Time to Recharge: Practical Strategies for Finding More Rest and Preventing Burnout
Rest is crucial not only for our energy, concentration and productivity, recovery, and general health and well-being but also to prevent and/or recover from burnout.
But in today’s modern world we don’t get enough of it — be it because of our modern lifestyle, lack of time, societal values and virtues of work and grind, our own expectations and pressures, constant distractions, etc.
In this article I’m going to talk about rest, why it’s so crucial and how to get more and enough of it.
What is “Rest”?
Let’s first define what rest is. What do we mean, when we use the word “rest”.
The first association is probably sleep — and rightly so. Sleep is the single most important lifestyle practice that contributes to every single pillar of our health, wellness, and well-being.
The second association when we hear the word rest is probably physical rest: relaxing and chilling on the couch, bed or armchair, watching TV or series, surfing the web, scrolling social media, or reading a book.
Although sleep and physical rest are very important and essential to our health and well-being, rest has a much bigger spectrum and includes much more than just those two aspects.
Different Types of Rest
Even though we often feel like we’re just physically tired and that we just need physical rest, there’s more to it than just that.
There are 7 different types of rest:
- Physical rest
- Mental rest
- Creative rest
- Emotional rest
- Spiritual rest
- Social rest
- Sensory and Environmental rest
But why is it so important to get all types of rest?
Not all rest is created equal. Depending on the type of work we do and the type of stress we’re exposed to, we need different types of rest to replenish our energy, recover, heal, and support our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health and well-being.
Also, things are interconnected and interdependent: The realms of body, mind, and soul are not separate from each other, but they are connected to each other and form a whole: when something in one of these three areas isn’t right, the symptoms manifest in all other areas.
Because of that, we need to approach things holistically — which means evaluating in which areas are we struggling, which type of rest we lack and which type of rest we need to get more of.
If you want to learn more about 7 types of rest and how to implement them in your life, check out the article below:
Why Don’t We Allow Ourselves to Rest?
Often it’s not the lack of knowledge that is preventing us to live better and improve our life and health — it’s the lack of implementation.
We know that we should be resting, or at least rest more, but why don’t we?
As I quickly touched on in the intro of the article, the answer is multifold.
It’s partly our modern lifestyle that is getting more and more fast-paced and we simply don’t have the time and opportunity to take the rest that we need.
It’s also because of the societal values and virtues that glorify, encourage, and reward workaholism, grind, and hustle.
But it’s also partly our fault: it’s our own expectations of ourselves, our own internal pressures, internal patterns, and belief systems installed in us or inherited from our parents, ancestors, or society.
So the question then becomes:
How To Get More Quality Rest?
1. Identify what type of rest you need
To get all the different types of rest, you first need to know and identify which types you lack and which you need to incorporate into your life.
You can identify which types of rest you need by looking at the deficiency symptoms of each type of rest: I have a full list of symptoms of each rest in my article Why Do You Need Different Types of Rest?
You can also take a quiz that will tell you which type of rest you lack. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, MD of internal medicine and author of the book Sacred Rest, has a free quiz that you can take in the link below:
https://www.restquiz.com/quiz/rest-quiz-test/
You can also Identify what type of rest you need by listening to your physical body, mind, and soul and observing the signs and signals in the form of intuition, feelings, emotions, dreams, etc.
The answer can always be found within us — although that’s a bit harder at the beginning until you’re more in touch with yourself and your needs.
2. Make a list of rest activities
Make a list for each of the 7 types of rest.
Include activities different acitivies that can be done in 15 minutes, some in 30 and some in 60+ minutes, so if you can add them in different parts of your day, week and/or month.
Again, a full list of activities for each rest can be found in my article Why Do You Need Different Types of Rest?.
3. Schedule quality rest
When you identify which types of rest you lack and the rest activities that you will incorporate into your life, you need to schedule them in your day-to-day life.
Because of our modern lifestyle, oftentimes rest won’t happen unless we schedule it. If something is not fixed and scheduled, we’ll think ourselves out of it or simply forget about it.
Make sure to have some rest every day. Look at your calendar. Check for free time and free spots. You can pick a form of rest depending on what you need most that day, and have options listed ahead of time so it’s easy to pick instead of always repeating the same forms of rest.
Make this easy and realistic for you. Put it in your calendar, make a schedule, utilize time blocking, or go by the “gut feeling”.
4. Allow yourself to rest
After you’ve scheduled the rest, you need to allow yourself to do it: to rest quality and comfortably.
If you have troubles allowing yourself to rest, explore the reasons behind why you don’t allow yourself to rest.
Is it the pressures and deadlines at work? Is it your own limiting belief that you don’t allow yourself to rest because you don’t believe that you’ve done enough or that you’re worthy and “good enough” to rest?
This internal exploration can be achieved by journaling, therapy, and altered states of consciousness (eg. breathwork, meditation, flotation, Shavasana, psychedelic substances, …)
5. Adapt your lifestyle to seasons
Like I mentioned in my newsletters about How To Overcome Autumn Fatigue? and “autumn burnout”, we should thrive to adapt our lives, lifestyles, expectations, doing and being to seasons.
Evolutionarily, autumn and winter are periods in the year to calm down, rest, sleep and rejuvenate. Winter is also the season and period for deep rest and deep rejuvenation.
Like Aubrey Marcus talked about in a newsletter from some time ago,
“The Winter is a time of rest and hibernation. A time with family and friends, or perhaps the long-awaited cocoon. […] This is where the nervous system can find its baseline. Where new programs can replace outdated ones in the operating system.”
Adjust our lifestyle accordingly. Lower your expectations for yourself, work and life in general. Slow down and feel the changing seasons. Spend more time in nature and with people you care about. Spend less time on social media. Invest and work on yourself.
Remember: We need rest to function optimally. Recharge your batteries so you can run and thrive! 🙂
That’s it for this newsletter! If you enjoyed it article and found it useful, make sure you’re subscribed so you won’t miss any new articles from me.
Also, click here to check out the archive of all my already published articles on my blog and newsletter Conquering Burnout.
Take care, talk to you again soon! ✌️😊
