Why People in Caring Professions Need to Rest Differently

If you spend your working week holding space for others, as a therapist, nurse, social worker, teacher, or carer, you will probably recognise this: you leave work, you sit down, you tell yourself you are resting but the conversation from this morning is still running. The patient you are worried about is still there and the emotional weight of the day hasn't gone anywhere. You go to the gym, the next day you go again. The weekend comes, you make plans, have family round for Sunday lunch and the tiredness in your body just becomes normal. Unnoticeable.

You start to lose your passion, your compassion and your empathy, all the things that brought you to this profession. You become irritable with patients and colleagues. Your professional standards start to slip. That pain between your shoulder blades is back. You reach for the biscuits and coffee to get you through the day.

I have experienced this myself (a package of chocolate fingers would be finished in an afternoon!) and seen it within hospitals, schools and care homes time and time again. It is called compassion fatigue - and understanding this will make you realise (if you are reading this and know what it feels like) that the rest you are getting isn’t enough for the emotional load you give.

What compassion fatigue actually does to the body

The term compassion fatigue is widely used in healthcare but not explained at the level of the nervous system, so I started to look into it a bit more.

It is often described as the "cost of caring" - a form of emotional weariness that builds from holding space for people in distress, day after day. But what's actually happening underneath that is physical.

When you spend a working day with vulnerable people, you are regulating your own responses in real time, so that the person in front of you feels held and trusted. You are, at a neurological level, absorbing the distress of another person and processing it through your own nervous system. Most of us have not been taught how to regulate our own emotions anyway. Add on regulating your emotions while holding pain or distress in others - it will start to show up in your nervous system.

This keeps your stress response quietly ticking over. Your body stays on low-level alert because there is always the next patient, the next sad story, the next person who needs something. Over time that shows up as broken sleep, getting ill more often, hormonal dysregulation, physical pain and eventually burnout. In the workplace it shows up as irritability, rudeness and disengagement and poor practice.

I started looking into how this affects the NHS and found that stress, anxiety and depression are now the single biggest cause of sick days, nearly 29% of all absence in 2024. Six million working days lost to mental health in a single year.

Why passive rest isn't enough

Most of us default to the same things after a hard day. We watch something, scroll, eat chocolate, have a glass of wine, and try to sleep. But for a nervous system that's been on low-level alert all day, none of that actually discharges the tension. You are still taking in information, still responding to stimuli and never fully letting go of the day.

Sleep is our most important restoration tool but when activation is high, sleep itself gets compromised. So many people in caring roles describe sleeping a full night and waking exhausted. When the nervous system hasn't properly shifted into rest mode before sleep, the things that should happen overnight like cellular repair, hormonal regulation, immune buffering are incomplete.

So how can we help people in caring professions not burnout?

The last thing anyone in a caring profession needs is another thing to do, another practice to get right, another box to tick. 

Active rest is something quite specific: a body-based, guided practice that does the work of calming your nervous system for you. You don't have to ‘do’ anything, just be open to receive it.

This is where I believe Yoga Nidra is particularly relevant for people in caring roles. It's a guided meditation you do lying down, you follow a voice (a set of instructions) and you can’t get it wrong. And what happens in the body during the practice is now well researched, your nervous system shifts into rest mode, cortisol levels drops, and your brain moves into the kind of deep rest it doesn't always reach during ordinary sleep.

A 2025 randomised controlled trial by Moszeik et al. found that even 11 minutes of daily Yoga Nidra produced measurable reductions in salivary cortisol, the direct biological marker of stress, alongside improvements in anxiety, depression, sleep quality and rumination.

These are not self reported outcomes from people who enjoyed a relaxing Yoga class. These are biological changes, measured objectively, in a controlled trial.

And why this matters beyond just you

There is a systems argument here as well as a personal one, a bigger public health issue.

The mental health crisis among NHS staff is costing around £12 billion a year. Behind that number are real people, experienced, skilled, deeply committed people who are chronically depleted and do delivers worse care. Not because they care less but because the physiological effects of sustained sympathetic activation impair cognition, emotional regulation, empathy and decision-making.

Supporting people in caring roles to rest differently is not a wellness add-on. It is, I would argue, a clinical and organisational priority.

THE EFFECTS OF YOGA NIDRA

What it does

Reduces Stress: Yoga Nidra activates the pineal gland, which helps the body release melatonin - a powerful hormone known not only for supporting sleep, but also for its anti-inflammatory and immune-regulating effects. The cool thing, is they still do not know yet how it regulates the immune system, it just does. As melatonin levels rise, cortisol (the body's primary stress hormone) naturally decreases, helping shift the nervous system out of "fight or flight" and into a parasympathetic state.

This practice is especially beneficial for anyone experiencing a high stress lifestyle and/ or managing an auto-immune disease. And for people under chronic stress, this can provide a profound sense of calm and reset.

A study showed that against traditional medication, when Yoga Nidra is used regularly for 3 consecutive weeks it significantly reduces depression, anxiety and insomnia and was shown to be more effective than the medication itself.


Improves Sleep Quality: 75% of total sleep time in adults is know as Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) however due to our modern lifestyle (screens, processed foods etc) this stage of sleep is limited causing a sleep deprived, caffeine dependent society. Yoga Nidra calms the nervous system and allows the brain to drop from active beta brain waves to slow wave delta brain waves - (NREM). Yoga Nidra promotes restorative rest as just one session is equivalent to 4 hours of deep sleep. Over time, it also helps rebalance disrupted sleep cycles, which are increasingly common in screen bound, always on work cultures.


Promotes Deep Healing: Deep rest is essential for physical and emotional recovery. For anyone managing chronic stress, burnout, or recovering from illness, Yoga Nidra supports cellular repair and nervous system regulation, offering a powerful antidote to technology overstimulation.

People who are recovering from chronic illness, surgery or chronic stress need deep states to rest and restore. Yoga Nidra induces the body into a deep rest, supporting the body into ‘slow wave sleep’, which allows for regeneration from a cellular level.


Enhances Mental Clarity:  The practice bridges wakefulness and sleep, accessing deeper layers of consciousness and supporting emotional processing. It helps quiet mental chatter and clear cognitive overload - like closing tabs on a busy computer screen which allows for renewed focus and clarity on all levels!

Sunday reset - spring series

As a physiotherapist, I've spent 15 years working with people whose bodies are holding more than they realise.

Chronic pain that doesn't respond to treatment. Fatigue that sleep doesn't fix. Immune systems that keep failing. Nervous systems are stuck in a low-grade chronic stress. 

We treat the symptoms. But rarely do we treat the state the body is living in. The patient has normalised it and doesn’t even notice it.

The truth is, most people in our Western always-on society do not know how to rest. I didn't. We are information-overloaded, overworked, and when we finally stop the mind keeps racing, ruminating, replaying. Rest becomes another thing we can't quite get right.

This is why I started integrating Yoga Nidra into my clinical practice and why the emerging neuroscience behind it matters to every healthcare professional, not just those working in wellness (Western medicine needs science to make people listen).

In 2024, researchers at IIT Delhi and AIIMS Delhi published the first brain imaging study of Yoga Nidra in. Using fMRI scanning, they found that the Default Mode Network, the area of the brain responsible for ruminating negative thoughts, becomes significantly less active during the practice. The more accumulated practice a person had, the more pronounced the biological effect in the brain.

Even first-time practitioners - people who never practiced meditation before - showed meaningful activity in the brain regions responsible for emotional processing and sleep regulation from their very first session.

How does this matter in the clinical setting? Because a dysregulated nervous system is not a mental health problem in isolation, it shows up as chronic inflammation, poor immune function, disrupted sleep, hormonal imbalance, and slow tissue repair. All things we see every day in physiotherapy. And this low-grade chronic stress, that we do not notice within ourselves and in our patients, is now scientifically linked to long-term illnesses and auto-immmune diseases.

In my clinical opinion Yoga Nidra is not a ‘wellness fad’ or an ‘alternative therapy’, it is an evidence-informed tool for creating the biological conditions in which deep healing becomes possible.

Rest is not passive nor do we need to earn it. It is medicine and it is time we start prescribing it.

I'm currently running Sunday Reset - a weekly online breathwork and Yoga Nidra series for people who need their nervous system supported. If you work with patients or clients (or for yourself!) who are carrying chronic stress, fatigue, or burnout - I would love to connect.

Sign up here -> https://forms.gle/prnhejMsYYxT2364A

Or email me to connect

#Physiotherapy #YogaNidra #NervousSystemHealth #EvidenceBasedPractice #HolisticHealth #Breathwork #ClinicalWellness