Rest as an essential part of practice

As we move into a new season at Children’s Therapy Tasmania, I want to begin a conversation that feels both timely and deeply important.

It is a conversation about practitioner wellbeing. About sustainability. About what it means to continue showing up in this work with children and families in ways that are ethical, grounded, compassionate, and human. And, perhaps most importantly, it is a conversation about the kinds of support we need if we want to keep doing this work with care over the long term.

I’ll be sharing a series of reflections and curious wonderings focused on the wellbeing and sustainability of practitioners working with children and families. I want to talk about this proactively.  Not when people are already exhausted, depleted, emotionally frayed, or quietly wondering how much longer they can keep going like this.

Because by the time burnout becomes visible, much has often already been carried for too long.

In previous leadership roles, I noticed a familiar pattern emerge around this time of year. After the long, cold winter months, many practitioners began to feel flatter, more tired, and more worn down. The initial momentum of the year had faded. Caseloads often remained full, if not heavier. Administrative pressures had built. Complexity in the work had accumulated. And the emotional labour of holding children, families, systems, risk, uncertainty, and responsibility had started to take its toll.

For many practitioners, Term 3 of the school term felt like the hardest stretch.

Not because they cared less.
Not because they were less committed.
But because they had been carrying a great deal, often for a long time, in systems that do not always make room for the impact of that carrying.

And this year, many practitioners are holding even more.

We are working in a time of significant change across the health, mental health, disability, and community sectors. There are ongoing shifts in funding and service systems. In the NDIS space, reforms such as Thriving Kids are beginning to shape the landscape. Cost-of-living pressures are affecting not only the children and families we support, but practitioners too. Professional changes and uncertainty across associations, pathways, and broader systems have also left many people feeling unsettled, stretched, or not quite where they thought they would be in their professional lives by now.

All of this exists alongside the work itself, which is already relationally demanding.

To work therapeutically with children and families is to be in ongoing relationship with complexity. It is to sit with grief, distress, ruptures, uncertainty, dysregulation, systemic limitations, and the slow pace of meaningful change. It is to hold hope on behalf of others, even when things feel messy or unclear. It is beautiful work, and it is costly work too.

That is why practitioner wellbeing cannot be treated as an optional extra or an individual afterthought.

When the pressure keeps building, our own wellbeing can quickly slide to the bottom of the list. We tell ourselves we will slow down later. Rest later. Reflect later. Tend to ourselves later. But sustainable practice is not built by indefinitely pushing through. It is built by learning to notice earlier, respond sooner, and honour the needs of the nervous system, body, mind, and heart before we reach the point of depletion.

Sustainable practice asks something different of us.

It asks us to recognise that our wellbeing is not separate from our work. It is part of the foundation of our work. The way we care for ourselves shapes our capacity to stay present, reflective, boundaried, compassionate, and connected. It influences how we listen, how we regulate, how we make decisions, how we repair after hard sessions, and how we continue showing up with integrity.

That is why I’ll be exploring a content series focused on practitioner wellbeing and sustainable trauma-responsive practice, including:

• the 7 different types of rest

• when a session stays with us long before its ended

• boundaries as an essential part of ethical and sustainable practice

• when our own parts show up in the therapy room

• a more nuanced approach to self-care, informed by our inner world and different parts of self

A conversation about rest

I wanted to begin this series with rest because, for many of us, rest is both deeply needed and surprisingly complicated.

Exploring the seven different types of rest became an important part of my own recovery and healing from trauma. I still remember the moment my doctor told me that one of the most important things I could do for a nervous system that had been living under chronic stress for many years was to rest.

At the time, that was not an easy message to receive.

Rest had never felt simple or natural to me. In fact, it often felt deeply uncomfortable. It could feel undeserved. Unproductive. Even unsafe. I had absorbed, in ways both subtle and obvious, the belief that rest was something you earned only after everything else was done. Work first. Productivity first. Meeting everyone else’s needs first. Then maybe rest, if there was anything left.

I have reflected many times on where those beliefs came from. Perhaps they were shaped by personal history, by chronic stress, by family narratives, by the values of Western culture, or by the expectations so often placed on women to keep going, keep functioning, and keep carrying. Whatever the source, I had internalised the idea that hard work came first and rest came later.

What I had not yet understood was that rest is not simply a reward at the end of effort. Rest is a biological, emotional, relational, and spiritual need.

For those of us doing deeply relational and emotionally demanding work, rest is not separate from good practice. It is part of what makes good practice possible.

The 7 types of rest

When I first thought about rest, I imagined holidays, sleep, switching off, lying down, or doing nothing. While those can absolutely be part of rest, I came to realise that rest is much broader than that. We do not only become tired in one way, so we cannot always be restored in one way either.

Sometimes we are physically tired.
Sometimes we are emotionally overloaded.
Sometimes we are mentally saturated.
Sometimes we are spiritually disconnected, socially drained, creatively flat, or sensorily overwhelmed.

Different types of depletion require different kinds of care.

That is where the framework of the seven different types of rest can be so helpful. It gives us language to better understand what is happening within us, and it invites us to respond with more intention and self-compassion.

Here are the seven types of rest, explored a little more deeply.

Physical rest
Physical rest is about honouring the needs of the body. It includes the obvious forms of rest, such as sleep, lying down, slowing down, and taking time to recover physically. But it can also include more active forms of physical restoration, such as stretching, gentle movement, massage, warm baths, getting outside, or noticing the places in your body that have been bracing all day and inviting them to soften.

For practitioners, physical rest matters because therapeutic work is not only cognitive or emotional. It is also embodied. We hold tension in our shoulders, jaws, stomachs, backs, and breath. We sit for long periods. We move between sessions with little pause. We carry stress physically, often without realising it.

Physical rest asks: What does my body need in order to feel supported, replenished, and less burdened?

Emotional rest
Emotional rest is about having spaces where you do not need to perform wellness, composure, or professionalism. It is the kind of rest that comes when you can be honest about what you are carrying, acknowledge the impact of the work, and let yourself feel what is true without needing to minimise it, package it up, or hold it all together for others.

For child therapists, emotional rest can be especially important because the work asks us to be emotionally attuned while also regulated and containing. We are often tracking multiple emotional worlds at once: the child’s, the parent’s, the family’s, the system’s, and our own. Over time, this can become heavy.

Emotional rest might look like supervision that truly makes room for you, conversations with trusted colleagues, journalling, therapy, tears, naming what feels hard, or simply allowing yourself to stop being the one who holds everyone else for a moment.

Emotional rest asks: Where do I get to be real? Where can I put some of this down?

Mental rest
Mental rest is about supporting the thinking mind. It is what helps when your thoughts feel crowded, your attention feels fragmented, or your brain feels like it has too many tabs open at once.

Practitioners working with children and families are often holding a huge amount of mental load: remembering details across multiple clients, planning sessions, writing notes, making clinical decisions, coordinating with systems, assessing risk, responding to emails, and constantly shifting gears throughout the day. Even when we finish work, our minds can remain switched on.

Mental rest might include taking proper pauses between sessions, reducing multitasking, building quieter transitions into the day, limiting information input, brain-dumping tasks onto paper, or having moments where your mind is not required to solve, analyse, or organise.

Mental rest asks: What would help my mind feel less crowded and more spacious?

Spiritual rest
Spiritual rest is not necessarily about religion, though it can be for some people. More broadly, it is about connection to meaning, purpose, values, and the deeper why beneath what you do. It is the kind of rest that comes when you reconnect with what matters most, and when you remember that you are more than your output.

In helping professions, it can be easy to become consumed by demands, paperwork, crisis, or the day-to-day pace of service delivery. Spiritual rest invites us to step back and reconnect with what anchors us. It helps us remember the heart of the work, our values, our humanity, and what gives us a sense of meaning.

This might look like time in nature, prayer, reflection, meditation, meaningful conversations, creative ritual, dadirri or stillness, or reconnecting with the values that guide your practice.

Spiritual rest asks: What reconnects me with meaning, purpose, and the deeper parts of myself?

Social rest
Social rest is about honouring our relational needs with more intention. It involves noticing that not all connection restores us in the same way. Some interactions leave us feeling nourished, seen, and settled. Others leave us more drained, overstimulated, or disconnected from ourselves.

As practitioners, we often spend our days in high-contact roles. We are listening, attuning, responding, giving, holding, and relating for much of the day. Even if we deeply value connection, we can still become socially depleted.

Social rest may mean spending time with people who feel easy, safe, and mutually nourishing. It may also mean saying no to demands for social energy, reducing contact where needed, or allowing yourself solitude without guilt.

Social rest asks: Which relationships restore me, and where might I need more space?

Sensory rest
Sensory rest responds to the impact of overstimulation. Modern life asks a lot of our senses. Screens, bright lights, traffic, noise, constant notifications, busy clinics, shared workspaces, fluorescent lighting, and the ongoing input of the day can leave our nervous systems feeling overloaded.

For child therapists, sensory load can be especially significant. We may be moving between noisy environments, richly stimulating play spaces, emotionally charged sessions, computer work, phones, and the sensory demands of being constantly alert and responsive.

Sensory rest may look like turning down noise, stepping away from screens, sitting in silence, dimming lights, reducing background stimulation, spending time in nature, limiting digital input, or simply having moments where your nervous system is not being asked to take in so much.

Sensory rest asks: What is overwhelming my system right now, and how can I create more sensory spaciousness?

Creative rest
Creative rest is about allowing yourself to receive beauty, wonder, inspiration, playfulness, and imagination without needing to produce anything in return. It is restorative in a different way. It helps soften the pressure of constant output and invites us back into curiosity and aliveness.

This kind of rest matters because so much of our work relies on creativity. We are constantly adapting, responding, imagining possibilities, making meaning, and being flexible in the room. Over time, creativity can become something we only use in service of work, rather than something we get to experience for ourselves.

Creative rest might include spending time in nature, engaging with music, art, colour, stories, play, beauty, or spaces that awaken delight and imagination. It might also mean letting yourself enjoy creative experiences without needing them to be productive, therapeutic, or useful.

Creative rest asks: What helps me feel inspired, playful, or connected to beauty again?

Thinking about rest intentionally

When we begin to understand rest in this broader way, it can open up a gentler and more practical path toward wellbeing. Instead of asking ourselves why a weekend away did not fix everything, we can ask a more compassionate question: What kind of tired am I?

Because sometimes what we need is sleep.
Sometimes what we need is less noise.
Sometimes what we need is a safe place to cry.
Sometimes what we need is time alone, time in nature, a good supervision conversation, or a moment of beauty and playfulness.

Each form of rest offers an opportunity to notice and respond to a different need within ourselves.

This is where I’d encourage you to begin.

Take some time to sit with each of the seven types of rest and reflect gently:

Where am I currently getting enough?
Where do I feel depleted?
What am I already doing that supports me?
What feels missing?
What small practices could I begin to build in more intentionally?

Try not only to think about the big, obvious, once-in-a-while forms of rest, but also the micro-practices that might fit into everyday life. Sustainable practice is rarely built through occasional grand gestures alone. More often, it is shaped through small, repeated moments of responsiveness to ourselves.

A few minutes of quiet between sessions.
A slower lunch.
A walk outside.
A voice note to a trusted colleague.
Stretching your shoulders before notes.
Turning off notifications for an hour.
Sitting in the car for a minute before going inside.
Choosing not to fill every empty space.

These small moments matter.

Once you have identified what might support you, I want to gently encourage you to actually book it into your calendar.

Not as an optional extra.
Not as something you will get to if everything else is finished.
Not as a reward for overextending yourself.

But as part of the infrastructure that supports your wellbeing, your professional longevity, and your capacity to keep doing meaningful work with children and families in a way that is sustainable.

Because practitioner wellbeing matters.
Your wellbeing matters.
Your sustainability matters.

An Invitation to seek further support

If this reflection has resonated, and you have found yourself thinking, “I might need some support with this,” 1:1 supervision could be a meaningful next step.

Supervision can offer a dedicated space to pause, reflect, and think more deeply about your practice, the complexity you are holding, and what sustainability might look like for you in this season of work. It is often in these spaces that we begin to notice what we need, untangle what feels heavy, and find our way back to a more grounded and supported way of working.

If you’re looking for a space to capture some of these thoughts and reflections, grab a copy of my free ‘Supervision Topic Tracker’ - make your wellbeing a priority in your work.

Kind regards, 

Ashleigh