When Depression is in your bed

Relearning Safety: Working With Your Nervous System to Create Habits of Rest

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Episode 40

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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)

Feeling exhausted even after a full night’s sleep? We dig into why rest doesn’t land when your nervous system is stuck in go mode or collapses into shutdown, and how tiny, consistent signals of safety can rebuild your capacity for calm, connection, and real renewal. Drawing on polyvagal insights, I explain why forcing sleep backfires and why micro moments—90 seconds of breath, a soft gaze toward the horizon, warm hands around a mug, gentle rocking, or barefoot grounding—can do more than a once-a-year vacation. These small cues tell your body it’s safe enough to release, and repeated often, they rewire how you meet stress, settle at night, and wake with energy.

We unpack top-down versus bottom-up permission to rest. Affirmations like “My worth isn’t tied to productivity” can help, but many of us need embodied proof: steady breathing, soothing temperature, or rhythmic movement that convinces the nervous system more than words ever could. You’ll hear practical ways to stitch these moments into a busy day without overhauling your life, plus how to navigate perfectionism, missed days, and the urge to self-criticize. Consistency matters, but it doesn’t need to be rigid; imperfect practice still builds capacity.

We also explore co-regulation—resting with others in settings like restorative yoga, meditation groups, or quiet faith spaces—so you can borrow steadiness when solo slowing feels impossible. I share what shifted for me after years of running on fumes, and how a gentle, repeatable routine can replace late-day caffeine with genuine energy. Walk away with a clear, compassionate path: choose one small step today, repeat it often, and let safety lead you toward the kind of rest that actually restores. If the conversation helps, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a softer way to feel well.

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. Are you someone who longs to feel well rested, but you either find that it's just too hard for you to slow down, or no matter how much sleep you get, you just never seem to feel restored? If so, please listen to today's episode in which I continue the conversation about rest and how to work with your nervous system to heal the impact of trauma and stress so that you can finally feel renewed. I'm your host, Trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. In the last episode, I talked about how our autonomic nervous system is shaped by trauma and stress and our life experiences in general, and how the impact of those things can actually damage our physical capacity for restorative rest. Many of us have systems that have learned that it's not safe to slow down. And so we get stuck in go mode: go, go, go, do, do, do, never rest, never stopping, a lot of anxiety, racing thoughts, trouble falling asleep at night, that sort of thing. Or some of us find that when we try to go into slowdown, our systems actually go into shutdown, which are not the same thing. And when our system goes into a biological shutdown, we don't have the capacity for that restorative rest either. So in either case, restoration and renewal is not physically accessible. And if you want to hear more about that, you can check out my last episode or any of my recent episodes. I think that I'm on episode six right now of talking about rest because I think it's such an incredible topic that so many of us don't feel well rested and we're going through our day in survival mode, running on fumes and feeling frustrated that we can't do all the things that we want to do. And I think very often we're asking our systems to do more than we really have capacity to do as a human being. One person can only really do so much, but we're really asking a lot from our systems and not able to give ourselves the rest we need to biologically function. So today I'm going to talk about how to help heal your nervous system to be able to experience restorative rest so you can finally get that sense of renewal that you're longing for. I will be talking about the concepts of how to stretch into creating habits of rest that can really begin to get you to where you want to be. I also want to mention that I have a free resource that has 100 practices that can help make rest and renewal more accessible to everyone. And you can go to regulatedrelationships.kit.com forward slash rest if you want to download that free guide. It's a really great pairing with the information I'm going to share today. There'll also be a link in my show notes below if you want to just go and click the link to get that free resource. So one of the most important things to really understand if you're stuck in a state of never really feeling rested and never getting to that sense of feeling renewed and waking up feeling alert and bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready for the day is that for many of us, our actual nervous system in a biological way needs to relearn the capacity for rest, which takes some time because many of us have the experience, whether we're conscious of it or not, but our systems know that we hold the idea that slowing down is dangerous. Stillness can be dangerous. And I again I talked about that a lot in the last episode and in recent episodes. If you want to hear more about that, but today I'm going to talk about the process of helping your nervous system relearn that stillness and slowing down is actually safe. And that will help you restore your capacity to get where you really want to be, so that you can wake up, maybe not always hopping right out of bed, you know, even when you're feeling well rested, you might wake up feeling a bit groggy, but within a few minutes, you can actually get back waking up feeling like, wow, I'm rested and ready for the day. Which I have to tell you, as somebody who's been working on my own rest practices for the last few years, waking up and feeling like I have energy and then moving through my day and not feeling like I have to reach for caffeine in the late afternoon, which has been my lifelong practice, my morning caffeine and my afternoon caffeine to be able to get through the day has been totally incredible. And that's really why I'm sharing this with you today, because I really think that everyone is entitled to rest to biological need. And I want to help support everybody get the rest that they need so we can keep going and doing all the important things that we want and need to do. So if you've ever tried to force yourself to rest, you may have realized that this is not a helpful approach. Like when you're laying in bed and you're trying to fall asleep, and the more you're actively trying to fall asleep, the harder it is to fall asleep. You can't really say sleep now and have your body respond. It just doesn't work that way. So the reshaping process, and this is, I think, one of the very exciting things about our nervous system, is that when I said earlier that life experiences shape our nervous system, any and all life experiences have impact. So if your nervous system has at some point learned that it needs to be in protective mode, and that's where you tend to be stuck, your nervous system can also relearn how to experience groundedness and connection and feeling safe enough. And I find that very exciting and very hopeful. And the way to do this reshaping process is often slower than we would like it to be. In polyvagal theory, which I talk about a lot, which was created by Dr. Stephen Porgis, they talk about the micro moments that create healing. And so little teeny micro moments accumulate over time to create real change. And so a lot of the time, and this is true in a lot of habits in general, but today I'm talking about the experience of rest. We often want to be able to have change happen now. And a lot of the changes that we want to see happen right now, we try to force or push or make happen, or we take a big bite. If you think about New Year's resolutions, we often want to do it all. I'm gonna go to the gym five days a week and I'm gonna start this new habit and it's full form and they don't stick, right? And so we know this about habit formation. And this is the same exact process when we're talking about healing our nervous system that we can't necessarily create this giant change. Like if you're somebody who goes to bed at 2 a.m. and tonight you start trying to go to sleep at 10 p.m., it probably won't work. And so we need to be aware that micro moments, these little tiny changes that we can do. And this is why I created that free resource I mentioned before, because there's a hundred small practices that you can begin to incorporate into your life that can help you to reshape your nervous system and to help teach your nervous system that slowing down is safe enough now, even if in your childhood that was not true. Or as I've been mentioning, in your ancestry, in your lineage, if your ancestors had the experience that slowing down was not safe or that they pushed so hard all day that their body went into biological shutdown at night just to get by. If that's what you're carrying in your bones, in your DNA, then using micro moments can help reshape your system so that you can have a totally new experience and a new relationship with rest. And consistency is really important, but for me, I can tell you that consistency is not something that I strongly identify as being very good at. It has historically been really hard for me to maintain a habit in a consistent way. If that applies to you, I totally understand. And it's still possible and probably even more possible than you think because we're aiming for micro moments, these tiny changes. We're not making big asks. We're not talking about making giant changes. And so you might need a little support incorporating these things or building consistency into your practice. But with the help of alarms or little notes, putting things in your calendar, stuff like that, you can actually help remind yourself to keep these habits going. You can pick tiny little new practices to incorporate into your everyday. And if you continue to do them, they will continue to impact your nervous system and help it heal. The way I like to explain this is if you think about the idea, if you are someone who goes on vacation, let's say once a year, which many of us don't even take time to slow down and rest for a vacation. But if you go on, let's say, a one-week vacation every single summer, that's great. However, you may have noticed for many of us, when you go on vacation, there's a lot of stress going into preparing to leave for the vacation. And then you get on the vacation and it takes time for your nervous system to actually start to release and let go and rest. And then you have to ramp back up to prepare for the vacation to end and to go back home. And a lot of time, people come home from vacation not feeling like they rested and feeling that they often eat a vacation from their vacation. And if you're somebody who actually can disconnect and go on that one vacation a year, that's fantastic. That's very exciting. And I hope that you enjoy it and you take advantage of that. However, if you only go on one vacation once a year, your nervous system will not have the consistency it needs to be reshaped. And so that's really, really important. It's the same idea if you went to the gym and did an amazing workout once a year, you would not build any muscles. And so this is a practice that you have to be consistent. But again, it's a really achievable and accessible practice if you realize that the changes you're making are just little tiny baby steps one at a time. And I've always said baby steps get you where you're going as long as you keep taking them. And this is very much this process. So keep taking those baby steps and you will get the rest that you deserve. And if you are a perfectionist like me, or I like to think of myself as a perfectionist in recovery working on that, but I even now find myself being judgmental or critical of myself when I try to do something and it doesn't look the way that I imagined it to look. And so this process is going to be totally imperfect, messy, inconsistent at times. And that is okay. Because if you beat yourself up along the process, it's not actually going to help in any way. What ends up actually happening is, for example, let's say you decide, okay, I want to start my mornings with a 90-second breath work or 90 second meditation. And I want to do it every single day. And let's say for the first few days, it works really well. But then there's a morning when the alarm goes off and you're just too tired and you shut the alarm. And then when you wake up, it ends up that you're running late now and you have to jump into the shower to get ready to go wherever you have to be. And so you miss that day. And then you're like, oh my gosh, I was doing it for a few days and now I failed. And if you start to talk to yourself that way, you're going to put your system into survival mode again because you're attacking yourself. Your nervous system is probably in sympathetic mode, which is your fight or flight response, and your fight mode is being directed at yourself. And yourself is going to react and probably push back. And a lot of the time that can create inner turmoil and you end up getting stuck in this inner fight instead of having compassion for yourself and saying, like, whoa, well, you know, doing it imperfectly is certainly better than not doing it. And this is a process. And I'm going to be gentle with myself in this process. And maybe you decide, oh, I'll meditate for 90 seconds later today when I have more time, or maybe I'll just begin again tomorrow. The next really important thing is giving yourself permission to rest. And there's a couple of different ways to do this. It's really important to talk about both top-down ways of giving permission as well as bottom-up ways of giving permission. So let me tell you what I mean. Top-down ways of giving permission are things that start in your head and you send a message down to your body. So that's thinking about things, that's using words. And you might actually say to yourself, I'm allowed to rest. Rest is biologically important. Rest is biologically necessary. My worth isn't tied to my productivity. I am giving myself permission to slow down. I'm giving myself permission to pause. Those are fantastic. And if you tell yourself that and that works, keep telling yourself that and keep going, creating more and more micromoments so that you can continue to expand your habits of rest. However, for many of us, telling our body something doesn't always work because the nervous system is constantly assessing our internal environment, our external environment, and the space between us and others. So the relationships we have with others. And if it's getting a felt sense of something not being okay, if we have learned that it is not okay to slow down and our brain is telling our body, hey, it's okay to slow down. Our nervous system says, uh, no, it's not, and it doesn't believe our brain. And so this is sometimes a problem with top-down approaches. Like I said, if it works for you, great. But if it doesn't work for you, you might want to think about how to create bottom-up approaches to giving yourself permission. I would refer to this as embodied permission because it really starts in your physical body so that it sends a message up to your brain. Ah, my body is safe. My system feels safe. I experience cues of safety in the environment. And then your brain gets the signal, it's okay, we're safe enough. All is well. You can let your guard down. And that is often a much more helpful approach. So, how do you do this? Well, there's lots of ways and you can experiment and play. Many of these things are on the free resource that I created, but just some ideas. You can start a grounding practice, like just feeling your feet on the floor or feeling yourself in your seat. You can actually go outside walking grass or put your hands on the earth, those sorts of things. They actually send that message to your brain that you're safe because you're feeling the support that's there for you. And so that could be a really helpful practice. Breath work, of course, can be very helpful. It's not true for every single person. Sometimes people experience breath as dysregulating, but for many, it's a great way to slow down and to send that message to your brain because when we're in fight or flight mode, when we're fighting or running, we're often breathing really fast, like right. And if we're stuck in dorsal, that shutdown experience, we may be breathing infrequently or very slowly or even missing breaths, like little moments of stopping our breath. And so if we breathe slowly and consistently, then our brain gets the message, like, oh, okay, everything is safe here. But like I said, it's not always true for everybody. So you can experiment for yourself. You can also play with rocking or swaying, some sort of gentle movement that can be really soothing for a lot of people, as can playing with temperature. If you think about having a warm cup of tea and just holding the cup before you even take a sip, that can be a very soothing experience that conveys safety to our body. You also can keep a soft gaze or look out into the horizon gently. And the reason this works is because if you think about, you know, when you're again in fight mode, you're probably holding a very intense gaze and really lasering in on the possible threat. And so softening your gaze, looking around, orienting yourself to your space, your room, allowing yourself to look out into the distance can actually help your body learn that you're in a safe environment and can kind of help flick the switch from I'm not feeling safe to I'm feeling safe or safe enough. And also, and this is something that I really try to do, something that I work with. And sometimes I'm doing a really great job, and sometimes I'm doing it very imperfectly, but being able to take short pauses throughout your day can be very, very helpful because again, when you're like, I have to go, I have to do the next thing, I have to do the next thing, which is a space that I often live in. Like, what's next? What's next? What's next? And my day is stacked back to back with activities a lot of the time and things I have to do, clients and meetings and all of that. And if I just take pause just for even a minute and just breathe and allow my system to reset, it does wonders in a cumulative way over the course of my day. So these are all ways to let our body know that we're safe and it can again send that message up to our brain where it can be received. And I want you to think about co-regulation. And in this case, as it pertains to rest, co-regulation is being with another, being safely connected to another person and with rest and renewal, these can be beautiful practices because the idea of slowing down together and being in a space of quiet, of stillness. And I've talked about this in recent episodes. And again, there's examples of this on the resource that's available for you where you can slow down, like in a meditation class or in a restorative yoga class, or you can go to a place of worship and being able to connect with other people and rebalance your nervous system with the help and support of other people's nervous systems. It's a really beautiful and powerful practice. And if you're having trouble slowing down on your own, this is a really wonderful option. So I invite you to think about the ways that you can begin to stretch into creating these habits of rest that can reshape your nervous system to increase your capacity to actually feel restored and to be able to slow down with your nervous system in a ventral state, which is your nervous system state of safety, so that you can actually receive rest that you're looking for. And I have to tell you that for me, this process truly began with a shift of self-love and self-care that I've talked about on the podcast before. But I really got to a place around when I turned 40 that I realized that if I didn't start taking better care of myself, I was not going to be able to sustain the way I was living and certainly not be able to get to the goals that I wanted to achieve because I was I just couldn't do enough to get far enough because I didn't have enough fuel to run on. I was always busy, I was always overwhelmed. I had too much on my plate. And I really got to a place where I was like, I can't keep going like this. I need to start taking care of myself. And so the care came first, the idea of care. And it wasn't so easy to receive care. And a lot of that had to do with my nervous system and how my nervous system had been shaped through my experiences and the idea of taking care of myself and truly deeply loving myself didn't always feel accessible. Certainly it did in certain moments, but it wasn't something that I was able to sustain for a long period of time. But as I started to take little tiny micro moments of self-care, I started to really shape my system. And over time, I was able to really shift to noticing when I wasn't taking care of myself the negative impact that it had on my system. I was like, ooh, this feel doesn't feel good. This doesn't feel like my normal, familiar as it has for much of my life. And so I've really been able to benefit over the last five years from being able to see how my conscious choices have impacted my nervous system. And if self-love or self-care feels inaccessible to you or like a luxury or something that you can't quite reach yet, starting with the idea of perhaps thinking about what does feel accessible, either treating yourself with respect or even just thinking about it in terms of biologically what all humans need to survive. And then to be able to think, well, how can I move beyond surviving into thriving? What would that look like? How can I think about that? And if you're having trouble, of course, getting support, therapy or coaching or whatever makes sense to you, getting support from a friend or anybody who might be able to support you through this journey. Because even though I would love it for everyone to just be able to be totally open to taking care of themselves, I know that that's not really always true for all of us. Again, it certainly wasn't true for me, but over time there's been such incredible shifts for me. And I'm really excited and hopeful that you can experience shifts like that as well. Because I know that you might be listening to this and think to yourself, like, yeah, slowing down sounds great. You know, like for me, I definitely had people tell me over my life, well, just go to bed earlier or just slow down or don't do so much or take it easy, which sounds good in theory, but it just wasn't a choice that I could make at the time. The idea of going to bed earlier that felt totally impossible to me, really, until pretty recently. I knew that going to bed earlier would benefit me, but I couldn't physically get to bed earlier. And so if you feel that way, like, yeah, of course, doing these healthy things sounds good, but you know, dot, dot, dot, I really hear you, I see you, I know that it can be hard. Please, please, please take the pressure off. Don't think about what you should be doing or how this should be, or even the end goal of what you want this to ultimately look like. Please think about one step that you can take today. And if you allow yourself to drop down into your body, out of your head, not thinking, but to ask your system what could feel restful for you today? What's accessible for you today? What do you need? You might be surprised that you may receive an answer that you hadn't expected. So, in closing, please remember that rest becomes restorative when your body feels safe enough and you can help your nervous system relearn what safety feels like. It's very possible. And it might be, as I said earlier, a slower process than you want it to be. It may take many months or longer, but if you start today, you will be somewhere different a few months or a few years from now. 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.