By Abi Beri
If this is you
If you have ever collapsed onto the sofa at the end of a long day, genuinely exhausted, and then found that you couldn’t actually rest. That your mind was still going. That your body was still humming. That the thought of sitting still felt almost unbearable.
If you’ve ever been told to just relax and felt a small flare of rage at the person saying it.
If you’ve ever wondered whether something is wrong with you because rest doesn’t feel restful, because holidays leave you more wrecked than work, because the moment you slow down you feel worse — this piece is for you.
You are not lazy. You are not broken. You almost certainly have a nervous system that has been running on sympathetic activation for a long time, and that doesn’t know how to come off.
The pattern
You wake up tired, even after seven or eight hours. There’s a quality of dragging to the first part of the day. But you push through, and somewhere mid-morning you find your second wind. You’re productive. From the outside, you might look like the most reliable person in the room.
Underneath, you’re running on something. A faint hum of urgency. A subtle bracing. A sense that if you stopped, even briefly, something terrible might happen.
Then evening comes. By rights, you should be ready to rest. And what happens? You scroll. You eat things you didn’t plan to eat. You watch something you’ve seen before because the familiarity is regulating. You stay up later than you meant to because going to bed feels like turning off a machine that doesn’t have a stop button.
If that sounds familiar, welcome to one of the most common nervous system patterns of our cultural moment.
What this actually is
You are stuck in sympathetic activation. The part of your nervous system that handles mobilisation, urgency, fight and flight is doing the long shift, and the parasympathetic branches that handle rest, digestion, repair, and genuine settling cannot get a word in edgeways.
Sympathetic activation is meant to be temporary. Something happens, you mobilise, you handle it, you come back down. The come-back-down is the whole point. When that doesn’t happen reliably, the system stays in mobilisation — and mobilisation, sustained over months and years, is metabolically exhausting. You are burning fuel even when you’re sitting still.
Which is why rest doesn’t feel restful. The system doesn’t actually know how to drop into rest anymore. Sitting still without an activity is, from the body’s point of view, threatening — because it’s the moment when whatever has been driving the activation might catch up. So the body invents activity. Scrolling. Snacking. Worrying. Anything to stay in mobilisation.
How we got here
Some of it is developmental. If you grew up in an environment where you had to be alert — to a parent’s mood, to a household that wasn’t predictable, to demands too big for a small body — your nervous system learned that vigilance was the right strategy. That pattern is structural. It’s not a choice you’re making in the present.
Some of it is cultural. The world we’re living in is genuinely designed to keep us in sympathetic activation — the notifications, the deadlines, the expectation of being reachable, the pace of news and social media. We are collectively marinating in low-grade activation, and our nervous systems are absorbing the message that this is normal.
And some of it is iatrogenic — caused by the treatment. A lot of self-improvement advice doubles down on doing rather than being. Optimise your sleep. Hack your routine. The implicit message is that the answer to exhaustion is more discipline. Which lands beautifully for a sympathetic nervous system because it gives the system more things to mobilise about.
The lie of the productive evening
The lie is that productive people use their evenings well — reading for an hour, journaling, preparing a healthy meal, in bed by ten. This image has been sold so successfully that most people who are exhausted but can’t rest are also ashamed of how their evenings actually go.
The version of you that comes home, sits on the sofa, and watches the same thing for the fourth time while picking at food is not failing the morally optimised evening. That version of you is doing the only thing the nervous system can do in the state it’s in. Seeking soothing through activities that are familiar, predictable, and not demanding.
The problem isn’t the soothing. The problem is the state that made the soothing necessary. If you turn the soothing into another moral failure, you add a layer of shame to an already exhausted system — and shame is sympathetic activation. You spiral further into the very state you’re trying to escape.
What rest actually requires
Rest is not the absence of activity. Rest is a state — the parasympathetic, ventral vagal state where the body slows, the breath deepens, and you become capable of stillness without that stillness being threatening.
You cannot get to that state by stopping. You can stop and remain in sympathetic activation. You can lie on the sofa with your eyes closed and have a nervous system running at the same RPM it was three hours ago.
To actually get to rest, the system needs cues of safety. They are felt, not thought. Slow exhales. Slow movement. A warm hand on your own chest. Sitting with a regulated nervous system — a person, an animal, a particular place. Repetitive non-demanding activity — walking, knitting, washing up by hand. None of these are productivity. All of them are nervous system input.
A practice you can try now
Make your exhale slightly longer than your inhale. Not dramatically. Just slightly. Breathe in for whatever count feels natural, and let the out-breath take a beat longer.
Do that for four breaths. The exhale, mechanically, stimulates the parasympathetic branches of the vagus nerve. It’s a small signal. It’s a real one.
Now notice. Is anything different? Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever you noticed, or didn’t, is information. If something dropped, that’s the parasympathetic state coming partway online. The trick isn’t the breath itself; the trick is the repetition. Doing this several times a day, in short doses, retrains the system to believe that the slow exhale is a regular feature of life.
When daily practices aren’t enough
If your sympathetic activation comes from a relatively recent stretch of life — a stressful year, a project you’ve just finished — good daily practices, more sleep, time outdoors, and a few months of intentional downshifting may do most of the work.
If you’ve been like this for as long as you can remember — if rest has never quite worked, if you cannot remember a time when stillness felt safe — then we are in structural territory. Structural sympathetic activation usually has a cause underneath it. Developmental. Intergenerational. Unprocessed trauma. In those cases, the work isn’t breath work. The work is finding what is keeping the system in mobilisation and letting it be witnessed and metabolised — slowly, in the right hands.
That work takes time. It takes a relationship with someone who knows what they’re doing. It doesn’t reduce to a thirty-day challenge. But it does work.
What changes
The mornings change first. You wake up and there’s a fraction more space before the urgency starts. The middle of the day changes next — the faint hum reduces, you can sit through a meeting without your knee bouncing.
The evenings change last, and this is the bit people notice as transformation. There comes a day when you sit down on the sofa at the end of a normal day and discover, with something close to wonder, that you can just sit there. That the thought of doing nothing is no longer terrifying. That you’re tired, and the tired feels like it’s headed somewhere — toward actual rest, rather than toward the simulated rest that doesn’t restore.
That moment, when it comes, often makes people cry. Because they had forgotten what genuine rest felt like, and the body remembering is a kind of homecoming.
Be gentle today
If this piece has named your experience, you are not unusual. You are part of a very large group of people whose nervous systems have been doing the long shift, and who have been blaming themselves for what is, ultimately, a physiological situation.
Be patient with yourself. The information itself is not a fix. The fix — if fix is even the right word — is a slow, multi-month, multi-year reorientation of how your system holds itself, supported by the right people and the right conditions.
Take care of yourself today. Especially the part of you that has been working very hard for a very long time.
About Abi Beri
Abi Beri is an Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator, and Nervous System Specialist. He works with clients in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online worldwide. IPHM accredited.
