what it feels like to just really rest, and it is really nice. But in the real world, it can be, it can feel really challenging. So what holds us from resting and resting deeply is on an emotional level, is attachment.

We’re talking about emotional stress here. It gets in the way of rest. And it’s because we’ve gotten attached to something that we don’t have, but we think we need, maybe we’re attached to doing a good job. And maybe that’s trying to avoid some painful criticism. And so we try to keep working or our mind keeps working even if we’ve gone to bed.

Or maybe we just feel like we need to complete something and until we complete it, we’re not gonna be satisfied. And so we get stuck into work mode when we’re actually trying to rest. Likewise, if there’s been an emotional trigger, for example, an argument or some kind of criticism that got to you or something like that.

Then the mind is trying to resolve that. And we, as HSP feel these things deeply and we work through them. We sit with them and we, the mind kind of chews on them for a long time. And so that is, it’s like a certain kind of need there. When I say attachment, it’s like I can’t do anything else until I’ve taken care of this.

And while there’s some truth in that. It can lead us or get us caught into not being able to get the rest that we need. ’cause you’ve also experienced, at least I have, that sometimes I’ve just fallen asleep or I’ve just gotten some rest and the thing that was troubling me the night before is not troubling me the next day because my energy has changed and something has shifted just from the rest itself.

Whenever you’re holding onto something, whenever you’re attached or holding on, then that can prevent you from relaxing. Holding on is an active kind of energy. It takes effort to do that. Relaxing is the opposite of that. It’s a letting go kind of energy. And these are incompatible in a way.

They’re two separate modes of functioning of the nervous system. You can say yin and yang if you want. And so if I’m trying, if I’m having too much of something that’s I’m holding onto, whether it’s emotional, whether it’s mental it will prevent me from settling. So if you’re feeling too tired to rest, if you’re feeling too caught up in something to rest, if your emotions are too.

Much you’re feeling exhausted by them. Then how do you get to the root of these emotional imbalances and find peace again? There are many ways to work with emotions. My favorite way is a very powerful one that, as far as I know, it just, it’s my favorite. I should say it’s a form of self-inquiry called the work of Byron Katie, and I’ve been doing it for many years, a couple of decades.

And what happens, how you do this is whenever you feel an emotion, some kind of stressful experience. Maybe you got in an argument, maybe you got you lost something, or you, something got to you, you got triggered in some way. Stop and pause. It can be right afterwards or it can be hours or days or years afterwards.

Stop and notice where your mind is. What are you thinking about? What is bothering you? The emotion tells you something’s bothering you, but you have to ask, what is it? What is actually bothering you? And if you ask what’s stressing you, and you wait, because it’s an open-ended question, you ask of yourself, what is going on?

What am I, what is stressing me here? What am I thinking? You will start to find different thoughts coming, different situations coming. And if you find a situation, then explore it more fully. What are the thoughts that you’re thinking in that situation? And at first, your mind may present superficial issues.

But keep asking. It will show more and more of what’s really bothering you. And of course there can be more than one thing bothering you, but pick one and focus on one. See what you can do with that one at least. So notice then what it is that you’re attaching to. What is it that you want or need?

What are you stuck on here? And write it down. This is a really important part of it. Write it down, and you may need to brainstorm first. Write a bunch of them down, and then pick one that feels closest. Once you’ve written down the thought, you’ve frozen that and you’ve taken it out of the mind and taken it onto paper or onto a screen, and you have kind.

Stopped the mind, which is a cool thing to do in and of itself. That’s why journaling can be so powerful in and of itself. But then don’t stop there. Start asking the questions of the work, and there are several questions, is it true? Is it really true? What I’m getting caught up in that I need this thing, I need, my partner to be nicer or something like that.

I need whatever it is I want. Is it really true? And then what is the effect on me when I believe that things should be different than the way they are? Notice the effect. Notice how you treat others. Notice how you treat yourself. Notice what happens when you’re caught on this thought. And notice what it would be like if you didn’t have that thought in the same situation.

And then finally, explore if the opposite could be true, maybe. I should be nicer. I should be nicer to myself. Is more important than my partner being nicer, or maybe I should be nicer to my partner. Or maybe it’s understandable in some way that my partner is not being nice. Like this is stretching the mind, opening the mind.

And of course, it’s never about condoning another person’s behavior. If it is say abusive or something, then that’s something that you have to. Just look at objectively and why would you stay in this, in an abusive situation, but save that and if it’s not that, then where can I find understanding for what’s going on from the other person’s point of view so that I’m less frozen by it?

So this work is powerful. You have to. Consider things that you wouldn’t normally consider. You have to consider if the opposite of what you’re thinking might be truer than what you were originally thinking. And if you really do this work, you’ll look for reasons, like genuine reasons why a turnaround could be true and could balance your original.

When you start balancing the mind, when you start balancing the experience around a particular thought, it loosens the thought and it loosens the corresponding emotion. So this is a way of working with emotions by working with the mind. The beautiful thing about this approach is that when you work with the mind and you find this balance point between opposites, you start to experience a kind of freedom.

And non-attachment is just a natural byproduct of this balancing. So you find yourself letting go. And when I let go doing this kind of work, what happens is in future situations, I tend to be less likely to be caught by it as well. So an example of this is say I’m working on a new course right now and.

I need to do it as soon as possible. I need to complete it as soon as possible. That’s a thought that I could question and just really look at is it really true and how does that affect me? It keeps me on go and pushing and pressure and and who would I be without it? A lot lighter, able to take breaks and then I can look at the.

Opposite, which is now, I don’t have to complete that as soon as possible. It will have a life of its own. It will be completed when it’s time to be completed. So I notice that I didn’t say that rest is not important. We’re focusing here or have been focusing on, rooting out the attachment to an emotional thought, but rest is still important.

And if you root out the stressful thought. You still need to make time for rest itself. There still has to be time in your day, enough time in your day for sleep, and we need more as HSPs. There needs to be time for some kind of deeper rest like meditation, where you can also get to the roots of stresses through just deep settling of the nervous system.

Same with taking, resting the mind and focusing on the body for a change, doing exercise. This is known to reduce stress, and it is super helpful in an outward way to help give you balance in your body and mind having a wind down routine at night, like where you can maybe soak your feet for a while or get a, have a bath or do a little self massage, or listen to some relaxing music without screens like just being.

Like having a routine that starts to slow you down in the evening before you go to bed and then making decisions of what to cut in your life because you can’t do everything. And part of the problem with this overdrive or inability to rest. Is that we get frustrated because we can’t do everything, and that itself becomes an emotional overload.

Like I’ve always been working on my French for the last, seven, eight years and I’ve, I love that. But right now I’ve decided to put it on hold because it’s too much. I don’t have the bandwidth with other things that I’m doing, and so saying no even to yourself is a super strategy for.

Bringing yourself back to balance and putting a little less on your plate so that you’re less emotionally overloaded, and so that, and mentally overloaded, and so that you can take advantage of the rest that could be available. So the feeling I’m left with today is that you can approach emotional exhaustion from both sides, from the side of the mind and from the side of the body.

And why limit yourself to one? Why not have a nice wind down routine and give yourself time for sleep? Even if sleep doesn’t come, just resting on the bed? Why not do that? And why not look at the emotions and the thoughts, connect to those emotions and question those to find more space and more freedom on the inside.

In this episode, we looked at why rest alone is often not enough to free you of emotional stress. We looked at how to address the deepest roots of emotional imbalance to find peace again, and we looked at a strategy for combining the power of rest and deeper work so that you can get your energy back Again.

Thank you for listening. It’s always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom.