When Your Body Is Asking You to Slow Down (and Why That’s Not Failure)

For a long time, I thought being tired was just part of being responsible. Part of being someone who cared about what they were building. I assumed that if I wanted something meaningful, I should expect it to feel hard most of the time. So I pushed through exhaustion, ignored the signals, and told myself I’d rest later, once things were more settled.

But things are rarely ever settled for long.

What I didn’t understand back then is that the body keeps track, even when the mind insists everything is fine. It notices when you’re always bracing for the next thing, when your nervous system never really gets a break, when rest feels uncomfortable instead of restorative. Eventually, it starts to speak up in ways that are harder to ignore.

Burnout doesn’t always show up dramatically. Sometimes it’s quiet. It looks like waking up tired even after sleeping. Like feeling disconnected from work you used to enjoy. Like losing your sense of creativity and assuming it’s a motivation problem, when really it’s a depletion problem.

We’re often taught to respond to that feeling by looking for a better system or a stronger plan. But most of the time, burnout isn’t asking for optimization. It’s asking for honesty.

Slowing down doesn’t mean you’re quitting or failing or losing momentum. It means you’re listening. It means you’re recognizing that you are not separate from the work you create, and that ignoring your own limits eventually costs more than it saves.

Some of the most important shifts I’ve made in business came from moments when I stopped forcing forward motion and gave myself space instead. Space to notice what felt heavy. Space to question assumptions I’d been carrying for years. Space to admit that something technically “working” didn’t mean it was sustainable for me anymore.

There’s a lot of pressure, especially for creative women, to prove resilience by pushing through discomfort. But there’s a difference between growing pains and chronic strain. One stretches you. The other slowly wears you down.

If you’ve been feeling tired in a way that rest doesn’t seem to fix, or disconnected in a way that strategy hasn’t solved, that doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It may simply mean your body is asking for a different pace, or a different way of holding your work.

Listening to that isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom. And it often marks the beginning of building something that actually supports you, instead of quietly asking you to disappear inside it.