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.