Worth Your Time: When Rest Isn’t Just About Sleep
with Joycelynn Harrell from Living Whole Wellness
Welcome to Worth Your Time, where I share one of the the best things I read this week and tell you why it mattered.
I’m usually reading Substack while drinking coffee before the chickens start complaining each morning.
When something hits me different, when an article makes me sit back and think or feel seen or understand something new about my own life, I want to share it with you.
This isn’t a summary. It’s a conversation about what the article sparked in me, and an invitation for you to go read the whole thing yourself.
This week’s featured writer is Joycelynn Harrell from Living Whole Wellness.
When Rest Isn’t Just About Sleep
I’m coming up on my fifth year anniversary of retirement this summer. Five years since I walked out of my classroom at 54, and I’m just now starting to feel like myself again.
Not the teacher self. Not the caregiver self. Not the woman who held everything together while her daddy died, her momma’s health failed, a pandemic raged, and her own body gave out from a freak accident. Just me. Whatever that is.
I’m still figuring it out.
I read Joycelynn Harrell’s piece this week about rest, and one line stopped me cold:
“Research I’ve found shows that it can take several years after an adjustment, such as retirement, to recover if you were in a high-pressure role.”
Several years.
I needed someone to say that out loud. Because here’s what nobody tells you about walking away from the thing that’s killing you: you don’t bounce back in six months. You don’t “get over it” after a good vacation. The recovery timeline for burnout isn’t measured in weeks.
Joycelynn writes about discovering that rest isn’t just one thing. It’s not just sleep or time off or bubble baths. There are different kinds of depletion, and they each need different kinds of refilling. She was a nurse drowning in what she now knows was moral distress, and finding language for what was actually wrong changed everything.
I adored my students. That part never wavered.
But loving what you do doesn’t protect you from being emptied out by the circumstances around it.
The pandemic didn’t just make teaching harder. It made existing harder. And I was trying to do both while grief was tearing through my family like a wildfire.
What Joycelynn helped me see is this: I wasn’t just physically tired in 2021. I was emotionally depleted, mentally exhausted, spiritually dry, and probably three other kinds of worn out I didn’t have names for. And trying to fix all of that with more sleep was like trying to fill a car with the wrong kind of fuel.
Five years later, I’m finally understanding what kind of rest I actually needed. What kind I still need.
If you’re somewhere in that gap right now, wondering why you still don’t feel right even though the hard thing is technically over, go read Joycelynn’s piece. She’s honest about her own journey, and she points to a book I wish I’d had back then: a way to understand what’s actually empty so you know what needs filling.
💌 Before You Go
If Joycelynn’s article resonates with you, please leave her a comment and let her know. Substack writers pour their hearts into these pieces, and hearing that their words mattered to someone makes all the difference.
If you found this Worth Your Time and helpful, please hit the restack button and share it with someone who might need to read about rest that goes deeper than sleep.
See you next Wednesday with another piece worth your time!
With Love,
Mary Kaye 💕