You. Are. Tired.
The kind of tired that sleep doesn’t seem to touch. You wake up and it’s already there: that low hum of depletion, following you into your morning before you’ve even made coffee.
I know this feeling. And for a long time I thought the solution was to simply get more sleep (because my sleep was erratic, and so naturally, I thought more sleep at night would fix things).
And while nighttime sleep helped, it didn’t totally resolve that tired-deep-in-my-bones feeling.
Because there’s a whole other category of rest that many of us haven’t been taught to appreciate in this modern, go-go-go world.
Note: I dive deeper into this whole topic in the video below, so check it out if you prefer something visual 🙂
There Are Actually Two Kinds of Rest
Let me break this down in a way that I wish someone had explained to me years ago.
Passive rest is anything that doesn’t require your conscious participation.
Sleep is the perfect example of this: your body does it on its own, without you have to be an active participant. Your body does its most profound repair work while you’re completely out of the picture.
Active rest is different. It requires you to be awake and be intentional about it. What’s also interesting about active rest is that it comes in many different forms and there’s lot of room to play with it depending on where we are in life.
What Active Rest Actually Looks Like
Active rest basically exists on a spectrum.
On the gentler end, it might look like:
- Sitting in your backyard listening to birds.
- A lazy walk where you’re feeling into your body and taking in the world around you.
- Relaxing with your favorite book.
- Breaking out into laughter as you watch an episode of the Golden Girls (any other Golden fans out there??).
A little further along that spectrum, you find more formal practices like:
- Meditation (and there’s an endless number of variations out there).
- Mindfulness (sitting in your backyard or reading a book also fall into this category when there’s an intention of being present)
- Somatic work.
These all require you to show up intentionally, but they take you somewhere deeply restorative.
Meditation, in particular, can shift your brain into wave states similar to sleep, which means you can access genuine restoration while you’re still awake.
One practice I keep coming back to personally is yoga nidra.
You might have heard it described as “non-sleep deep rest” (a term Andrew Huberman helped popularize) but it’s actually an ancient meditative practice.
You lie down. You follow a gentle audio guide. And your brain moves through the same wave states it would during sleep, while you stay softly aware.
To me, yoga nidra always feels like I went into my body and gave myself a massage at the cellular level. Like the earth enveloped or cocooned me in a very safe, healing nest for an hour (or however long I choose to do it for).
I come out of every session feeling like something has been quietly put back in order 🙂
If you’ve tried meditation before and found it frustrating, yoga nidra might be the doorway you’ve been looking for. I’ll link to two teachers I love at the bottom of this post.
Rest Goes Beyond the Mental and Emotional
When I started thinking about rest more holistically, I realized that it’s something we can offer ourselves in multiple ways (beyond mind-body practices). For example
Nutritional rest
This is about giving your body a break from foods that wear it down.
That might mean cooking more meals at home instead of relying on packaged foods full of additives and preservatives.
Or it might mean a gentle cleanse or a period of simpler eating.
It could also take the form of intermittent fasting just to give your digestive system room to breathe.
Not that this isn’t about deprivation. I’m talking about the difference between constantly asking your body to process and filter and cope, and instead saying: here, just rest for a while.
Movement rest
If you’ve been running yourself hard with high-intensity workouts, packed schedules, and always giving, then your body may be craving movement that restores rather than depletes.
This could be practices like:
- Yin yoga.
- Hatha yoga.
- Qi (chi) gong.
- Tai chi.
These aren’t lesser forms of exercise. They’re practices that actually bring energy back into your body instead of drawing it out. They are, in their own way, a profound form of rest.
Digital & social rest
And then there’s the rest we need from overstimulation: from screens, from noise, from the relentless pull of social media, from people and situations that quietly drain us.
This one is harder to talk about because it asks us to be honest about what — and who — is running our energy down.
It can sometimes be the hardest one to implement (and it can also be the most rewarding!).
How to Know What Kind of Rest You Actually Need
Not all rest is the same, and what you need right now is specific to you and your season of your life.
The only way to find out which form of rest you need is to do an honest self-assessment.
That might mean carving out an afternoon, or a weekend to feel into what you need.
Remember that physical symptoms, emotional fatigue, that bone-deep tiredness…these are not signs that something is wrong with you. They are just your body’s way of saying: I need to recalibrate. Give me the conditions to do so.
The signals are always there. We just have to get quiet enough to hear them.
A Place to Start
If you’re new to any of this, I’d encourage you to start with yoga nidra.
As a certified yoga teacher and someone who has tried many forms of meditation, I’ve found it to be the most effortless entry point into active rest — especially if meditation has felt inaccessible before.
My favorite teacher is Kristyn Rose who has a tremendous gift as a yoga nidra teacher. I also recommend looking into the work of her counterpart, Ally Boothroyd (I actually started with Ally’s channel and was led to Kristyn’s shortly after).
Both ladies offer free yoga nidra sessions on YouTube. I have no affiliation with either of them; I simply love their work and am grateful it exists!
Remember that rest is not a reward for finishing everything on your to-do list.
It is the foundation that makes it possible to live a truly luscious and delicious life!
