Redefining Rest with Ash Brodeur of Feelosophy

Last Wednesday, I got home from dropping the kids off at daycare and holy hannah was I ever tired.

How tired? So tired.

All I wanted to do was sit down, or maybe take a nap, but neither of those were options because I was already behind on work, the dogs needed to be walked, the house was in an extraordinary state of chaos, and and and.

So instead of getting cozy on the couch with my weighted blanket and The Good Place, I leaned against a kitchen stool and gave myself permission to pause for just a few minutes; to gather whatever reserves I could muster, and carry on with my day.

As I half-stood in the kitchen, I thought about that quote that's been going around on the socials about emotionally hitting a wall and how the wall is there to rest.

I mean, I get it — I've been the first to go off about the importance of Self-care and filling your own cup so you aren't a depleted resentful mess...but also, we're almost a year into a global pandemic and unlike, you know, knitting or something, this experience has not gotten easier with time.

And even though I was really trying to give myself brief moment of reprieve — literally leaning to rest — I couldn't escape the dread that comes with feeling perpetually behind, the grief for the way life used to be, the helplessness because it's all out of my control, and rage that we're all actually just expected to keep going in the midst of everything.

Now. When I find myself getting pulled into a riptide of emotion, the best way for me to get anchored is to write + reach out because more often than not I'm met with words of support, and knowing that I'm not alone in my loneliness somehow makes it better.

So, I ranted on social media, and had some really great conversations with people on the internet about how the heck we're supposed to rest when we can't catch a break.

One of the people I got talking to was Ash Brodeur from Feelosophy. It turns out (unsurprisingly) that she'd been getting a very similar vibe from her people — we're all burnt the eff out but don't really have an option to pause for the rest we desperately need.

There's supposed to be a light at the end of the tunnel, but all I see is another wall.

Work needs to be done. Bills need to be paid. Mouths need to be fed.

The world doesn't stop when our capacity runs out, even when we don't know how to keep going.

Ash and I got to talking about how under normal circumstances, we experience stressors followed by resolution...the stressor is supposed to stop so that the cycle can be completed. And as much as we've normalized the current state of affairs, they are far from normal when it comes to our well-being — the stressors keep a-coming.

So. We both sat with this question:

How do we redefine rest when taking a break feels impossible?

And that's precisely what we talked about on an IG live this past Wednesday, which you can watch here.

Some of the moments that stuck with me are:

Why we feel like we can't ask for help even though we need it (~ 2:00)
The importance of the stress cycle and why we're struggling (~3:45)
Adjusting our expectations when we're in the tunnel of Big Feels (~4:40)
The difference between avoidance and deferral of feelings (~7:15)
Finding self-care practices that meet you where you're at (~10:25)
Permission to ignore your kids once in a while (~13:13)
How to redefine rest 60 seconds at a time (~14:14)

We chatted for about 15 minutes and my audio ended up having some crappy feedback (sorry) but the content was good if you can listen past the scratching — or here's a transcript if you're more of a reader:

{ Note: some of the excess likes, you knows, and so's, etc have been removed for the ease of reading, but the context of the conversation remains unchanged. }

A: [The other day] I posted that meme or tweet about how if there's a wall, sometimes it's there to lean into. And some people identified with it, but then what I thought was even more profound was about a week later when you started to post.

You said, "what if leaning on the wall isn't even an option?" So, I just wanted to first, get you to introduce who you are to the world and to everyone here, and then share a little bit about what inspired those posts that so many people resonated with.

J: Yeah, so I'm Justine Sones. I'm a writer and a self-care /stress management coach. Originally, my background was massage therapy, and that was really my introduction to the world of self-care.

Over time, the principles that I learned about taking care of the body really started to play into how I talked about taking care of mental and emotional and spiritual well-being as well.

Part of my journey in this conversation really evolved postpartum; after I had my second kid is when I really felt like I was struggling to keep up with everything — with the pressures, with the demands, and the message that I received at the time was, "it's okay to ask for help." It's okay to bring people in and build that community support to supplement the self-care.

So I did that, and then fast-forward a couple years later I find myself writing this post — I was literally leaning against the stool in my kitchen because I was so tired, I couldn't stand upright anymore, but I couldn't actually stop and sit down and take a break because I just dropped my kids off at daycare, and I had client work to do. It just felt like this never-ending...you know?

Theoretically, I'm stopping and leaning to take this break, but also it feels more like I'm catapulting slow motion into the wall where, I'm kind of seeing everything fall apart and it's like, okay, I'm gonna hit this well but it's not to like [gestures leaning] "ahhhh," it's kind of like... [explosion gesture/sound]

A: Yeah and you kind of said something there in just sharing, or even in our private sharing about how you've been told, "ask for help when you need it. Ask for support." And pre-pandemic you had this support, and now what I'm finding — even in the work that I do with clients — is they feel like they can't ask for support because they feel like everyone is being burdened.

We're all being burdened, so I can't share my feelings with my friends because they also are struggling through this. So you kind of hit the nail on the head — we asked for support but then like, how, especially during this time?

J: Mm-hmm. And I think that's part of where, as much as this pocket of time has really shaken things up, it's also brought some real truth and needs to light in terms of how we foster depth in our relationships.

We're finding that the ways that I may have asked for help a couple years ago would have been like, "can you come over, can you do this thing" — and now I think we're being asked more to hold that emotional space for each other, where we can't problem solve and do anything about it.

So I not only feel helpless in what I can do for myself, but like you said, I feel so helpless in what I can do for others, or in what I can ask from them. And yeah, I think it raises that question of how do we support each other when everything that we've known has been taken away? And I think it's just something completely new for us and that's what makes it so hard.

A: Yeah it's completely new and I think what starting to happen to is that the light at the end of the tunnel, it doesn't always seem like it's ever there.

And you mentioned something about our relationship to stress and our stress cycle, and how it needs to complete in order for us to move the stress through it, and how right now just feels like it can never complete so it's almost like stress is just...forever a part of us now.

J: Yes. The interesting thing about stress is that stress itself is not bad, it's actually a really healthy physiological response that's put in place to keep us safe.

But again, what we depend on is that return to balance where the stress cycle resolves; where we feel the tension or the threat, it passes, and then we can process it and come back to normal.

What I've found right now, like you said, it feels like the light at the end of the tunnel is never gonna get here, so I've really had to shorten what that tunnel looks like.

Because if I'm looking at the light at the end of the tunnel being when I can see my friends, when we can hug each other, like when we can support each other the way we're used to — that feels impossible.

If I look at the tunnel as...for example when I wrote this post, it's like I'm really deep in these feelings of like helplessness despair and rage. I'm there right now.

For me to meet that need by articulating it, which is why I wrote it down, and sharing it so that I can connect with other people and feel less alone in it, then that small pocket is actually what allows me to complete that stressful cycle, and it meant that the tunnel was actually only about 10 minutes long.

And then, again, that said — my expectation used to be that I would come out of that cycle completion feeling like, I'm recharged and I'm ready to go and instead, I've had to really scale that back to be like, completing that cycle now just means "okay, I'm ready to take the next step, I'm ready for the next hour."

A: What's huge too because I think, for me, the other day I was talking to my best friend and I was like, well I don't feel stressed, and she's like, you're so stressed.

And that's so interesting, that this is my new baseline because I'm assuming when I rest if I — I don't have children, so I get the privilege of being able to maybe sleep in if I need to or take a step back — but like you said, I still have the same expectations for what rest will result in which is feeling rejuvenated, like I can take on the world.

But like you just said, if we kind of start to redefine that where it's like, okay, I actually am just now good for the next hour, what that could look like. And we take it kind of in these more — instead of this long stretch of time, we start to redefine it more as like a shorter segment.

J: Yes. And ideally, also being able to get that perspective and the trust — because ultimately we're stuck in this pocket of uncertainty, and we're trusting that eventually it's going to pass.

There's the element of, we're going to see these little tiny gains, like I found when I adjusted my perspective and, yeah, get to those more like micro resolutions.

I can keep doing that as long as I can also hold on to that hope or faith that long term, we're going to move through this and that nothing actually does last forever. And it's that that blend of, I don't know, meeting myself where I'm at and knowing it's going to pass...like there's something in there that I still haven't quite articulated.

It's not toxic positivity because I'm not pretending that things aren't bad, but it's that element of being able to actually own it, so that you can meet the need and move on.

The honesty matters.

A: I was just listening to a podcast this morning about neuroplasticity, and we don't have to get into that, but what he was saying is that if we want something to change we have to bring attention to what we want to change.

And I think we're so good at pushing things away, like, I'm not stressed — and sometimes we need to because it's protection right? Like, I need to turn off the news to protect my nervous system.

But sometimes I think we get so good at just like, pushing away, pushing away, pushing away, that I think what you did in your post, and in just being honest and sharing, was you just brought attention to what it was.

I don't really think we have the answers of what we can be necessarily doing, because I think it's going to depend person to person. But what I think you did in that moment, by being so honest, was you allowed other people to maybe bring attention to it as well and like you said, feel that they're not alone.

J: Yeah I think that it allows us to, again, if we can step away from that sense of a moral failing when we're struggling — because that's part of the sea that I think we're kind of swimming in, is this idea that, our worth and our productivity is tied to all of these external things that have been so disrupted.

If we can take the pressure off of feeling that need to suppress, and we do actually address it, we can keep that pot from boiling over. And there's a difference between that avoidance of saying like, "oh, I don't like this, this makes me uncomfortable, so I'm just gonna keep going," versus saying, "it's not helpful for me to give in to this right now because I do have a client email I have to write, but I know it's there, I'm gonna put a little pin in it, and I'm gonna come back to it later — probably in the 10 minutes that I'm going to pick up my kids from daycare when I rage sing 'Lose you to love me,' in my car."

That's my pocket to process my stress and it's not perfect, but it's what's available to me right now and it allows me to again, metabolize those feelings and in that micro-pocket, create resolution. Because when my kids come back home, the relentlessness just persists, you know?

A: It almost sounds like, I remember a term — you parking lot it. Because I know a lot of people are reaching out saying, "I need to hustle right now because I need to pay bills or, I am the one who supporting my family."

I know the pandemic has hit women way more in work — in the role of like, you are the caretaker, and you're keeping your job, and you're working at home — so to rest as what is sometimes defined or what we kind of see poured out is, I take a long bath, binge-watch a Netflix show like, you know, paint (laughter) and you're like, I have ten minutes of a pocket, to just try to complete this stress cycle today for me, and know that maybe that's okay right now.

J: Yeah and I think again, that's where the willingness to be able to actually look at and name the feeling — specifically what it is — is so important because we have such small pockets to target them.

And, you know, when I started that thread, it started with, "I'm so tired." But that's a really common thing for us to say; "I'm tired" is a safe feeling, you know? "I'm sad" is a safe feeling.

The scarier feelings are like, "I feel desperate. I feel anguish. I feel rage." And to tend to rage requires a different practice than tending to sadness, you know? So if we aren't able to be honest about the things that we're actually feeling, it's going to be really hard to do the thing to meet the need and find that resolution.

A: That's huge. I just think I had an a-ha moment in that, if you're able to better define or just better articulate the feeling, you can address it a lot quicker because, like you said, tired...you think a lot of people are feeling tired, so my go-to is just to do less when I feel tired.

But the other day I got behind what the tiredness the exhaustion was, and it was like, a lot of anger and feeling trapped, so I screamed in the car like, really ragey, and I was surprised — but then I was like, oh, that's what that was. Lying in the bed, for me at least, that wasn't actually what I needed, it was this.

So I think that's beautiful what you just said, label the feeling — or try to at least get behind it — because then you might be able to complete it.

J: Yeah like, the last thing that rage needs is to stew in a vat of hot water — that just makes it worse, to be honest.

And then it also starts to play out in things like, if I'm starting to notice signs of mental fatigue, theoretically I feel like I should lay down and do nothing but that might actually create the space for the hamster wheel to keep going, when doing something simple like taking a small basket of my kids' socks and laying them out and pairing them and putting them back might actually be a better way of tending to that that fatigue because what I need to do is to prove to myself that I can do something.

A: Yeah, wow. I love that. So I guess the final thing, because we want to keep this short and sweet too — we don't want to take up all your time because it could be your rest time! You could be... I said to someone the other day, I was like yeah, maybe your rest is just you pee a little longer and she's like, "if you have kids, you don't pee alone." And I was like, "okay exactly." It's like, yeah, it's so much.

J: Yeah and that's like, before we do our one last thing, for the person who feels that way — where you literally can't even — for me I sometimes just have to step out into the cold and close the door with my kids. And they're on the other side, and they're crying, and it's just like...I just need a minute.

A: Yeah, you just need a minute. Yup. [laughter] You got a lot of hearts for that one.

J: [laughter It's okay ignore your kids temporarily so that you don't, you know, do something you regret.

A: So the last little piece was just, how can we redefine rest right now, in a pandemic? If there's one takeaway, or a couple takeaways for people, what would you say maybe they are right now?

J: Oh man. I've given this a lot of thought over the last week, and I still don't totally have an answer because, I think that when it comes to that sense of redefining rest, start with [hand to chest] inside.

Forget everything you're hearing from other people, even from me, and just start with, "what do I need right in this moment." And again, you just need a minute.

Give yourself 60 seconds of whatever you need — 60 seconds of screaming, 60 seconds of deep breathing, 60 seconds of downward dog, like, start with giving yourself 60 seconds and allow that to be enough to visualize a completion.

And then those little wins are what you build from, but you have to start by scaling way way way back. Think smaller, lower your expectations, and always start from within.

A: Beautiful.

Whew.

As per most conversations along these lines, I could have kept talking for hours about this stuff. Luckily, I’ve been writing about it for a while and can point you in the direction of a few other posts I’ve put together if you’re keen to learn more about this shiz:

And if you still want more of this self-care and boundary setting action, make sure to sign up for…