When Depression is in your bed

From Busy Bee to Safely Still: The Importance of Redefining Our Relationship with Rest

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Episode 34

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What happens when we slow down in a society obsessed with constant motion? After spending eight transformative days in retreat settings, I've gained powerful insights about rest that challenge everything our culture teaches us about productivity and success.

The truth is startling: our nervous systems are designed for cycles of activity and rest, yet modern life rarely allows for genuine restoration. We celebrate those who "burn the candle at both ends" while dismissing periods of stillness as laziness or weakness. This toxic narrative keeps us trapped in survival states – either pushing through in sympathetic activation (fight-or-flight) or collapsing into dorsal shutdown (often experienced as depression).

Looking to nature reveals fascinating parallels. Bees, the ultimate symbol of busyness, actually take regular breaks between gathering nectar. When they don't rest enough, they lose their ability to navigate – they literally cannot find their way home. Lions, apex predators at the top of the food chain, rest approximately twenty hours daily. This isn't weakness; it's what enables their power and effectiveness during hunting.

Depression itself can be understood as the body's desperate attempt to force needed rest when we've been pushing ourselves too hard. Unfortunately, it rarely provides the truly restful rest we need – the kind that happens in our regulated dorsal state, where we feel safely still, connected, and genuinely restored.

While society may not slow down anytime soon, we can begin rewriting our personal narratives about rest. This means questioning beliefs that equate rest with laziness and learning to create intentional moments of slowdown even within busy lives. Through this practice, we not only improve our well-being but contribute to a broader cultural shift toward valuing rest as essential rather than optional.

Ready to transform your relationship with rest? Subscribe for upcoming episodes exploring accessibility of rest, practical strategies for creating restful moments, and how to distinguish between collapse and genuine restoration. Your journey toward balanced well-being continues with each small step, even when depression is in your bed.

- If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat!

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the One Depression is in your Bed podcast. Are you a busy bee? Do you find yourself buzzing through life nearly in constant motion, hustling, making all the things happen, perhaps in your relationship or at work, or as a friend or a caregiver, in one of the many demanding roles that you take on that have the tendency to deplete your energy? Underneath it all, do you have a deep longing to figure out a way to slow down? Well, if so, you are not alone. Today, I want to explore how our society has created a terrible reputation for rest and how so many of us hold that belief, which is not just wrong but it's also harmful to our well-being. I'm your host, trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started.

Speaker 1:

Last week, I had the absolute gift of having an experience of being able to slow down for eight days. My week started with three days in an incredible healing space filled with supportive, heart-centered, lovely, beautiful people, where I was able to have the time and space to slow down and focus inward on what I really needed and what was really happening for me. And then I went from this delightful space right into a five-day polyvagal retreat. And if you've been listening to me, then you'll know what polyvagal theory is, but if you're new, polyvagal theory explores how our nervous system is really at the core of everything that we do and how our nervous system affects how we perceive ourselves and others and the world, and also how we experience our own well-being. And at the retreat it was a training for therapists and wellness practitioners. It was about how we bring nervous system work into the office and work with our clients and it was also very experiential. So it was really connecting to the wisdom of our own nervous systems and exploring our own wellness and healing process through that lens. And so, as a result of having all this time, I've been very reflective and I talked in recent episodes about my incredible gratitude for being able to have this time and space, because I am a business owner and a mom and I can't just take eight days off without making a lot of arrangements, but yet I am able to make those arrangements and I was able to get this incredible expanse of time to focus on myself and, of course, also be able to focus on how to do even better work with the people that come and work with me.

Speaker 1:

So in this space, I've been very reflective, very grateful, and I thought a lot about rest and truly, one of the takeaways that I had from my eight days was the intention to walk slowly, to walk with purpose, to trust that it is actually in the slowdown that I will be able to make my most informed decisions and consciously choose one step after another in present time. And it's not about the destination, it's not about how quickly I go there, but rather this is, of course, very cliche to say, but it's so true but really how important the journey is and how that's where my purpose is found and created and unfolds. And what really supports that is the slowdown, is the rest, is the time to be able to reflect and be in that being space, that safely still space where I can really tune in to what my needs are and what makes sense for the next step or how to move forward. And so I've been thinking about this and all eight days. There was certainly some busyness, there was work to do, there were parts of the training, there was travel, those sorts of things, but even with all of that, I still had very much time to slow down each day, the way that both experiences the wellness weekend and then also the polyvagal retreat, were really intentionally created by the people who were running them so that the participants could have that time to slow down, to reflect, to be in connection with yourself certainly safe and delightful connection with others and nature and spirit and the greater world. And so, as I thought about all of this and how grateful I was to have this experience, I realized how I had so much clarity, and I've been gaining so much clarity over the last several years, about how taking this time to slow down stress even though it's between times of much more activity and what many people would think of as the traditional productive time, getting things done how valuable it has been to me, but how it is not a value in society for many. Certainly, I live in American culture. I am just outside of New York City, the city that never sleeps, so you know the hustle is very real here and the number of things that quote unquote need to be done for me, for my business, for my kids I mean kids are so incredibly busy today again, certainly in my area of the world it is not a value to slow down, to breathe, to take times of reflection, and so I really wanted to start this conversation today to name that and acknowledge that and think more about it, and my plan is to take the next several episodes to explore different parts of rest and the narrative about rest in our society and what that means to us and to our well-being.

Speaker 1:

As long as I can remember, certainly back to when I was a teenager, I have always been drawn to stillness practices like meditation or being able to spend time in nature, restorative yoga, those kinds of things. And yet for many years, as much as I tried, it took me decades to really be able to have a regular practice of creating times of stillness. And I think today I understand that largely through the lens of the nervous system, that for me that slowdown was most often associated with that survival response of dorsal shutdown and collapse. So for me, when I was still a lot of the time came when my nervous system was perceiving danger. My nervous system experience of stillness is paired with me needing to be in protection mode and so sometimes slowing down felt overwhelming. It felt scary because the thoughts would come, the quiet did not come. I felt overwhelmed. All the things that I didn't want to think about, that I was trying to avoid could flood in at times and that it wasn't an experience of safely still. But yet there was a part of me that just deeply knew that this stillness was an important part of my healing and necessary, as a matter of fact, for my well-being. And it wasn't until after my husband and I separated and then got back together that I was able to successfully start what became a daily meditation practice and lasted as a daily practice for almost two years I would say a year and a half to two years and then the results were so incredible. The physical results of how I noticed the shift in my body were so astounding and I felt so much better that it was easier to hold on to the practice.

Speaker 1:

But then I still being human and all, I fell off practice and have kind of ebbed and flowed and sometimes I have very much an active daily practice. Sometimes it's a sporadic practice, sometimes I still fall off for months on end. But now I know when I'm not sitting in daily meditation that I notice a physical difference. I have fluttering in my chest. I have what I would call sympathetic fight or flight activation. Now that kind of comes with that. That's where it sits in my body. I can feel my body tends to live in, this sort of pulled up like place, as opposed to being able to sit back and settle in which is that more sort of like safely still relaxed place, calm, grounded place. And so, knowing this and having had this experience over many years a decade that I've had a somewhat regular meditation practice, and then it's only been about the last probably three years that I've had this information about the nervous system, that has helped me to deepen my understanding of what's actually going on and what those deeper needs are. And through that nervous system awareness, I started to really honor how helpful depression was trying to be.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that depression, I think, is trying to give us that often it does not actually successfully give us, but it's trying to give us that slowdown. It's trying to give us that break. We feel overwhelmed, and for many of us, then, this's trying to give us that slowdown. It's trying to give us that break. We feel overwhelmed, and for many of us, then, this can be confusing and complicated if you don't experience it yourself, because sometimes people seem fine quote unquote when they're depressed. They're kind of going through the motions of the day they go to work, they might hang out with friends, that kind of thing. But they're still suffering from depression and it's not clear what that means from a nervous system perspective is that during the day they've activated unconsciously most of the time, but they've activated their sympathetic fight or flight response and they're in push mode, strive mode, go mode, and they get through their day, which is very hard, it's very exhausting and taxing on the system, and then at night they crash and in the moments when they don't have to push they're in that nervous system state of dorsal shutdown collapse. And in the moments when they don't have to push they're in that nervous system state of dorsal shutdown collapse.

Speaker 1:

And that was my life, certainly with Ben, for many, many years before we had kids particularly, and it continued once we had kids. But it shifted and that's a whole other conversation which I will happily share with you another time. But it was both of us kind of just using all the resources we had and sympathetic survival to get through the day. And then at night we would come home, we would drink a lot of wine, we would crash On the weekends we slept a ton and we were in that dorsal collapse and so we never felt rested. We never really got to a point where it was like, oh yeah, I feel really restored and renewed because we were in this cycle of survival. We were in the sympathetic survival push and strive and then we were in dorsal collapse, but dorsal was trying to allow us rest. It's just that, because we were stuck in this survival cycle, we never really felt rested.

Speaker 1:

And for people who may be in a deeper dorsal stuckness where they're not able to get out of bed and that sort of thing, it's still an attempt to protect, to take care, to help us avoid what feels scary, to help us avoid what feels overwhelming. Unfortunately, when we're avoiding what feels overwhelming, we're usually avoiding things that we need to do. There are, in fact, things that need to get done, but also we avoid joy and fun and connection and the things that we would actually really want to do in order to create the life we want to have. And depression doesn't pick and choose. Our collapsed, withdrawn, avoidant state doesn't say oh well, I'll just avoid the things that feel overwhelming, but I'll allow energy to enjoy fun things. That's generally not how it works. Again. There can be a little bit of a blend there, but it can be pretty all or nothing, and so this is why depression tends to be rather ineffective when we're talking about rest, because you don't actually get the rest and restoration that you need.

Speaker 1:

And so I really started thinking, holding this honoring of depression and what it means and how. For me, the way I would describe it is that over many years, while even though depression is definitely a very familiar and comfortable place, that I've spent a huge amount of my life, that empty, dark, sort of dead feeling place, quite frankly, that state of immobilization, that shut down I did find out that being in sympathetic, which is that fight or flight, that energy again, that striving, push I did find out that feeling alive, that aliveness that can come with sympathetic energy, that busy bee right, that buzzing feeling, felt preferable in a lot of ways to the dorsal collapse, shutdown, avoidance, that dead feeling. Feeling alive often felt better than feeling dead, although, conversely, when you push and you strive and you have so much of that sympathetic energy, feeling that dorsal collapse is really welcome because you're pushing and you're striving so hard that then falling into dorsal collapse can feel really welcoming. I hope you can start to see it's certainly been my experience, I have lived this how we can stay stuck in these patterns of protection, because when there's a lack of familiarity with that ventral state of our nervous system, that connected, grounded, safe state I did not know that ventral state of our nervous system, that connected, grounded, safe state I did not know that ventral state very well.

Speaker 1:

I certainly had a pull, I was drawn to it. There were pieces of me, as I said before, where I knew I needed some stillness, I knew I needed some grounding. I had experiences of healthy flow, like grounded feeling, like oh, I'm getting through my to-do list, I feel good. I certainly had moments of that, but they happened in a very unconscious way, like they just happened to me, like, oh, I had a good day today. Don't know how that happened, don't know how to make it happen again, and so there was a lot of challenge for most of my life in that way and that was sort of the cycle.

Speaker 1:

Now, thankfully, I have definitely begun to grow into knowing how to more consciously and purposefully reconnect with that ventral grounding state and I think that being able to connect with that has also really helped me understand how important rest is and, again, that honoring of the depression and how it was trying to support me in slowing down when I was pushing myself so hard or when I felt overwhelmed, and I can come from that place of gratitude now instead of beating myself up for all the things that I couldn't do or didn't do, which certainly can sometimes still fall into that trap, but I really notice it a lot quicker and have tools and support to get myself out of it. So I started really thinking about all of this and to me it feels very clear that our society does not value rest. And again, you might be in a different corner of society, you might have different cultural influences. Certainly, I think if you go further out from New York City or further out from big cities in general in the United States, there is a little bit of a different experience of what rest is. I hear that from friends who live out of state or even in different parts of the state pretty regularly, or people who used to live here and then they move somewhere else and it's like wow, it's so different. So you may relate to this in a big way or you may relate to this in a small way or perhaps not at all, but I do think that there's a lot of misinformation out there about rest and restfulness and people who rest.

Speaker 1:

Often we think of them as lazy or slackers or things like that, or we call them unmotivated or unproductive and we say that they're wasting time or that they're doing nothing if they're going slowly traveling through life those sort of things. We definitely have a lot of negatives around procrastination. I myself am a big procrastinator and, with my ADHD brain and my relationship to time and my to-do list and things feeling hard, there's a great term out there. It's not mine, but the wall of awful is something I deeply relate to and so getting things done can feel very hard and procrastination comes in and I've learned this is a pretty active process, but I'm learning how to respond to that in a way that actually is helpful so I can get my rest and get my work done, which is really nice to be able to do. Both Feels really good when I can make that happen.

Speaker 1:

And on the flip side, we really value things like people who are overachievers or workaholics or hustlers or people who are grinding you know, in the daily grind all of that and it feels like a real positive. And if you think about it, maybe workaholic doesn't feel 100% positive, but would you rather someone call you a workaholic or a slacker. For me, I think that, from the two, workaholic seems like the more positive term, right? Not only do we value this right, we think that time is money and you have to hustle and we have to put in all this energy. There's something problematic about slowing down. We also even further distance ourselves from our ability to rest by often thinking of it as a luxury, and I did feel luxurious last week, I have to tell you. It felt like an absolute luxury to be able to slow down and again have the support that allowed me to slow down.

Speaker 1:

And as I thought about it, I had two very distinct feelings. One was like it did feel luxurious, like it felt delicious. I mean being able to plan my day. Listen to my nervous system. You know there were things on the calendar. There were things that were planned over the whole eight days that I didn't have control over, but there was a lot of open time. If you look at my calendar, there are not a lot of white spaces hardly any. On my day to day, there's pretty much something happening almost every hour of every day, which I'm trying to do something about, by the way, and I've made a little bit of progress, but there was a lot of white space on the calendar, a lot of what do you want to do now? And I got to ask myself in the present moment, what do I want to do now? And that felt really luxurious to have this ability.

Speaker 1:

And then I also felt like this is a luxury that should be accessible to everyone and that's really what got me thinking, and in the next episode I am going to talk more from that perspective of the accessibility of rest. Stay tuned for next time I will dive into that more, but for today I just wanted to start thinking about the narratives that our society holds and what more accurate narratives there would be, and I was thinking about as my intro. I thought about like the busy bee right, we think of like the busy bee, and we have other phrases in our society that show the value of pushing yourself, like burning the candle at both ends, keep on trucking, like just keep pushing through or I'll sleep when I'm dead, that sort of thing. Like there's no time for rest, you just push through. That's all very sympathetic fight or flight energy. That's pushing, striving energy, and we value that and I will also touch more on why we perhaps value that and also that goes hand in hand and why we can often really demonize people who are dealing with depression and I think we have a lot to learn from people who are sitting with depression. But again, hold on, stay tuned for one of my next couple of episodes where I talk more about that. But to know that rest is not actually a luxury, even though, again, I will talk more about accessibility and there are major barriers to being able to access rest. So I'm fully aware of that, but it shouldn't be a luxury.

Speaker 1:

Rest is biologically necessary. Our nervous system has that dorsal place, not only for survival, not only for collapse, avoidance, shutdown, not only for feeling safe with disappearing or invisibility, but it has the regulated dorsal experience. That's the rest and digest part of our nervous system where we can slow down and we can get rest that feels restful. I've talked about this quite a while ago on one of the earlier episodes about how important that is to be able to have rest that feels restful. And when you're depressed, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the time your rest doesn't feel restful. You can't ever get enough sleep that sort of feeling, but feel restful. You can't ever get enough sleep that sort of feeling, but when you're actually resting in this regulated place and what regulated means, by the way, is that you have this dorsal energy, this rest and digest energy, which is grounded by some ventral energy, that safe, connected, often calm energy, and when those states blend, then we can have restful rest, which is a beautiful thing. And we need rest. Why is our nervous system, which has been in us for millions of years, it developed this way and has been this way for so incredibly long? Why? Because we need rest. We need to do things and we need to rest.

Speaker 1:

I started thinking about bees and I was like I need to research this a little bit because I don't know a whole bunch about rest in bees. But I started looking it up and I found some very interesting, although honestly not surprising information. Bees do not constantly go. They have a system where somebody is being productive all the time, especially when the nectar is flowing and they have work to do. But there is a cycle, there's a village, it takes a village. We have other terms in our society that are absolutely true, but we don't always value them, especially American, which is very individualistic, very about me, very I have to do it myself on my own kind of beliefs around that. That's also very white driven beliefs, actually. But again, more on those really important topics and ideas another time.

Speaker 1:

How is a bee actually so productive? Because it takes breaks. It doesn't just go from flower to flower, to flower, to flower, to flower, to flower, to the hive and repeat the cycle. It actually slows down. It takes a break after it does some of its work before it goes back to the hive. And I read this and I found it so interesting and so symbolic. I'm a play therapist and I see symbolism and connection in lots and lots of things. But if a bee doesn't get enough rest, it affects its navigation system. Bee seems to know where it's going. It knows how to get back to the hive. If it's not rested, a bee will be disorganized and it can't find its way home. I do not know if that resonates for you, but that really hit my soul.

Speaker 1:

When I read that I was like, oh my gosh, when I'm not rested and I am burning the candle at both ends or pushing myself or doing the things that I often think I should do Should, by the way, is a very sympathetic fight or flight driven thought that I should do this. I need to do this, I have to do this. That's some dysregulated sympathetic energy in there. I can't find my way home, I can't find my way back to myself. I found that to be really, really powerful. I can't find my way back to ventral when I'm not rested.

Speaker 1:

So I continued to do a little bit of research and I also came across thinking about rest and animals and nature. There's a lot about trees, by the way, which I had a little bit more awareness of. You know, trees kind of go slowly and they do their thing and there's a lot of rest in the winter. There's a whole shutdown cycle which I think is also really beautiful. I feel very connected to trees.

Speaker 1:

But in sort of looking up these ideas, I came across lions. They're apex predators. They're pretty good at doing, they can get things done right, they can attack. That's very sympathetic, that's very survival. They do what they have to do and we think of them as so powerful and so fierce. But I found out maybe you know this, but I did not know this Lions sleep and rest about 20 hours of the day. That's a lot of resting In order to be so incredibly powerful, to be at the top of the food chain. You know, maybe this is a luxury I'd be interested in your take on this and feedback on it but they have to rest in order to be so powerful and to have such a fierce go mode and to be able to get things done. So powerful and to have such a fierce go mode and to be able to get things done, they know instinctively they're not consciously planning this out, but they know they'll burn out if they don't rest. They won't be able to attack their prey and pounce when the time is needed, and they have to take action if they don't rest and restore. Again, this feels very much in line with the messages that I need to remind myself, and so I am offering them to you in hopes that perhaps they land as needed and helpful reminders for you.

Speaker 1:

We can't be on all the time, and when I think about my experience of my depression, that is, it was a huge part of it feeling like I couldn't be on, I couldn't achieve in the way I thought I was supposed to, I didn't feel good enough, which, of course, is a very dorsal story of story related to that nervous system state of dorsal and shutting down felt safer, taking action a lot of the time, and when I start to really think about that and think about what my true needs were, that I really did need a break. I did need to slow down. I did need a break. I did need to slow down. I did need help. I often didn't feel deserving of help and didn't feel comfortable asking for it. Yet now I see and have had, thankfully, the experience of getting the help that I needed, and so another way to rest is to not do it all by yourself.

Speaker 1:

You might not be totally taking a nap, yet. Many hands make light work, right. That's another saying that exists somewhere in our world. So I encourage you to start thinking about what restful rest means to you. What narratives do you hold about rest? Do you think of yourself as lazy if you slow down, or a slacker? Do you feel like you have to push and push in order to get ahead and to sort of start to invite some slowdown in that and wonder what do I really need? What could rest look like in my life and how can I rewrite this narrative? Like even the busiest of bees need to stop buzzing sometimes and, as I said, in the next few episodes I'll be continuing to talk about rest and accessibility to rest, and rest as a luxury, and what rest can legitimately look like in your day-to-day life, even when we are very busy and pressed for time, because, in reality, society probably is not going to slow down anytime soon and it's probably not going to give us permission to slow down.

Speaker 1:

However, we can learn to give permission to ourselves and if we can get to that place, we can actually shape society in a way that works better for us, and that's what I'm hoping to do, and I invite you to think about how that lands for you and to imagine a society where you can get the rest that you need deserve, so that you can truly live the life that you really want to live.

Speaker 1:

As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments, because I want to thank you for showing up today and I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be. The path may seem long or unclear or unknown, and I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride, and that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one, any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action, or towards rest or connection or self-care, or whatever step makes sense to you.

Speaker 1:

I invite you to take a step today because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed. If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trishsanderslcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes and I love hearing from you. Also. Please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.