Rest

As we reach the end of another year, many of us are fortunate to have some time off from work.

This tip is relevant for this break and also to help manage our day to day busyness.

In this post, I share three thoughts:

1. Why is rest important?

2. What are the different types of rest?

3. And how you can get the most from rest.

Rest is critically important for success as it directly contributes to our physical and mental wellbeing.

Rest gives our body time to heal, it allows our body time to repair and recover.

Rest allows you to reset. Neuroscience and psychology shows that rest enables us to recharge and that good rest is not being idle.

So if it’s not idleness, what are the different forms of rest?

In her book, Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity,** **Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith shares seven unique types of rest:

1. Physical rest - means taking a break from physical activities. This can come in the passive form of sleeping or the active form of exercise.
2. Mental rest - this helps with constant mental demands, and allows you to combat mental fatigue, lack of concentration, and that lethargic feeling of brain fog. Mental rest includes short breaks between tasks, unburdening your mind by writing down thoughts, switching off your phone and avoiding social media to give you time to disconnect.
3. Emotional rest - allows you to take a break from emotional demands, usually from interactions with others who drain your energy. Ways to do this include giving yourself space for contemplation, avoiding stressful situations and spending time alone
4. Sensory rest - is removing yourself from constant sensory inputs, this can be overwhelming sound or vision or light and it overstimulates and fatigues your senses. Listening to calm music, taking a soothing bath, or practicing deep breathing are things that can help here
5. Creative rest - is removing the need for the constant demand of needing to produce and create things. Doing fun things, that you want to do and enjoy, will give you the opportunity for creative rest
6. Social rest - in this context, social rest is the ability to recognise relationships that revive versus ones that exhaust. For social rest, it’s spending time with people who can help by letting you be yourself
7. Last is spiritual rest - this is how you experience your personal relationship with the world around you and your place in it. Spiritual rest provides you with a sense of purpose and belonging. Ways to achieve this? Participate in a community organisation that aligns with your interests, volunteer for a cause that’s meaningful to you or simply spending time in nature.

As you can appreciate, rest is more than just sleep, there’s many facets to rest and it’s useful to find the rest you need.

How do you get the most out of rest?

Take rest seriously and dedicate time for it. Allocate time for rest and if there’s “no time”, decide what you will give up to allow time. As the saying goes, “If you don’t make time for your wellness, you will be forced to make time for your illness.”

Rest should be a priority, not an after thought. In his book, Rest: Why you get more done when you work less, author Alex Soojung-Kim Pang says, “Rest is not this optional leftover activity. Work and rest are actually partners. They are like different parts of a wave. You can’t have the high without the low. The better you are at resting, the better you will be at working.”

So treat rest as a skill. As with any skill, you need to approach it with mindfulness, focus and discipline. This involves developing a strategy by setting goals, creating a routine and sticking to it. With practice, you will learn to get better at rest, and therefore get more from it.

Lastly, establish clear boundaries, when resting, rest, don’t try to rest and work at the same time. I made this mistake when I planned to study on a holiday trip. Not only did I not do the study I hoped to get done, but was stressed out for not studying, which ruined my holiday. So have the discipline to not allow work to sneak in and sabotage your rest.

I hope this has helped you to understand why rest is important, the different types of rest and how to get the most out of rest.

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Image credit:

Photo by Javier Peñas on Unsplash

https://unsplash.com/photos/person-on-camping-hammock-tied-on-tree-UI1zMu-otWc