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The Dignity of Being Tired: Give Yourself a Break

What if tiredness isn't weakness? What if it's the most honest thing your body is telling you?

In this episode, we talk about why we treat exhaustion like a personal failure instead of listening to what it's actually telling us. I share what it was like being Mayor of Truro, running on empty, showing up to every event because stopping felt like letting people down. We explore why busyness has become a badge of honour, why animals rest without guilt and we can't, and what actually happens in your brain when you don't get proper rest. This isn't about life hacks. It's about giving yourself permission to stop before you have nothing left.

Key topics:

• Why tiredness is not a weakness but honest information from your body
• The culture of celebrating exhaustion as proof of commitment
• What happens in your brain during deep sleep and why rest matters
• Thich Nhat Hanh on how animals rest and heal without guilt
• Practical permission to disconnect and stop being on call

Companion meditation: Inner Peace Meditations #98 — Permission to Rest

If this episode meant something to you, please share it, leave a review, or treat me to a coffee: stevenwebb.uk

With thanks to: Senga, Sujata, Jack, Denise, Glenn, Aileen, Joe, Laurie, Barb, Audra, Bronwyn, and Emily.

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.