Did you know there are seven different types of rest that are needed for you to feel fully recharged? In our busy lives, with so much drawing and draining our attention and capacity, sleep just doesn’t cut it anymore. What we know now is that sleep isn’t rest. To sleep well, you need to ensure you are resting well throughout your days, and most of us don’t have the time.
When we do, we often feel lazy, like we should be doing something on our to-do list, and it feels indulgent to rest in any of its forms. Rest is anything but lazy; it’s essential for our health and well-being. We simply don’t know how to really rest anymore. Societal pressures have made striving and swimming upstream toward a goal the mission—for what? The vacation you get once, maybe twice a year? There is a reason why you can come home from vacation feeling like you need another one. It’s because one or two weeks off a year will not replenish the areas of rest you may be depleted in. What’s needed is daily rest, woven into everyday life to help you live more fully.
How often do you feel low energy? On edge? Struggle with poor concentration and lack of focus? Forgetfulness? Exhaustion? Irritability? Boredom? Craving solitude? Disconnected? These are all signs you may be depleted in rest. When we dive into the seven different types of rest, there are many suggested activities you can do, and the benefits you receive are endless.
By learning where you are depleted and making a conscious effort to add restful moments into your daily life, you will gain increased awareness, restored energy, better immune function, improved sleep, reduced inflammation, enhanced mental clarity, boosted resilience, better decision making, lower stress and anxiety, a calmed nervous system, better hormone balance, more joy and motivation, strengthened connections, lifted confidence and mood, and a renewed sense of hope and meaning.
There are lots of moments in the day when rest could be taken. Most of us resist real rest because slowing down brings things up—the ache in your lower back you’ve been ignoring, the tightness in your chest, the shortness of breath, the thoughts that you try to push away. Being busy clouds our awareness of what we are feeling, truly feeling inside.
For me, I ignored rest for so long that eventually I crashed, collapsing on the floor of my office in tears. Looking back, I can see I had been in a state of overwhelm and survival mode for a long time, and my body was not happy. It had been speaking to me for a long time, but I wasn’t resting enough to hear what it needed, and then I was forced to listen. I’d crash into bed at the end of the day, but still struggled with sleep. I tried various things that were meant to help, but nothing worked. In the end, there is no medication that will help you rest. Medications can help with symptoms, but if you are depleted in rest, you need to learn to make it an essential part of your days.
Beyond making time, setting boundaries may be necessary. Every “yes” that you give someone or something out of obligation, or against what your intuition is telling you, is an energy thief. It takes from your daily energy bank, leaving you feeling depleted, among other symptoms noted above. We only have so much in our daily energy bank, and how you spend the day before—your rest, your sleep, all the things—will determine whether your bank in the morning is full or only at 50%. Setting boundaries can take time, and sometimes we need to learn the hard way, as I did, how important rest truly is. But I want to help share my story so that others can learn from me and not reach a state of collapse and exhaustion. I want to help shift the narrative from “rest is lazy” to “rest is essential.”
Using the framework of Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith and the seven types of rest—Physical, Mental, Emotional, Sensory, Creative, Social, and Spiritual/Purposeful—can guide you toward a more restful, full life. Beyond that, the book by Nicola Jane Hobbs, The Relaxed Woman, explores the relaxed woman as an archetype and way of living. We all have our own individual journeys and can learn from one another, taking pieces of each other’s life lessons that resonate and weaving them into our own path forward.