RUCHI PAREKH - COACH/SPEAKER
Welcome to another issue of Rise & Thrive. Each week, I send insights that help high-performers like you break through barriers, beat imposter syndrome, and build unshakeable confidence so you can live your best life while reaching your full potential.
A successful client said something to me recently that I’ve heard, in one form or another, more times than I can count:
“I took a whole week off. Beautiful place, nothing to do, total break. And I came back just as exhausted as when I left. What is wrong with me?”
Nothing was wrong with her. She’d just discovered something most accomplished people eventually run into: at a certain point, rest stops working.
You do everything right. You take the time off, you clear the calendar, you lie on the beach. And somehow you return depleted, vaguely cheated, wondering why the thing that’s supposed to restore you didn’t touch the exhaustion at all.
Here’s what’s actually going on.
The first thing worth understanding is that there’s a difference between stopping activity and actually downregulating.
You can lie completely still and remain, internally, in a state of high alert. Your body is on the lounger; your nervous system is still scanning for threats, running tomorrow’s to-do list, half-bracing for the next demand. You’ve removed the activity but not the activation.
This is the state researchers associate with chronic sympathetic nervous system engagement - the “fight or flight” branch that’s supposed to switch on briefly and then switch off. In a lot of accomplished people, it never fully switches off. It just hums in the background at a low, constant level for years.
So when you “rest,” you’re resting the part of you that was tired in an obvious way - your body - while the genuinely depleted part, your overstimulated nervous system, keeps running. That’s why you can sleep ten hours and wake up unrefreshed. The exhaustion isn’t in your muscles. It’s in a system that never got the signal that it was safe to stand down.
Here’s the cruel mechanism underneath it.
Your nervous system learns what “normal” is from repetition. If you’ve spent years - maybe decades - in a state of constant low-grade activation, your brain recalibrates that state as your baseline. High alert stops feeling like high alert. It just feels like you.
Which means when you finally do slow down, the unfamiliar calm can actually register as wrong. Some people feel anxious the moment they stop. Restless. Itchy to check their phone, to be useful, to do something. That’s not a lack of discipline. It’s your nervous system, accustomed to activation, treating stillness as a deviation that needs correcting.
So you reach for your phone. You “just quickly check” something. You turn rest into a project - optimizing the holiday, planning the relaxation. And the activation you went away to escape comes right along with you, because you brought the operating system with you.
What genuinely refills you isn’t the absence of activity. It’s the presence of safety - the felt sense, in your body, that you can let down your guard.
This is the parasympathetic state, the “rest and digest” branch of the nervous system. It’s where actual recovery happens: where stress hormones clear, where the body repairs, where the mind stops bracing. And it can’t be forced or scheduled. It can only be allowed.
The things that reliably bring people into that state are almost embarrassingly simple, and they have very little to do with luxury or time off. Slow, full exhales - where the out-breath is longer than the in-breath - directly signal the nervous system to downshift. Unhurried time in nature. Being genuinely absorbed in something with no outcome attached. Real connection with a person you don’t have to perform for. None of these require a week away. All of them require something harder for accomplished people than a vacation: the willingness to stop being productive.
When the people I work with start exploring this, the realization that tends to land hardest is this one: they don’t actually know how to be unproductive.
They can stop working. They cannot stop achieving. So the vacation becomes a performance of rest - the right photos, the optimized itinerary, the wellness routine pursued with the same intensity as a work goal. Even their relaxation has KPIs.
The shift isn’t about resting more. It’s about resting differently - learning, often for the first time in years, what it feels like to do something for no reason other than that it feels good, with nothing to show for it afterward. For someone whose entire identity is built on output, that can feel almost transgressive. And it’s usually exactly what’s been missing.
If rest hasn’t been working, you don’t need a better vacation. You need to give your nervous system evidence, in small and frequent doses, that it’s safe to come down from high alert.
That happens far more in the texture of ordinary days than in the occasional grand escape. A few slow breaths before you walk into the house. Ten minutes outside with no phone. One conversation where you’re not managing anyone’s impression of you. One activity a week that produces nothing.
These sound too small to matter. They’re not. Your nervous system doesn’t recalibrate through dramatic gestures. It recalibrates through repetition - the same way it learned to stay switched on in the first place.
You taught it, over years, that life was an emergency. You can teach it, over time, that it isn’t.
That’s the rest that actually rests you. And it was never waiting for you on a beach. It’s available on a Tuesday afternoon, in the unremarkable moment you finally let yourself exhale.
If you’re someone who can stop working but can’t quite stop achieving, that pattern is worth looking at - and it tends to loosen faster in conversation than alone. I keep a few free 15-minute calls open each week.
When did you last feel genuinely restored - and what were you actually doing? Hit reply and tell me.
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