Why You're Exhausted Even After a Full Night's Sleep
Owning Pleasure As A Black Woman, Season 7 Episode 4-Rest Series Part 2
You finally sit down.
Not in-between-things sit down. Not checking-my-phone-for-two-minutes-before-the-next-thing sit down. You actually sit, on the couch, in your car in the driveway, on the edge of your bed at the end of the day.
And your body doesn't know how to stop.
Your leg is bouncing. Your jaw is tight. You're already running tomorrow's to-do list. Or you fall asleep the second your head hits the pillow, and you wake up feeling like you never slept at all.
If that's you, there's a gap between how your life looks and how your body feels. This post is about that gap.
A Body That's Exhausted Can't Want Anything
This season of the podcast is about desire. I don't only mean romantic or sexual desire, though we'll get there, because we're all grown. I mean your capacity to actually want things and feel drawn toward something, instead of being pushed by obligation.
Here's what I need you to sit with: a body that is exhausted cannot desire. It can survive. It can perform. It can check every box on the list. But real wanting, real pleasure, takes a body with something left in it, a body that isn't bracing for impact.
Exhaustion doesn't just make you tired. It mutes you.
So before we can talk about what you want, we have to talk about rest, starting with the physical kind.
The Two Kinds of Physical Rest
Most of us were never taught that physical rest comes in two forms.
Passive rest is the one everybody knows: sleep, naps, lying down, letting your body be still.
Active rest is the one high-achieving women skip entirely. Yoga, stretching, walking without a destination, massage, bodywork, breathwork that moves through your body instead of just happening in your head. It restores blood flow, releases tension, and helps your body process instead of just pause.
You can get plenty of passive rest and still be exhausted if you never get any active rest. Sleep turns your brain off. It doesn't unclench your body.
So the next time you catch yourself saying, "I slept eight, ten, twelve hours and I'm still exhausted," try asking a different question. Not did I rest enough? but did I rest my whole self, or just my brain?
And then: did I rest enough to actually want something today?
When Was the Last Time You Let Your Body Receive?
Think about a typical week. You might get your seven or eight hours most nights. But when was the last time you:
Stretched for no reason except that it felt good in your bones and joints?
Took a walk without a podcast in your ear or a to-do list running underneath it? (I'll be honest: I struggle with this one too. There's almost always something playing in my ears.)
Let someone hug you for longer than two seconds? Not the church side hug, a full-on hug, where you let yourself want it and receive it instead of thinking about the next thing.
I recently got a hug at a work event from a woman who held on and really embraced me. It almost made me want to cry how good it felt. That's what I mean. Are you letting your body have experiences like that?
For a lot of us, the honest answer is "not in a long time." That doesn't mean you've done anything wrong. It's often an unspoken belief that active rest, and desire itself, is a luxury you earn after everything else is done.
But nothing is ever all the way done. So the wanting keeps getting pushed back, week after week, and the goalpost keeps moving. Your body won't complain loudly about it. It just gets quieter and quieter, until you can't hear what you want anymore.
You Were Trained to Ignore Your Body
You're not failing at life. You were trained to ignore rest.
A lot of us grew up, whether anyone said it out loud or we just watched it, with the message that strong means not needing anything. Pain, discomfort, and exhaustion are things you push through. They aren't data.
The Strong Black Woman archetype says your value comes from your capacity to endure, not your capacity to rest or to feel. And here's the part I don't think gets said enough: that same archetype trains you to override your desires, too. It's the same muscle.
If you've spent your whole life learning that your needs come last and that wanting things for yourself is indulgent, of course you don't know what lights you up. You've been practicing the opposite for years.
And this pattern came from somewhere real. Generations of our ancestors had to override physical pain and personal desire because there was no room, no safety, and sometimes no choice. That pattern kept people alive. It made sense for the world they were in.
But your body can't tell the difference between I have to push through this because my survival depends on it, I have a headache during a Tuesday afternoon meeting, and I actually want to take the afternoon off and do nothing. It fires the same override every time, and you get dangerously good at not noticing your pain signals or your desire signals.
Your Body Keeps the Truth Your Mind Moves Past
Your mind can say "I'm fine, I'm handling it, everything's under control," and mean it. Your body usually tells a different story: shoulders up around your ears, shallow breathing, a stomach that's been bothering you for a week.
Stress doesn't just live in your thoughts. Your mind works through a hard conversation or a deadline with words and logic. Your body processes it physically. It braces, tightens, and holds. If it never gets a release, through movement, touch, or real physical rest, it accumulates, layer after layer, week after week.
And a body carrying that much weight has no room left for desire. Pleasure and desire need openness, softness, and a nervous system that isn't running as if a bear is chasing it. You can't reach your wants from a body that's in survival mode.
That's why, when a woman tells me she doesn't feel desire anymore and doesn't know what she wants, my first question isn't about her relationship or her mood. It's about her body. What are you holding?
It's also how a woman can look like she has it all together on paper, and still feel like a stranger in her own skin. It's the gap between what the mind says is fine and what the body is actually telling you.
If you're dealing with pain that keeps coming back, like headaches or aches that have lasted weeks, please don't just push through it. Schedule the doctor's or dentist's appointment you've been putting off.
A 30-Second Practice: Somatic Awareness
Somatic awareness means noticing what's happening in your body without trying to fix, explain, or judge it. It counts as real rest, and I think it's also a back door to desire.
Here's how it works:
Pause and ask your body a question: Where am I holding tension right now? Not where you think you should be, just where it actually is.
Ask what that part of you would want, if it could ask for something. While recording this episode, I tried it myself. I felt tension in my lower back, running up and down my spine. My body wanted to get up, go outside in the sun, and get a snack. So that's exactly what I did when I finished.
Add one small action: a breath into the tight place, a stretch, unclenching your jaw, rolling your shoulders down and back.
For you, it might be your jaw, or a tightness behind your sternum that you've been calling "just stress" for so long you stopped noticing it. Underneath it might be something as simple as I want to be touched gently, or I want to feel something other than tired.
You can do this in traffic, in line, at your desk, or right now. Thirty seconds. Notice what changes, and notice whether anything in you softens toward wanting something.
The more you practice, the more you catch things earlier and quieter, before exhaustion has had months to numb you. That's the real value of somatic awareness as rest: your body doesn't have to shout to be heard.
Two Questions to Sit With
I'd love for you to journal on these, or just let them land:
When did you last rest your body without guilt? Not when you last sat down, and not when you technically stopped moving. When did you last rest without the background chatter cataloging everything you should be doing instead? And when you did, did you feel any flicker of wanting underneath the tiredness: pleasure, softness, touch, stillness, just because you wanted it?
What does your body keep asking for that you keep ignoring? It might be simple, like water, a stretch, or an earlier bedtime. And if you go a little deeper, it might be a want you haven't let yourself name because naming it feels indulgent or unrealistic.
If your honest answer is "I can't remember," that's just information. It doesn't have to mean anything about you.
Try This Tonight
Before bed, skip the phone and the doomscroll. Do one slow pass through your body, from your feet to your stomach, chest, and jaw. Don't fix anything. Just notice. If you find tension, breathe into it. If something softens into a want, even a small one, let yourself notice that too. You don't have to act on it.
If it feels awkward or your mind wanders back to your to-do list, that's normal. You're building a relationship with a body that's been on autopilot, running the same override on both pain and pleasure. It gets easier when you keep coming back to it, day after day.
You don't have to fix all of this today. You have a lifetime to get reacquainted with your body. But I'd love for you to leave with one honest question: is my body actually resting, or is it just waiting for permission to want something again?
Your Next Step
If this stirred something in you, I created a free 7-Day Self-Care Reset for high-achieving Black women who are tired of surviving. It's free, it's short, and it meets you exactly where you are, even if you're exhausted and short on time. You deserve to see what seven intentional days can feel like, and what it feels like to want something again.
→ Grab it at javerywellness.com/reset
You can look successful and still feel exhausted and disconnected inside. Closing that gap starts in your body. And if you're watching on YouTube, subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don't miss the rest of this series.
Natasha Riley is a licensed therapist and founder of Javery Integrative Wellness Services. Owning Pleasure As A Black Woman is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute therapy or a therapeutic relationship. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional or the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.