I slept 11 hours and woke up exhausted. After 4 years of doctors saying “it’s probably stress,” I finally found what was actually wrong.

I am 38. For four years I was exhausted in a way that nobody could find on paper, and if that sentence landed somewhere in your chest then you already know the specific loneliness of it.

I had a job I was barely keeping. A relationship I was barely showing up for. I would lie down at 3pm because standing was too much, then lie awake at 3am because my brain would not shut off. Exhausted and wired at once, which nobody warns you is even possible.

Here is what I am going to tell you, and I have put it in order:

• The three weeks that accidentally proved rest was not the answer, and what that ruled out
• Why the supplements aimed at energy production were never going to work, no matter which brand I bought
• The difference between a body that is relaxed and a body that has collapsed, which feel identical from the inside and are not remotely the same thing
• What actually moved first, and how long it took, including the parts that are still not fixed three months in

I am not a doctor. I am somebody who spent four years and a genuinely embarrassing amount of money being treated for things I did not have.

Four years, and everything I tried

I am going to list it, because if you are reading this I would bet you have been round some version of the same loop.

By year four I had read enough symptom searches to be convinced I had every chronic illness in existence. I was in three private groups full of people exactly as tired as I was. We swapped protocols nobody could finish. We all agreed something was badly wrong and not one of us could prove it on paper.

The day it broke open was an ordinary Wednesday. I was at my desk, I had already had two coffees, and I stood up to walk to a meeting and my legs felt like they belonged to somebody else. I sat back down. I put both hands flat on the desk and looked at them, and then I started crying in an open-plan office at eleven in the morning, which I had never done in my life. My manager found me like that and suggested I take a week or two.

I took six. They became three months of medical leave.

The three weeks that ruled out the obvious answer

The first week of leave I slept. The second week I slept. Somewhere in the third week I sat up in bed at two in the afternoon and had a thought that reorganised the entire four years.

If rest was the answer, three weeks of nothing would have fixed me. It hadn't. Which meant rest was not the answer.

That sounds small written down. It was not small. I had spent four years assuming I was in energy debt and that enough rest would eventually pay it off. Three weeks of doing genuinely nothing is a serious repayment. And I woke on day twenty-one exactly as heavy as day one.

So the problem was not a deficit. It was something else, still running, that rest did not reach.

The question I had been asking wrong for four years

I had spent four years asking what is wrong with me, hoping for a name I could put on a form. That was the wrong question. The right one, which I found somewhere around two in the morning reading a paper I barely understood, was this: what decides whether my body is willing to recover at all?

That is how I got to the vagus nerve, and to a phrase I had never once heard from any of my fourteen specialists. Dorsal vagal shutdown.

It is a state the nervous system drops into after it has been overwhelmed for long enough. It stops trying to fight or flee, and instead conserves. Goes offline. Energy drops, sleep stops repairing you properly, digestion slows, your face goes flat, your thinking fogs. It is not a mood and it is not weakness. It is a protective setting, and it is doing exactly what it evolved to do.

And then the sentence that actually wrecked me:

You don’t come out of shutdown by resting harder.

You come out of it by giving the system specific physical signals that it is safe to come back online, and repeating them until the pathway is familiar again.

Suddenly the whole failed list made sense in a way it never had. The supplements were aimed at energy production, but my body was not producing energy because the system that decides whether to produce energy had decided no. The thyroid medication was aimed at hormones that were fine. The antidepressant was aimed at sadness, and I was not sad, I was shut down, which turns out to be a completely different thing.

What was wrong was not fifteen things. It was one thing, running the show.

Relaxed and collapsed feel identical. They are opposites.

This is the distinction nobody had ever made for me, and it is the one I would most want you to walk away with.

When you lie down at the end of a day that has taken everything, your body is still and heavy and doing nothing. That looks like rest. It can even feel like rest. But a collapsed system and a settled system are not the same state, they just produce a similar stillness, and only one of them is repairing anything.

Which is why you can rest for three weeks and gain nothing. You were not resting. You were lying down inside a shutdown.

Nobody can tell the difference by feel at the start. I certainly could not. It took me about two weeks of practice before I could, and being able to tell is most of what changed.

So before any of it, the honest question is which version of tired you are actually in.

Most people are one of these most of the time, and something else on a bad week.

What I actually did, lying in bed at 11am

I almost did not try it. I had been burned by wellness before and I had developed something close to an immune response to the word transformation. What got me was that it did not promise anything overnight. It said: practices you can do in bed, built for people whose energy is on a budget.

The first one was three minutes. A specific exhale pattern with a soft hum at the end. I remember thinking this cannot possibly do anything, and doing it anyway, because I was already lying down.

I did it twice that day, and only because the instructor said something I had never heard anybody say: low-energy days are the right days to start, not the wrong ones. Every other thing I had tried in four years required me to have energy first in order to earn more of it. This was the first one that did not.

By day three I was falling asleep faster. By day five I had stopped reaching for my phone the second I woke. By the end of week two I was sleeping seven hours and waking up feeling like a person. Not a great person. A person. The bar had been on the floor for so long that this felt close to miraculous.

The thirty-minute walk

The moment I knew was about ten weeks in. I went for a walk. Outside, thirty minutes, no particular reason, and I came home and made dinner.

Then Tuesday came and I did not crash. Then Wednesday. By Thursday I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and let myself understand that I had spent a whole half hour on my feet and paid nothing for it. For four years, thirty minutes outside cost me three days in bed. That arithmetic had run my entire life, and I had stopped noticing I was doing it.

My husband said I seemed more here. That one made me cry.

What is still not fixed

I am writing this three months in and I want to be straight with you, because I read enough testimonials during my four-year spiral to know exactly what overclaiming sounds like, and I promised myself I would not do it.

I am not running marathons. I still pace myself. I still get low days. The difference is that they are days now rather than weeks, and when one arrives I have something that works instead of white-knuckling through it and hoping.

I still practice ten to twenty minutes a day. I still go to the live sessions when I can. This is not a thing I did and finished. It is a thing I do.

And if you are living with ME/CFS, long COVID or fibromyalgia, I am not going to stand here and tell you this is your answer. I do not know that. What I can tell you is that nothing in it asks you to push through or build up, everything can be done lying down, and if you crash after exertion you should talk to whoever manages your care before adding anything at all, this included.

Who built the practices

Taryn Elise Herselman

Somatic practitioner, body-based therapeutic work

MA Psychology · 15+ years clinical practice

A Johannesburg-based somatic practitioner with fifteen years in clinical practice, twelve years of residency-style study in India, and an MA in Psychology. Her work centres on nervous-system recovery: stress, exhaustion, and the body's part in emotional health. The practices here were built around what a braced or shut-down system can actually absorb, which is why most of them are done lying down and none of them ask you to hold a shape.

I am not the only one

Two versions of next spring

In one of them you are roughly where you are now. Still rationing. Still doing the arithmetic before you agree to anything, still deciding whether a coffee with a friend is worth what it will cost you on Thursday. Still being told that everything came back normal. I lived in that version for four years and I know exactly how long a person can survive inside it. That is the problem with it.

In the other one you can tell the difference between settled and collapsed, so you stop mistaking one for the other. The bad days are days. And once in a while you spend thirty minutes on your feet and pay nothing for it, and it takes you until Thursday to even notice.

The distance between those two is one honest answer about the state you are actually in.

You don’t come out of shutdown by resting harder.

See the practices built for your state →