Do You Need A Nap, Or To Pick Up A Paintbrush? How I’m Embracing The 7 Types Of Rest

Not all rest is about sleeping.

Rest looks different to everyone.

For my partner, he is quietly reading a book on a beach in the South of France, glass of rosé in hand, a view of the waves in front of him. Classic.

For me, I am most relaxed when I am doing something with my hands and creating something. Or when I am learning and synthesising ideas and then putting them down on paper.

But just as we fall into habits, we tend to reach towards some of the same ‘rest’ tools time and again, without really considering what type of rest we really need.

Sometimes, one form of rest might actually be detrimental:

• Staying in your bed, marinading in your self, causes inertia. The body is not made to stay still forever. Movement can often be a better form of rest than lying down.
• However, if you’re in need of spiritual restoration, it may be that a jog or a walk in the park just doesn’t hit the spot — and you return feeling more drained than ever.
• Or if you’re in need of emotional rest, distracting yourself will television might not help — but rather make you feel even more disconnected from yourself and the world.

It was only until I realised (and this may be super obvious to some, but here we are) — rest is about restoration. This is the longer word for rest, and what we need to have in mind before we just automatically assume we need a nap.

I’ve started to ask myself: ‘What would restore me right now’? And more importantly — ‘What am I restoring myself from’?

Ten years ago, internal medicine physician Saundra Dalton-Smith burned out. And despite prioritising getting 8 hours of high quality sleep a night in her recovery, she was still feeling exhausted.

This eventually led to her research into restoration — and how she defined the 7 types of rest.

“If you’re waking up (after sleeping) and still exhausted, the issue probably isn’t sleep. It’s likely a rest deficit.”- Saundra Dalton-Smith, M.D.

As a person who struggles with relaxing, gets stressed when I’m not ‘being productive’, and is familiar with waking up unrefreshed — I found this concept life-changing.

Here are Dalton-Smith’s 7 types of rest, and how I’m incorporating them into my life:

1. Physical rest 🛌

We all know this one. The classic. Tired? Get into bed. But how about if it’s the middle of the day and you have 3 deadlines to meet and you’re just generally a highly strung neurotic mess?

Here’s the thing. It’s ok to need a physical rest. We don’t get enough sleep as it is. Who says resting your body in the middle of the day is ‘unproductive’? Screw that.

Here are a few ways I’m embracing physical rest:

• Taking a post lunch cat nap. South Koreans often have a nap after lunch. Hurrah! A country that isn’t ashamed of physical rest. I do this when working from home sometimes — I eat my lunch, then crawl into bed and set a timer for 20 mins. I don’t care how bad for your digestion this is, it’s delightful.
• Getting into ‘child’s pose’ throughout the day. Gosh this feels good. Just 1 minute and your chest and body will open up like someone wrenched you open with a spanner and you’ll feel … ahhh.
• Using my Sensate device to trigger my vagus nerve. This is a bit expensive but has done wonders for my stressed-out nervous system. The Sensate device is a vibrating pebble which helps you get into a meditative, calm state in just a few minutes — and helps me physically rest more easily.

2. Mental rest 🤯

That buzzing feeling in your brain when you’re on the train home, conversations with colleagues bubbling in your head. It’s like your brain is itching, addicted to chasing thoughts.

When I notice my thoughts jumping around like this and my frontal lobe throbbing after too much intellectual stimulation, here are some ways I enjoy mental rest:

• Painting, cooking or DIY: doing something methodical, non-intellectual and tangible helps me to switch off my buzzing brain. Picking up a paintbrush and getting into artistic flow is an antidote to the left-brained hamster wheel.
• Meditating: Meditation helps me to recognise the spiralling thoughts and get distance from them. Just closing my eyes, breathing deeply and imagining a river of water with my thoughts rushing past is always a winner.
• Brain dumping onto paper: If I’m still feeling particularly buzzy after meditating, just pouring out my thoughts onto paper until my stupid monkey brain starts repeating itself is usually a quick-fire way to calm my thoughts.

3. Creative rest ✏️

Day to day, I’m creating — drafting documents for work, coming up with ideas and solutions to difficult problems, and sometimes actually doing typical ‘creative’ work like drawing or writing articles.

Restoring my creative bucket is one thing I hadn’t really considered doing until I heard Saundra Dalton-Smith talking to Gwyneth Paltrow about this topic. You need to refuel your creativity through ‘creative rest’: letting yourself be inspired by the world around you, so that you can pour from the creative cup later.

For me, that means:

• Going for my morning walk and listening to podcasts: Stephen Bartlett’s ‘Secret Diary of a CEO’, Glennon Doyle’s ‘We Can Do Hard Things’ and Emma Gannon’s ‘Ctrl Alt Delete’ are my go to podcasts for my morning walk. Walking and listening is a superb combination for creative inspiration.
• Reading inspiring content on the train: I can’t read non-fiction books or articles at night. My brain starts firing up with ideas, filling my creative bucket too much at a time when I can’t release it. So doing this on my morning commute instead is a great way to charge my creativity for the day.

4. Emotional rest 💝

People-pleasing, trying to fit in, not being authentic. Feeling like I’m not able to share my feelings, or that I have to show up a certain way in specific situations. Putting others first without considering what I actually want or need.

These are all sure-fire ways that I’ll end up on the path to emotional depletion.

When I feel myself drained in this way, I look to the following to help me to gain emotional rest:

• Morning Pages / Journalling: allowing myself to get my true feelings all out on the page is a practice that never fails to help me realign myself emotionally. I set a timer for 15 minutes, light a candle and put on some boring ‘relaxation’ music and just let rip onto the paper. V. satisfying.
• Doing something nice for myself: having a massage, getting my nails done, watching something I and only I like (hello Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Prioritising me helps me refill my emotional cup.
• Letting it all out — sometimes it’s really good to cry. Letting myself feel my true feelings and releasing them without apologising can feel really damn good.

5. Sensory rest 📵

For me, I know I’m need of sensory rest when I get that ‘wired’ sense after using technology all day, being in a busy, loud office or after a particularly stressful commute.

To ensure I’m getting regular sensory rest, I prioritise the following:

• Turning off (nearly) all phone notifications: this has been a game-changer for me. Instead of being bombarded with stressful alerts at all hours of the day, I avoid sensory burnout by switching off notifications on my phone.
• Listening to white noise or lyric-free music on noise cancelling headphones — I highly recommend searching Spotify for classical, relaxing music or soothing sounds to avoid sensory overload at work.
• Having a walk in nature: Your brain easily recognises green, so surrounding yourself in nature has a calming effect. Getting into nature, away from technology and distractions, is a way I prioritise sensory rest.

6. Spiritual rest

Whenever I recognise when I’m feeling cynical, depressed or hopeless — I now know that I probably need a combination of different rest types, but most importantly, spiritual rest:

• Read something spiritually inspiring: Ekhart Tolle. Thich Nhat Han. Louise Hay, Elizabeth Gilbert, Glennon Doyle. Choosing an inspiring thinker and reading their work helps to uplift me and connect to humanity.
• Connecting with a good friend and getting into the good stuff: better than any spiritual teacher or healing meditation — having a really good, deep chat with my sister or best friends makes me feel reconnected to the world and my purpose within it. Even if we’re just laughing at how crazy we’re finding the TV show ‘Married at First Sight’.

7. Social rest 👯‍♀️

The pandemic gave us all some much needed respite from the endless social commitments we find ourselves tethered to. Now that we’re back socialising regularly, we might find ourselves in dire need of ‘social rest’ — particularly since we’ve lost that muscle.

As an ‘introverted extrovert’ (or extroverted introvert, I’m not really sure) — here’s how I recuperate myself with social rest:

• Having time to myself — well, duh. Obviously the antidote to social overwhelm is getting away from everyone. Learning to enjoy my own company has taken time, but it’s a lesson I’m so happy I’ve discovered.
• Hanging out in comfortable silence with partner — but if you really hate being alone, I find that spending time with someone who you can just do nothing with is lovely. Replace the word partner with best friend/sibling/dog as needed.

Thanks for reading my tips — I know that was a long one. Tell me — how do you tap into the 7 types of rest?

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