When Calm Feels Dangerous: Understanding Rest Resistance — The Sensitivity Doctor Podcast | Transcript

Episode Introduction

Welcome to this deeply insightful episode of The Sensitivity Doctor Podcast, where I join Dr. Natasha Fallahi to explore a phenomenon I call rest resistance. If you’re a high-achiever, a highly sensitive person, or someone navigating the complex aftermath of relational trauma, you might find that slowing down feels not only difficult but downright dangerous. Why does rest trigger anxiety instead of relief? Why does the idea of stopping feel like a threat to safety? Together, we unpack the neuroscience behind rest resistance, the role of the nervous system, and how trauma and hypervigilance create this paradoxical experience.

In this conversation, we dive into how rest resistance manifests in daily life—from compulsive work habits to the subtle ways our environments and internal narratives keep us from true ease. I share clinical insights from my work with driven clients who struggle to rest, as well as practical strategies to begin cultivating a sustainable relationship with rest, even when it feels impossible. We also discuss how relationships, nervous system regulation, and mindful titration can help heal these patterns.

Whether you’re battling burnout, navigating your own sensitivity, or simply curious about how to “go slow to go fast,” this episode offers compassionate guidance and hope for anyone ready to reclaim rest as a vital part of thriving. I invite you to listen, learn, and take a gentle step toward healing your nervous system and honoring your need for rest.

Key Takeaways

• Rest resistance is a compulsive drive to stay active and productive, often rooted in relational trauma where slowing down was experienced as unsafe.
• The difference between healthy ambition and pathological rest resistance often comes down to whether rest feels like a choice or a threat.
• Highly sensitive people and high sensation seekers may experience rest resistance differently, influenced by their nervous system’s unique wiring and trauma history.
• Burnout is a serious, biopsychosocial condition that can take months or years to recover from, and it often includes emotional symptoms like self-doubt and apathy toward previously loved activities.
• Guilt around resting is common and often linked to early messages that rest equals laziness or failure; unpacking these beliefs is key to healing.
• Micro-practices and titrated, incremental rest are essential tools for overcoming rest resistance without overwhelming the nervous system.
• Relationships can be powerful healing agents in learning to rest, especially when partners support and model healthy rest behaviors.

Notable Quotes

“When rest equaled danger or achievement was the only thing that gave us safety or validation, slowing down can feel enormously anxiety producing, scary, hard, if not impossible.”

“Rest resistance is feeling a compulsivity to keep moving, to keep working, and an overwhelming amount of anxiety when you imagine slowing down, stopping, being non-productive.”

“If we sacrifice the goose that lays the golden egg for short-term gains, we end up killing the goose entirely. Sustainable rest is essential for a long, beautiful career.”

“Go slow to go fast. You build your endurance slowly so you don’t take yourself out and have to be out of training for two months.”

“So many unresolved trauma symptoms can mask as potentially neurodivergent symptoms. It’s important to understand the origins of what we’re experiencing.”

Topics Covered

• Rest Resistance: Understanding the compulsive drive to avoid rest, especially in high-achievers with trauma histories, and how it manifests mentally, emotionally, and physically.
• Nervous System Regulation: Exploration of how trauma and hypervigilance impact our nervous system’s ability to tolerate rest and stillness.
• Relational Trauma: How early attachment experiences shape beliefs around rest, safety, achievement, and self-worth.
• Highly Sensitive People and High Sensation Seekers: Differentiating nervous system responses and how sensitivity influences rest resistance.
• Window of Tolerance: The concept of nervous system thresholds for stress and calm, and how rest practices can expand this window.
• Burnout: Signs, symptoms, and long-term consequences of chronic overwork and emotional exhaustion.
• Guilt and Shame Around Rest: Psychoeducation on emotional responses to resting and strategies to reframe maladaptive beliefs.
• Practical Strategies: Micro-practices, titrated rest, and relationship dynamics that support healing rest resistance.

Full Transcript

Host (Dr. Natasha Fallahi): Hey everyone, welcome back to The Sensitivity Doctor. Do you ever feel like your compulsion to work, move, and go, go, go is bogging you down and making you feel burnt out? Well, this episode is for you. I talk with Annie Wright, who is a therapist who specializes in working with highly driven folks who need to figure out how to combat something called rest resistance. And this isn’t just something that happens in the work avenue. We also talk about how things like trauma and also high sensitivity can impact our ability to rest. Annie was fabulous. She’s so compassionate. She’s so full of ideas. And I also cannot wait to read her book that’s going to be coming out next year. I will definitely have to have her come back and chat about that. I hope each and every one of you finds a little piece of advice and something from this episode that helps you know that you deserve rest, you deserve peace, and you deserve to allow yourself to go slow in order to go fast. Enjoy.

Natasha: Annie, thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them a little bit about yourself and why you’re passionate about the topic we’re going to talk about today?

Annie Wright: Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Well, my name is Annie Wright and I’m a licensed psychotherapist, very specifically a relational trauma recovery specialist. I’m a practicing clinician, but I also founded and run a pretty large therapy center, Evergreen Counseling in Berkeley, where I have a team of other trauma trained clinicians. I actually sold that company in January, but I’m still staying on as CEO. Congrats. Thank you. I’m also a writer. My manuscript is due to Norton in the fall, and I teach and lead programming really designed around relational trauma recovery, very specifically for folks who are driven and ambitious and who coped with their relational trauma histories through work addiction, achievement, drive. And the reason why I’m so passionate about the topic, I mean, of course, my entire professional life is personal. It’s my own story. And now I get to, on the other side of my healing, support those with resonant stories.

But I think what I’m so passionate about when it comes to talk about rest resistance is for so many of us, when we’re young and we come from relational trauma histories where rest equaled danger or achievement was the only thing that gave us safety or validation or secured love from our attachment figures. The idea of slowing down, of being still, of sort of taking your foot off the gas pedal can feel enormously anxiety producing, scary, hard, if not impossible. And yet, if we don’t, we run the risk of killing the goose who lays the golden egg. So helping people develop a different relationship to rest, regulating their nervous system, and allowing themselves to actually feel good and take care of themselves, it’s one of my favorite things to do when working with driven and ambitious folks from relational trauma histories.

Natasha: Awesome. Well, I’m excited to unpack rest resistance because I’m sure it looks different for all different people.

Annie: Sure. So I would love if you could start with how you would describe rest resistance and how to tell the difference between I’m just really driven versus I struggle with actually resting.

Natasha: Right.

Annie: Well, again, bearing in mind this is my subjective definition, I think rest resistance is feeling a compulsivity to keep moving, to keep working, and an overwhelming amount of anxiety when you imagine slowing down, stopping, being non-productive, being non-generative. And I think the primary difference between what might be considered a little bit more pathological or clinical is choice, it always boils down to choicefulness, I think. When we’re operating from a place of drive and passion and generativity for our work, which I completely identify with, I love what I do. We can be driven and we can be ambitious, but we can still find choice around, okay, that’s enough for today. I got to take care of myself now, I got to get those eight hours of sleep, and it feels easier to close the laptop. It feels easy to take a Sunday off to go to a field hockey practice and a potluck with the neighbors, where if we’re having a more pathological response, we might push ourselves beyond what’s appropriate for our bodies. We might sacrifice having a life in order to zero out the inbox. So it really boils down to, do you feel a certain amount of… of choice around whether you do or don’t rest and take some time off to take care of yourself.

Natasha: I like that distinction and it’s something I would imagine could be difficult for people who maybe have neurodiversity to be able to piece apart and have the, I mean it sounds like it takes a certain level of mindfulness to be able to do that.

Annie: Yes and no, and bearing in mind that neurodiversity is not my clinical area of expertise, what I am aware of though is that so many unresolved trauma symptoms can mask as potentially neurodivergent symptoms. So it always becomes a little clearer to me when I’m working with somebody through trauma recovery, what is or is not potentially related to neurodiversity versus lingering trauma symptom. But tell me a little bit more what you mean by that and I can speak to it a little bit more clearly.

Natasha: Sure. And I really appreciate, one of my favorite things about talking to people who I think are the most interesting and the most knowledgeable is that they’re also the first ones to be able to say, I don’t know. Well I will. So I really appreciate, I really appreciate your honesty. So I guess the way I look at it would be, and this is just based on my work and who I’ve worked with, is first and foremost the etiology. So where did it start, right? Is this something that came as a response to something like trauma? Or is this a bit more of an ingrained response that has been present in some way or another much of our life? So that’s one part of it when I think about the distinction. But I guess I would decipher it between the experience of racing thoughts and the seek for dopamine input that maybe someone with ADHD might have where they like novelty and they like to be involved in things and keep the train moving because it actually calms their nervous system in a weird contradictory way versus more of like flight mode, which we know is more a trauma response that might be more centered around, I need to keep moving so I stay safe.

Annie: Yeah. I love this conversation. I’m going to add another nuance to it because I think it’s important and it’s something I’m learning more and more about, particularly for folks. Well, I’m learning more about the subtype of high sensitivity where those folks are also high sensate seeking, right? And I actually identify as that highly sensitive, but high sensate seeking. And so I think it would be reductive to say, well, if you’re experiencing this, then it must be that, right? You have to be mindful of pulling all these pieces apart. The etymology, as you mentioned, the origins of what is the nervous system doing even as we’re seeking out that stimulus, right? And again, do you feel that choice around stopping seeking? How is your nervous system doing? And also, how does your nervous system actually respond when and if you choicefully slow down or sometimes are even forced to, right?

Natasha: The anatomy leave is an example I always think about, or, you know, an injury, an athletic injury that puts you, you know, lays you out flat. So much of my understanding of my clients and how rest resistance might show up for them comes actually when it’s forced upon them, right? So it’s a, and it, you know, what’s also tricky, what’s also really tricky sometimes is the bulk of my clients work in Silicon Valley. And they’re there. It’s not just an internally generated compulsivity to work, but rather you’re surrounded by a culture that rewards quote unquote, heroic hours where 80, 90 hours are the norm.

Annie: Absolutely. Well, it’s, it’s a lot like working in big corporate law too. You’ve got not only your own internal stuff, which might be playing into this, but the culture around you says, aha, keep going, work more. You’re as good as your available rates. We need you to hit these hours, right? You need to ship this work all night. So it becomes really tricky to tease apart for folks, particularly if they’re in those environments as well.

Natasha: Yeah, I could definitely see that. It’s funny because even someone who I have, and now I’m sitting here trying to think, do I have rest resistance or do I not? Because when I’m resting, I do enjoy it, but it almost feels like I feel better able to rest if I have been productive first. So what are your thoughts around that? Like it’s like, do your chores before you enjoy like kind of that kind of energy.

Annie: I know, I know, I know. Well, you know, I think my thoughts are that I would ask more questions about that, right? Where that belief comes from, where the discomfort stems from if the chores aren’t done, right? The dishes aren’t cleared away. What comes up inside of us? Where did we learn early on that completing chores equals, we earn our rest by completing chores, right? I think that’s a problem for so many of us. And of course I’m listening to myself because I also tell my daughter, well, no, we can’t play in the morning until the bed’s made, right? And until the, you know. Right, so it’s like, where are these messages coming from? So again, and we want to be nuanced about it too, right? A certain amount of life does require us to do things in order to move life along. So I wouldn’t ever say, clearly you have rest resistance. I would want to unpack it in a more nuanced way.

Natasha: Right, well, it makes me think of how this can show up differently maybe for high sensation seeking or highly sensitives because I think one of my drivers of getting the chores done before rest is that if I don’t, my very active limbic system is scanning, and this is maybe a little bit of like, maybe of an ADHD energy too, but scanning or viewing or assessing like what needs to be put away. It’s almost like when there’s too much noise and too much input, it makes it harder to rest.

Annie: Oh, I absolutely agree with you. I’m terribly impacted by my environment and I keep my home, I mean, it practically looks like a minimalist spa. And like, you know, my child, it can’t look like that all the time. I have a six year old, but I will also own to the fact that if I’m gonna sit on my like corner of the couch with my Kindle and disappear into the Sarah J Maas verse with my latest book, I can do so more easily if I don’t see clutter all around me because that’s distracting and it’s just, it’s not as pleasant to look at, right? So again, we wanna, but we wanna also be mindful. Can we still tolerate it even if that’s not done? Does it feel intolerable? Does it feel preferable or intolerable, right? And so that’s where I start to gauge what might be going on for folks, what stories we’ve attached to it. And I wanna be mindful. That’s a really subtle way, I think, of rest-resistant showing up. The ability to sit down with a book is not something that people who are actively compulsively workaholic for compulsively resisting rest are even close to or touching. Usually a friendliness, a constant being in motion that doesn’t even let you experiment with that moment on the couch. And that’s kind of at the end of the spectrum, but I love where you and I are at and like being curious about that.

Natasha: Annie, this was such a great conversation, I really appreciate it. I love it because I think it speaks to so many different types of people who maybe have rest resistance for different reasons and I’m curious, we covered so many different ways you can look at it, what you can do to cope with it. If someone listening today is thinking, okay, I’m gonna deal with rest resistance, I’m going to titrate rest. Is there any last thing, a way of thinking, I don’t know, a mantra, something that you want to give them to live with today?

Annie: I think the analogy of the gym can be really fruitful to think about and also just the mantra, go slow to go fast, right? You do it in the gym, right?

Natasha: Oh, I like that.

Annie: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talk about it in business building as well, right? Slow to go fast down the road, you build really sustainable structures brick by brick so it can really last. You build up your endurance slowly so you don’t take yourself out and then have to be out of training for two months. As you’re starting this process, the titration is so darn important and in ways that feel tolerable so you don’t eclipse and overwhelm your nervous system. Just bear in mind, go slow to go fast and it’s going to be uncomfortable and just anticipate that, right? But what I always tell my clients too