When rest feels unsafe

This is such a common experience, but rarely talked about

For some people, rest feels like relief. For others, it feels like threat.

This is a common experience, though it is rarely named.

You sit down. You stop. The noise quietens, and instead of calm, something stirs. Restlessness. Guilt. A low-level anxiety. A sense that you should be doing something, fixing something, staying alert.

If this is you, nothing has gone wrong.

When you have spent long periods of your life needing to be vigilant, emotionally, physically, relationally, your nervous system may have learned that rest equals risk. That stillness is when things happen and safety depends on awareness, readiness, movement.

In those conditions, rest wasn't neutral, it was dangerous.

So, your system adapted. It learned to stay busy, productive, useful, switched on. Not because you are driven or flawed, but because staying active once helped you stay safe.

This is why rest can feel uncomfortable long after the danger has passed.

Your body is not resisting healing. It is protecting you using an old map.

There is no need to push through this. No need to force relaxation or “make” yourself rest properly. Safety cannot be imposed on a nervous system, it has to be felt, gradually, on its own terms.

Sometimes healing begins not with rest, but with permission:

• permission to pause for a moment, not forever

• permission to rest without relaxing

• permission to notice discomfort without fixing it

Over time, as safety is gently reintroduced, rest stops feeling like disappearance and starts feeling like support.

If rest feels unsafe to you, you are not broken.You are remembering how you survived. Your system can learn - slowly and kindly - that it no longer has to do that alone.

Rebecca xo