When Depression is in your bed

The Art of Slowing Down: Practical Ways to Rest and Renew

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Episode 38

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✨ Free Resource: Download my guide, 100 Practices That Can Increase Your Access to Rest & Renewal  — filled with simple, doable ways to rest your body, mind, and spirit.

These are small, easy to incorporate practices for eight kinds of rest — from physical and emotional to creative and communal and more.

👉 Grab your free copy here! (regulatedrelationships.kit.com/rest)

Ever feel like your days are all gas, no brakes—then you crash at night and call it “rest,” only to wake up just as tired? I’ve lived that loop. Today I open the toolbox that finally helped me break it: practical, accessible ways to restore your energy by working with your nervous system, not against it. No spa days, no perfection—just small, doable shifts that add up.

We start by naming the hustle–crash cycle through a nervous system lens—how sympathetic drive keeps you pushing and dorsal shutdown masquerades as rest—and why real recovery starts with safety signals. From there, I walk through eight types of rest with concrete, everyday examples: physical rest with sleep masks, cat naps without guilt, and calmer mornings; emotional rest through better boundaries and self-compassion; mental rest via asking for help, delegating, or bartering support; and social rest by choosing people who nourish rather than deplete. You’ll also hear restorative practices you can do in minutes—slow breaths and soft sighs, grounding barefoot on grass, letting the sun warm your face—as well as creative rest that values process over product so your inner critic can finally take a seat.

We round it out with sensory resets like a subtle lavender ceramic diffuser, bass you can feel in your chest, and “spa showers” that change your state without adding time. Community and ancestral rest play a role too: group breathwork, restorative yoga, and the surprising power of shared quiet to co-regulate when you can’t do it alone. If sleep is elusive or life is loud, this episode gives you a menu of options so you can pick what fits your reality. There’s also a free guide with 100 rest and renewal practices to spark ideas and help you start small.

Ready to feel replenished instead of just “done”? Press play, download the free resource above and then tell me: what’s one small step toward rest you’ll take today? If the conversation resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a gentler path back to themselves.

- 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_00:

Hello and welcome to the When Depression is in your bed podcast. Do you push hard all day only to crash on the couch at night, longing for some real you time, but instead you end up staying awake too late, scrolling or watching Netflix, only to start the same cycle again in the morning? Or maybe you drag through your day, doing the bare minimum, but no matter how much you rest or try to rest, you never feel truly restored. If either of these rhythms feels familiar, I see you. I have been there. And today I'm going to be talking about practical ways to make rest and renewal more accessible so you can finally feel present and replenished in your own life. I'm your host, Trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. As I just shared in my intro, for most of my life I have noticed that I have fluctuated between these two cycles, one being that striving, pushing, hustling, often running on coffee and caffeine to get through my day and do all the things that needed to be done. And then getting home at night and just crashing with a glass of wine or a beer, watching Netflix, because I didn't have energy to do anything else. And even though my body felt exhausted, my brain was really longing for some downtime. So I would have what I thought was downtime in this crash experience. But then I would go to bed too late and I would wake up the next morning exhausted, no more ready to tackle my day, but yet go through the whole thing again. I didn't know it then, but as I see it now, I realized that my nervous system was in this sympathetic fight or flight, striving, pushing, mobilized energy place for the day. And then because I was pushing so hard and using resources and really running on fumes, by the time night came, I just crashed into this dorsal shutdown experience, which really didn't allow me to get the rest that I needed. And if I wasn't in that cycle of sympathetic into dorsal crash, then I was sort of just in this dorsal place of going through the motions, a lot of numbness, accomplishing the bare minimum, and doing everything I could just to make it through the day. Very similar nighttime crash. Again, didn't have a lot of resources, wasn't able to go to sleep, get a restful night's sleep. And now I realize that dorsal stuckness, of course, through my lens, this is also what I always describe as depression. And I've had many, many episodes through my life of moderate to severe depression, as has my husband. And I've witnessed these cycles for both of us. However, over the last few years, a lot of things have happened. And it really started for me with the idea of needing to take better care of myself, of what real, deep, profound, restorative self-care looked like. I think in the beginning, the idea that a lot of people hold of getting massages or pedicures or something with self-care was sort of what I was trying to figure out. Is this what I need to do more of? And it gets expensive and I don't know what to do. So as I started to think about self-care and focus on that, it became pretty clear that I needed to slow down because this was really right in the beginning of the pandemic. And I had my daughter who turned one and my son, who was in second grade, being homeschooled. And of course, I was working from home, as was my husband. I had a lot of clients virtually. And instead of having work hours, I was just seeing clients wherever I could fit in because I was home all day and I didn't have to leave and go to the office, which on one hand was really convenient, but also it led me to just being busy constantly. And it was just like this nonstop day. And I'm pretty familiar with that nonstop day. And now what I see is my nervous system's sympathetic drive. But I started to realize that that was not sustainable and that I needed to slow down. And in this process of slowing down and thinking about self-care, I started to realize that there was this really interesting thing that was happening for me because the more that I focused on self-care and what truly loving myself looked like, the more I realized I needed restorative rest and slowdown. And it became so clear that my practices were not allowing me truly restorative rest. And now I also realized, and I'll talk about this next time, that my nervous system was really essentially fried and didn't know how to rest in that way. And it took a lot of healing, which came through my slowdown in order for me to be able to move into more growth and creating the life I really wanted to create and the habits that I wanted to create. But rest was absolutely necessary for me first. And so as I started thinking about wanting to share this with you, it was very clear to me that rest is not always accessible to so many people. And certainly, as I've talked about in like recent episodes, if we think about rest in just strictly physical rest terms, going to sleep at night at a decent time, getting a full solid eight plus hours, and then waking up feeling restored and well rested is not necessarily an option that's available to many different people for many different reasons. And so I started wanting to share practical ideas about how to first of all expand the concept of rest, as I touched on a couple of episodes ago. And I wanted to provide accessible ways to begin to incorporate rest into your life because I really do see it as foundational in order to create deep healing and the growth that we're looking for. If we are stuck in this survival state of just going through sympathetic striving and dorsal crash, then we're not really going to be able to move forward or move from where we are. We need to be able to have the resources, which comes, at least in my experience, and I think for many others, first in being able to have true rest. And so I decided to share my experience. And now I'm still working on incorporating more rest into my daily life. And I realized that some of these things might be inspiring for you and might be helpful, but I realized that you might not want to do exactly the things that I have done. So I created a free guide that you can download that is a hundred practices that can help increase your access to rest and renewal. And you can go and download your free copy of the hundred practices at regulatedrelationships.kit dot com slash rest. And you can subscribe to my email list and get your free downloads so you could check out the list and see what you are called to and check off the things that you might want to try to incorporate into your life. And also the link to the download will be available in the show notes. So if you want to scroll down underneath the title of the podcast, you'll see a place that you can get the free download as well. But for today, I wanted to be able to talk about some of the practices that I've incorporated that have been incredibly transformative for me. In one of my recent episodes, I did talk about rest in eight different categories. And I'm going to touch on each of those eight categories today and give some examples of what I was able to incorporate into my life to help increase my access to rest and what has been so very helpful to me. So for physical rest, really allowing my body to get the rest that it truly needs, I started sleeping with an eye mask a few years ago and it has been extraordinary. And my room is not particularly bright. It's not like I have lights on or even a nightlight, but being able to have more darkness has really had a positive impact on how restful my sleep feels. And in those wonderful times when I'm able to take a nap during the day and there is some light coming in, being able to have a sleep mask on has been incredible because I used to be somebody that if I ever took a nap, which when I was depressed, I definitely took naps. But I was somebody who, if I laid down, I wasn't getting up for two or three hours. And those two or three hours are not usually available to me these days, but I do sometimes have 20 minutes or 30 minutes. And I now use a sleep mask when I take those little cat naps, and I find that to be really restorative. And if I'm falling into like a lull in the afternoon, every once in a while I can take one of those cat naps with my mask. And it's been incredibly helpful for me. And I also have set a bedtime for myself. Now, I will be honest, this is something that is still in process, but I do have 1045 set in my phone as my bedtime. And in my head, I think about 1045 as my bedtime. And I do not go to bed at 1045 many, many nights out of a month, but I am going to bed much earlier than I've ever gone to bed in my entire life. And there are also nights where I'm getting to sleep at 1045 or even earlier, which is very exciting, especially for somebody who has been a night owl my entire life. And I still do consider myself a night owl. But the more that I have moved into not being in this sympathetic push striving all day long, I actually am not crashing at night in the same way that I used to most of the time. And I'm actually finding it much easier to go to bed at night the more I'm incorporating some restful slowdown practices, more of which I will talk to you about in this episode during my day. So that has been pretty cool. And it kind of just gives me this little framework of, oh, okay, bedtime's coming. Uh, also I wear an aura ring and it also tells me your bedtime is approaching. And it just sort of helps me get into that mindset that I have a bedtime. I'm not just pushing to stay up to all hours of the night anymore. I also have found, and I've referenced this before in other episodes, but when you're depressed and you're resting or sleeping or doing nothing, quote unquote, you're not really truly resting. And a lot of the time it's because there's a lot of guilt and shame that you feel about what you're not doing, because you're aware that you're not doing all these other things that you think you, quote unquote, should be doing. And so the rest is not restful at all. And I have found that being able to take a 20 or 30 minute nap when I really feel like I need it and being able to have gratitude for that, like, wow, I'm so thankful that I have this time to be able to rest. Or on a weekend or a day off, instead of thinking, oh my gosh, I have so much I have to do, I should be doing that, which is a sympathetically driven should, right? Like I should do this. That's a judgment. I say, well, you know what? I'm feeling a little bit run down. I'm going to take this little cat nap or sleep in without shame, without guilt. And that has been an incredibly restorative practice for me as well. I will also mention, because it has just been one of the most significant practices for me, befriending my nervous system and becoming familiar with my nervous system and attuning to my nervous system and finding out how to be more regulated more of the time. Again, this is basically the opposite of what I have spent most of my life doing, which has been being in survival mode of this sympathetic charge or this dorsal shutdown, being in a more ventral space, that grounded, safe, connected present space more of the time. It has truly allowed me to just not be living a life that is drawing on my resources in such a fierce way. Because going all day in survival and even crashing in dorsal is exhausting. And so the more regulated I've become, the more energy I have had. And I talk about this in many different other episodes, so I'm not going to go into it, but I really wanted to mention it today because it has definitely been one of the absolute top rest and renewal practices that I have adopted over the last few years. I also think about emotional rest. And one of the things that I have done is try to consciously step away from being other people's emotional caretakers because there's a big difference between supporting people that you love and care about and stepping into the role of their caretaker and being their absolute full-on support that they lean on you for their emotional needs to be met. And I've definitely done this in different capacities, but certainly with my husband, over the last number of years, I have shifted out of the role that I carried for much of our relationship. And this is also something else I could talk about in another episode because there's so much here to dive into. But being able to rebalance where I give my energy and attention has really done something beautiful for me and my ability to not be depleted and drained all the time. And it's also really helped empower my husband. It has not been an easy journey. It wasn't so simple, but it was also easier and better than continuing in the really unhelpful cycle that we used to live in. So that has been a really amazing emotional renewal practice that I have consciously adopted. And that has been for several years. And I've really seen such positive impact from being able to do that. And I also have really shifted, and this has to do a lot with what I mentioned in the beginning, like this self-love idea of moving away from self-criticism into self-compassion. And also, as I've talked about before, the way we interpret the world, the way we interpret ourselves and others is directly connected to the state of our nervous system. When I was mostly in sympathetic or dorsal, my stories were either about the world and others and myself were sympathetic stories. There was a lot of self-criticism, dorsal stories, a lot of self-loathing in those kinds of stories. And as I become more regulated, I have been able to access so much more self-compassion, which has been incredibly restorative for me as well. I've also always felt really connected to awe-inspiring things like noticing a sunset or something else in nature. And I take a lot of pictures of those things and I really take moments out of my day to savor them. That has also been a really beautiful practice. And something that has also been an extra bonus is that by me doing this and me being verbal about it, taking pictures, saying something about the beautiful sky, my kids have adopted this as well, which has really been beautiful. And I see them take time to slow down to notice awe-inspiring things. This idea that we are small yet connected to something so much bigger than us, and really being able to sit with that in a really beautiful way has really been something that has really fueled me day to day. Another category of rest that I think about is mental rest. And in general, I would say this is like, how do we let down the load that we carry? I think that asking for help is probably top on my list and how difficult that can be for many of us. It certainly has been difficult for me, but looking about who I can ask for help, whether it's my son asking for help with chores that I do in the house, or asking my husband for things, or asking colleagues or friends or family members, it's been really helpful. And I also want to include here, and I just want to touch on that I think that if you have the capacity and access to hire help, whether that's someone to help clean your house or someone to walk your dogs or to babysit, I think that that can be incredibly helpful. A lot of us feel we can't financially afford to hire somebody, and that may very well be true. But I also think that many of us have some more capacity than we think to hire some sort of help. I realize that I come from a place of privilege that I have been able to get some people on my team and I plan to expand and have more help in time, having something like a personal assistant, which is something I'd love to have at some point soon, being able to have people to help with chores or childcare, that kind of thing. And if that doesn't feel accessible to you, I do encourage you to think about bartering for services because you can trade services with another parent that you know so that you can not pay a thing and be able to have some childcare in your week or even in your month. And so I think if you think about it, kind of like this is like where there's a will, there's a way. There's things that can be figured out if you let yourself think about them and get curious, like hmm, what could work for me? And like I said, for me, I have been able to hire some people to help me out on my household team. And I do plan on increasing the number of people I get to hire to be a part of my team and the business sense soon as well. Because I think that if you really do the math, the amount of time that you have perhaps to do another job or do your passion or something like that, a lot of the time the numbers might surprise you. Perhaps not all the time, but like I said, it's something that I think is worth at least thinking about. Social rest is also something that's really important. And in my guide, I talk about a lot of ways to disconnect and give yourself space socially that you might need. And I think that is important for me, being able to say no to certain engagements that will feel more overwhelming than nourishing. But for me, I am a social person and I generally do like being around people. So for me, what social rest has looked like is actually being around people who nourish me and reducing relationships that I feel depleted in. And that has really been something that I've been actively doing and I'm still very much actively doing and figuring out how to do because it's not always easy to shift your relationships. But for me, it has really contributed very deeply to a sense of restoration and renewal. I would also add that if you have pets, I think that social connection and social support cuddling with your pets is also a beautiful way to obtain some very substantial social rest. So there's a category that I refer to as restorative rest, which is a wide category and it's really just how I see it to be. A lot of my practices that I find really restful and renewing do fall under what I think of as that restorative rest, like meditation and breathwork practices and restorative yoga and being in nature. Breathwork could just be breathing in and a sigh out, which I consciously create and I also notice when that happens, and I kind of savor those moments where I have a little bit more of that expansion available. And even that noticing practice of those moments can be really restorative for me. I also have been consciously reconnecting with the land. This is also a whole other episode of my relationship to the earth and the great outdoors in general, but I have been able to reconnect with and cultivate a practice of grounding outside and walking barefoot in the grass or just standing in the grass and squatting with my hands on the earth and just slowing down, often closing my eyes, giving my energy to the earth and feeling the support that I received from the earth. And that has been an incredibly restorative practice for me that I have really reclaimed because I did not grow up feeling comfortable. As a matter of fact, up until last year, literally wore slippers everywhere in my life. I would step out of a shower into slippers. I never walked anywhere barefoot. And like I said, there's plenty more for another episode about that. But it has been a huge shift for me to be able to walk barefoot outside. And it has been a really beautiful practice. I also find that just standing barefoot and feeling the warm sun on my face is something that I absolutely love to do. And if I'm having a busy, stressful day and I don't have a lot of time, I often will make time to just go spend two minutes in the backyard to be able to ground and feel the sun on my face. And then I feel recharged and renewed and able to get back to my day, which has been a really beautiful practice that I have felt very grateful to have been able to begin over the last, like I said, year. Another type of rest that I don't know if people always think about is what I think of as creative rest. And this is perhaps sometimes a more active way of resting, but this is perhaps more renewal-oriented of connecting with beauty and art and nature or creating in some way that is really process-oriented rather than product-oriented, right? Like just being in the moment with something rather than having to produce something and allowing yourself that space and that freedom to create without expectations or judgments or shoulds or have-to's, or needing it to be a certain way. And I personally really love spending time in gardens. My daughter and I frequently stop and appreciate the flowers wherever we are in the world. And I also tend to take a lot of pictures of things that are really beautiful, and then I can look back at them later when I kind of need a little inspiration, which is a really beautiful creative practice for me. Sensory rest is something that's really vitally important in our world that is often so loud and so bright and so fast moving. And I think that being able to disconnect from screens is certainly something that's very important. In addition to that, some other sensory rest practices that have been truly delightful for me, as an essential oil diffuser on my desk, and I think it's called a passive diffuser or something like that. But if I have a flower, a lotus flower, and it's just this ceramic piece that I put on my desk, and I just put a drop or two of lavender oil in it, and it's not like a diffuser where the whole room smells intensely. You'll have to play around with it if you work in a cubicle or someone's right next to you, but it's much more subtle than other ways of using essential oils. I have found that I've enjoyed it quite a bit. And when I'm feeling stressed out, I just grab my little flower and I take this beautiful inhale of lavender, and I have really enjoyed having it there on my desk. That was something that I realized that I wanted to start doing, and I've really enjoyed having around. I also have noticed, and this has been in a few different contexts, including going to concerts, but humming or listening to music with deep bass and feeling the vibration in my chest and really being present with that has been something that has been really restorative for me and something that I can really actively cultivate when I need a moment of slowdown that I can kind of be present with myself and feel that vibration that has been really beneficial for me. I also take what I think of as a spa shower sometimes, where I have the lights low and I have like an essential oil steamer in there. I listen to some soft music, I take my time, I slow down, I pay attention to my breathing. And the importance of doing this came to my attention because of the statistics that would come up on my ring that I started to see very consistently that when I was taking a shower and getting ready in the morning, it was registering that I was doing some sort of exercise because I was in such a strive push-go mode. And I started to realize that I didn't want my getting ready process to be running a marathon and feeling that incredible push. So I started to consciously slow down my getting ready experience in the morning. And that has also really, really changed my morning. And I also have to say, most of the time, I'm not taking any more time. I'm not talking about taking a long, luxurious warm bath, which is also another wonderful practice, but I'm actually just talking about slowing down your shower and making it something that feels delicious and delightful and restorative as opposed to just plowing through. So my spa shower experience is really just a part of my regular day, more than it is something else that I do or add on to what I already do. It's really just my regular daily practice, just done in a more renewing way. The last type of rest I'll talk about is what I think about as ancestral, cultural, and community rest. And this is a wide topic, but how I think about it is rest in the presence of others. And I think that sharing restful practices can be deeply renewing. And it can be something like connected with your ancestors, which I have done some of that work, which has been really powerful and profound for me. And I have done some process work where I have been able to release some of the burdens my ancestors have carried, and it's been very powerful for me. But there's other ways where if that doesn't feel accessible or of interest to you, you can do something like go to a restorative yoga class. Or I mentioned, I think in one of my last episodes, I go to a group breathing practice every week. And being able to share those kind of renewing experiences in community can be deeply healing and really create a lot of beautiful space for that deep rest experience to occur. And I also say that this is something that really was a gift for my husband. But being able to share silence with somebody that you love, that felt unfamiliar to me. I'm a words person, which might not be a surprise being that I have a solo podcast. But my husband really enjoyed being able to share silence together, whether it's us doing something together. I can remember one time we did a puzzle together and afterwards he was like, wow, that was amazing. And I was like, really? I hated that experience, which was many years ago. And looking back now, I'm like, oh my gosh, I've grown so much since then. But I often have felt connected through words and doing, and being able to feel connected through being together is something that is truly, truly beautiful and an incredible practice. And that may be something that feels hard to you as it has for me in the past, but now that it's something that I can enjoy and appreciate, it's really been something that I truly love. So there you have it. Some of my most favorite rest and renewal practices that I have been cultivating over the past several years. And I really invite you and encourage you to think about if any of the things that I shared fit. Or as I mentioned, I have a free PDF that is a hundred practices that can help increase your access to rest and renewal. That maybe you'll like some of them and you could check them off and try them out, or maybe the list will inspire you to think about rest in new ways so that you can connect with things that truly benefit you. So just one more time, you can find that PDF at regulatedrelationships.kit dot com slash rest, or you can look in the show notes right underneath the podcast title. Scroll down and you will find a link to that PDF. And you can keep that on your phone or put it on your nightstand or your refrigerator so you can remember to try to incorporate your own rest and renewal practices into your day. So good luck, and I will continue my conversation more on rest next time. 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. 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 trish.sanders.lcsw. 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.