Art by a robot
There is a particular kind of tiredness that sleep doesn’t seem to touch. We’re talking beyond physical exhaustion. The tiredness feels deeper than that. It’s the kind of tiredness that comes from always being alert, always anticipating, always carrying something that perhaps no one else can see.
You might be the person everyone relies on. The one who keeps things moving. The one who solves problems before anyone else notices they exist.
Or perhaps you’re building a business that means something deeply personal to you, trying to balance your creativity with the realities of earning a living.
Or maybe you’ve been exploring your own personal growth for years, reading books, attending workshops, working with tarot, meditation or coaching, hoping to feel lighter than you do now.
From the outside, these lives look very different yet underneath them often sits the same quiet question.
Why do I still feel like I’m carrying everything?
We’ve been told for a long time that stress is simply something to “manage”. Something to reduce, to organise or to overcome. If you found the right routine, the right practise or the right mindset, eventually you would become someone who wasn’t stressed anymore.
What if stress wasn’t simply something that happened, like some external factor? What if it’s been an internal place we find ourselves that offers a weird kind of familiarity when coping?
The identities we don’t realise we’re building
None of us wakes up one morning and decides to become “the responsible one.”
We don’t consciously choose to become the fixer, the peacekeeper, the dependable colleague, the person who always has the answer or the friend who never asks for help. Those identities are usually built slowly.
Perhaps you learned that being useful earned acceptance. Perhaps staying prepared helped you avoid criticism. Perhaps looking after everyone else felt safer than paying attention to your own needs. Perhaps uncertainty once carried consequences that taught you to stay constantly vigilant.
These adaptations are often intelligent responses to the environments we’ve lived through. Or perhaps it’s deeply societal that certain people carry more responsibilities.
Either way, the difficulty comes later because what once protected us can quietly become the way we believe we have to live. The habits remain, even when the circumstances have changed so we continue carrying responsibilities that were never entirely ours.
We continue saying yes because saying no still feels uncomfortable. We continue trying to anticipate every possible outcome because uncertainty still feels like danger.
Over time, stress stops feeling like an emotion and it begins to feel like part of our personality.
When your old way of coping no longer fits
There often comes a point where something begins to shift. You notice that constantly “rescuing” people leaves you feeling resentful.
You realise you’ve built a successful business, yet you rarely allow yourself to enjoy it.
You recognise that leading others has become emotionally exhausting because you’ve been carrying not only your own responsibilities but everyone else’s emotions as well.
Or perhaps your spiritual practises no longer feel like places of peace because they’ve become another thing you’re trying to “get right”.
This can be a confusing place to find yourself. The old identity no longer feels sustainable but the new one hasn’t fully arrived yet. This means you know you cannot keep living exactly as you have been, you just don’t know who you’ll become if you stop. That uncertainty can feel frightening because you’re beginning to loosen your grip on an identity that has spent years trying to keep you safe.
Becoming someone who doesn’t need to carry everything
One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that it feels confident.
Often it doesn’t. It feels uncertain. It feels like questioning habits that once seemed unquestionable. It feels strange to leave an email until tomorrow. It feels uncomfortable to let someone else solve a problem. It feels unfamiliar to admit that you don’t know the answer. It feels almost irresponsible to rest before you’ve earned it.
These moments can feel surprisingly vulnerable because they ask us to trust a version of ourselves we haven’t fully met yet. To trust the person who believes they don’t have to prove their worth through constant effort. The leader who creates space for other people to think instead of providing every answer. The business owner who understands that meaningful work doesn’t require perpetual urgency. The individual who realises that healing isn’t about becoming perfect but about becoming more fully themselves.
At first, these moments are so small that we often dismiss them. Yet they matter. They are often the earliest evidence that something within us is changing because we are beginning to relate to ourselves differently.
A different relationship with stress
Within humanistic magick, stress isn’t viewed simply as something to eliminate. Nor is it seen as something to push through. Instead, it becomes something we can become curious about.
Practises such as journalling, meditation, symbolic reflection, ritual or working with cards are not intended to magickally remove every difficulty from our lives. They create intentional spaces where we can notice the stories we have been living inside.
Sometimes these practises reveal the expectations we’ve placed upon ourselves. Sometimes they help us recognise old patterns that no longer serve us. Sometimes they simply offer enough stillness for us to hear our own thoughts again.
Alongside approaches drawn from psychology, coaching and reflective practise, these experiences can help us distinguish between genuine demands in the present and protective patterns that belong to the past. It’s about learning to meet reality as the person you are becoming, rather than remaining trapped in the survival strategies of who you once needed to be.
A gentle reflection
Rather than asking yourself, “How do I stop feeling stressed?”, try asking something different.
Imagine sitting beside the version of yourself who first learned that carrying everything was necessary.
Without trying to change them, ask:
- What were you trying to protect?
- What did you believe would happen if you stopped?
- Which of those beliefs still belong in your life today?
- If you no longer needed to survive in that way, who might you become instead?
You don’t need immediate answers. Sometimes the questions themselves begin the change.
Perhaps this is what healing feels like
We often imagine that becoming less stressed will feel dramatic. That one day we’ll wake up completely calm, entirely certain and effortlessly balanced. But real life is rarely like that.
More often, change arrives quietly. It looks like pausing before reacting. Accepting help without guilt. Choosing rest without needing to justify it. Allowing uncertainty to exist without rushing to remove it. Trusting that your worth isn’t measured by how much you carry.
These moments can seem insignificant because they don’t announce themselves as transformation, but they’re often the first signs that an old identity is beginning to soften.
Long before your circumstances fully change, your relationship with yourself begins to. Perhaps that is the real work of becoming someone who lives with less stress. In slowly discovering that you no longer need to carry life in quite the same way.
References
About Humanistic Magick
Humanistic Magick is a psychology-informed framework developed by Andie Brookes that integrates reflective and symbolic practises to support meaningful, lasting personal change. You can explore the full reference guide here: https://magentaschoolofmagick.com/what-is-humanistic-magick/
Thank you for subscribing. By subscribing you now have premiere access to exclusive content. Do you know someone who would like to enjoy all our free content? Please share this with them and invite them to subscribe too!
