7 kinds of rest (other than sleep)

0:00Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:This message comes from Northwestern Mutual. Their financial professionals will build a tailored plan based on your goals, looking out for blind spots and new opportunities. Get started at nm.com, the Northwestern Mutual life insurance company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

0:24Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Hey, it's Marielle. Sometimes I like to sit still, close my eyes, and just take a little rest. I don't mean take a nap. I mean, I do like to do that too. What I'm seeking here, though, is not sleep, but a reset. A moment of conscious pause. If I don't allow for these moments, I hit a wall, and every other part of my life starts to suffer. Dr. Sondra Dalton-Smith remembers when she hit her wall. There was this moment when her kids were young. She just picked them up from daycare, set them on the couch to watch TV. And she had this realization. She had everything she'd been dreaming of, a life that she'd worked hard to build.

1:06the Life Kit team:I had a successful practice. I'd already written a couple of books, had children, husband, house, you know, all the things. My life on the outside looked extraordinarily successful, and it did not feel successful at all to be in the middle of. And so that particular day, I just kind of laid on the floor looking up at the chandelier in my foyer thinking, how did I get here?

1:29Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Sondra is a doctor of internal medicine. And when this happened, she was splitting her time between the office and the hospital and never taking time to recover. This lying on the floor moment led her to write another book called Sacred Rest, Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. In the book, Sondra outlines seven different types of rest that we all need, based on decades of experience seeing patients.

1:54the Life Kit team:You know, 25 years in clinical practice, people would come in and say, something's wrong with me, doc, and I would do all of these tests and nothing would be wrong with them. They're perfectly healthy, but they looked horrible and they felt horrible. And for a lot of them, it was because of one of these types of rest deficit.

2:13Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Physical rest, emotional rest, sensory rest, creative rest will go through the list. But I should say, they don't all look like what I described earlier. That moment where you get very still, close your eyes, and block out the world. Rest can look active. It can look social.

2:30the Life Kit team:It depends on what you're needing in a given moment. I think when you think about rest for myself, I'm always thinking about where am I spending energy? and so depending on where you're expending different types of energy throughout the day are going to impact where you're needing restorative practices to be implemented.

2:48Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:On this episode of Life Kit, I talked to Sandra about those seven types of rest, what they look like, and how to know which ones you need right now. And this is a helpful framework you can use to think through your needs. But as always, when you have medical concerns, talk to your doctor.

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3:44Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Get 20 % off all plans at ahs.com slash NPR and see promo details. See ahs.com slash contracts for coverage details, including service fees, limitations, and exclusions. Support for NPR and the following message come from Warby Parker, the one-stop shop for all your vision needs. They offer expertly crafted prescription eyewear, plus contacts, eye exams, and more. For everything you need to see, visit your nearest Warby Parker store or head to warbyparker.com. This message comes from Northwestern Mutual. One of the biggest life hacks people miss is putting off working with a financial professional.

4:23Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Northwestern Mutual will match you with a financial professional to build a plan based on what's important to you, finding new opportunities to help grow your wealth and protect what you've worked so hard for. Find a better way to money at nm.com, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Company. You talk about seven different kinds of rest in the book. Let's go through them. The first one, as you mentioned, is physical rest. What does that look like other than just lying down?

4:56the Life Kit team:Yeah, so physical rest has two components. You have the passive, which does include things like sleeping and napping. And then physical rest also includes those things that actually help improve your circulation, your lymphatic drainage, your flexibility, the way your muscles and your body feels. So it includes things like going for a leisure walk or getting a massage or like using a foam roller. It also includes things like your body ergonomics, how you function with your workstation and your desk and your chair and the height of your computer monitors. And so it takes into account all the things that can have a negative impact on how your physical body feels and what are some of the restorative practices and activities that help your body to restore itself and to get to a stronger position and feel more energized.

5:44the Life Kit team:list.

5:46Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:All right, takeaway one. Physical rest can be passive. Sleeping, lying down on the couch, or it can be active. You could go for a walk, get a massage, stretch, do yoga, keep your body flexible and in motion. Some signs that you have a physical rest deficit. You feel tired, but you can't fall asleep. You're getting sick all the time. Your muscles are always sore or painful. You're relying on substances like caffeine and sugar to keep you going, or like alcohol and pills to help you get to sleep.

6:23Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:The next ones you talk about are mental rest and emotional rest. I wonder how are those two things different?

6:30the Life Kit team:Yeah, I separate mental and emotional rest because mental rest, we focus primarily on mental processes, decision making, memory function, the ability to have recall, to concentrate. And so someone with a mental rest deficit is this person who lays down at night and can't turn their brain off. Let's say they're super tired, but they lay down in the bed and they're ruminating over all of the things that happen in the day. Or it's a person who finds that they are very forgetful or can't seem to focus their attention to get a job done. And so that's the mental part of it, the decision focus aspect of the brain.

7:10the Life Kit team:The emotional rest part of it is looking at how you process your emotions. And it tends to be one that I find that a lot of people struggle greatly with, because many of us have jobs and careers and lifestyles, where we carry a large amount of professional emotional labor, and the process of staying at a high level of customer service or performance where you don't have the ability to authentically express your emotions in that moment. That can lead to an emotional rest deficit. What are some ways to get emotional rest when you realize you need it? So the three main ways are either expressing your emotions with someone else.

7:52the Life Kit team:And so that could be anyone from a trusted friend to a counselor to a therapist. The trick there is to make sure that you're not doing what a lot of us do, which is trauma dumping rather than emotional rest. Often when someone says they're doing emotional rest, what they're doing is they're actually, rather than processing their emotions and being able to express them, they're actually expressing the event without talking about their emotions. So they may tell all the details of what happened in the situation, but actually never get to what that situation made them feel. Because that's really what emotional rest is about.

8:32the Life Kit team:It's that level of transparency and vulnerability where you can share not just what happened, but how it impacted your emotions, how it made you personally feel and the impact it had on your heart. And so being able to do that with someone where you feel safe and there's a level of trust, that's one way. Emotional rest can also be done through journaling. And some people process through emotional rest through actually some type of creative expression. So, for example, my son, he doesn't particularly like to talk about his feelings, but he plays guitar. And so I'll hear him up in his room sometimes strumming.

9:12the Life Kit team:And depending on what he's playing, I can pretty much let you know what type of emotion he's processing through. And so there's various ways of emoting, and it's a matter of determining what allows you to be able to be your most authentic in expressing how your emotions are impacting you.

9:33Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Takeaway two, we all need mental rest sometimes, a chance to tune out the mental chatter that exhausts and drains us. Mental rest can look like meditation or simply putting down your devices and quieting your mind for a few minutes. It can also look like time blocking, scheduling blocks of time on your calendar to do particular kinds of tasks. Like in this hour, I'm going to make all those phone calls to my doctor's offices and set up appointments. And in this hour, I'm finally going to make those returns. This can help when you're feeling scattered. Some signs you might need mental rest. You're getting irritated when you think about everything on your to-do list.

10:10Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:You feel like you're in a mental fog. You're snapping at people over small inconveniences. or you feel overwhelmed all the time. Then there's emotional rest. That might look like talking to someone you trust about your feelings, journaling, or processing your emotions through another form of creativity or even body movement. Signs that you might need emotional rest. You tend to focus on your failures and flaws. You're always apologizing. Or you feel depressed, angry, or anxious when you're thinking about your life.

10:47Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:We'll have more types of sacred rest after the break.

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12:19the Life Kit team:Okay, what is spiritual rest? Spiritual rest, at the very core of it, is the need that we all have to have a sense of belonging, to know that our life has meaning and has purpose. Some people are able to experience that through a faith-based type system. Others who maybe don't have a faith-based concept or pattern that they follow can experience that as well through things like volunteerism, any type of specific causes that they feel connected to, places where they feel like they are part of something greater than themselves and that they're giving back to the greater good. is the increase of just goodwill and feeling of connection that happens when we do something for others with no ability for them to do back to us.

13:06Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Okay, tell me about social rest. Does this mean taking a break from socializing or resting through socializing?

13:12the Life Kit team:It includes both. So many introverts will automatically go to the thought process, I get to get away from people. So that's a part of it. But the part of social rest that most people are actually most in need of is the rest that they experience when they're around life-giving people. Most of the people in our lives are negatively pulling from our social energy. And that doesn't mean they're negative people. It could be your spouse, your kids, your elderly parents, your clients. It just means they're people who need things from you. So they're socially pulling from you. And then you have to take a look at the other side of your relationships and determine who in my life actually pours back into me.

13:56the Life Kit team:And so it takes a level of intentionality to be aware of how much giving and receiving is happening in the relationships. And I think it's also important to have people in your life where you just enjoy being around them. There isn't this huge expectation of each other other than the expectation of I enjoy your presence. and allowing those relationships to also have some place in our lives. Takeaway three.

14:25Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Though Sondra is Christian, she says spiritual rest doesn't necessarily mean religious devotion. It can include prayer, but also helping others and being part of something bigger than yourself. You may need spiritual rest if you're feeling numb and apathetic, hopeless, trapped, or defeated. Social rest is about resting through community. prioritizing face-to-face time, listening to others instead of just talking, being around people who pour into you as much as you pour into them, and doing things as a collective. You may have a social rest deficit if you find yourself feeling alone, isolated, and detached from family and friends.

15:09Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Well, okay, let's talk about sensory rest. So what does this mean, sensory rest, and why do we need it?

15:17the Life Kit team:Our world is highly sensory overwhelmed. Everything from just the ambient sounds. I mean, our gadgets make sounds. The lights have sounds, depending on the buildings that you're in. Elevators are going off. Phones are ringing all the time. Our cell phones, our notifications are vibrating. So there's this nonstop movement, noise, action that's always going. And it's having an effect on us. I think a lot of us seem to think that we are tuning out many of the sensory inputs that we're experiencing. But if you really think about that process, you're not able to tune something out without your brain filtering it.

15:58the Life Kit team:And so if the brain is working to filter it, then by doing that work, it can become exhausted. It can have a level of fatigue that results from it. And what we find is that many people develop sensory overwhelm throughout their day, and then they have a sensory overwhelm response that presents itself as a psychological outburst. and they're not aware that all day their brain's been filtering through sensory inputs from all the things I just mentioned and that something as simple as taking a couple of sensory rest breaks throughout the day, whether it's noise cancellation earphones or if it's something like having a sensory break.

16:41the Life Kit team:If you're having Teams meetings back and forth all day, have moments where you actually shut the screen, close your eyes, five, ten minutes. It's similar to the reboot we do on our computers when it gets frozen and won't respond to us anymore. We do a hard reset, five minutes, everything's back to normal.

17:01Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:Yeah. This is really huge for me. I get overwhelmed being in Manhattan sometimes. And you're always navigating all these other people and what they're trying to do. So that's like one form of sensory overload because I feel like I'm too attentive to what other people are doing, I guess. You're on high alert. Exactly. And then I start to feel really overwhelmed. And once I get into our office, I'll go into a quiet room and sit alone with the lights off for like five minutes or 10 minutes. Then that really helps me.

17:37the Life Kit team:And that's the thing. It sounds so simple. And I think that's the beauty of it. It doesn't require like some major million dollar sensory deprivation tank, right? to be able to accomplish that. It is actually very simple. It's the level of intentionality I find that most people struggle with. It's not that it's hard, but you have to have a level of self-awareness first. You have to recognize something's not right. I don't feel my best. What's wrong with me? Takeaway four, sensory rest.

18:12Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:I find myself needing this one a lot. This might look similar to mental rest. For me, it's about sitting in a quiet room for a few minutes, sometimes in the dark. You could also try setting aside all your devices for 20 minutes a day. Another way to do this is think about a sensory stressor you experience every day. The screeching of the train on the tracks. The smell of the automated air freshener in the office bathroom. Is there anything you can do to limit your exposure or undo its effects? Also, think about what sounds, smells, tastes, and textures make you feel relaxed and at ease. I like the feeling of velvet, silk, and chenille, and the smell of my hair conditioner.

18:54Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:You may need sensory rest if you find yourself highly sensitive to noises or smells, or the opposite, you're desensitized to smells or flavors, or you're just generally overwhelmed by the sensory inputs in your environment.

19:09Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:okay well let's talk about the final type of rest in the book it's creative rest and you say that's allowing white space in your life and giving room for creativity to show up it seems important here to not turn this into a compulsion to produce some perfect work of art oh absolutely not that's

19:28the Life Kit team:actually just what you said create a work of art that's work yeah it's actually the opposite of creative rest. I did mention you can have an artistic release for emotional rest. Some people do use art as a way to emotionally express themselves, but that's not creative rest. Creative rest is when you allow what's already been created to really unlock creativity inside of you. It's going to a museum or and maybe looking at a type of art you never look at before and letting it awaken something inside of you. For a lot of people, it can be listening to music, or it could even be natural beauty, like going to Central Park or maybe going to the water.