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Why You Feel Torn Between Pushing Through and Resting

3 May 2026Self and Growth, Burnout7 min read

If you have ever sat at a desk past nine, half-finished work in front of you and your body asking you to stop, this piece is for you.

It is 9.45pm at a desk in Raffles Place. The deck for tomorrow's review is still not done. The phone lights up with another message in the family group chat. Dinner has gone cold. Your mother is asking when you are coming home. Outside, the monsoon rain is dragging across the windows.

One voice in your chest says: just finish. You have come this far. Push through.

Another voice, lower in the body, much quieter, says: stop.

Both voices feel like you. Both feel right. The old reading is that you are conflicted, indecisive, perhaps weak. The more honest reading is that two protective parts of you are awake at the same time, and they are arguing because they are both trying to look after you.

The conflict is not the problem. The conflict is the information.

Inner conflict is not failure

Most of us were raised to interpret two opposing pulls as a flaw. A clear-headed person decides; a confused person agonises. By that logic, the woman lingering on the message and the man hovering over the deck are weak or undisciplined.

A trauma-informed reading of the same scene is very different.

We are made of parts. This is not a pathology. It is how a human nervous system organises itself across time, role, history, and demand. The part that sits at the desk at twenty-eight is not the same as the part that hides in a bedroom at eight, even though they live in the same body.

There is a way of looking at this from a model called Internal Family Systems. The idea is that the human mind is not one smooth voice. It is closer to a household. Different parts of you developed at different times, in different conditions, for different reasons. The part that goes quiet when someone raises their voice is not the same part that drafts the email at midnight. They are not character flaws. They are the company you have been keeping inside yourself.

A part is not bad because it pushes you somewhere uncomfortable. A part is loud because something it cares about feels unprotected.

When two of these parts disagree, both tend to get louder, not weaker. The push-through part doubles down. The rest-asking part doubles down. The body, caught between them, tightens. Sleep gets shallow. The Sunday afternoon is spent recovering from the week and dreading the week to come.

Every part has a good reason

This is the door to self-empathy, and it is worth slowing down to walk through it.

Family therapist Richard Schwartz, who developed Internal Family Systems and gave the model its central book No Bad Parts, has a stance that turns most self-criticism on its head. Every part of you, including the parts whose behaviour you cannot stand, is trying to do something positive for you. Even the part that procrastinates. Even the part that goes quiet in a meeting where you wanted to speak. It learned, in some earlier season of your life, that this behaviour kept something safe. The behaviour may now be costing you. The intent underneath is still trying to protect you.

What that means in practice is that most of the parts you are most ashamed of are not character flaws. They are parts stuck in old jobs. They learned a survival role at age six, or fourteen, or twenty-two, and nobody ever told them the situation has changed. They are still working the shift they signed up for back then.

If you have spent years frustrated with the part of you that keeps overworking, or the part that goes quiet when you should speak up, the usual instinct is to fight it. To shame it into stopping. To call yourself lazy or undisciplined.

That fight has almost certainly not worked. Not because you are not trying hard enough, but because the part you are fighting is convinced it is keeping you safe.

Self-empathy begins the moment you stop asking why am I like this and start asking what is this part of me trying to do for me.

You cannot bully a protector into standing down. You can hear it, and slowly help it trust that the situation has changed.

The part that pushes through

Look at the push-through part for a moment, as if it were standing in front of you instead of speaking from inside you. What is it actually trying to protect?

In Singapore, this part wears familiar clothes. It is the kiasu part, that has watched its peers move ahead and refuses to lose ground. It is the filial child part, that pays for the parents and absorbs the disappointment. It is the eldest daughter part, that holds the tone of the whole family. It is the breadwinner part, that has learned that other people eat because you do not stop.

This part is often very old. It learned, somewhere in childhood or adolescence, that resting got punished, or that someone else paid the cost when you slowed down. By the time you are sitting at a desk in Raffles Place at 9.45pm, the lesson has hardened into a personality.

There is a small move I learned from trauma psychiatrist Frank Anderson, in conversation with psychotherapist Lisa Ferentz, that helps. Rather than putting a clinical label on the part, let it name itself. Not "this is my anxiety" but "this is the one who keeps us safe". Not "this is my inner critic" but "this is the one who does not let mum down". A label is a category. A name is a relationship.

Honour this part. It has done extraordinary work for you. It does not, however, get to drive every decision unchallenged.

The part asking for rest

Now look at the other part. The slower one. The one that has been quietly asking, for weeks or months, for you to stop.

This part is also a protector. What it is protecting is not less important than what the push-through part is protecting; it is just slower to make its case.

It is protecting your body. It is protecting your sleep and the sustainability of your career across years rather than this quarter. It is protecting the relationships that will fall away first if you keep overriding it. It is protecting the version of you that is still around in five years.

Singer and writer Michael Gungor has a line that lands here, quoted in psychotherapist Morgan Johnson's recent piece on burnout. "Burnout is what happens when you try to avoid being human for too long."

Burnout is not the cost of caring. It is the cost of overriding a protector for too long.

The part asking for rest is often quieter than the part asking for performance. Which is precisely why it gets ignored, until the body forces the conversation.

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A kitchen table where each part has a seat

When two parts are at war, the move is not to choose the winner. It is to call a meeting.

Imagine a kitchen table inside you. Each part gets a seat. You ask each one, in turn, what it is afraid of, and what it is trying to keep from happening. The argument does not vanish. The volume drops. The parts stop shouting because they have stopped being ignored. This is one of the central images in Internal Family Systems therapy. It works in a therapy room because it works inside the person; the therapist is mostly helping you set the chairs out and stay calm enough to listen.

You can do a quieter version of this without a therapist in the room.

After the desk, before the bed, take ten minutes. Notice which voice is loudest right now. Ask it, gently, what it is trying to protect. Let it say its piece. Then ask what the quieter voice underneath it is trying to protect.

You are not asking either part to stand down. You are asking them to share the table.

The work is to be the one at the head of the table. Not the part that pushes. Not the part that collapses. The you who can hear all of them and choose with the whole system in the room.

Back at the desk

It is still 9.45pm at the Raffles Place desk. The deck is still unfinished. Your mother's message is still on the screen.

Nothing has been solved.

There is, however, a third option that was not available five minutes ago. Not push through. Not collapse. Pause, listen, and choose with both voices in the room. Sometimes that means finishing the deck. Sometimes it means closing the laptop now and answering your mother first. The choice is less important than the fact that you made it from the head of the table, and not from one of the seats.

Find Your Way Back to Yourself.

Crisis support and a note on this piece

This piece is educational and is not a substitute for psychotherapy. If you are reading this in a season where the push-through part has been driving for too long, and your body is no longer absorbing the cost quietly, it is worth working through with someone. If you are in crisis in Singapore, please reach out. Samaritans of Singapore (SOS) is available at 1767. The Institute of Mental Health 24-hour helpline is 6389 2222. In an emergency, call 999.

If any of this resonates and you would like a space to work through it, you are welcome to Book a Consultation or Explore Working Together.