When you train as a counsellor or a psychotherapist, your tutors go on all the time about self-care and how important it is. To the point that it feels like another ‘thing’ to complete alongside the essays and the client work. But it was only in the final year or two of my training that something started to click for me, and I started to understand the importance of rest and self-care experientially.
Maybe that’s a part of my autism, that I need to understand the mechanics and the whys underlying something before I can engage with it. When self-care is presented as an essential but with no explanation for why, it just sounds like lip service. Especially when the people teaching you about it are the ones piling on the workload of a course you are studying!
Self-care seemed to me to be making a list of things I liked to do, and squeezing bits of time throughout the week to do them. Variety seemed somehow to be important, as well as various activities which I had no interest in or outright dislike of – going for a walk, physical exercise, artistic creativity. Juggling the demands of life with training as a counsellor, there was no such thing as ‘spare time’, and any moments I did get were spent zombie-like in front of the telly, scrolling on my phone and dissociating.
“Okay fine” I thought, “I’ll add some self-care stuff to the list of demands being imposed on me”, and I might do a jigsaw occasionally or sit baffled in a bubble bath just thinking about all the better ways I could be using my time.
The concept of self-care wasn’t personally meaningful or resonant. And in my opinion, ideas which are imposed from outside never stick in the same way those do which originate from inside a person. I never really ‘owned’ the idea of prioritising my wellbeing though self-care practices so my motivation was never intrinsic. I just phoned it in, did the bare minimum so that I was doing what I was told by my tutors. But that’s not the foundation for meaningful or sustained change.
Now I have been a practicing counsellor for six years, I have a different perspective, partly because I have more autonomy over my time, but mostly because I now understand, in a very literal and embodied way, what happens when I don’t rest. I used to think of rest as something that came after everything else was dealt with, once the work was finished, the emails answered, the obligations met, and I could finally justify stopping. The problem with this, which seems obvious to me now but didn’t then, is that there is no natural endpoint to most demands, and my brain is particularly good at holding unfinished things open indefinitely.
If you believe you have to be “done” before you can stop, it means that rest is often deferred, and over time this leads to a gradual narrowing of capacity. Thinking becomes more rigid, relatively small demands feel overwhelming, and fatigue increases while sleep becomes more elusive. Life in general gets harder and harder. Especially as an autistic person, when I don’t offer myself enough rest everything requires more processing power. Sounds are sharper, decisions are heavier, and social interactions become disproportionately costly.
What I understand now is that rest isn’t a reward for having worked hard enough, and it isn’t optional. It’s a basic requirement for functioning.
The way self-care was framed during my training didn’t reflect this. It focused on adding activities, often generic ones, rather than looking at overall demand, as though the problem were a lack of pleasant experiences rather than a system already operating at or beyond capacity.
Rest, for me, is not primarily about doing things I enjoy. It’s about having stretches of time where nothing is expected of me, where there is no need to perform, produce, or justify how I am using my time. Sometimes that means vegetating on the sofa. Sometimes it means becoming absorbed in something that has I characterise as “unproductive” – fun in other words, like a jigsaw puzzle or a lego set.
When rest is missing, I don’t just feel tired, I function differently, my work is affected, and my world becomes smaller and more brittle. So rest isn’t another task to be completed or optimised. It isn’t self-improvement. It’s maintenance, the thing that allows everything else to keep working at all.