Episode Five: You Don't Have to Earn Rest

There is a belief woven so deeply into modern culture that many people rarely stop to question it: the belief that rest must be earned.

That rest comes after the work is finished. After the responsibilities are handled. After the goals are achieved. After everyone else is taken care of. After we've somehow proven that we've done enough.

And for many people, that moment never arrives.

In this episode of Becoming the Sanctuary, Kelley explores our complicated relationship with rest and why so many people struggle to slow down even when they are exhausted. Building on the conversations from Episodes 3 and 4, this episode continues exploring life after survival mode. If Episode 3 asked what it means to stay present with yourself instead of disappearing, and Episode 4 explored why the nervous system often struggles to trust peace after years of stress and emotional bracing, this conversation asks the next natural question: if peace finally arrives, are we actually capable of receiving it?

Because many people say they want rest. They say they are tired, overwhelmed, and burned out. Yet the moment space finally opens up, something else often appears alongside it: guilt, restlessness, anxiety, and the feeling that there must be something more productive they should be doing instead. A quiet voice emerges that says, you haven't done enough yet.

Kelley reflects on how easy it is to turn rest into another achievement. Another thing to optimize. Another item on a checklist. Another reward that can only be accessed after enough work has been completed. The conversation explores how productivity and self-worth have become deeply entangled in modern life. Many people have learned to measure their value through what they accomplish, produce, achieve, fix, carry, or provide. Over time, usefulness becomes identity.

The result is a culture filled with exhausted people who no longer know how to stop. People who know how to push through, survive difficult seasons, and carry enormous amounts of responsibility. Yet receiving can feel much harder than doing. Receiving help. Receiving support. Receiving kindness. Receiving care. Receiving rest.

This episode explores the possibility that many people are not addicted to work itself. They are attached to what work allows them to avoid. When the constant movement stops, emotions often rise to the surface. Questions become louder. Uncertainty becomes harder to ignore. For some people, busyness becomes a way to stay one step ahead of what still needs to be felt.

The conversation examines the ways modern culture reinforces these patterns. Productivity is praised. Exhaustion is normalized. Burnout is expected. Entire communities bond through stress and wear busyness as a badge of honor. Being overwhelmed has become so common that many people barely question it anymore.

Kelley reflects on her own experiences building Thrivewell Hub while navigating entrepreneurship, healing, creativity, workshops, vendor fairs, podcasting, financial pressure, and the ongoing challenge of balancing ambition with sustainability. Because there is always more to do. Another event to plan. Another project to build. Another responsibility to carry. Another goal waiting on the horizon.

The problem is that if rest only comes when everything is finished, rest never arrives.

Life is not designed that way. There will always be another project, another chapter, another challenge, and another dream. If people continuously postpone rest until some imaginary future point where everything is finally complete, they risk postponing their lives along with it.

The episode also explores the relationship between hyper-independence and rest. Many people are comfortable giving, helping, supporting, producing, and carrying responsibility. Receiving feels entirely different. Receiving requires trust. It requires vulnerability. It requires allowing ourselves to be human instead of endlessly capable.

Throughout the conversation, Kelley examines the different forms of rest people often overlook. Rest is not simply sleep. Rest can be physical, emotional, mental, creative, sensory, social, and spiritual. Someone can sleep eight hours and still feel exhausted if their nervous system never settles. Someone can take a vacation and return depleted if they never stop carrying emotional responsibility. True rest is not simply the absence of movement. It is the presence of restoration.

The episode also explores the difference between rest and avoidance. Not everything that looks like rest is restorative. Scrolling for hours may distract the mind without replenishing it. Numbing may create temporary relief without creating recovery. Learning the difference between avoidance and restoration becomes an important part of healing.

One of the deeper themes woven throughout the episode is the reality that many people wait until collapse before giving themselves permission to stop. They wait until burnout, illness, or emotional exhaustion forces a conversation they have been avoiding. Yet the body often whispers long before it screams. Fatigue, irritability, brain fog, resentment, disconnection, and difficulty experiencing joy often appear long before full burnout arrives.

At its core, You Don't Have to Earn Rest is not really an episode about rest at all. It is an episode about worth, permission, and the belief systems many people carry without realizing it. It asks difficult questions: Would you still be worthy if you produced less? Would you still be enough if you slowed down? Would you still deserve care if you weren't constantly taking care of everyone else?

For many people, those questions reach much deeper than they initially appear. Because underneath productivity often lives a desire to prove something—to ourselves, to others, or to the world around us. Yet healing eventually asks something different. It asks whether worth can exist before achievement, whether rest can exist before exhaustion, and whether peace can exist before everything is fixed.

You Don't Have to Earn Rest is an invitation to step outside the endless cycle of earning, proving, producing, and performing. It is a reminder that rest is not a reward waiting at the end of the road. It is part of the road. And perhaps one of the most radical things a person can do in a culture obsessed with productivity is to remember that their value has never been determined by their output.

They do not have to earn rest. They do not have to justify it. They do not have to wait until collapse. They are allowed to rest because they are human.

And that has always been enough.

#BecomingTheSanctuary #ThrivewellEstate #RestIsProductive #BurnoutRecovery #HealingJourney #NervousSystemHealing #EmotionalHealing #Embodiment #Mindfulness #SelfAwareness #PersonalGrowth #MentalWellness #ConsciousLiving #SelfCare #RecoveryJourney

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Becoming the Sanctuary. If this is your first time here, my name is Kelly, founder of Thrive Well Estate and Thrivewell Hub, located in Whitensville, Massachusetts. And this podcast is a space where we explore healing, embodiment, emotional awareness, nervous system regulation, creativity, human connection, and what it actually means to return to yourself while still living inside a very overwhelming world. Now, over the last few episodes, we've been building on a conversation that I think many people are quietly living every single day. In episode three, we talked about staying when it would be easier to disappear, the ways we disconnect from ourselves through overthinking, overworking, perfectionism, emotional isolation, and survival behaviors that often become invisible because they've been with us for so long. And then in episode four, we explored what happens when the nervous system doesn't fully trust peace yet, how the body can remain emotionally braced long after life starts improving. How many of us become so familiar with pressure, urgency, responsibility, and survival that calm itself can start feeling unfamiliar? And I think today's episode is the natural next question. If the nervous system doesn't trust peace, can we actually rest? Because I've been noticing something lately, both in myself and in the people around me. Many of us say we want rest, we say we're exhausted, we say we're burned out, we say we need a break, but then the moment the opportunity to rest appears, something strange happens. And we talked about this in the last episode. And I really wanted to focus on this as a whole episode this week because when the moment happens, we feel guilty, we feel lazy, we feel unproductive. We start looking for something useful to do, something to clean, something to fix, something to organize, something to accomplish. And before we know it, we've turned rest into another task. Because I think many people have unknowingly learned that rest is something that you earn, something you deserve only after you've worked hard enough, produced enough, given enough, sacrificed enough, exhausted yourself enough. But what if that's not true? Stay with me here. What if rest isn't a reward? What if rest is actually a human need? What if one of the reasons so many people are exhausted right now is because they've been taught that slowing down must always be justified. So today's episode is about guilt, productivity, worthiness, exhaustion, receiving, and why so many people wait until collapse before finally giving themselves permission to rest? So let's think about that. Because I knew as soon as I talked about it um last week, you know, talking about relating to being on the couch and just that guilty feeling that that just pops up. Um and I want to start there. Why does rest feel so hard? And I am definitely um at a point in my life where I'm really, really, really leaning into the deeper work. I am making changes in my life now that I've been talking about for months, for years. I'm really starting to pick those habits up or letting some habits go. Um, because honestly, I want to find a way to slow down, um, you know, slow down in general, but also understand for myself why rest feels so hard. Um because I say I'm tired all the time. I've already said it so many times today. And it's not that I'm making it up, um, because I do, I do feel tired, but I don't think it's um something that just sleep can can fix, can cure. Um, because really what what it is is like we're talking about, it's the struggling to slow down. Um and I I think it's this constant need to just go, go, go is is what we're responding to. Um and certainly we need rest, we need sleep, those, those are all important. But I I do think that, you know, in the the way that we're talking, that rest and sleep are are not the same thing. Because once we can get ourselves to fall asleep, um, you know, really our our subconscious mind is what takes over at that point. But how many of us even struggle to get there? I know, I know I do. But I want to talk about, you know, why it is that we start to feel guilty when resting. Think about it in yourself. When when did it become that we need to justify the downtime? You know, it's like even I feel like in my own life, I sometimes feel the need to text my partner and say, I need you to text out that you give me permission to take a nap. And, you know, that's not because I guess he's controlling by any means or anything like that. It's it's for some reason I can't give the permission to myself. So I'm looking to him to somehow remove the expectation that I need to get something done. But even just saying that right now, it's like, is that expectation coming from him? No, absolutely not. The expectation that I need to get things done is coming from from me. This need to constantly stay busy and and that difficulty relaxing is very real for me. Um, because I can't tell you, I mean, vacation, that's what it took me to fly what, seven hours away, um, to be able to feel like I could suddenly actually rest and not judge myself for it. Um, because I know what happens to me when I rest now or when I attempt to, I feel restless. I don't actually rest. I sit there and I get filled with anxiety and I start thinking about everything that I need to do, everything that I should be doing. Um, I'll even take good habits and and start making myself feel guilty about them. Like reading. Reading is a great habit. But does that mean in every ounce of downtime I have that I need to be filling my brain with any book I can get my hands on? Um, because I think what I'm what I'm more fighting is that emotional discomfort that comes during stillness. Like if I if I slow myself down enough that I can actually rest, what is it that's going to pop up? Um, because true rest feels very unfamiliar. Like I said, there's not many times in my life that I can remember truly resting and and not having any sort of feelings about it. Um, but and this is where that we can kind of take action in ourselves and and something that I'm doing for myself. Um, because today is is one of those days. It's um, you know, I I really want to, like I said and been talking about, really step into this new version of myself um and create healthier habits. But for me to do that, I have to see how much these bad habits are still in there. So I got myself, um, I have to be honest, I didn't get myself, I had it because I have a little bit of um obsession with office supplies for some reason. So I have all these notebooks everywhere in my house. Brand new ones, some use, some not. And there's this little one. Um, it uh it's perfect. And and this is the one that I'm going to use to track my doom scrolling. So whenever I doom scroll, and I already had to mark it right before I started this podcast because I found myself in the abyss of Facebook yet again. Um, so I write it down because for me, I need the visual. I need to visually see how many times a day um I doom scroll because that's how I can can see and accept and acknowledge a problem, right? Um, so those are just some things that's helping me be able to sit and not feel like I need this constant stimulation um and and making it so there is some sort of blockage or obstacle in my way from from truly truly resting. Because next thing I want to talk about is how we, and we've talked about this in the in the past episodes, but let's really lean into it here. Because we absolutely as a culture tie productivity to self-worth. So when we do that, um, you know, when you think about the worth that you have within yourself, how how you think people perceive you and how you feel about yourself, we have absolutely tied that, tied that to the output of of what goes into the world. What are we producing? What are we creating? What are we accomplishing? You know, um, and that in turn, you know, you we've heard it how many times? And and this is just the lack of awareness where it's like, I'll give you something to be tired about. Like you, you're you're not tired enough. You're not, I've had a longer day. You know, again, that just all comes from this deep ingrained comparison culture. And it's like, what if I woke up for the day and realized I still needed more rest and just went right back to bed? Right now I'm somebody who sleeps late and and I'm lazy. And, you know, it can come, those descriptions can come from myself and and like I said, culture, culture as a whole. Um and we also think about, you know, with with our own self-worth, but but more so our identity, that how much usefulness becomes an identity. Because I mean, just look look all around us, right? The achievement culture. Um, and again, you're gonna hear me continuously talk about this. Um, sorry if I got a little distracted there. I had something in my eye, but you're gonna hear me um talk about culture a lot because we're in the we're in a um reactionary culture, we're in a digital culture, we're in achievement culture, we're in a comparison culture. Think about all those descriptions that I'm using for this culture, and they're all true. It's where we're at. Um and and we're all trying to be our best self while we're at the intersection of this culture that's cutting us into 700 million different pieces, and we can't be stretched that thin. We can't do all the things that we the pressure is put on us to do, and then in the same breath, say, but you have to earn the rest. Because if you're constantly proving your value, right, in in what you produce, or like we said, like you what you create, um that productivity that becomes your self-esteem marker, right? Think about what you what you go through to your day. You ask yourself, what did I accomplish today? How would you feel if you say nothing? Right? What if you accomplished nothing? What if you allowed your body to just rest? It's like we can't get there because we have such difficulty feeling worthy without producing, and it and it's this constant battle of work ethic versus self-worth. And and think about that in your own life, right? Like, think about what is a work ethic to you? What is that definition? I was just asked this recently, right? What is a work ethic mean to you? Does it mean that you show up, that you give a hundred and ten percent, and you do the very best that you can, and whatever you get accomplished is what you get accomplished, and then you go home and you rest. Or do you give a hundred and ten percent, right? And still feel like it's not good enough and feel like you need to take on more and you need to take on more projects or say yes to your boss more and not take the vacation time and not take time off. Is that your work ethic? Because we have to really look, because now where I'm at and where I continue to be, is I'm going to give you my best effort. But my best effort and your version of my best effort is not my responsibility. Only I know what my best effort is. And and we can manipulate this, right? If you're trying to cut corners or anything like that, like that's I'm not talking about those type of situations. I'm talking talking about being authentic and being genuine. Because this is how we have entered the burnout culture. Um I mean, my gosh, the amount of cultures we're in right now. It's kind of it's wild when I think of how many. Um holy smokes. It's gonna be okay. We can come out of this, we can heal ourselves, we can collectively come back, we can slow down, we can do this. Because even as I'm recording this podcast, you could just hear the panic that came out of my voice, just realizing how many intersections we're in in the culture and the society that we are in today. Um, and that honestly just naturally leads me into my next topic: how exhaustion um has become an identity. Think about that. We have completely normalized burnout. I'm 40 years old, and it feels like since the second I got out of high school, that's been become normalized. You work hard, you hustle, you don't sleep, you don't drink a lot of water, you do the best you can. But even if you do the best you can, you have to do more. Just go, go, go. Get the bigger house, get the bigger car, make more money, have more money in the bank, go on more vacations. But don't actually go on vacation. You still have to be accessible, right? You still have to post to your social media, you still have to respond to your boss, you still have to answer to all of these responsibilities. We have become a society that wear that wearing busy is a badge of honor. And we're the worst thing is is that we're bonding over this. Where like again, the only thing I have to reference to at this moment is being a business owner. I can't tell you how many um jokes or videos or or reels or anything, right? Like, see, it's all around that doom scrolling that I send my fellow business owner friends being like, How are you doing? On the verge of mental breakdown. Oh ha ha ha. It's like, well, wait a minute. Like, this isn't this isn't what we're supposed to be doing. Like, I I came out of the world that glorified hustle, right? And I understand that you do need hustle. Hustle has to happen. You have to work hard as a business owner. You will hear me say continuously in every single podcast, it's the balance. It's the balance. I have to work hard, right? And I want to work hard, I choose to work hard. But what I what what is not helping me is when I go home at the end of a long day, and then I feel like I still can't slow down. I can't rest. I have to, but then that's where the collapse comes in. That's where I go into shutdown. And and I just want to numb everything out and I want to shut everything out. And that's that's what we're doing when we're doom scrolling, um, or or any of these activities that we participate in that help us shut the world out. Because, you know, God forbid, we actually just rest. Um but I think the fact that something else that can really, I'm thinking about my own career, um, and not even just career, my own life, right? There's been times that I can feel important because I'm overwhelmed. I like I said, we we we're we're normalizing this, but we we wear it like a badge of honor. I'll be like, my plate is just so full. And then and then you get the validation of like, I don't know how you do it, I don't know how you do it all. That should not be something that we're celebrating because we that just means we are never slowing down. And again, like we continue to talk about survival mode, it becomes a personality, and our world is just constantly reinforcing this exhaustion. I have a really hard time finding anyone that is in my life or that I meet um that isn't just tired all the time. And like I said, I know I'm one of them. I'm I'm the type that's tired all the time. But because of the unhealthy balance in my life, I finally get to the point that I get to lay my head down on the pillow um next to the man that I'm building this amazing life with. And my eyes are just wide open. Wide open. Can't stop thinking, can't stop the thoughts, pick up the phone, do the doom scrolling. Now I'm buying something on Amazon that I don't even need, and now I'm comparing myself to the business that's been open 10 years and is super successful. Like none of this combination is healthy for me. So that's why I want to know why do we wait until collapse? Because if we're waiting for burnout before we rest, right? Like, I'll just talk about my own experience. Yes, of course, this was not just burnout for the record, but I had to wait until I hit rock bottom, until my life was literally collapsing around me before I raised my hand and said, I need help. My life has become unmanageable. And I think when you remove the idea that it's a substance, right? What if it's life itself? What if life has made it so life is unmanageable? Because if we're if we're sitting here and waiting for the collapse to come, that's gonna be so much harder to come out of. I had to take a six-month hiatus from my own life to start building that foundation in a way that was going to be productive and beneficial for me and my healing and my sobriety. But only for what? For life to kind of suck me back out and and you know, yeah, I'm not I'm not drinking, and I am very grateful for that. And my cravings are minimal, minimal would be an overstatement. I very, very, very rarely knock on wood because I work on my sobriety very hard, have cravings for alcohol. But what about everything else? What about everything else that can help us escape life? And and that's why a lot of it we're we're waiting until the sickness comes, right? We're waiting until the emotional breakdown. We are ignoring every single early sign. Because what? Because we don't deserve to rest. It is just this push through, dig deep. You can do it. We have to push through everything. And again, it's because we think that rest has to be earned. And again, if if we all of a sudden say, I'm going to take two days for myself and take a breather, right? Then we have the fear of falling behind. Or say we don't go to all those events that weekend, right? Because I don't know about you, but my summer's almost jam-packed. I don't even know how that happened. Um, because we have this fear of disappointing others or of appearing lazy for not going or showing up or doing what we quote unquote think we should do. So we just keep adding and adding and adding and showing up for everything and everyone else except for ourselves. And trust me when I say, and I know there's some listeners out there who have also experienced this, but if you wait until collapse, collapse is nothing to joke about. Collapse is extremely, extremely difficult to come out of. So to allow my life and everything that's involved in that to collapse. Well, I don't know if I could do it again, first of all. Um, and again, I'm not talking about my sobriety. I our life can collapse in in many different ways. Um, and I have to make some tough decisions in my own life right now, um, whether that to be able to sustain financially um or to start really taking better care of my body um and my spirit, I don't want to see what that collapse looks like. So this is me starting to wave the white flag saying, I am a student, I am healing too. I need I need to start walking the walk. And you'll probably hear me talking about this several times because, like I said, I'm it's the books that I'm reading now and and the information that I'm not only just learning, but I'm actually putting into action is what is me acknowledging those early signs. Um because like I said, opening Thrivewell Hub it changed me in a way I wasn't expecting. I knew it was going to be hard. I'll be fully honest, I didn't know it would be this hard. Um but I think in anything in our life where we can start to feel the walls closing in, um, or feeling that you know you're kind of losing yourself again, you're disconnecting. We're we're going right back into that rinse-repeat survival mode um body that that can carry us a really long way, actually. Um not even because it's disguised in in the society that we live in, that it's very easy to just blow past all these signs. Um, but I think I mean for myself, um I'm you know, trying to balance healing and building at the same time. And whatever it is that you're building, whether that's new routines or a business or a family or a home, whatever that is, that's been something that I have been looking at for a long time. And I think I'm just finally ready to really start living that balance because to not lose yourself to burnout or disconnection or just numbing yourself from it altogether, you know, even being in in your own dream. Like I've owned owning a business has been a dream of mine my entire life in in some sort of way. But if I don't stop and slow down and take care of myself, it's not sustainable. I'll lose it before it even begins. And I am far too invested and committed to close the doors. For me, success, failure is not an option here. Success is what needs to come of this. You know, you don't get a lot of these opportunities in your life, and it's not to say if I shut the doors, then that's suddenly a failure. Um, and I'm also not saying that I need to shut the doors. It's just understanding the balance of slow and steady. Slow and steady wins the race. We're we're taught that since we're a kid, but suddenly this turtle in the hair reference gets lost along the way. Because I think about in my own life how many times I postpone rest, right? I can slow down when I can take a nap when I'll take a bath when. And it's the guilt, the guilt that I'm that I'm working very, very hard to let go of. You know, the book that we've chosen, we're on to the next pillar um for our book club, and this pillar is cleanse, and we're literally reading a book that's called Letting Go. And the book's a bit bigger than I thought it was going to be, but I'm really excited to read it because after learning about how responsible I am for where I'm at and um the obstacles that are in my way, how many of them are myself, I want to know and truly know how to truly let go of something. Because I think that's something that I've that I've always struggled with personally. Um because my body is getting to the point where it is forcing me to stop. And again, I don't want to end up at a younger age, not saying I'm young, but I'm younger, that my body is shutting down on me. And all of that comes back to learning how to listen earlier. You know, it's it's like we're driving our our our bodies are our cars, right? And we're behind the wheel, and the check engine light is on, and then the tire pressure light comes on, and then uh-oh, something's up with your battery. And and it's like a mat, you know, some people may do that with their car. Full disclosure, my check engine light is on naturally. But if we pretend not pretend, but let's give it a reference of somebody who who takes better care of their car, because anybody who knows me knows that's that's not me. I hate to say that. I need to another thing I should write down on the list, but not today, um, to work on. But imagine just putting a piece of black electrical tape over all those lights and just ignoring it. And then when the car shits the bed and can't go any further, you're like, I don't know what happened. What happened? It's like all the signs were there. The car's dashboard was screaming at you. Well, that's what your body's doing. Um, and and we need to start looking at those signals and actually doing something about it. Because, and I'm not to say that you have to have kids to this, but how many do we, how many of us? I I know I have really started to look into generational cycles because what do you think we're just teaching? What do you think we're carrying down to the next generation? Because I think there's so much awareness out there now that we can't ask this question. What if you were the one? What if you were the one that that actually said no more? You stop that cycle, and then you get to see the next generation not just picking up right where, not even where we left off, but where we are. Because it is all cyclical, it is all the ripple effect. We have the ability to change the direction in which our world is going. Um, because for for a lot of us, and I know this took me far too long to realize um is that receiving is harder than is doing. Because think about how hard is it to never mind ask for, but to receive help, to receive support, to receive kindness. How about a compliment? I'm famous for getting a new dress, getting it off the clearance rack at TJ Maxx. Somebody gives me a compliment on the dress. And instead of just saying, thank you, I have to go into this elaborate story of that I got it for only X amount of dollars, that it didn't fit right here, or it didn't do this right. It's it's like this elaborate explanation of why, for some reason, I don't deserve that compliment. And I'm trying to get better, which which I feel like I am, that now I start to correct myself. I'll give the spiel, but then I end it with what I meant to say was thank you. And that's me trying to make light of a situation that obviously runs a bit deeper. Um, because I think that the same way we talked about help, support, kindness, and compliments, it's very hard for us to receive rest. And I know even in my own life, I'll try and rest. And if my partner is up and he's doing stuff, well, suddenly I'm mad at him that he's doing stuff because I feel like now that he is, I have to get up and do it. Well, is that his problem or is that my problem? He's not putting that pressure on me whatsoever. It's just that I have a problem with receiving rest. And I mean, that just can naturally, all of those parts, anything that we have to receive versus doing, that's how it can translate into that hyperindependence. Because now it's it's this act to prove that we don't need anybody else. But if we don't need anybody else, there is never time for rest. So it's just understanding. I mean, if you I I like to listen to a lot of motivational um videos and and audio, and and I believe that it was Simon Sinek who said it, where he talks about the people that we see out in the world in these successful positions. How many of them got to the top or got to where they are completely by themselves? The answer is none of them. They all had some sort of tribe, they had some sort of support system because you you just to be successful in life, um, and whatever that, whatever success means to you, deep down, nobody gets there all alone. We have to learn to receive help and support, but we also have to learn how to rest. Because if we don't, um again, it's just collapse. That's what inevitably comes. And we have to let go of the control, right? Because when you ask for help, what being allowed to rest is letting go of control. Because then again, everything just translates into these thoughts. If you're still trying to control everything, say you do something as simple as somebody's helping you wash the dishes, and you feel like you need still need to control that situation. You're wondering how they're washing it, how are they stacking the dishwasher? Are they drying them afterwards? Are they putting them away properly? Again, surrender the outcome, let go of control, allow yourself to be vulnerable. Okay, that is also very, very important. Allow yourself to show your human side, and I think in this moment, it's like so much. It's just like an aha moment. Like we're all trying to pretend like we're not human, but then live in a in a human world, and then you you look at the world that we've created, none of this is human. Not the way we live, not where we live, not how we live. What's the point of being human? What's the how many people come through here at the hub and say, I'm doing fine, I'm doing okay, I'm getting by. What's the point? We should feel more than okay and more than fine and more than busy. And that you have to start allowing yourself to be cared for. It takes a village, we hear it all the time. It takes a village to get through life, and then for some reason, we don't believe that enough. And think about your own struggles. Think about the times that you've struggled to receive anything, um, whether that be help or support or even just something as simple as taking a nap. Um because even just while doing this podcast, I'm I'm sitting here reflecting on my my own life. You know, I just I just went and had a lovely chat with one of the other business owners um on the street here. And and at first, you know, I was just going in for a quick hello, but I had that energy of go, go, go. And I'll tell you, I actually allowed myself to sit down for a minute. Um and that's what made me in this moment realize what rest actually is. Because it wasn't like I had anything desperate to come back to, but it was this pressure, the first 10 minutes of sitting down, feeling like, okay, I need to get up, right? I need to record my podcast, I need to do this. But if if the topic, right, is talking about needing rest, and I'm rushed and feeling this pressure and this energy to record the podcast, am I going to say the message in the right way? And I think why there's a little bit more time in between my words on this podcast is because I'm I'm reflecting on my own life in real time. You know, the same way I talk about that I'm figuring out Thrive Well and this business and what my path is and where I'm headed. It's like I'm I'm starting my healing journey with everybody at the same time. So, I mean, I know I have five years, but and and really leaning into this, but I don't know, it's it is similar to what I talk about so much is is that surface level. And I think that's when I'm realizing in lifetime is I'm now entering the deeper level. Because sitting there, um, having this amazing conversation and taking half hour to just be and let the let the conversation naturally flow where it was supposed to flow. Um it made me it it was amazing. It it was a it was a conversation that felt like it was more important than maybe even both of us realized at the time. Because I think that's what is and and has opened my eyes to even in the smallest bit, like what, like I said, what real rest actually is. Because rest is not laziness, and it's definitely not avoidance, and it's not giving up. It's like driving your car down the street and never stopping at a gas station and trying to wonder why eventually it broke down on the side of the road. We have to fill our tank, we are not endless beings, we are in a certain way, I guess, um, but not in the sense of never-ending energy that doesn't need rest. Uh and I'm talking about rest on many different levels. I don't mean, like I said, I'm not talking about rest and sleep as the same thing. I'm talking about physical rest, I'm talking about emotional rest, sensory rest, creative rest, social, spiritual, all of it. We have to start allowing ourselves to rest. We have to start restoring our nervous system. Because if we don't start learning the difference between numbing and resting, that's a world of disassociation that I don't really want to be a part of, to be honest. So I'm gonna really start looking at that myself. Really, what is the difference between numbing and resting? And my little list here is gonna come in handy, and I think I'm going to be shocked and not shocked at how many times I catch myself doom scrolling. So, but I think if that brings us to um the deeper realization of this entire episode, um is that humans were never designed to constantly produce. Because think about yourself after you rest, you have more clarity, you have more energy, ideas or um plans or anything that you're you're trying to figure out in your own life. I'll just speak for myself. Whenever an idea comes, or especially my creativity, always comes down, comes in when I slow down just enough. Um, because rest creates the sustainability in our lives, it supports creativity, it supports healing. Rest supports relationships and it definitely supports purpose. Um and we I'm just slowing down isn't failure. And I'm gonna stop telling myself that it is because that's one of the biggest lies that I think I've allowed to get in, to seep in. Because my worth exists separately from productivity. Being just being is just as important as doing. And I think the sooner that we that we wrap our our mind around that, um, the better off that we'll be because yeah, I just I really, really, really believe of and it's not just belief. I I you talk to anybody and you yourself, you feel it. We're carrying exhaustion that we don't question anymore. And like I said, to end it, let's wrap this up because I can tell myself, I mean, I can feel that I'm just gonna start going into this rambling spiral. Um, and I want to wrap it up so I can rest, right? Rest after accomplishing something and not feeling see, there it was. Rest after accomplishing something. I even just said in the own podcast about this that I need to finish this podcast before I can rest. Reminder rest is not something you earn. Rest is not proof you've done enough. Rest is not weakness. I don't know if I'm talking to all of you or myself. Probably both. Probably more myself, if I'm being honest. Um, yeah, because your body, it needs restoration. Your nervous system, it deserves recovery. Let's not wait until we collapse. And maybe one of the most radical things that we can do in a culture that constantly asks us to produce more is to remember that our worth was never tied to our output in the first place. And maybe rest isn't something that we earn after we've proven ourselves. Maybe it's something we deserve simply because we're human. Well, on that note, I think that'll wrap it up for this episode. Um, thank you again so much for listening. If you can help spread the word, I don't know if these episodes are helpful or I'm rambling. I'm still working on healing myself. Um, I will say that every time, but we I will see you next Friday. And a little preview is next Friday we're gonna talk more about why we keep outrunning ourselves. But until then, have a great weekend, and I'll see you next week.