Pyjamas at 3pm: On invisible exhaustion and the permission to rest.

I’ve been ill this week: Proper under-the-duvet, sore throat, head-pounding kind of ill.

And for the first time in a long time, I had to cancel a lot of clients. Even typing this makes me squirm a bit. I care so much about my work. I don’t like letting people down. There’s always a little voice that says, “you could probably push through. It’s only a cold. Just get on with it.”

But I’ve learned the hard way that “just get on with it” isn’t always wise. I once did an open water swim race with a cold because I didn’t want to waste the entry fee. Reader, I got pneumonia: Ten out of ten do not recommend. So this week, I listened sooner to my body. I emailed. I apologised. I rescheduled. I went back to bed.

There was some discomfort about this. When you’re self-employed there’s no manager saying, “You look awful, go home.” There’s no colleague quietly stepping in. If I’m off sick, no one takes over from me and my clients don’t get a stand-in. They just get an email from me saying I need to cancel. I’m the one who has to decide for myself that my health matters enough to stop.

Physical illness at least feels legitimate though. You look pale, you sound terrible, you’re obviously unwell.

But a couple of weeks ago I felt another kind of exhaustion, the sort with no obvious physical symptoms, just a quiet internal wobble that didn’t look like much from the outside but felt quite loud on the inside.

I woke up feeling slightly off. Not unwell exactly, but just not right and kind of foggy. I could work, and I did. I managed to put whatever it was into a mental holding pen for the morning so I could be properly present with my clients. But by mid-afternoon the fog hadn’t lifted. It had thickened. I felt absolutely shattered and really tearful, like my system had quietly run out of charge.

So at three o’clock, I put on my favourite pyjamas and got into bed.

It felt mildly rebellious. Also slightly pathetic. Also completely necessary.

I should say here that I’m in the UK at the moment for work, while my amazing wife and son are back home in Germany carrying on with normal life. She was doing the school runs. She was holding things together. I wasn’t in parent mode. I wasn’t the one being needed every five minutes. This context matters, because being able to lie down mid-afternoon isn’t a given.

But what struck me was how hard it was psychologically, even though it was practically possible.

I watched something on Netflix that required absolutely nothing from my brain. Then I read a few pages of my new book about goshawks and had a nap. The next day, I woke up and whatever it was that was with me had completely shifted.

A few days later, discussing this with a good friend, I found myself thinking about how rarely I allow that kind of rest.

I am very comfortable with what I call “active rest”. I can garden for hours, wander slowly through the forest with my dog and voice-note a friend, lose myself in physical work around our farm that leaves my muscles pleasantly tired. There is something deeply regulating for me about these rhythms.

But they also leave evidence: A cleared flower bed. A long walk completed. A task ticked off. I can see what I’ve done.

The quieter kind of rest, the horizontal, unproductive, slightly invisible sort, is harder for me to “do”. There is absolutely nothing to show for it, really. No proof that the time was well spent. Only the subtle recalibration of my frazzled nervous system that has been running a little too hot for a little too long.

I have a hunch that a lot of us are tired right now in a way that sleep can’t fully help with. We can do all the right things and still wake up feeling worn down from the low hum of being needed, the small frictions of modern life, the steady drip of decisions, notifications, and the ongoing effort of keeping life ticking along without dropping anything.

And instead of pausing to ask what kind of tired this actually is, we tend to crack down on ourselves: More caffeine. The magnesium everyone’s recommending. A late-night Google spiral about cortisol that somehow feels productive at 11pm. We consider whether there’s something wrong with our morning routine and we promise ourselves that from Monday we’ll be stricter.

We treat tiredness like some kind of personal failing we just haven’t managed properly yet.

It is rarely framed as a question of permission.

Permission to stop before we fall apart. Permission to rest before we are visibly unwell. Permission to lie down without earning it first.

The truth is, permission often shows up in the smallest possible choices. That might mean cancelling one thing instead of five. Going to bed earlier. Leaving the kitchen messy. Asking someone else to pick up the slack. Admitting you’re at capacity instead of pretending you’re endlessly ok.

Bernie and I talk about this in our new podcast episode, actually. There is an assumption that because we are coaches we must have found a way to live in constant balance, that we move through our days serene and steady.

We don’t.

We struggle with the same old stuff as everyone else. We overdo it. We get tired. We need rest in more forms than we’d like to admit.

I’m trying to learn to listen before my body has to shout. Maybe that’s my work for 2026.

What kind of rest do you resist? And what would it look like to allow a tiny bit more of it?