We’ve all been there. You finally get a full night of sleep. The baby didn’t wake up, the house was quiet, and you stayed in bed for eight hours. But when your eyes open, you don’t feel rested. You feel heavy. You feel like your battery is still at 5%.
This is the motherhood tired. It’s the kind of exhaustion that sleep cannot fix, because the fatigue isn’t in your head. It’s in your nervous system.
Your Body is Still Standing Guard
As someone who looks at Public Health and the way our bodies react to stress, I want to tell you why this happens. When you become a mother, your body enters a state of hyper-vigilance. Your brain rewires itself to stay on alert for every cry, every movement, and every potential danger.
The problem is that for many of us, the alarm never actually turns off.
Even when the house is silent, your body is still braced for a crisis. You are clenching your jaw while you watch TV. You are holding your breath while you scroll through your phone. Your muscles are standing guard because they’ve forgotten that the emergency is over. This is somatic burnout. It’s a physical state of survival that consumes an incredible amount of energy.
The Body Has to Lead
We are often told to “just relax” or “practice mindfulness.” A fried nervous system needs a body-level response, not a mental one. If your body doesn’t feel safe at a cellular level, no amount of positive thinking is going to make you feel rested.
This is why a spa day or a nap often feels like a band-aid on a broken bone. You might be lying still, but your internal system is still running a marathon.
At Nabad Rising, we believe that the only way out of this exhaustion is to stop talking to your mind and start talking to your body. We have to teach your nervous system how to come back to center.
The invitation
If you are living in the tired that sleep won’t fix, start with the body rather than the mind. Right now, drop your shoulders. Check your jaw, your stomach. Notice where you are bracing for something that may not be coming. That noticing alone is a form of signal to your nervous system. From there, try exhaling for twice as long as you inhale. It is a physiological cue that it is safe to downshift, one your brain will recognize even when your thoughts won’t cooperate. And when the overwhelm peaks, try shaking your arms and legs for thirty seconds. It sounds strange. It works. Animals do it instinctively after a threat passes, because the body needs to complete what the stress response started. You are a system that has been on for too long. That is the whole story. It is time to let your body know it can finally stand down.
Where in your body are you still standing guard? And what would it feel like to finally let that weight go?