The Courage to Pause: Why Rest Feels Dangerous Amidst Burnout

Understanding the systemic roots of exhaustion—and how we reclaim our nervous systems through rest

Rest Isn’t Always Restful

Rest is often framed as a privilege—something we “earn” only after producing enough.
This article argues otherwise: rest is not a privilege, but a birthright.

Yet for those experiencing burnout rooted in personal, familial, or intergenerational trauma, claiming that right takes profound courage—because rest can feel dangerous when it reactivates old fears of invisibility, displacement, or erasure.

As a trauma-informed coach and scholar, I support individuals—especially immigrant scholars, artists, and cultural workers—who find themselves exhausted yet unable to pause, held back by internalized fear and insecurity. This is not a personal failure; it is a systemic pattern, shaped by histories of overwork, silence, and survival.

For those navigating trauma, systemic marginalization, or immigration precarity, rest often feels unsafe, unfamiliar, even triggering. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Through coaching rooted in somatic awareness and positive neuroplasticity, it’s possible to unlearn these patterns and build a more compassionate relationship with rest.

This article explores:

• Why rest feels dangerous amidst burnout
• How exhaustion becomes embedded in the nervous system
• And how we reclaim rest as a form of resistance, healing, and repair

The Hidden Fears of Rest

If you’ve ever sat down to rest only to feel guilt, grief, or anxiety—you’re not alone. In fact, this response is predictable for people with lived experience of: 1) Chronic overwork as survival (especially for immigrants, scholars, and cultural workers); 2) Trauma that made taking rest feel dangerous, 3) Institutional erasure, racism, or precarity, 4) Internalized capitalism or “achievement-based worth.”

Tricia Hersey, the author of Rest Is Resistance remarks in an interview, “We have been brainwashed by this system to believe these things about rest, about our bodies, about our worth, this violent culture that wants to see us working 24 hours a day, that doesn’t view us as a human being but instead views our divine bodies as a machine. And so when I think about the first tenet and this idea of disrupting and pushing back, for me, when we are on – in a system that we’re on that’s under capitalism that doesn’t look at people as people – they look at profit.”

Hersey reminds us that capitalism requires disembodiment. It trains us to override our limits, silence our needs, and treat our bodies like tools of production. Rest, then, is not simply a break—it’s a rupture in the conditioning we’ve inherited.

Many of us were never taught how to dream or imagine alternatives to endless striving. Stillness becomes threatening because it interrupts the very system that taught us our value comes from output. When we pause, the nervous system doesn’t interpret it as relief. It interprets it as a break from survival programming.

Why Rest Feels Unsafe for Burnout Survivors

Rest is often equated with stillness—lying down, doing nothing, unplugging from activity. But rest is not one thing. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith offers a helpful model that expands our understanding. In her Seven Types of Rest framework, rest includes:

1. Physical rest (passive and active)
2. Mental rest (reducing cognitive overload)
3. Sensory rest (limiting stimulation)
4. Creative rest (reconnecting with beauty and inspiration)
5. Emotional rest (expressing truth without performance)
6. Social rest (prioritizing nourishing relationships)
7. Spiritual rest (connecting with meaning or belonging)

What this model reminds us is that rest is not always stillness or sleep. It can also be movement: a walk in silence, a breath-led sway, the ritual of making tea. Rest is anything that regulates rather than depletes the nervous system.

But for many trauma survivors, both stillness and movement can feel unsafe—depending on the nervous system’s adaptation to survival.

• For those in chronic fight or flight, rest can trigger vulnerability or collapse.
• For those in freeze, rest may feel distant, and movement—even gentle movement—can feel exposing or explosive.

People in flight mode may resist stillness entirely. They overwork, overschedule, or distract themselves because the nervous system has learned to associate rest with danger. In my upcoming memoir: Writing in the Wound: Acculturation, Trauma, and Music, I show my journey of pushing through burnout during my graduate years at Harvard University (2010-11) and the University of Alberta (2012-19) 

Burnout survivors often describe rest not as soothing, but as confronting—a space where:

• Grief we haven’t had time to feel begins to rise
• Selves we abandoned to survive come into awareness
• Silence threatens to consume what we’ve tried to outrun

In my podcast, Listening to the Wound: Where Trauma Meets Tenderness, I reflect on this process: “Rest asks us to stop… and in that stillness, everything we’ve buried begins to rise.” To reclaim rest, then, is not simply to relax—it is to face the very conditions that taught us rest was dangerous. 

At the same time, for those shaped by freeze, the body may have learned to survive by numbing, immobilizing, or becoming invisible through dissociation and numbness. In these cases, movement itself can feel threatening. Committing to physical or creative movement may stir discomfort, vulnerability, even explosiveness—because motion reawakens sensations the body learned to suppress in order to stay safe.

This is why rest must be personalized. It must emerge from listening to the nervous system, not overriding it. When I apply Dr. Dalton-Smith’s model in my Rest Planner with coaching clients, I help them map their exhaustion—not as a personal failure, but as layered depletion. Once they identify the forms of rest they are most deprived of, they can begin rebuilding an internal ecosystem that supports recovery.

This understanding is key in my work with high-performing individuals whose exhaustion isn’t rooted in laziness or lack of motivation—but in years of pushing through systems that never fully saw them. 

Reframing Rest as Resistance and Belonging

Through my learning in positive neuroplasticity from Dr. Rick Hanson, I’ve come to understand rest as more than a pause—it’s a practice of retraining the nervous system to absorb and retain good experiences. Rest is how we begin to re-attune to the body, to the breath, and to the rhythms we’ve long ignored.

In this process, we begin to ask new questions:

• What if doing less meant coming home to ourselves?
• What if we didn’t need to justify our rest with productivity?
• What if slowing down was a form of protest?

Rest, then, is more than self-care. It is structural defiance in a culture that thrives on overextension. It is a way of saying: I belong, even when I am not performing.  I deserve breath, even when I am not producing. I am still here, even when I am quiet.

Final Reflection: You Don’t Have to Earn Rest

Rest is not something to earn after burnout. It is something we can choose as a radical act of presence, even when the world around us says to keep going.

In my podcast, Listening to the Wound: Where Trauma Meets Tenderness and my upcoming memoir, Writing in the Wound: Acculturation, Trauma, and Music, I explore how rest became a portal—not only to healing—but to reclaiming legacy, rhythm, and breath beyond survival.  

The work of recovery begins with one quiet question:  What would rest feel like right now—if it were safe to receive it?

Work With Me

If you’re navigating exhaustion, burnout, or creative depletion, you’re not alone.

I invite you to join my upcoming 6-week live course,
Break Free from Burnout: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Rest and Reclamation,
beginning August 10th.

Together, we’ll explore somatic tools, deep listening practices, and the neuroscience of positive neuroplasticity to help you build a sustainable, compassionate relationship with rest—one that honors your lived experience rather than bypasses it.

📩 To reserve your spot or inquire about 1:1 coaching and deep listening consultations, email me directly at shumaila @deeplisteningpath.ca.