The video popped up unexpectedly in my feed – Jim Carrey, his face more lined than I remembered, speaking with that unsettling clarity that sometimes comes through when comedians talk about pain. “Depression,” he said, “is your body saying ‘I don’t want to be this character anymore. I don’t want to hold up this avatar you’ve created in the world.'” Then came the phrase that stuck in my ribs like a dull knife: deep rest. Not a disorder, not a failure, but deep rest. The kind your nervous system demands when it’s been running emergency protocols for too long.
My body recognized the truth of this before my mind could articulate it. There were years – decades, really – where sleep felt like temporary death rather than restoration. I’d wake more exhausted than when I closed my eyes, my muscles holding onto tension like they expected to be attacked mid-dream. The nightmares weren’t just psychological; they left physical bruises from thrashing against invisible threats. At 24, when I first slept through the night without screaming awake, I cried from the sheer novelty of unbroken darkness.
This is what happens when your body learns, early and thoroughly, that rest equals vulnerability equals danger. The nervous system – that brilliant, overprotective guardian – starts treating relaxation like negligence. Breathing slows? That’s not safety, that’s letting your guard down. Muscles unclench? Obviously you’ve forgotten the rules of survival. The very state we call “depression” might be the body’s last-ditch effort to force the rest it’s been denied, like a computer crashing after too many unsaved documents.
What Jim Carrey’s reframing exposes is how our language shapes the experience itself. We say “I suffer from depression” as if it’s an invading force, not a logical response to unsustainable conditions. The term itself comes from the Latin deprimere – to press down. No wonder it feels like drowning. But “deep rest” suggests something the body is actively doing for preservation, not something passively endured. The difference between “I’m broken” and “I’m healing” might hinge on which phrase we reach for first.
Of course, knowing this doesn’t magically dissolve the weight. Understanding why your nervous system keeps sounding false alarms doesn’t stop the adrenaline surges. But it does create a sliver of space between the experience and the story we tell about it – and in that space, sometimes, we can begin to whisper back: I see what you’re trying to do. You can stand down now.
When Language Becomes a Cage: The Stigmatization of ‘Depression’
That video of Jim Carrey lingered in my mind longer than I expected. Not because of his comedic timing, but for how he reframed the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest’. It struck me how much power resides in the words we use to describe our inner experiences. Mainstream culture has conditioned us to view depression through a lens of catastrophe – dark clouds, bottomless pits, losing battles. These metaphors aren’t wrong, but they’re incomplete.
Consider how we talk about depression in daily life. We say someone ‘struggles with’ or ‘suffers from’ depression, as if it’s an invading army rather than a potential signal from our psyche. News reports describe it as an ‘epidemic’, medical papers classify its ‘symptoms’, and well-meaning friends urge us to ‘fight’ it. This language shapes our experience more than we realize. When your body needs rest but society calls it laziness, when your nervous system demands downtime but culture labels it weakness, the dissonance itself becomes a source of shame.
Celebrities like Carrey perform an unexpected service by disrupting this vocabulary. When he describes depression as his body’s way of demanding profound rest, he’s not minimizing the pain – he’s changing its context. Other public figures have done similar work: Lady Gaga discussing PTSD as her body’s ‘smarter’ response to past trauma, or Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson reframing his depressive episode as ’emotional weather’ that needed to pass through him rather than define him. These aren’t clinical definitions, but they serve an equally important function – they create linguistic escape routes from the prison of stigma.
The words available to us shape what we can feel. In some indigenous cultures, what Western medicine calls depression is referred to as ‘the long remembering’ – a period where the soul reviews unresolved experiences. Traditional Chinese medicine might describe it as ‘blocked qi’. Neither framing carries the moral judgment embedded in phrases like ‘chemical imbalance’ or ‘mental disorder’. This isn’t to reject scientific understanding, but to expand our emotional vocabulary beyond pathology.
Language works on us in subtle ways. Notice the difference between saying ‘I am depressed’ (identity) versus ‘I’m experiencing depression’ (temporary state), or ‘I feel broken’ versus ‘my nervous system is protecting me’. The latter phrases create psychological breathing room. They allow for the possibility that what we’re going through might contain intelligence – that depression could be, among other things, the psyche’s strike against unsustainable living conditions.
So here’s a question worth sitting with: What words do you use to describe your own depressive experiences? Not the clinical terms you’ve inherited, but the private vocabulary that emerges at 3 AM when no one’s listening. Maybe it’s ‘the heavy blanket’ or ‘the gray filter’ or ‘my system rebooting’. There’s no wrong answer, only the opportunity to notice how your chosen metaphors shape what you believe is possible for yourself.
This linguistic awareness won’t cure depression – no play on words can do that. But it might create enough space to ask a new set of questions: If my body could speak its truth about this experience, what would it say? If this isn’t just brokenness, what else might it be? The answers won’t come in words alone, but sometimes changing the words is where we begin.
When the Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets
A high school teacher once told me how she’d suddenly freeze at her desk between classes, heart pounding, though there was no immediate threat. Her classroom was orderly, her students respectful. Yet her body reacted as if she were back in her childhood home, bracing for the next outburst. This is how trauma rewires us – not through conscious memory, but through physiological responses that outlast the original danger.
Our nervous systems keep score in ways our rational minds can’t override. Research on heart rate variability shows that people with childhood trauma often have erratic patterns, their bodies stuck vacillating between hyper-alertness and exhaustion. It’s like carrying an oversensitive smoke detector that screams at every wisp of steam from your morning coffee.
Your body’s overprotection checklist:
- Do you startle unusually easily at sudden noises?
- Does relaxation sometimes trigger guilt or unease?
- Have massage therapists commented on muscles that won’t unclench?
- Do you experience unexplained nausea or dizziness in “safe” environments?
These aren’t character flaws – they’re physiological echoes. The polyvagal theory explains how trauma can leave our autonomic nervous system distrustful of calm. After prolonged periods in fight-or-flight mode, the body struggles to recognize safety even when it arrives. That teacher’s midday panic attacks weren’t irrational; they were her nervous system following old programming that once kept her alive.
One client described it as having emotional brakes that barely work while the accelerator sticks. Modern stressors become amplified because the body responds to today’s email overload with the same intensity it once reserved for genuine survival threats. This explains why some trauma survivors feel exhausted by ordinary life – their systems are doing double duty, reacting to present events while simultaneously managing residual alerts from the past.
The good news? These responses aren’t permanent settings. Like any overworked system, the body needs patient retraining rather than harsh correction. In the next section, we’ll explore practical ways to gently convince your nervous system that rest isn’t a threat – starting with techniques as simple as adjusting your exhale.
For now, consider this: What physical sensations always accompany your stress? The tight jaw? Cold hands? Noticing these signals without judgment is the first step in rewriting your body’s survival code.
Restarting Your Capacity for Rest
When your nervous system has been wired for survival since childhood, the concept of rest often feels foreign—even threatening. The methods below aren’t quick fixes, but ways to gently negotiate with a body that’s forgotten how to power down.
The 4-4-8 Breath: An Emergency Reset
This breathing pattern works like a manual override for your fight-or-flight response. Inhale quietly through your nose for 4 counts, hold gently for 4, then exhale slowly through pursed lips for 8. The extended exhale triggers your vagus nerve—that internal brake pedal evolution installed to counterbalance panic. I keep this technique in my back pocket during subway rides when sudden crowds make my palms sweat and vision tunnel. It’s less about achieving instant calm than disrupting the panic feedback loop. Some days it feels like blowing on embers, waiting for the warmth to return.
Environmental Anchors: Building Safety Through Sensation
Trauma survivors often exist in a perpetual present tense, our bodies reacting to old threats as if they’re current events. Creating tangible anchors—a specific wool blanket’s texture, lavender oil dabbed on wrists, the weight of a ceramic mug—helps ground the nervous system in actual safety. Mine is a chipped turquoise mug I drink tea from each morning, its familiar warmth convincing my hands before my mind that this day isn’t danger. These anchors work cumulatively, rewriting bodily memory through repetition: This scent means home. This texture means now.
The Permission Slip
No list of techniques acknowledges the fundamental obstacle: Many of us carry subconscious beliefs that rest must be earned through exhaustion or achievement. Try writing yourself a literal permission slip—I’m allowed to rest before collapsing—and place it where you’ll see it during decision points. Mine lives taped to my laptop, a reminder that productivity isn’t the rent I pay for existing.
These practices won’t erase trauma’s imprint overnight. Some mornings you’ll still wake with your heart racing for no reason, your muscles clenched against ghosts. But gradually, through these small negotiations, we teach our bodies a new language—one where deep rest isn’t a crisis, but a birthright.
What Kind of Rest Does Your Body Truly Need?
The question lingers long after you finish reading about trauma and depression. Not all rest is created equal—your body may be craving a specific type of respite it’s never been allowed to name. That afternoon nap you guiltily take might not be laziness, but your nervous system’s plea for sensory downtime. The hours spent staring at walls could be your psyche’s version of rebooting a frozen computer.
Some rest needs feel counterintuitive. One reader described craving complete silence after years of hypervigilance toward household noises, while another found solace in weighted blankets that finally quieted her body’s phantom alarms. Your version of deep rest might involve:
- Movement rest: Not exercise, but slow stretches that remind your body it’s safe to occupy space
- Decision rest: A day with zero choices beyond ‘tea or water’ to relieve decision fatigue from constant survival mode
- Time rest: Permission to exist without measuring productivity in hours and minutes for once
Two books helped reframe my understanding of trauma-informed rest. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score explains why traditional relaxation often fails traumatized nervous systems. Meanwhile, Rest Is Resistance by Tricia Hersey dismantles capitalist notions that equate worth with constant labor. Both sit on my nightstand, their dog-eared pages testifying to repeated consultations.
This isn’t about quick fixes. Real rest begins when we stop seeing our needs as problems to solve. Your body already knows how to rest—it’s been signaling you in migraines, yawns, and that peculiar exhaustion no sleep seems to cure. The harder work lies in believing those signals deserve attention.
For more on honoring your body’s neglected wisdom, consider joining our trauma-informed community. The next guide explores creating ‘rest sanctuaries’ in hostile environments—because everyone deserves spaces where survival mode can finally power down.
