Why Rest Doesn’t Feel Restful (And What Your Nervous System Is Trying to Show You)

When rest doesn’t actually feel restful

Something I hear from so many women I work with — and that I struggled with for years too — is that rest doesn’t actually feel restful. You get a pocket of quiet, you sit down, but inside you feel anything but rested. Your mind keeps scanning, you feel vaguely uneasy or guilty for sitting down, your body feels tense or you’re physically resting but mentally planning and solving the next day’s potential problems.

Technically you’re “resting,” yet your body doesn’t feel that it is, and you don’t feel replenished or re-energised afterwards.
For many women, this leads to a sense of being overwhelmed by emotions or feeling disconnected from themselves — and wondering why slowing down feels so hard.

There’s a very real nervous-system reason for this, and understanding it is an important part of learning how to feel safe in your body again.

Your nervous system rises and falls like a wave

Your body mobilises energy to meet the demands of life: to get something done, solve a problem, hold space for someone, manage a situation, or even just to stay attuned to what’s happening around you. This mobilisation energy rises like a wave on the ocean. There’s an increase of charge as the wave builds, then a peak as you handle the thing in front of you.

Once the demand has been met, the wave is designed to come back down. The body shifts out of doing mode and returns to baseline.

That downward part of the wave is what creates the felt sense of rest.

It’s also what allows your system to feel safe, grounded, and connected to yourself.

Why the wave doesn’t come down

But many women don’t experience that downward shift. You stop the task, but your nervous system doesn’t come back down. Instead, the body stays partway up the crest of the wave: still alert, responsive and anticipating.

So even when you slow down on the outside, you remain mobilised on the inside.

This is why rest feels anything but restful, because your nervous system is looping in a familiar pattern rather than reflecting what’s actually happening in the present. You may find yourself wrestling with guilt, tension, or the urge to get back up and keep doing, even though your body feels tired and you genuinely want to rest.

How this relates to safety, belonging and self-worth

For many of us, this nervous system pattern of getting stuck in “on” mode has similar roots. Many women’s nervous systems learned early on that praise, acceptance and belonging were tied to being capable, helpful, responsible or high-achieving.

You were valued for what you did, not for who you were.

When that’s been your lived experience, your body adapts. It keeps you on the upward part of the wave, because that’s the state that once kept you connected, appreciated or noticed. Slowing down or resting didn’t bring praise, or simply wasn’t something you saw modelled around you.

So now, when you try to rest, your body is not resisting you — it’s simply defaulting to what it learned.
This is also why many women say they don’t trust themselves, feel afraid of their emotions, or feel unsafe slowing down. Their bodies have never experienced rest as a safe place to land.

How somatic work helps your body feel safe enough to rest

This is a big part of the work I support clients with: listening closely to the patterns and memories the body holds, and giving your nervous system what it needs so that it can start to sense that it’s safe to complete the wave — to come down, to settle, to not be “on.”

As your system experiences this inside sessions, it gradually becomes possible in your real life too.
We teach our nervous systems that it’s safe to naturally ride the wave down into rested states by consistently giving ourselves this experience.

This is how new patterns and defaults are formed. Over time, that familiar inner dialogue of “I can’t slow down,” “doing nothing makes me feel guilty,” “I’m exhausted but still wired,” or “there’s always something else to handle” softens, because you’ve shown your body a new way.

This is what it means to begin learning how to feel safe in your body again.

If this feels familiar

My free somatic class, Anchored: Feel Safe and Steady in Your Body, goes much deeper into this idea of the wave and what somatic rest actually feels like in your own body. If it’s been a while since you experienced your system truly come down the wave, this class is a beautiful place to start.