There’s a particular kind of being tired that doesn’t make sense on paper.
You’re not ill. Nothing catastrophic has happened. By most measures, you’re doing fine – meeting deadlines, showing up, keeping things together. And yet you wake up already exhausted. You get through the day and feel like you’ve run a marathon or have been hit by a truck! You sit down in the evening and can’t quite remember what you actually enjoy.
This is the exhaustion that coping produces.
Coping is not the same as being okay
We tend to use “coping” as though it’s a destination. I’m coping – therefore I’m fine. But coping is a mechanism, not a state. It’s what your nervous system does when the demands on it consistently exceed what it has to give.
And coping takes energy. Real, physical, metabolic energy. When you’re constantly managing – your workload, your reactions, other people’s emotions, the gap between how things are and how you need them to appear – your system is working hard even when nothing dramatic is happening. Especially when nothing dramatic is happening, because then there’s no obvious reason to stop.
The result is a kind of exhaustion that rest doesn’t fix. You can sleep eight hours and wake up tired. You can take a holiday and spend the first three days just decompressing. You can have a quiet weekend and still feel like you’re running on empty by Sunday afternoon.
Sounds familiar?
Why high-functioning people are often the most exhausted
The people I see most consistently running on empty are often the most competent ones- and I’m not alien to that either! The ones who are good at their jobs, reliable with friends, thoughtful with family. The ones who hold things together.
Part of what makes this exhausting is that it’s invisible – to others and often to themselves. When you’re managing well on the outside, there’s no external signal to stop. No one tells you to rest, because you don’t look like you need it. And internally, the bar for “bad enough to address” keeps shifting. You adapt. You cope. You add another coping mechanism to the pile.
Until one day something very small undoes you completely, and you can’t quite explain why.
That’s not your weakness. That’s a system that’s been running on overdrive for too long without a real reset.
The difference between rest and recovery
Here’s something I’ve noticed, both in my own experience and in working with clients: rest and recovery are not the same thing.
Rest is passive. Lying on the sofa, watching something, sleeping. All necessary. But if your nervous system is still in fight-or-flight mode, still vigilant, still managing, still braced – rest doesn’t fully land. You’re horizontal but not actually off. The engine is still running.
Recovery is what happens when the nervous system genuinely downregulates. When the body gets the signal that it’s safe to stop. That nothing needs managing right now. That you can let go of the vigilance, even briefly.
That’s a different thing entirely. And for a lot of people, it’s genuinely hard to access and not because they’re doing anything wrong, but because their system has been in high-alert mode for so long it’s forgotten there’s another way to be.
What Reiki offers in this context
This is where I come in and where I want to be honest about what Reiki does and doesn’t do.
What Reiki does is give your nervous system a genuine experience of downregulation. Not because you’ve thought your way there, or decided to relax, or done a breathing exercise, but because the conditions in the room create enough safety for your system to actually let go. Often for the first time in a long time.
But Reiki won’t fix your workload. It won’t change the circumstances that are draining you. If something structural needs to change, that still needs to happen.
I’ve watched people fall asleep within minutes; not a light doze but a deep, genuine sleep they tell me they haven’t managed in months. I’ve watched shoulders drop that have been held up around ears for a long time. I’ve watched faces shift from that particular taut, held quality of someone who’s been managing, into something softer and more themselves. Hence sometimes people say they look a tad younger after a Reiki session.
But none of that requires you to understand Reiki or believe in anything. It just requires an hour, a treatment table, and the willingness to stop trying to manage things for a while. Or even just the curiosity about what might happen if you did.
You don’t have to be in crisis to deserve support
One of the things that keeps high-functioning, competent people from seeking support, any kind of support, is the sense that things aren’t bad enough yet. That they should be able to handle it. That other people have it worse.
But exhaustion that’s been building for months or years doesn’t wait for a crisis to announce itself. And by the time it does, recovery takes longer.
You’re allowed to address the low-level running on empty before it becomes something more serious. You’re allowed to prioritise your own nervous system before it forces you to.
That’s not indulgence. That’s maintenance.
And sometimes, one quiet hour is enough to remind your body what it actually feels like to rest.
