Did You Know There Are Different Kinds of Rest?

Yep, that's right. There are in fact eight different types of rest! Which do you need most right now?

When we think of rest we often only think of being sedentary eg. sitting/laying on the sofa, or passive rest eg. sleeping/taking a nap where the whole body and senses are resting and inactive.

But our body as a whole system is so much more than this. Our 'body' and our well-being are dependant on our Spiritual, Emotional, Physical Active, Physical Passive, Mental, Social, Sensory, and Creative health.

These are seven of the different types of rest, and this is why, even after days of sleeping well, you cans till find yourself as burnt out, depleted, and fatigued as ever! You can find a full description of each below including examples:

1. Physical Rest

Physical rest has two components. It has the active component and a passive component. Passive being things like sleeping and napping. We need high-quality sleep. But physical rest also includes active things like yoga, stretching, using a foam roller, getting a massage, and making sure that the ergonomics of your work station are not toxic to your body.

Signs that you have an active physical rest deficit could be body aches and pain. It could be swelling in your legs and feet after sitting at your desk for long periods of time; it could be spasms in your back.

2. Mental Rest

Someone with a mental rest deficit might find themselves lying down to go to sleep at night and their mind’s racing and they’re not able to quiet it and fall asleep. Another example is the person who walks into the grocery store and is trying to remember the three items that they went in there for, and they can’t seem to recall the information. They’re struggling with concentration and recall, and they’re not in their eighties, so they’re not someone who we’re thinking has dementia. We’re seeing people in their thirties who can’t remember three items for longer than a few minutes because of this busy brain. They’re not able to hold on to information.

3. Social Rest

Social rest is the rest we experience around life-giving people. Most of us spend the majority of our time with people who are pulling from our social energy. Not that they’re negative people, but they’re negatively pulling from our energy, whether that’s your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your clients—they need things from you. They’re pulling from that social energy. You can tell that you’re feeling that if you ever find yourself saying, “Can I just get a moment for me?” You feel like everybody’s taking, and you never feel like anybody’s ever pouring into you or contributing back into your life.

One of the ways of evaluating your social rest is to think about all of your relationships. Are you always the one who’s pouring out into the lives of others? Do you spend time with people who don’t need anything from you, where you just enjoy each other’s company and each other’s presence? That’s what we want to have in our lives: some people we just enjoy spending time with. Your kids and your spouse can be part of your social rest, but you do have to be aware of the dynamics of the relationship so that you don’t spend all your time pouring yourself into them. Let them pour back into you.

4. Spiritual Rest

Spiritual rest needs vary based on someone’s own belief system. At the very core of that is that need that we all have to feel like we belong—that need that we feel for our work and our efforts to contribute to the greater good. We need to feel like we’re pouring ourselves back into humanity.

Somebody who might be suffering from a spiritual rest deficit is someone who goes to work for a paycheck, but they’re like, “What I do doesn’t really matter. What I do doesn’t benefit anybody. If I do it or don’t do it, if I do it with excellence or not, it’s not going to make a difference.”

If you don’t feel like your work has meaning, you will experience burnout. Find a way to connect to desire for meaning, whether that’s through community, a work culture where you feel like what you do matters, or a faith-based culture. We all have that need to feel like we belong and that we are contributing.

5. Sensory Rest

Whether or not you are consciously aware of the sensory input around you, your body and your subconscious self are going to respond. That sensory input might be the sound of phones ringing in the background, the bright lights of your computer, the kids playing while you’re at your home office, your notifications going off on your phone or your email, or even the visual backgrounds of everyone on a Zoom call.

All of these sensory inputs over time can cause you to develop sensory overload syndrome. The number one way most of us respond to sensory overload is irritation, agitation, rage, or anger. And so people with a sensory rest deficit may find that you’re good in the beginning of the day, but you can’t understand why at the end of the day you’re so agitated or irritable.

6. Emotional Rest

Emotional rest specifically refers to the rest we experience when we feel like we can be real and authentic in how we share our feelings. Many of us carry quite a bit of emotional labor privately, in that we don’t share with people what we’re feeling. We may be carrying emotional labor because we don’t want to share with our kids how bad things are with the pandemic and how it’s affected our finances. You may be carrying emotional labor if you’re in management and you had to lay off employees but you couldn’t show your feelings because you wanted your team to feel like everything was great.

There are a lot of times we carry emotional labor and we hide our feelings without giving them the opportunity to be expressed and to heal, to be exposed. The symptoms of an emotional rest deficit are feeling that you always have to keep your emotions in check, that you never have the freedom to be truly authentic about what you’re feeling.

7. Creative Rest

So creative rest is the rest we experience when we allow ourselves to appreciate beauty in any form. Whether that’s natural beauty, like the oceans and the mountains and the trees, or created beauty, like art, music, and dance.

The way you can tell when you have a deficit in this particular area is when you have a hard time being innovative. When you have a hard time brainstorming, when problem-solving is difficult for you. Creativity is more than just art; it’s any type of innovation. A lot of people over the pandemic used an excessive amount of creative energy because everything as we had known it changed. There was a lot of problem-solving required, which means there was a lot of creative energy required. And most of us, because we don’t see ourselves as creatives, never thought about how we would pour back into that energy well as we were draining it.

Did any of those descriptions stand out, has a little light bulb pinged on for you as you realised you have been neglecting some of these areas? Are there one or two areas where you thought - "Yep, that's me!' ? Or are you thinking that all of them apply to you?!

The problem with prolonged stressors, overworking yourself, and not balancing your work, play, and self care, is that most of these areas get seriously neglected.

Then once we are so run down we're struggling to function, we try to claw our energy back by sleeping longer or days on the sofa. But as you can see, that is not always enough!

To truly restore, nourish and support our full health and wellbeing all of the areas of rest need to be nurtured, restored, and maintained.

THIS is why I always say health, true health and wellbeing, is never a one step quick fix. Your health will always be an ongoing process, a journey, one whose destination shifts and changes as we age, as we develop, get pregnant, encounter hardships and challenges, give birth, hit menopause, encounter trauma, age....

Each and every change we make in our lives has a direct impact on the needs of our body and our overall wellbeing -- that is our Spiritual, Emotional, Physical, Mental, Sensory, and Creative needs.

But remember, you can’t eat the whole elephant at one time. You have to start with one area.

So which kind of rest do you need most right now?

xo Emily