In today’s post, we’ll consider tired feet but also the accompanying fatigue arriving as year-end approaches. We are in October and for many the year is not finished, yet the finish line is already visible. What our end-of-year conversations usually exclude, is something physical, something you literally carry with you … the fatigue in your feet.
The human foot carries the weight of the entire body, it assists with balance, it is used for movement and on average moves your body thousands of steps each day. Add long workdays, lots of standing, commuting and constantly rushing from one responsibility to the next and by October your feet are often heavy, aching and even restless. Many arrive for a Therapeutic Reflexology session with those exact words” “My feet are so tired; I did not even realise how much tension I was carrying in my feet.”
Tired feet are not only a comfort issue. The heaviness at the end of the day is often a signal that the body has been absorbing stress, constant motion and the load of an entire year pushing toward its climax. When your feet become tired, posture and gait often change while tension travels through the legs, hips and lower back. That physical tension affects the nervous system keeping the body in a mild state of stress even when you are trying to rest. That is why you often feel tired this time of the year even after just waking up from a long night’s sleep.
October brings a specific kind of pressure, namely heaped-up deadlines. Projects that were supposed to be completed suddenly demand attention. Year-end assessments loom. Holiday planning adds another layer of mental load, especially with the extremely high fuel price that might negatively affect your vacation plans. Add to that family expectations, financial pressures and low energy reserves and you can begin to understand why you experience fatigue. The workplace, and often society, still expects us to be busy-busy-busy, almost as if busyness is the same as productivity. It is not! Being busy does not mean that you are productive, it merely means that you are occupying your time while your energy tank runs lower and lower.
Ask yourself a few questions:
- Do my feet feel heavy, aching or restless by the end of the day?
- Do I wake up tired, even after a full night’s sleep?
- Do I feel emotionally drained as well as physically tired?
- Do I keep telling myself that I’ll rest in December?
- Do I feel guilty when I am not busy?
If you answered yes to more than one of these, you may be carrying more than tired feet; you may be moving toward the general fatigue that precedes burnout.
When stress continues for extended periods, the body keeps excreting adrenaline and cortisol and remains in fight-or-flight mode. You do not have a physical opponent in front of you, but prolonged pressure acts like an emotional opponent, constantly sucking your energy. If the body is not given time to move into rest-and-digest mode, the result is both emotional and physical exhaustion. The feet are often where that exhaustion shows up first.
“I don’t have time,” you may say. Think about that for a moment. If you do not take care of yourself now, you may spend your entire December vacation simply trying to recover, resulting in beginning the next year already depleted. That is your choice: push through on an empty tank until year-end or take one protected hour now so that the remaining months are met from a fuller tank.
Therapeutic Reflexology will not remove your deadlines, your workload, nor the pressures of year-end. It is a complementary healthcare therapy formally regulated by the Allied Health Professions Council of South Africa (AHPCSA). It does not diagnose, and it does not replace your doctor nor any other treatment you may be using. What it does offer is a foot-centred session in which specific pressure on the reflexes (nerve endings) of the feet helps the body to relax from the inside out. It stimulates the body’s own innate healing ability to rebalance, moving you from fight-or-flight toward rest-and-digest mode while creating the optimal conditions in which unnecessary tension can be let go.
For tired feet specifically, the session addresses the feet themselves and the systems they reflect. Many report that they sleep better after a Therapeutic Reflexology session and wake up feeling less heaviness in the feet while feeling able to meet the work that remains more enthusiastically. Not because the work changed, but because the body has been given time to reset. The ideal is often a late-afternoon or early-evening session when the feet are already tired from the day and the nervous system is ready to settle.
You do not have to wait until December to recuperate. Consider what you have been carrying since the beginning of the year. Consider where the fatigue is sitting, often it may be literally felt in the feet. Then consider giving yourself what the final months of the year actually require, namely a calm, restorative pause. It may be a once-off Therapeutic Reflexology session, or you may choose to schedule regular sessions for the rest of the year ranging from once a week to once every second week to once a month.
Make your Therapeutic Reflexology session today and step into the remainder of the year one step at a time with excitement that December will be your time of vacation and rejuvenation instead of merely time to recuperate.
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Christo A. Scheepers: Therapeutic Reflexologist
DTR (Cum Laude), PhD
AHPCSA: A11945
Pr. No.: 0737453
Tel. 072-800 7243