Why Community Therapists Wake Up Exhausted Before Work Even Starts And What To Do About It

Children are finally in bed. You land on the couch, pick up your phone, and start scrolling to avoid how tired you feel. You tell yourself this is rest. The truth is you have not rested at all. You are just adding more cars to an already full highway.

In this episode I share the version of myself from twelve months ago, the doom scroll that ran all the way through my evenings, and the snowball that carried my overload from the couch, into my workday, into daycare pickup, and back to bedtime again. I unpack why avoidance rest leaves your executive function running on empty, why that is the exact capacity you need to write the strong report, regulate in the room, and hold the grief that comes with changing independence, and the one shift that actually opens up the lanes on your highway.

If you are telling yourself you are too busy to rest properly, you were just too busy doing the wrong rest. My free masterclass, How I Built a Multi Six Figure OT Practice Without Sacrificing My Weekends or My Sanity, is on the 24th of June at 12pm AEST. The registration is here: www.imogenot.com.au/masterclass

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Cognitive Capacity Chat. This is the podcast for the therapist ready to think beyond the therapy room. I talk about our cognition as our foundation, not just for our clients, but for ourselves. Because the way we think, organise, and live directly shapes our clinical work, our capacity, and longevity in this profession. I'm Imogen, an OT, here to bring you practical conversations that fit into real life. This podcast is for the therapist who wants more depth, more clarity, and more life. Welcome. Alright, today I wanted to jump straight into rest and intentional rest because this is something that I really grappled with for a long time throughout my career, and it's only probably the last six or so months I've really stepped into the likes of intentional rest. So if you relate to me and if you relate to the experience that I have had, I feel like you will be me 12 months ago. Evie was finally in bed. I had been complaining all afternoon about how tired and exhausted I was and how much work I had to get done and how much there was to do. And I finally landed on the couch and finally, I don't know why I get so excited about my social media, but I was able to scroll through my phone. And I was able to avoid the emotions that I was feeling and just scroll on social media and deep dive into other people's lives. And when you take it out in that context, it's like, why are you doing that? But it's such an ordinary habit that a lot of us are doing to just doom scroll because it's addictive. These apps are designed to be addictive. I know what it's like to sit there on your phone after feeling so tired from bedtime routine. You finally have this new lease on life after 7 p.m. You're scrolling, and then you get the constant thoughts of you should be catching up on your case notes, you should be doing that report, you should be catching up on those extra hours that you missed today because you had to go to daycare earlier. And you just have constant noise in your head. You're constantly processing information, you're constantly putting additional cars on your highway, and you're feeling guilty for doom scrolling, but you really want to rest, you really need the rest. But the truth is you haven't actually rested at all. You are just adding more and more to your cognitive load, and you are just creating this snowball effect of overload, and then you have your rest in quotation marks. You wake up, you are not well rested, you then wake up in the morning, you go to go to work, you feel like you're behind, you feel tired, fatigued because your executive function is totally running on empty. And then this scaffolding effect happens. You start snowballing. So your executive function isn't at the capacity to hold what you need to do at work. So you're not able to write that really strong report that you need to advocate for your client. You are not able to problem solve and articulate in a way that makes reasonable sense, that aligns with the person reading. You're not able to regulate when you're standing in the room with a client and being able to absorb their emotions and your own emotions as well. You're not able to hold the grief that comes with changes of independence, changes of functional capacity. And all of a sudden you're just feeling overloaded at work. And then you clock off work, you go to daycare, you pick up your kid, and you're exhausted. And you just want to be present with your kid, but you're guilty for not being productive at work, and then all of a sudden you're overloaded with with your child. You're likely unable to emotionally regulate there or have the patience that you want to as well. And then it finally gets to that bedtime routine, and you put them down and you say you're exhausted and you're fatigued, but you spend the entire evening on your phone scrolling. And it's so clear that scrolling on your phone is a a bad habit, and I I don't think I need to explain that at all. But what I do want you to realize is picture that traffic jam analogy, all of that additional cognitive load that you are adding in your evening is only snowballing into your workday. And what I have learned as I've lived through this, as I felt overloaded, as I felt like the world was on my shoulders, trying to be a working mum, that productive rest is so necessary if you want to manage it all. And the difficult thing is, I think you need the discipline to be able to get that intentional rest. So I know because I remember putting Evie down for a lunchtime nap and being so clear that I was gonna work for the two hours, and I would spend the first hour lying on my bed and doom scrolling, and then the second hour eating something because I was so famished, because I had avoided it, because I was avoiding working at all. And those were the days that I felt so exhausted and so fatigued because of my behaviors. I was just being avoidant, and I was not actually intentionally resting or doing it in a productive way. Best days were the days when I was able to get in the gym, move my body, be able to actually clock on to work and follow through with what I said to do. And I'm not telling you not to rest, I'm telling you that there's a better way to rest if you're feeling overloaded. And that can look really different to everyone. But the main idea is that adding to your cogn an already full highway, adding to your traffic jam, adding to your cognitive load, adding movies that cause anxiety, adding phone where you compare yourself to people, adding, I don't know what else could be adding to the cognitive load. The idea is intentional rest is something that will open up those lanes in your highway. So for me, productive rest, intentional rest is very much about moving my body. So going to the gym or going and having a walk. And it's also about only doing one thing at a time. So if that's watching TV, which it absolutely honor that, watch the TV. Because when you're doing lots of things at once and thinking that you're being able to do everything and being productive in every way, you're actually losing that intention piece, which means that you're not actually gonna open up those lanes and open up that capacity. You're actually just adding cars to your highway, which is the opposite of what we want. And what I hope you take away from this is intentional rest and reducing that noise in your head. When we clear out that cognitive load, all of a sudden it's easier to step into our higher level thinking. The skills that we need to meet our executive function, what we need to do for work, what we train for, we're going to have more clarity that actually enables us to get to the resolution that we need to. So we're able to regulate ourselves in the room with the client whose behaviors are escalating because of a sensory-centered sensitive day. Instead of getting pulled up into the dysregulation with them or closing the door and just melting into the door because it was just so much effort to stay, stay there. That you can actually make comprehensive decisions and do comprehensive assessments around real check seating. So that we actually complete the prescription to a really high standard and we get it right the first time rather than carrying it back around again because we missed something while we were running on empty. I know there are so many clinicians out there that are just so brilliant at the work that they do, but because they are overloaded, they are missing steps or not feeling their full line of capacity. You know, that I remember a lecturer at uni saying we have to be uh empathetic and we have to step in their shoes. There is just no way that you can step into your client's shoes if you are running really full and you're not having intentional rest. What you need to do is you need to think about reducing your cognitive load rather than adding it when you rest. You need to ask yourself what is going to open up my lanes and my capacity and reduce the number of cars on the road. And that's going to look different to everyone. For some people, that is sitting down, being very intentional. Maybe it's cooking your entirety of your meal without any distractions and then eating it. Maybe it's eating that delicious dessert in front of the TV with your partner, but without your phone. Or maybe it's going to the gym, moving your body, and doing intentional exercise without your phone. It might be meditating, it might be breath work. Honestly, I would love to hear what works for you when it comes to intentional rest. But I would love to see people follow through with intentional rest. It is so easy for us to grab our phones. We're addicted to that damn thing. So be disciplined and actually put it away and be really intentional with your rest. Because when you are able to wake up in the morning and get straight into that morning routine, and then you send them off to daycare, send them off to school, you've regulated the whole drive. There's no yelling, there's no screaming, they're gonna feed off that energy as well. And then you're gonna sit out to your desk and you're gonna feel like you have energy, that you can actually be productive and you can stop carrying the constant weight of thinking about work without effort doing it. You're actually doing it. So then when you clock off, you are actually able to be present with the kids. So you're not carrying around additional cognitive load because you've done the work. You finished it, done. So if you're listening to this and you're saying, this sounds like a great idea, but I'm just too busy. No, you are just too busy doing the wrong rest. I challenge you to put your phone away. Rather than spending it in avoidance, you need to be intentional. This is exactly what I'm going to teach in my free masterclass, which is running the 24th of June at 12 pm Australian Easter Standard Time, 2026, if you're listening to this live. And it's all about how I built my multi six figure OT practice without sacrificing my weekends or my sanity. And I want every therapist to know this. I want every therapist to feel like they have capacity for it all. I will put the registration in the show notes, and I would love to see you there.