“I Rest as I Move”: Exhaustion,Fatigue,and Somatic Movement

Exhaustion

Depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, and burnout are frequently diagnosed ailments. “Depression, in particular, has reached epidemic proportions—it is thought to affect more than one in ten people in the Western world at some point in their lives. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 350 million people are affected by it globally. Seventeen million people experience CFS worldwide, and more than 1 million people are currently diagnosed with CFS in the United States. […] Burnout features among the three most commonly diagnosed complaints in the workplace, after backache and stress,” notes Anna Katharina Schaffner in her Exhaustion: A History (2016). ² All these conditions include physical and mental exhaustion as their core symptoms.

As Schaffner argues, exhaustion can be difficult to separate from other diagnoses. “Is exhaustion a state we can quantify scientifically, or is it a wholly subjective experience? Is it primarily a physical or a mental condition? Is it predominantly an individual or a wider sociocultural experience?” Exhaustion can be physically experienced as lethargy, weakness, fatigue, and lassitude. It can be a temporary experience or a chronic condition. Mentally and emotionally, exhaustion can manifest itself as lack of motivation, hope, enthusiasm, resilience, initiative, self-belief, and as disillusionment, irritability, and weariness. As Schaffner points out, “Sometimes exhaustion is seen as the consequence of other symptoms: sometimes it is thought to be their cause.”

Mark Momplaisir, personal trainer, institutional psychologist, and author of Strong Women, Fed-up Men, Defeated Sons, Broken Daughters: Healing Generational Pain (2021) and The Power of You (forthcoming) pointed out in an interview with the author that when his clients complain of being tired, the first step is to have a conversation to understand what is causing the exhaustion (for classes and workshops; see https://healingvibes.org/). “Are you sleeping enough? Are you managing work in a healthy way? How are your relationships—familial and romantic? Are they draining you or are they satisfying? Maybe you are tired because you are not processing what you are eating well enough and are not getting enough energy from what you're eating. When was the last time you had a checkup with your doctor?” In a holistic approach, one attempts to understand on a deeper level what is going on with the client physically, emotionally, and mentally.

The difference between physical and mental exhaustion might not be as clear-cut. Momplaisir noted that with his fitness clients, the tiredness is often not physical. “My clients have a lot going on in their lives. They don't necessarily know how to manage some of their responsibilities or find a balance between their work life and home life. What I usually do with most of my clients—besides teaching them how to exercise—is teach them how to manage life. How to manage stress and decrease stress. Once that happens, they learn how to live a life that is less stressful, with less fatigue, less mental exhaustion, and full burnout from work.”

Fatigue at Work

What we do for a living plays a key role in whether and how exhausted we feel. Recommendations regarding movement are bound to be closely related to one's occupation and the amount of one's daily physical activity. Movement needs and advice for physical and mental rest are different for someone who works in a seated position, in an office setting, and for someone whose job involves heavy physical labor.

Liina Pääbo, occupational health physiotherapist, noted in an interview with the author that in her experience, sedentary workers tend to feel the fatigue mostly as mental exhaustion (for articles and information, see https://xn--tfsioteraapia-imba1h.ee/en/blogi). The people whose work involves heavy physical labor also feel the fatigue mentally, especially if they have to be very focused when doing the physical activity. However, they tend to experience manual handling of heavy objects and having to be in an uncomfortable physical position for long periods of time as the most challenging aspects of their work. “They feel the fatigue in their bodies. Their joints and muscles are aching, especially in case they are on their feet the whole day and wearing heavy safety boots. If you are walking on a concrete floor and you take 20,000–30,000 steps per day, you feel that in your calves. Your feet are so tired. By the end of the day all you want to do is lie on the couch and do nothing,” she noted.

Pääbo underlined the concept of physical activity health paradox. “If we do leisure time physical activity, it is very good for our physical and mental health. Movement is prevention and a part of the cure for depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular problems. But when we talk about occupational physical activity—the activities you do for your work—it is typically moderate and low intensity but continues for a very long time. It is monotonous and you cannot take breaks as often as you would like. This type of physical activity is not very good for the cardiovascular system. The mortality rates are higher and the fitness levels of these workers are actually not as high,” Pääbo explained.

What kind of movement practice to adopt depends largely on what the person experiences physically and mentally for most of the working day. “When an office worker tells me about the exhaustion they feel, I can very confidently say ‘definitely exercise.’ Do walking meetings, take the stairs, have exercise breaks. In sedentary work, your cardiovascular system does not get enough exercise. But when we talk about the people whose jobs involve a lot of physical activity, breaks during the day are much more important as well as figuring out whether some of the labor could be automated,” Pääbo pointed out. “Thinking about your occupational health is something exciting,” she added, encouraging people to consider their movement needs from the perspective of their work.

Motivation and Self-Discipline

As Alex Soojung-Kim Pang notes in his Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (2018), studies show that people of any age, gender, and athletic ability benefit from exercising. ³ Movement and exercise can increase brain power, boost intelligence, and provide stamina and psychological resilience. “Studies of the effects of fitness programs on brain structure and health have shown that exercise improves brain structure, just as it does the cardiovascular system and muscles,” he observes. “Exercise doesn't just make your brain healthier by reducing cholesterol or improving cardiovascular capacity; exercise actually induces profound structural brain plasticity,” he says. He points out that “exposing yourself to predictable, incremental physical stressors in the gym or the playing field increases your capacity to be calm and clear-headed in stressful real-world situations.” Treating exercise as “something that would be good to do when we finally have the time” is not productive. “We shouldn't be surprised that people manage to be physically active and do world-class work. We should recognize that they do world-class work because they are physically active,” he argues.

The value of exercising against stress and fatigue is easy to comprehend cognitively. To pick up the weights, to dedicate the time for exercising, to see a movement practice as an integral part of one's daily life is another matter. Self-motivation and self-discipline are integral in maintaining a commitment to a movement practice. Working with a coach or attending a group class in person or online or using a workout app or an online program can be helpful, especially for people for whom working out by themselves is difficult.

“You have to find a reason for why you're doing it. You have to get to be able to say, ‘This is what needs to be done. I'm going to commit to just doing it instead of finding reasons not to.’ You have to come to the space where you value the outcomes that come with weight training, for example. You prioritize that outcome over the feeling like you're going to be bored. If you get stronger, your metabolism gets faster. If you fall, it is less likely you're going to break something. Your bone density increases. We were created to pick up things, to move things around. Because of how our society is designed, a lot of us do not get to do that. So we have to be intentional about lifting weights and exercising whether we think it is boring or not,” Momplaisir explained.

One's approach to exercising plays a key role in continued motivation. For Momplaisir, lifting weights is therapeutic and fun because he has conditioned himself to seeing it that way. “When I exercise, I stop worrying, stop stressing, stop thinking about anything in my life that could be a stressor. My exercising time is my time to meditate, to decompress, and to let go.” “I'm in the moment, focusing on the exercise. Especially if you are working with a coach or with friends—being in that environment and having someone to hold you accountable and say, ‘just one more repetition, keep going’ makes you be in the present moment. Even after you leave the workout, you feel good because you are still running on that endorphin,” he adds.

Matt Jones, a participant in my somatic movement classes and a weight training teacher, similarly noted that weight training can be a type of meditation. “You're being asked to be truly present with your psyche and in your body. In body building, you're being asked to be truly present with your actual muscle. You're focusing on a muscle group with extreme attention to literally feel the fibers working. You're trying to develop a mind-body connection so that you know how all of the different movements connect to your body.”

Balancing workouts with rest is key. “Over-exercising” itself can be a cause for burnout and lead to injuries. Giving the body and mind a break, without feeling guilty, is essential. However, as Momplaisir noted, “the thing to keep in mind is that you can't let that be consistent. You have to have enough discipline to say, ‘I took a break from exercising last week. I am not going to let it happen this week. Exercising is something I need to do.’ ”

Exhaustion and Somatics

While any movement practice can be beneficial and invigorating, somatically attuned, holistic movement practices include some unique characteristics that might help against exhaustion.

Somatic practices, gentler in nature, meet us where we are at. The goal is to connect to the “now body”—the physical, emotional, and energetic state we are in currently—rather than push ourselves to go through a particular regimen or to adhere to the “no pain no gain” approach. Modifying the movements, finding one's own movements, working within one's own range of motion, at one's own tempo, and taking breaks and listening to one's own needs are all welcome in a somatic movement class. Our energy levels, mood, and strength fluctuate—in somatic movement classes we can learn to embrace and work with these changes and develop self-care and self-compassion. These notions are particularly important during the times when we feel fatigue or experience burnout, injuries, transitions, and life challenges.

In somatic movement practices, particularly somatic dance practices such as Nia, SuryaSoul, and JourneyDance, among others, pleasure plays a key role in motivating people to keep returning to movement as a source of revitalization. ⁴ In Nia and SuryaSoul Soma, for example, we flow between easy-to-follow choreography and free dance. The participants are free to adjust and make the movements their own, to add their own personality, creativity, and style. The instructions frequently invite the participants to choose movements that feel pleasurable in the body. The classes do not feel like something that we “need” to do but rather something that we “want” to do.

The simplicity of the choreography and the freedom to include express one's own movements make participants feel able to perform the movements rather than worry about not getting the steps. We learn to see movement and dance as sources of pleasure and wellbeing. “[T]he way it is now, exercise is in the category of ‘work’ and that's not where it should be. […] Make pleasure the goal [of exercise]—as in dancing—and it will lead to good health,” as is noted in Bill Hayes' Sweat: A History of Exercise (2022). ⁵

As a trainer of somatic strength and flexibility classes, where the focus is on being present in the body and feeling its sensations, I have observed in my own practice how being mentally or physically exhausted is not necessarily a drawback or a reason not to exercise. ⁶ If physical exhaustion is not such that one is in danger of hurting oneself, being exhausted does not necessarily hinder a somatic strength training session. When we bring a sense of curiosity and deep body listening to our strength training practice, being physically tired before the exercising is an intriguing point from which to start the movement exploration for several reasons.

First, when we are exhausted, the body parts tend to feel heavier. In strength training, we want to connect to the heaviness of the body and/or the dumbbells—we want to learn about weight and use weight, not momentum and fast movement. We want to learn how to navigate weight, move with it, hold it, and place it down mindfully. In a state of exhaustion, we are more naturally connected to this sense of weight: the body feels heavier.

Second, when we are tired, our movements naturally slow down, which helps in somatic inquiry of tracing sensations. The slower the movements, the more we sense them. We can use this state of exhaustion to get more curious about the body and more aware of what is happening inside.

Third, when we are mentally exhausted, a somatic session can rejuvenate us mentally: we ask the mind to trace sensations, not to engage in analysis and cognitively complex abstract tasks or life worries. We enter a different state of mind where mental processes are united with and following the sensations of the body.

Fourth, when we enter the workout being exhausted, we feel the “before” and “after” effect more clearly. The feeling at the end of the session affirms the importance and energy-giving nature of mindful physical movement.

In a somatic strength training class, we notice how resting and release are a part of the movement experience. For example, doing quadriceps exercise with the back on the ground, knees bent, one leg extending and bending, we can notice how a certain area of the body is working: the quadriceps muscles are contracting to lift the lower leg. However, in this position, a large area of the body is resting: the head, the back, the chest, the arms, the upper abdominals are not working. We can direct the attention to these parts and, while the quadriceps are working, learn to let go more and more deeply in any other area of the body where we might be holding tension and let the ground support us.

Additionally, in any movement, one muscle group is contracting while the opposite muscle is releasing and lengthening. In the exercise above, while the quadriceps are contracting, the hamstrings are lengthening. Focusing on this experience of release and expansion of the opposite muscle is another way in which we can tap into the sensations of relaxation and pleasure during the workout itself.

As we learn to notice these moments during our movement experiences that present opportunities to rest and to enjoy being in our bodies, the workouts take on a different quality. They become sources of rejuvenation and gathering strength. We do not leave the class feeling more exhausted but fuller of energy. As Janet Marks, a participant in my Restorative Strength and Flexibility class, noted, “I often wake up feeling tired, achy and almost exhausted. On some Sunday mornings prior to class, I sense I may not have the energy to even take it. However, rarely missing a class, I attend and invariably, as the minutes progress, I feel energy and joy coursing through my body generating an exciting rejuvenation of my physicality along with a much improved mental outlook. I leave my apartment ready to conquer the world.”

Yoga can similarly teach us to value rest. In yogic practices such as Hatha yoga and Kundalini yoga, physical poses and moving and breathing sequences are followed by rest. During these pauses, the body has a chance to integrate the physical and energetic effects of the movements. In Hatha yoga, the pauses also keep the heartbeat and the breathing even. Yoga nidra, a guided meditation practice, helps participants enter a state of deep relaxation. In an interview with the author, yoga teacher Reelika Rohtmaa noted that the idea is not to fall asleep during yoga nidra but rather to stay conscious and relax deeply. “If you fall asleep, that means you are not getting enough sleep. You have to create a rhythm in your life so that you have enough rest on a daily basis.”

Sometimes we rest particularly well in a mindful movement class. Long guided meditations at the end of a class or a time spent in savasana or the corpse pose, with the back on the ground, the legs and arms to the sides, can be favorite moments for many. Being in a different environment, where someone else is holding the space for us, away from the physical objects of our own household and the mental preoccupations of our daily lives, can nourish the parasympathetic nervous system and feel deeply restorative.

Conclusion and Tips

By way of conclusion, I offer some tips for countering exhaustion with the help of movement:

A movement practice does not have to take a long time. Even 10 minutes of exercising, dancing, or stretching will leave an impact.