It was a Friday morning in Montreal and I hit snooze for the third time.

I wasn’t sick. I took one of those long, heavy sighs — the kind of exhale that carries the weight of something you can't quite name yet. The commute to the office felt like something requiring more than I had. So I stayed home. And instead of going back to sleep, there I was again with my laptop open, telling myself it made sense to get a head start on the week.

I had spent the better part of eighteen months flying from Montreal to Toronto every Monday morning for a high-visibility project I had volunteered for, fought to lead, and tied my next promotion to. I was early in my career at Deloitte, determined to prove something, and I had been running at full speed since day one. It wasn’t just at work. I simply believed that’s how life was meant to be lived — in constant motion, constantly producing. I didn't question it. I assumed everyone operated this way and that easing up meant falling behind.

Fridays were supposed to feel different. Back in my city. My phone would fill with plans I had made weeks earlier — dinners, catch-ups, time with people I genuinely loved being around. And I would cancel. Or worse, I would disappear. No text, no explanation. I carried so much shame about that. Not because I didn't want to show up. I did. But I had nothing left to show up with.

I kept telling myself I'd slow down once things settled. Once the project wrapped. Once the fiscal year ended. And since there was always another stretch, slowing down kept getting pushed to a place that never actually arrived.

Eighteen months in, on an early Monday flight to Toronto, sitting in my seat in a sharp outfit ready to present to the CISO of one of the largest banks in Canada, I felt cold sweats move through me without warning. My vision blurred. I could barely stand up. I had no control over any of it.

At the hospital intake, I couldn't remember my address.

They discharged me with two words: panic attack. Vitals are normal, everything's fine. I spent two days in my hotel room unable to do anything except sleep. A colleague kept checking in, bringing me to lunch, making the small decisions I had no capacity to make for myself.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith is a physician who spent years studying why people who sleep eight hours still wake up exhausted. Her answer changed how I think about rest entirely.

We don't have one battery. We have seven.

Physical rest is the one we talk about: sleep, recovery, movement. There's also mental rest, which you need when your brain won't quiet down even after the laptop closes. Emotional rest, for when you've been managing other people's feelings all day and have nothing left for your own. Sensorial rest, when your nervous system has been processing noise, screens, and input for hours without pause. Social rest, creative rest, and spiritual rest. Each one a distinct resource, each one depleted by a different kind of demand.

When I look back at those eighteen months in Montreal, I can now name exactly what I was running out of. It wasn't physical energy. I was training, sleeping, and functioning. What I was depleting every single day was emotional and mental, without a single targeted way to restore either.

My Fridays were full of social events that asked for more of exactly everything I had already given. My commute home from the airport on Thursdays offered no sensorial break; just a phone full of messages and a laptop with emails coming in faster than I could answer. Those two minutes in the morning after the third snooze, that afternoon walk I should have taken away from the screen, they weren't productive. They were the deposits I kept skipping.

There is a reason the body responds to breath the way it does.

It's the vagus nerve, a two-way communication pathway between the brain and the body. Your thoughts, your worries, that meeting you dread — they all travel along this pathway as physical signals: tense shoulders, palpitations, that knot that forms just below your breastbone. But the pathway works both ways. What you do physically, breathe slowly, release tension, pause, sends a signal to the brain: everything is okay, you can stop scanning. When you exhale longer than you inhale, you're not just breathing in conscious patterns. You're sending that message on purpose. And the brain listens.

Dalton-Smith's research echoes this and reframes the whole thing: if your definition of rest is sleep or lying on the couch watching a series, without asking yourself which battery actually needs recharging, you will keep waking up tired because you are not resting for the right thing.

Even as high performers, we rarely stop to ask ourselves which part of us is truly exhausted. Learning to use the body as a starting point changes everything.

I used to think rest was something you earned. Something that came later. It never occurred to me that it could be integrated into the rhythm itself and that, in fact, it was what made that rhythm possible in the first place.

Air travel didn't teach me that. Everything that came after did.

I still think about that Friday morning in Montreal sometimes.

I had built a life that left no room for the kind of rest that actually restores and my body said so in the only language I hadn't learned to ignore.

That third snooze. That long, heavy exhale before I opened the laptop. My body already knew what I was about to spend years understanding.

And the colleague who kept checking in, who brought me lunch without asking, who made the small decisions I had no capacity to make, he gave me something I hadn't given myself in eighteen months.

A pause.

Slow down, carry less, breathe more.

PS — The best time to rest is when you don't have time for it. It sounds paradoxical until it doesn't. If your rest only happens when everything else is finished, it will never happen. This week, create a two-minute pause. Breathe deeply, long enough to notice which battery is actually running low.

See you Saturday.

Victoria Grandury
CEO & Founder, Limitless Rebel
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