Rest & Recovery
Volume 1, Issue 8: Rest & Recovery
(Originally Published March 15, 2019)
What’s New This Week
Welcome back and thanks for joining us again in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, where each week we explore the human experience through different mediums, gleaning useful and practical insights to become more socially and emotionally powerful.
Following last week’s digest on The Power of Emotion, the theme of this week’s content is Rest & Recovery. Rest & Recovery is something that is often overlooked, though it is often just what we need to take our work and life to the next level. Speaking of rest, this week Winter Hearth Studios is taking a trip to Europe to explore the hearts of Spain and France (otherwise known as spring break 😉). The content in the below sections will show you how important rest can be to our mental and emotional states, so be sure to check them out!
Listen
This week, we’ll take a quick look at the Hurry Slowly episode “Prioritizing Rest & Reflection” with Alex Pang Ph.D. Dr. Pang is the author of the book “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less”, and emphasizes the importance of a balance between deep, focused work and deliberate rest. There’s a lot of great insights in this episode, so I’ll let Alex and Jocelyn do the talking.
Check out the episode to gain some new insights on using rest as a tool for achievement!
Learn
In this week’s Learn section, I want to dive into another episode from the podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin. In the episode Design Your Own “Happiness Project”, Rubin presents a novel and exciting idea of creating some sort of project that “helps you identify the resolutions that will bring more happiness to your life — and then helps you keep those resolutions”. In last week’s playbook edition, we talked briefly about filling the blank spaces in your life with the things you love to do and the people you love to do those things with. This idea is a part of the active rest we need to remain emotionally and mentally stable, physically healthy, spiritually attuned, and in a generally more positive and uplifting state of mind. Give this episode a listen by clicking the button below!
Level Up
This week’s Level Up section is all about making room for downtime. Have you ever been around someone who is cranky or grumpy (or both) when they don’t get enough sleep? Odds are if you’ve ever seen crying babies, you’ve seen someone like this. It’s not their fault necessarily, but one thing that we should understand is the limits posed on our mental and emotional functionalities when our brain hasn’t had enough time to recover from the last stretch of activity. Personally speaking, I can usually feel how little control I have over my emotions and reactions when I am operating in a sleep-deprived, mentally exhausted state. Beyond learning to better control your emotions in this exhausted state, one of the best things you can do here is learn to avoid being in that state altogether.
We live in an always-on, always-active society, and it can seem counterintuitive and even counterproductive to schedule some downtime for yourself, but active rest is one of the most important things we can do to keep our spaces (mental, emotional, spiritual, physical) healthy. Check out this article by shape.com to learn more of the science behind this idea and to learn some concrete steps for keeping your mental health in top form.
Fireside Spotlight
In last week’s Fireside Spotlight, we saw a simple, calm piece from Winter Hearth Studios called “Quietude”. This week, in the spirit of rest, we’re going to relax a bit and check out the brand new desktop game experience from Winter Hearth community members CakeZero called “MopBoy”.
According to CakeZero,
“Mop Boy is a top down rpg/ side-scrolling platformer hybrid about a family owned restaurant and the boy who mops its floors.
The game centers around Mop Boy, a kid whose family owns and lives above a pizza restaurant, Doughboys (based on our team member’s family-owned restaurant of the same name).
While the other members of the Boy family have normal restaurant jobs (running deliveries, cooking, taking orders), he’s left battling the grease lingering from the daily grind.
Upstairs, Mop unwinds and replenishes lost health while bonding with his family.”
This is sure to be a charming and exciting game, and I can’t wait to play the Mac release when it comes out — great work CakeZero! Thanks for sharing your creation with us.
You can follow the team @MopBoyGame on Twitter and @mopboygame on Instagram to keep up with the development and support their work, and check out the MopBoy demo here!
Walk It, Talk it
Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this digest to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the digest.
This weekly personal development playbook is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world achieve a better human experience :)
Your Greatest Chapter Awaits
Until next time,
Elgin
Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.
I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, read, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.
Copyright © 2019 Winter Hearth Studios, All rights reserved.
