Understanding Why Your Body Fights Against the Rest It Needs
Before we begin: Take a moment, if you’re willing, to notice what happens in your body as you read the word “rest.” Does your breath change? Do your shoulders tense or release? Does a subtle anxiety flutter in your chest, or perhaps a wave of longing wash over you? Whatever arises—or doesn’t—is valuable information about your nervous system’s relationship with stillness.
For many of us driven and ambitious women with histories of relational trauma, the very concept of rest can trigger a paradoxical response in the body.
Rather than feeling like a welcome respite, stillness can feel threatening—like the ground beneath you might suddenly give way.
Your body, despite profound exhaustion, resists the very thing it seems to need most.
If you’ve ever found yourself unable to relax despite desperate fatigue, if you’ve noticed anxiety spike when you finally have a moment to yourself, or if you’ve felt more depleted after a vacation than before it—you aren’t broken. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe. Especially in environments where downregulation once signaled danger.
In this exploration, we’ll examine why rest can feel like structural collapse rather than restoration, particularly for women whose psychological foundations were formed in relationships marked by unpredictability, emotional neglect, or the need to be perpetually vigilant.
The Relational Roots of Rest Resistance
Elena, a former therapy client of mine (name and identifying details changed for privacy), sits in her office after her last patient of the day, staring at her calendar. It’s 7:30 PM, and she’s been at the hospital since 5:00 AM. Her body aches with exhaustion. Yet the thought of going home to an empty evening fills her with a vague, unsettling anxiety.
“I should be grateful for a break in the evening, right?” She asks me this in our next session, her shoulders tensed nearly to her ears even as she speaks. “I have three hours before bed with nothing scheduled. But instead of relief, I feel this… dread. What’s wrong with me?”
Growing up in a high-achieving South Asian household, Elena’s father maintained exacting standards for academic performance while her mother managed the household with anxious, unrelenting perfectionism. The young Elena learned early that stillness wasn’t safe—it was merely the deceptive calm before inevitable criticism.
Think of your psychological foundation as the concrete, rebar, and support beams that underlie the multi-story house of your life.
Early relationships form this foundation—determining its composition, stability, and resilience. When those relationships were characterized by unpredictability or threat, your foundation may have developed with a structural bias toward vigilance rather than rest.
It’s not that your foundation is inherently flawed. It developed exactly as it needed to under the conditions present at the time.
