5 Things I Learned When I Hit Rock Bottom
I write about healing, trauma recovery, fitness, nutrition, mental wellbeing, and personal growth. Combining professional expertise with lived experience, my goal is to share practical tools, evidence-based insights, and honest conversations that help people move forward and realise they are not alone.
There have been moments in my life when getting out of bed felt impossible, moments when grief sat so heavily on my chest that I could not see a way forward, and moments when trauma, burnout, heartbreak, betrayal, illness and exhaustion seemed to collide all at once, leaving me feeling completely broken.
What I have learned over the years is that rock bottom is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like cancelling plans because you cannot face another conversation. Sometimes it is sitting in your car crying before walking into work. Sometimes it is staring at a message for hours because you do not have the emotional capacity to reply.
Sometimes, it looks like you are functioning perfectly well on the outside while quietly falling apart behind closed doors. You can still go to work, answer emails, train, laugh with friends and post photographs on social media while feeling as though something inside you is slowly shutting down. That is one of the hardest versions of rock bottom because nobody can see how much strength it is taking just to appear okay.
I have spent years healing from childhood trauma, abusive relationships, burnout, ADHD, grief and the emotional impact of an HSV diagnosis. I have had to rebuild my relationship with myself more than once, and I have learned that healing is rarely a straight line.
There have been times when I thought I had finally moved forward, only for an experience, relationship or loss to reopen something I believed I had already healed. I used to see that as failure. Now I understand that healing often happens in layers. Each time we return to the wound, we meet it with a little more awareness, compassion and strength.
I do not claim to have all the answers. I am still learning, still growing and still getting things wrong. But there are a few things that have repeatedly helped me find my way back to myself when life felt impossible.
If you are in that place right now, these are the five things I want you to remember.
1. Get brutally honest with yourself
The biggest shift in my healing journey happened when I stopped pretending I was okay. For a long time, I wore the mask of being strong. I told people I was fine when I was not. I convinced myself that I could carry everything alone because I had spent most of my life doing exactly that.
When you have lived in survival mode for a long time, independence can become part of your identity. You learn not to need anybody. You become the capable one, the dependable one, the person everyone else turns to. But being able to carry everything does not mean you should have to.
The truth was that pretending to be okay had become exhausting. I was not only carrying the pain itself; I was also carrying the weight of hiding it. The moment I became honest about how much I was struggling, something shifted. Everything felt lighter. Not easier. Lighter.
There is something incredibly powerful about finally being able to say, “I’m not coping,” “I’m burnt out,” “I’m heartbroken,” “I’m struggling,” and “I need help.”
These words are not a sign of weakness. They are often the beginning of real change.
Honesty does not immediately remove the pain, but it removes the additional pressure of pretending. It allows you to stop performing strength and start giving yourself what you actually need.
Sometimes that honesty means admitting that a relationship is hurting you. Sometimes it means acknowledging that the pace you are living at is unsustainable. Sometimes it means accepting that the coping mechanisms that once protected you are now keeping you stuck.
It can also mean taking accountability for the ways your own unhealed wounds have affected your life and relationships. Healing is not only about recognising what happened to us. It is also about becoming curious about how those experiences shaped our reactions, choices and patterns.
That is not about blaming yourself. It is about giving yourself the power to change what happens next.
Honesty allows the people who genuinely care about you to support you. It allows you to set boundaries, ask for help and stop abandoning yourself to keep everybody else comfortable.
You do not have to carry everything by yourself, and you do not have to wait until you completely break before admitting that something needs to change.
2. Move your body, even when you do not want to
When life falls apart, movement is often one of the first things we stop doing. I have been there. The gym felt impossible. A walk felt exhausting. Even getting dressed felt like too much effort.
When your mind is overwhelmed, everything can feel heavier. The things that usually help can suddenly feel like another demand being placed on you. That is why movement during difficult periods cannot be about punishment, pressure or chasing physical results.
It is not about burning calories or reaching a fitness goal. It is about reminding your body that you are still here.
Movement has played a huge role in my healing, but it has not always looked like structured training. Some days it has been lifting weights in the gym. Some days it has been swimming in the sea, climbing a mountain or running until my thoughts become quieter.
On other days, it has simply been a ten-minute walk around the block. All of it counts. The goal is not perfection. The goal is movement.
We often believe something only matters if we do it properly. If we cannot complete the full workout, walk for an hour or follow the plan perfectly, we decide there is no point doing anything.
But when you are struggling, five minutes matters. Standing outside and taking a few breaths matters. Stretching on the floor matters. Walking to the end of the road and back matters.
Every time you move your body, you create a little momentum. You interrupt the cycle of overthinking, release some of the tension you have been carrying and give your mind something else to focus on.
Movement will not solve every problem. It will not remove grief, repair betrayal or erase trauma. But it can create enough space between you and the intensity of your thoughts to help you make it through the next hour.
There have been days when movement was the only promise I could keep to myself. Each time I kept that promise, I rebuilt a small piece of trust in who I was.
So forget how far, how fast or how impressive it looks. Just move. That is enough.
3. Eat something, even if it is not perfect
One of the first things that can disappear when we are struggling is our appetite. I have experienced periods when food felt impossible. My stomach would be tight, my mind would be racing and eating would become another task I did not feel capable of completing.
But our brains and bodies still need fuel, especially when they are processing intense emotions. We cannot expect ourselves to think clearly, regulate our feelings or make rational decisions when we are running on empty. Hunger can make anxiety feel sharper, exhaustion feel heavier and difficult emotions even harder to manage.
This is not the moment to chase nutritional perfection. If all you can manage is an iced protein coffee, drink it. If it is a microwave meal, eat it. If it is toast, cereal, soup or a protein shake, that is okay too.
Convenience is not failure. Feeding yourself in the easiest way available is still an act of care.
Right now, your job is not to create the perfect meal plan or prepare something worthy of being shared online. Your job is simply to nourish yourself enough to get through today.
When you are used to setting high standards for yourself, this can feel uncomfortable. We are surrounded by messages telling us that food needs to be clean, balanced, homemade or carefully tracked to count. But during the hardest periods of your life, fed is better than perfect.
Try to treat yourself as you would treat somebody you love. You would not criticise a heartbroken friend for eating cereal for dinner. You would probably be relieved that they had eaten something at all. Offer yourself that same compassion.
Small acts of self-care count. Drinking water counts. Eating a banana counts. Ordering food because you do not have the energy to cook counts. A body that is fed is a brain that is better supported.
4. Sleep without guilt
For years, I viewed sleep as laziness. I thought I should be doing more, achieving more and pushing harder.
Rest felt uncomfortable because I had built so much of my identity around productivity. Slowing down made me feel guilty. Even when my body was exhausted, my mind would remind me of everything I had not completed.
Then I learned something important: sometimes exhaustion arrives when the body finally begins to feel safe.
When we have lived through prolonged stress, trauma or uncertainty, we can become used to functioning on adrenaline. We keep going because we have to. We operate in survival mode for so long that it starts to feel normal.
Then the crisis passes. The pressure reduces. We reach a safer place or step away from the situation that was keeping us on edge. Suddenly, we crash. Not because we are weak, but because we have been surviving for far too long.
I experienced this when I finally began creating a life that felt safer. Instead of immediately feeling energised and free, I felt tired, deeply tired. My body was asking me to repay a debt created by years of hypervigilance, stress and emotional exhaustion.
Sleep is not a failure. It is recovery. It is repair. It is your body finally receiving permission to rest after spending months or years braced for the next thing to go wrong.
Rest may not always mean sleep. It might mean cancelling a plan, switching off your phone, spending an afternoon doing nothing or allowing yourself to stop being available to everybody else.
You are not lazy for needing to recover. You are not falling behind because your body needs more rest than somebody else’s.
You do not need to earn rest by reaching complete exhaustion. You do not need to finish every task before you are allowed to stop.
If your body is asking for sleep, listen. You do not need to earn it. You need it.
5. Find safe people and let yourself be seen
Healing rarely happens in complete isolation. There is a difference between spending time alone because solitude feels restorative and isolating yourself because you are frightened of being seen.
One of the greatest gifts I gave myself was allowing other people into the difficult conversations, the conversations that are filled with shame, fear, anger, confusion and sadness. These were the conversations I wanted to hide because I thought they would make people see me differently.
When we are struggling, shame tells us to withdraw. It tells us that we are too much, too emotional, too complicated or too broken to be understood. But secrecy gives shame somewhere to grow.
Whether it is a trusted friend, a family member, a coach or a therapist, find people who can hold space for your truth without judgement.
For me, therapy changed everything. It gave me somewhere to unpack experiences I had carried for years. It helped me understand that many of the behaviours I had criticised myself for were survival responses developed during periods when I did not feel safe.
Therapy helped, but so did friendships built on honesty, accountability and vulnerability. So did learning that safe people do not punish you for having emotions. They do not use your honesty against you or make you feel as though you have to earn their care.
Safe people are not always the people who feel most familiar. Sometimes familiarity is simply our nervous system recognising an old pattern, even if that pattern is not good for us.
Safe people are consistent. They communicate. They respect boundaries. They allow difficult conversations to happen without turning every disagreement into abandonment.
You do not need people to fix you. You need people who will sit beside you while you find your own way through. There is a huge difference.
Being supported does not make you dependent. Letting somebody witness your pain does not make you weak. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is allow yourself to be seen before you have found the words to explain everything.
Finally, go outside
Nature has carried me through some of the darkest periods of my life, the mountains, the ocean, the forests and the quiet moments watching a sunset.
There is something about being outside that brings me back to myself. Perhaps it is the absence of pressure. Nature does not ask me to explain how I feel. It does not ask me to be healed or productive.
It does not care how successful I am or whether I completed everything on my list. It simply reminds me that life continues. The tide still comes in. The sun still rises. The seasons still change. The clouds move eventually, even when the sky has felt dark all day.
Some of my biggest breakthroughs have not happened in therapy rooms or gyms. They have happened halfway up a mountain, sitting beside the sea or walking alone through the woods.
There is something grounding about standing in front of something bigger than the problem currently consuming you. The problem is still real, but for a moment, it no longer feels like the only thing that exists.
Nature does not heal everything, but it creates space, space to breathe, space to think and space to feel without being watched or rushed.
When everything feels too much, go outside. Breathe. Walk. Sit. Watch the clouds move.
You do not need to climb a mountain or plan an enormous adventure. Sit in the garden. Walk through a park. Drink your coffee beside an open window. Put your feet on the ground and notice what is around you.
Nature has a remarkable way of helping us remember that we belong to something beyond our pain.
Final thoughts
If you are at rock bottom right now, I want you to know something. You do not need to have the whole plan figured out. You do not need to know what the next six months look like. You do not need to heal everything today.
You only need to focus on the next step. Be honest. Move your body. Eat something. Sleep. Talk. Get outside. Then, if you need to, do it all again tomorrow.
Healing is not built through one enormous breakthrough. It is built through tiny decisions repeated over time. It is choosing to feed yourself when you do not feel hungry, going for a walk when your thoughts feel too loud, telling somebody the truth when pretending has become too heavy, and resting before your body forces you to stop.
Progress does not always look impressive from the outside. Sometimes progress is getting through a day you did not believe you could face. Sometimes it is choosing not to return to the person, place or pattern that broke you. Sometimes it is responding differently, asking for help or giving yourself the compassion you have always offered everybody else.
Rock bottom can strip away everything you thought defined you. It can leave you questioning your identity, your choices and the future you believed you were building. But it can also become the place where you finally meet yourself honestly.
One day, you will look back and realise that rock bottom was not the end of your story. It was the place where you finally stopped abandoning yourself and started rebuilding.
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Niki Stannard, NLP Life Coach & Personal Trainer
I’m Niki Stannard, a wellness coach, Personal Trainer, NLP Practitioner, author, and retreat host. My work sits at the intersection of healing, fitness, mindset, and personal transformation, drawing on both professional expertise and my own journey through trauma, burnout, and rebuilding self-worth. Through my writing and coaching, I aim to challenge stigma, inspire hope, and help people create lasting change from the inside out.
