The Dignity of Being Tired: Give Yourself a Break

Q: Is this just permission to be lazy?

No, and the fear of that is exactly why we do not stop. Rest properly and you come back with more, not less. Laziness does not leave you refreshed, it leaves you flat.

Q: What if I genuinely cannot take time off?

Then take it in smaller pieces. An hour without the phone. A meeting you send apologies for. The point is that stopping counts even when it is short.

Q: Is there a meditation to go with it?

Yes, Permission to Rest. A gentle body scan and some breathing, with no goal and nowhere to arrive.

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The transcript

It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.

sleep · self-compassion · stress

Read the transcript

When I was mayor of Truro, there were days when I literally

had nothing left. I was exhausted, I wasn't very well at

the time. I was going through all kinds of problems with my body.

And as regular listeners know, I'm paralyzed already. But I had

some real issues going on. But I felt completely empty. But there

was always another event, another person who I needed to meet,

another speech, another parade, another time where I was

in front of everyone, another council meeting in the evening, and

it didn't normal hours. Every day was different, and they weren't

events that you could say, I'll go to the next one, because

it was the one off in the year and I felt I should be doing more

all the time. And I kept going, not because I had the energy,

but because stopping felt like letting people down. And that's what

I want to talk about today, the dignity of being tired. Permission

to stop. Hello and welcome. I'm Steven Webb, and this is Stillness

in the Storms. And I help people to find steady ground when

life gets too hard. No gimmicks, no life hack, just honest

conversation that will bring you more peace when you need it most.

So why do we treat tiredness like a personal failure instead of

an honest information from our body and our minds that telling us

we need to slow down being paralyzed? When my body tells me

something, it's like the world's worst WI fi signal. When

the legs tell my brain something, it never gets through.

My brain doesn't. I cannot feel anything from my chest down.

And I suffer from a condition called autonomic dysreflexia, which

will kind of help you to understand. So if I have any serious

pain below my level of injury, which is C5, the fifth bone down

in the neck. So really, from my chest down and from my elbows

down, I don't feel anything. So if I get any pain below that level,

the body goes into a shock, it sends a signal, it bounces back and

it starts ricocheting around and the body kind of panics. But

at that point, I don't know anything about it. So it sends the

blood pressure up to like 250 over 150, which is really dangerous.

It's the risk of having a stroke or death if it isn't dealt

with within a reasonable amount of time. And this can happen

pretty much any time. It's happened to me lots to a point where

I've been had to go into an ambulance and be rushed to hospital,

I think three, maybe four times in the 35 years. All the other

times which is probably several times a year, sometimes two

or three times a month, when I'm really not very well, where the

carers just deal with it. But the point of the story is we need

to listen to our bodies. And I don't always listen to mine, although

I've got no communication with it. But if we slow down enough and

really take notice, our bodies will tell us when enough's enough.

Have you ever got to the point where, you know, you're tired, you

know you're exhausted, but you carry on and doing one or two more

things and to the point where you cannot focus anymore, you cannot

take more information in, you can barely sleep, you can barely

function because you're just so overwhelmed and you're pushed

yourself right to the limit. You need. You're forced to take that

time off or you're forced into illness of some kind. Why is it so

wrong for us to go, hey, look, I'm tired, I can't do it. We can't

phone a friend. We can't phone the boss or anything and go, look,

I'm just exhausted. I need to take this day off. We almost have

to have a reason, like, are my legs falling off? Or, you know, we

make up the skitter, my car's broke down, I can again. And sometimes

it's just because we are literally, we're living in a world

which is so overwhelmingly tiring mentally and physically that

we don't have any time to stop. You know, it wasn't that long

ago where one of the people, one of the parents could stay at

home and look after the children. Now both have to work and

it's just. And we have to work more hours. We have to do two jobs,

we're doing all these things. And then we don't get no let up because

then we check the Internet and we're scrolling through and we're

told about how everybody else is sharing their success like I do

regularly, but people don't put on Facebook very often. If they

do, everybody else goes, if I put on Facebook and goes, do you

know what? I'm just knackered. Need timeout. Hopefully I've got

enough, I don't know, emotion in the bank with my friends that.

So they can go, okay, he's tired. Fair enough. But a lot of

the time when someone puts that stuff on there, they get all

kinds of, oh, what kind of attention seeking are they doing

that? We get judged, don't we? Maybe we don't have to have something

naturally wrong to go, do you know what? I need permission to stop.

Maybe it's us standing in the way. Maybe sometimes we need that

solitude, that we just need to take that time out. And sometimes

it's days, sometimes it's a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks,

three weeks, sometimes even a bit longer. But we need to be okay

to do it. And as mayor, it's a really strange job because I was

never a deputy mayor, so I didn't really know what it was like.

And your chair of the council, you have to go to the full council

meeting, the finance meeting, the planning meeting, the parks and

recreation meeting, any workshops or anything like that you're

expected to go to. Not only that, you're expected to go to all

the events and everything. Luckily for me, I didn't work at

the time, but lots of the mayors work as well. I don't know

how they do it. And yes, being paralyzed does make it a little bit

more difficult, but it cannot make it that difficult that it's

more difficult than someone working. And there's so much pressure

on us publicly. So how do we do this? How do we just say to the

world, you know what? I'm tired? And I think the main point

I want to hear is, tiredness is not a weakness. It's your body

and mind telling you something honest. Ignoring it is not the same

as ignoring any other signal that sometimes needs attention. You

cannot ignore your tiredness for too long because at some point

it will go to sleep. It will say, enough's enough. And whether

or not it makes you ill or you just fall asleep, you often hear

people say that I haven't slept for days or, well, they probably

have. I think the world record was done locally, actually, in Cornwall.

I think it's something like four and a half or five days. Because

no matter what, the body will fall asleep. It needs to do that

now. They know what happens when you're asleep now. One of the

reasons why you need it so much. So on the podcast by Stephen

Fry, it's free on Audit Audible. I don't know if you need

a subscription or not, but you don't have to buy it. And they were.

They were monitoring brain waves with people sleeping, and they

kept hearing this whooshing sound, like whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

And they thought that something was wrong with the equipment,

and this was the most sensitive equipment they'd ever really

monitored people sleep with. And they did. And they heard it again.

They heard it with other people, different lengths of time

and different, like, wave sounds and things like that. But

it was all very similar. So they started analyzing, they started

looking at the brain and where it was going. And it was coming from

the front of the brain, behind your forehead, above your eyes to

the back of the brain. And it was like waves. And then they realized

when this is happening, sometimes you dream. And what they,

what they found out is people that had that happened more to them,

they were clearer thinking the next day. They were able to do cognitive

tasks better simply because they were able to clear the front

of the mind. And if you don't have that deep sleep, if you don't

have that sleep that enables this to happen, then you're not able

to think clearly. You're not able to refill with the days things.

And that's why you can't remember anything. You, you need

to get out of bed in the morning with whatever processing

you need for the day has to be cleared, it has to be filed away.

It has to be organized in the mind in a way that it's like clearing

the computer. When you reboot, the computer is a bit quicker. It's

clearing out that working RAM in the computer. That's the only

analogy I can think of, to be quite honest. So I found that really

fascinating. We really do need to just, okay, I'm tired. I need

time out. I can't just carry on. And because we built a culture

that celebrates this exhaustion as proof of commitment.

I'm so busy. It's become this badge of honor that busy nurses this

good thing to have. You know, what are you up to? I'm so busy,

I hardly stopped for weeks. It's like, as if that's a good thing.

How about, yeah, I'm doing really well. I had a couple of days

off and I really did stop. I think it's Bill Gates that every

year or every like few months or something, he goes away and he

stays in a cabin. No Internet, no interruptions, no nothing. And

just takes a couple of books and just reads them. Disconnects

completely. Does have no connections with the outside world

at all. And I know a few people that do this to write books

or do different things. And I think we need to do that. We need

to just on a practical sense, just put your phone away and. Or

put your phone on the side, go out, go for a walk, spend an hour.

Practice time during the day that is completely disconnected because

we've got into this habit of we need the phone because we're the

new 999 or 911. We're the. What if my kids need me? What if

my mum Needs me. What if someone needs me? Well, we coped

for years and years before, if anything is that urgent? You got

the emergency services. Yeah, but what if they can't get hold of

them? No, come on. That's just been a bit over the top. What can

you do if they cannot do it? What is that urgent? So we've got

so used to being in contact and being ready, being on call and

stopping is like not giving up. It's not giving up and saying,

I can't do it. It's just saying, not today, not this week.

I'll be able to do it better next week and you're better off.

Rather than soldiering through and something taking three days to

do. If you can take a couple of days off and then get it done

in one day, how much better is that? So I think there is dignity

in saying, I have done enough today. That's it. I'm going to close

my eyes and I'm going to be proud of what I've done. Even if

you haven't achieved everything, I. I think Thich Nhat

Hat said this beautifully in the heart of the Buddha's teaching.

And he writes, when animals in the forest get wounded, they find

a place to lie down and they rest completely for many days. They

don't think about food or anything else. They just rest and

they get the healing they need. And I think we've forgotten

how to do that. Animals don't feel guilty about resting. They don't

lie there thinking about all the things they should be doing.

They just rest and they heal. And I think the healing has to be

done not just in the body. Because if your mind's telling, you

need to slow down. At some point, the mind will say to the body,

hey, you're going to help me. Tell him. You're going to help me.

Tell her. Because if you don't listen to the mind, then the body

will come along in the end and go, no, I can't do it no more. It

reminds me of when I used to. For years when I was a child, my

mom always tells me that whenever I used to walk anywhere,

I would sit down and go, my legs don't work. And I think this

is quite common for children to do this. But my mom always finds

it quite comical telling the story, especially now, the irony

of being paralyzed. Yeah, my legs don't work. I used to just sit

there and that was it. I wouldn't go any further. Perhaps

I need to do that. That's it. I'm just going to. Instead of Saying

like, now I'm trying to sit, legs don't work, brain doesn't work,

my mind doesn't work. So permission to stop is not laziness.

It's one of the most compassionate things you can offer

yourself. And I think we need to do it more often. And here's the

thing, when you actually rest properly without guilt, you come

back with a lot more to give, not less. Stopping is not the opposite

of caring. Do you know what stopping sometimes is? The caring

you can do. It's how we keep being able to care. I don't like

the cliches of you can't pour from an empty cup and things like

that, but they're true. You can't. So I've done a meditation

that goes with this podcast. A meditation for when you're tired.

It's a gentle body scan and a breathing meditation focused on letting

go or what you need to do. Letting go of everything you need

to do and just being. No goals, no fixing, no arriving anywhere,

just rest. So just before I close, I do want to say a huge thank

you to this week's supporters. Senga Sujeta, Jack, Denise, Glenn,

Aileen, Joe, Laurie, Barb, Audra, Bronwyn and Emily. You guys

are awesome. Thank you so much. Couple of monthly subscribers

in there, as well as a couple of new monthly subscribers. You all

keep these podcasts and the Inner Peace Meditations free from

adverts. Thank you so much. And if you'd like to donate or help,

you can do it. Just going to stevenwebb.uk thank you. Give yourself

permission to take time out, really genuinely rest, whatever that

looks like for you. Just sit and ask, what do I need right now?

What does my body need? What does my mind need? And remember,

you can come back a lot more refreshed, a lot more ready, a lot

more capable. There's no prizes for just soldiering through.

So let take care of yourself, stay curious and I love you.

The Dignity of Being Tired: Give Yourself a Break

In this episode

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The companion meditation

The transcript

One calm email.
Every Sunday.

The Dignity of Being Tired: Give Yourself a Break

In this episode

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The companion meditation

The transcript

More honest conversations

One calm email. Every Sunday.

One calm email.
Every Sunday.