an You Relate? The Tiredness That Sleep Doesn't Fix

For many years now I have been waking up tired, frequently feeling exhausted, falling asleep if I am sitting for a relatively short period of time and often feeling like I am living on a treadmill of to-do’s and I don’t know how to get off. I haven’t had a holiday of more than 2–3 days in about fourteen years, and that was to Auckland with the kids and I was pregnant with my son and had really bad morning sickness. It isn’t just that I haven’t had opportunity, the thought of stopping and having a holiday to “just relax” causes me to feel on edge. It would take several days for my nervous system to unwind even if I did go away.

I wrote that almost exactly a year ago. Can you relate to any of it?

Why So Many People in Their 40s and 50s Are Running on Empty

By their forties and fifties many people are starting to experience a deep weariness. It is connected to years of intense stress, demand, responsibility and also experiences of loss, heartbreak, unfulfillment, disappointment and failure. We are tired of our time being taken by things we don’t want to do and not being able to do the things we want to do. Many of us have carried the invisible load for decades - the unseen mental, emotional and logistical effort required to manage our relationships, families, and households. In our work and homelife we have been consistently required to do the non-stop exhausting labour of anticipating, planning, organising and remembering moving parts in the responsible role of adulting.

It is absolutely understandable that you are tired. Tired maybe even more than you know. It is not weakness. Modern life can drain the life out of any and possibly all of us. I don’t think that a longing for rest is something new, but I think that we are experiencing it in a new way due to the rapid development of technology leading to globalisation and almost constant lifestyle changes and updates. Those of us in our forties and fifties now lived through the dawning of the digital information age. We remember, not just in our minds, but also in our bodies, a slower, quieter, more personally connected life before personal computers, the internet, mobile phones and social media. I think that this adds to the impact of the fast-paced change and the weariness we feel.

And into all of this, gets thrown the turmoil caused by major hormone changes.

The 3 Types of Midlife Exhaustion

By midlife, chronic stress is effecting us in three main ways:

• fatigue, freeze and burnout

• hyperstimulation - wired but tired

• dis-ease and stress related illness

Exhaustion Type 1: Fatigue, Freeze and Burnout — When Your System Has Simply Had Enough

Ongoing stress drains your energy - even low-level ongoing stress which affects you like apps constantly running in the background on your phone. This can manifest as fatigue, brain fog, procrastination, difficulty making decisions, forgetfulness, emotional flatness and loss of interest in socialising. Freeze, which is a second layer survival (stress) response after fight or flight, can look like feeling numb, depressed, hopeless, disassociated and/or shut down. Burnout can happen when you experience too much emotional, physical, and mental fatigue for too long. You move beyond the overwhelm of stress into feeling depleted, used up, hopeless, cynical, and resentful.

Exhaustion Type 2: Wired but Tired — Why You Can't Switch Off Even When You Want To

Hyperstimulation is the sensation of being constantly switched on and struggling with switching off, or in other words, feeling tired but wired. It can look like overworking, over giving, overthinking and over-functioning, all while being unable to stop or sometimes even sit still for long. If you have difficulty stopping and resting, then it is likely that your nervous system is stuck in survival mode. There are usually subconscious beliefs operating underneath this for you. Experiences you had when you were young that taught you that being still was somehow unsafe, that rest equals weakness. or that if you don’t perform, you don’t matter.

Exhaustion Type 3: When Stress Makes You Sick — The Body's Long-Term Bill for Chronic Pressure

Long-term activation of your stress response system cause overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones which can cause inflammation and disrupt almost all of your body’s processes. This type of chronic stress can put you at risk for a variety of health issues including muscle tension and pain, headaches, infertility, heart disease, heart attack, weight gain, insomnia, auto-immune conditions and stroke. Long term stress keeps your body in a survival state where your body down-regulates systems not connected with fight or flight such as your immune system, your digestive system and your reproductive system. This can make you more prone to illness and slower to recover from it, stimulate or worsen digestive issues, and suppress your libido and sexual function.

You can experience issues from more that one of these areas at the same time. By midlife it is quite common to be experiencing all three in various ways .

Rest is Not Just Physical

Midlife exhaustion is not just physical and therefore the rest we crave and need is not just physical. By this stage of life, a big part of rest is also experiencing inner peace - which is mental and emotional peace, and also spiritual. Not spiritual in a religious sense, but in the sense of self awareness and living in coherence with your values and what is important to you.

You Can’t Make Yourself Rest

I have heard some people say that they will make an effort to rest more. There is a contradiction there because rest by its nature is the opposite of effort. Rest isn’t something we do, it is something we feel. It needs to be felt into because how we experience rest is different for different people and also varies for ourselves over time and mental and emotional state. We can equate rest with acceptance, ease, and flow and with the release of effort, performance and need.

What Does Rest Even Look Like?

Some of us are so stuck in survival mode or over-functioning that we are not even sure how to rest. This is heightened when we have beliefs like:

rest is lazy

rest is unproductive

I can only rest when all the work is done

The purpose of rest is to give me energy to do more

The Roadmap to Rest

Let me give you a roadmap to rest and a simple action point to start with. For those of us in our forties and fifties, effective rest needs to incorporate these three key elements:

Rest Element 1: Biological Rest — Telling Your Nervous System It's Safe to Stop

It is not enough to just physically stop. You need to signal to your body that it is safe and can switch into parasympathetic (rest, digest and breed) mode. The easiest way to do this is through breath techniques and somatic practices.

Rest Element 2: Mental and Emotional Rest — Releasing the Thoughts You've Been Carrying

Learn to observe your thoughts and emotions with curiosity and acceptance rather than becoming and living them. A helpful reflection statement can be, “I am not my thoughts.” Journaling can help you to externalise and observe your thoughts and feelings, and labelling your emotions with a precise word, for example sad, angry, excited etc., engages the logical, rational part of your brain and quiets your survival system emotional brain.

Rest Element 3: Spiritual Rest — Living in Alignment with What Actually Matters to You

Clarify your values and what is important to you, and recognise areas where you are not in alignment with that. This includes any ways in which you are withholding or suppressing your truth by either not saying something or not living something.

What Does Rest Actually Feel Like to You Right Now?

I think that the key question is to ask yourself is, “what does rest feel like to me at this point in time?” There is no right way to rest. The fourth key element of rest is that it feels good to you in this moment. What would make rest become welcoming to you rather than something you should do? What can you let go of to allow yourself some more ease? Rest doesn’t have to be another thing on your daily goal list, it can be about making a small adjustment to create a greater sense of space in your mind, body or life. Rest can be asking for help and receiving support.

Just One Thing - Try This Now: The 4-7-8 Breath Reset

This Just One Thing action point for this post is to pause, right now, and bring your awareness to your breath. Notice how you are breathing for a few moments. Then, inhale through your nose for the count of 4, pause your breath for the count of 7, and then exhale slowly through your mouth with a sighing breath for the count of 8. Repeat the 4, 7, 8 sequence 3 times. Notice how you feel now.

This breath practice is called the 4, 7, 8 breath. It has roots in yoga breathing practices, was formalised by Dr Andrew Weil, and is widely accepted as very effective for reducing stress and anxiety. It links to the biological element of rest and can signal your body that it is safe and that it can switch from stress survival mode (your sympathetic nervous system) to rest and digest mode (your parasympathetic nervous system).

A breath practice like this is a great place to start for a quick nervous system reset and to give you more capacity to investigate more in-depth mental, emotional and spiritual elements of rest.

Ready to Go Deeper? Here's How I Can Support You

If what I talked about in this article resonated with you and you are ready for longer personally guided practices from me, then you can join my Living Midlife Well Member Community. This gets you access to a weekly 20 minute guided wellbeing practice video or audio connected to the action point in my Weekly Wellbeing newsletter. For example, the guided practice connected to this weekly post focuses on the 4,7,8 breathing technique as well as other breath techniques to enable you to use your breath to reduce stress and anxiety from a body (biological) level. Joining the member community will also give you access to a monthly live group coaching call with me and the replays of that. All that for only $7US a month.

Click here to learn more.

Aroha nui, much love
Janine