Why Rest Feels Impossible When Your Nervous System Won’t Switch Off
Being tired but wired isn’t laziness, it’s your nervous system protecting you the only way it knows how.
If you’ve ever laid down at night completely exhausted, only to feel your heart racing and your thoughts speeding up, you know the frustration of being tired but unable to rest.
For many women, this isn’t just stress—it’s a sign of nervous system dysregulation. When your body stays stuck in a “go” mode, rest can feel unsafe, even when you want it more than anything.
What Is Nervous System Dysregulation?
Fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses
Your nervous system has built-in settings to protect you: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These responses are lifesaving in danger. But after trauma or prolonged stress, the body sometimes forgets how to turn them off.
Instead of returning to calm, you feel stuck on high alert. You may feel jumpy, hyperaware of everything around you, and unable to relax even in safe places. This is called dysregulation.
“Tired but wired”: symptoms of dysregulation
A dysregulated nervous system often feels like living with the gas pedal pressed down all the time. You may feel bone-tired, but as soon as you slow down, you notice:
Restlessness or racing thoughts
Shallow, quick breathing
Trouble falling asleep
Digestive issues that flare during downtime
You want to rest, but your body doesn’t know how.
Root causes of dysregulation
Chronic stress, early attachment wounds, and unrelenting life demands can wire the nervous system into a constant state of alert. Over time, this becomes the body’s default setting.
“Trauma and chronic stress can train the body to see rest as danger, making calm feel unsafe even in quiet moments.”
Why Rest Feels Unsafe
Biology of survival mode
When your brain thinks you’re in danger, it sends a signal through stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to keep you awake and alert. Slowing down can feel threatening because your body has learned that “on” is safer than “off.”
This is why lying still at night can make you feel more anxious, not less. The body equates rest with vulnerability.
Beliefs and emotions around rest
Many of us have been taught that worth comes from doing. This creates guilt around rest, as though slowing down means failure. Those feelings can make a stressed nervous system even more resistant to quiet.
Overlap with dysautonomia
Nervous system dysregulation and dysautonomia aren’t the same, but they often overlap. Both can cause a racing heart, dizziness, and difficulty finding calm. If you have POTS or another form of dysautonomia, your symptoms may intensify when you try to relax because your body is still in a defensive state.
Gentle Pathways to Safety and Rest
The way out of a dysregulated state isn’t to force yourself to relax. It’s to teach your body what safety feels like again.
Somatic and breath practices
Somatic practices are body-based tools that help bring your system back into balance. One of the simplest is diaphragmatic breathing. Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly. Slowly inhale through your nose, letting your belly rise, then exhale even more slowly.
Other gentle approaches include grounding exercises (feeling your feet on the floor, noticing your surroundings), gentle stretching, or massaging your shoulders and arms. These practices tell your body that it’s safe to soften.
Creating safe containers for rest
Rest becomes easier when you pair it with cues of comfort and safety. Try creating a “rest ritual”: dim the lights, listen to calm music, wrap up in a weighted blanket, or soak in a warm bath. Over time, these routines signal to the nervous system that this is a safe time to settle.
Seeking support
If rest feels impossible despite your best efforts, working with a trauma-informed therapist or a functional medicine practitioner can help. Therapy can address old patterns of fear around rest, while functional support can uncover biological imbalances that keep the body stuck in high alert.
“You can’t force yourself to relax. You can teach your body, step by step, what safety feels like again.”
Why This Matters
Your nervous system isn’t broken. It has been protecting you for a long time, and it has learned to stay “on” because that’s what kept you safe in the past. When you show it new ways to feel secure, rest gradually becomes possible again.
This process takes patience. Small, consistent steps create the conditions for safety. And when safety returns, your energy begins to rebuild.
Moving Forward With Support
If you’ve been living in a cycle of exhaustion without rest, you don’t have to stay there. There are tools to help your nervous system switch off.
At our clinic, we use a combination of nervous system regulation techniques and functional testing to uncover what’s keeping your body in survival mode.
Inside the Nervous System Healing Code, we guide you step by step through practices that teach your body how to slow down, rebuild resilience, and find calm again. You can also schedule a one-on-one consultation for personalized support.
Rest is possible, even if it hasn’t felt that way for a long time. With the right guidance, your body can remember what it’s like to feel safe enough to stop.
Further Reading:
How the Parasympathetic Nervous System Influences Your Mental Health
Anxiety was long treated as something to be analysed, rationalised or medicated
6 Benefits of Somatic Yoga for Enhancing Mind-Body Awareness
6 somatic hacks that work wonders on the brain and nervous system
Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy
Somatic experiencing – effectiveness and key factors of a body-oriented trauma therapy
Using Somatic Practices to Support Nervous System Regulation
Self-Regulation of Breathing as an Adjunctive Treatment of Insomnia