Healing Often Means Having No Energy. And There's Nothing Wrong With That

Your body has carried you for so long. Now it needs to rest

Photo by Hernan Sanchez on Unsplash

Many of us experience a point in our healing journey where exhaustion becomes an overwhelming presence.

It’s not the kind of exhaustion that can be cured by a good night’s sleep. It’s the kind of exhaustion that roots itself in your bones, in your soul. The kind where you wake up and already feel like you’re dragging a boulder uphill, and even the simplest tasks—responding to a text, making a sandwich, brushing your teeth—feel monumental.

And somewhere in the background of this fatigue is a nagging voice that whispers: What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just get it together?

It’s no wonder that voice is so persistent. We live in a world that glorifies productivity, that idolizes pushing through, grinding harder, and doing more. Rest, on the other hand, is treated like a luxury or a weakness.

But healing doesn’t play by the rules of hustle culture. Healing demands surrender. It demands that you slow down, listen to your body, and honor its needs—even if those needs make you feel like you’re falling behind.

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When Survival Mode Becomes The Norm

If your body is always tired and depleted, chances are it has carried you for far too long.

It has kept you going through long days, through stress, through endless responsibilities. It has shouldered the weight of everything you've pushed it to endure, even when you ignored its signals for rest. It has fought to keep up with demands, even when it was running on fumes.

And now, it’s finally asking for the break it deserves.

This was a lesson I had to learn the hard way. I spent years in a high-stress environment where the demands never seemed to end. My days were a blur of urgent deadlines, constant pressure to make the right choices, and the emotional weight of always needing to perform and deliver.

Rest was something I thought other people could afford—but not me. How could I stop and relax when everything felt so urgent? When so many people were counting on me? I couldn’t, of course I couldn’t. So, I leaned heavily on coffee—cups and cups of it—to stay awake, to stay focused, to keep moving. Looking back, it's clear why I would suddenly develop all kinds of random health issues. I was pushing my body beyond its limits, and it was only a matter of time before the consequences caught up with me.

The irony is, I was good at navigating that high-pressure environment because, growing up in chaos, hypervigillance was my default mode. My nervous system was already used to being in a constant “fight or flight”, so it felt normal to always be scanning the environment, preparing for the next crisis, the next demand. It was exhausting, but it was also familiar. It kept me safe—or at least, that’s what I thought.

But safety isn’t supposed to feel like a constant state of turmoil. It isn’t supposed to feel like a never-ending tension in your muscles, a tightness in your chest, or a mind that never shuts off. Safety should feel like ease, like a moment when you can take a deep breath and simply exist without fear of the next crisis.

For so long, I didn’t know what that kind of safety even looked like. And when that’s the case, it’s no wonder our bodies start sending us warning signs—because they’re trying to tell us something we can’t see.

Many of us live in this hypervigilant state without even realizing it. We’ve been conditioned, often by early experiences of instability or trauma, to stay on high alert. Our minds and bodies are always braced for impact, always ready to spring into action at the first sign of danger, even when there is no real threat.

And while this might help us survive—or even excel in a dysfuncional world—it comes at a cost.

On Learning Safety After Growing Up In Chaos

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The Reset We Need

That bone-deep fatigue you feel is not failure—it’s the consequence of survival. It’s your body’s way of forcing you to confront the truth: you’ve been running on reserves for far too long, and now it’s time to stop.

Survival can look different for everyone. For some, it takes the form of people-pleasing—the constant need to say "yes" to others, to take care of everyone around them, even at the expense of their own needs. For others, it’s the relentless drive to perform, to achieve, to be constantly producing in order to feel valued or recognized. The key point is, we’ve spent years in some kind of pattern that has completely depleted our reserves.

When we finally reach this point—when our reserves are depleted—it can feel like a complete shutdown, as if we’re being forced into a state of stillness we never agreed to. It’s as though our bodies have pressed pause without our permission, leaving us with no choice but to confront the depth of our exhaustion.

But that stillness is the only thing that can bring us back. It’s the reset our nervous system desperately needs.

It’s hard to surrender to this, I know. We want to move past the exhaustion as quickly as possible. We think, How long is it going to take? We want an answer, a timeline, a clear path to feeling better. But healing doesn’t work on our terms, and it doesn’t operate on a schedule. We can’t rush our way through it. In fact, the more we try to push past it, the more our bodies will resist.

Restoring what’s been depleted takes patience—a kind of patience that can feel foreign when we’re used to constantly moving, fixing, and doing.

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Survival isn’t the same as living. Survival is about getting through the day, bracing against the next crisis, and doing whatever it takes to stay afloat.

But living? Living asks for something deeper. It asks us to nurture ourselves, to find joy and ease, to create a life that feels expansive instead of depleting. It requires a shift—from enduring to nurturing, from hypervigilance to safety, from exhaustion to rest.

This shift isn’t easy. It means letting go of the patterns that have kept us safe but no longer serve us. It means learning to trust our bodies again, to honor their rhythms and needs. It means giving ourselves permission to slow down, even when the world around us keeps urging us to go faster.

Because rest is not weakness. Rest is a reclamation—a way of taking back what survival has taken from us. And when we allow ourselves that rest, we give our bodies the chance to heal, our minds the space to quiet, and our spirits the room to rediscover what it means to truly live.

So, if you’re here now, in the thick of exhaustion, know this: you’re not broken. You’re not failing. You’re just finally learning to listen to what your body has been trying to tell you all along.

It’s not the end of your story—it’s the beginning of a new one. One where you can stop surviving and start living.

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Thank you for reading 🤍

If my words resonated with you, I’d love for you to join my Creating Safety Within series! It’s a weekly-ish newsletter available only to my paid subscribers, where we dive into these truths together and create the safety to heal and grow at our own pace.

Here you can view a sneak peek of every part I’ve published so far to see if it aligns with what you’re seeking in your own healing journey:

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(If you’re on your phone and you have the Substack app installed, tapping the button above will take you to my profile page, not the Creating Safety Within series specifically. To catch up on the series and explore all my articles, I highly recommend using a laptop for a smoother browsing experience. Visit my website directly at www.consciouslyy.substack.com)

I think these 3 reads will be particularly meaningful as you explore the series:

How I Actually Unlearned Survival Mode and Came Home To Myself

You Don't Need To Be Fixed. You Need To Feel Safe

Creating Space For You: How Setting Boundaries with Yourself Can Transform Your Life