If there’s “nothing wrong with you” but you feel exhausted, it’s time to enlist the seven types of rest. By Nicky Pellegrino.
Have we forgotten how to rest properly? And could that be the reason so many of us feel tired all the time?
Saundra Dalton-Smith believes most people are getting rest all wrong. The US internal medicine physician and author of the book Sacred Rest: Recover your life, renew your energy, restore your sanity says her own experience led her to believe we need to take a more analytical approach to fatigue.
Struggling to cope with a demanding job and raising a family, Dalton-Smith burnt out completely.
"It was the lowest moment of my life," she says. "I came back after picking up my kids from daycare and working a full day in the hospital, and I lay on the floor in exhaustion. That was the deciding point, right then. I had to make some changes."
Her first step was to check her physical health to see if there were medical reasons for her tiredness, but all her test results came back fine.
"I found I wasn't the only one experiencing it. A large number of patients were telling me the same thing – my doctor says I'm healthy, but I'm exhausted. It dawned on me there was something going on that we weren't addressing."
Dalton-Smith did some in-depth research and eventually concluded that many of us aren't resting effectively.
"We focus on cessation activities such as sleeping and napping or taking a vacation, going on sabbatical, quitting our jobs – trying to remove the stress from our lives rather than looking at rest as a restorative process. I think that's why we stay drained."
She has identified seven types of rest – physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative and spiritual – and says, although they all need attention, there may be particular areas of deficit that each individual needs to make more effort to focus on.
An evening on the sofa binge-watching Netflix or scrolling social media doesn't qualify as a restorative process. And sleep, although vital, isn't the whole story, she says.
"Sleep and napping are passive forms of physical rest. Non-cessation activities would be things such as yoga, massage therapy, using a foam roller or going for a leisure walk – you're not sitting still, but doing things that help the body feel more relaxed."
If most of your time is spent with other people who are demanding or needing things from you, then you might need social rest.
"It's not that they're bad people, just that the nature of the relationship is that you're always on the giving end," says Dalton-Smith. "Social rest would be evaluating your relationships and determining which are the ones where nobody needs anything, you just enjoy each other's presence, then making a point of spending time with those people."
Sensory burnout might be caused by non-stop connectivity to digital devices, or being confined to a small and noisy space with your family during lockdowns. And, according to Dalton-Smith, all that "pivoting" and rethinking our work lives over the course of the pandemic has caused many to feel creatively depleted.
While her own Christian faith underpins her approach, she says spiritual rest isn't dependent on any particular belief system.
"I would define it as the rest we experience when we feel like we belong and are accepted. There are lots of different ways people can experience that."
Her advice is to take a good look at your life and "diagnose" which aspects are the most depleting – she has a free assessment tool at RestQuiz.com. "It's important to have a strategy, whether you're a business owner building a corporate culture or it's for yourself and your family to incorporate restorative practices."
Initially, she used herself as a guinea pig, taking a science-inspired approach to developing the techniques that rescued her from burnout. Now, after 20 years in medicine, Dalton-Smith is pulling back on clinical practice, and much of her work is focused on workplace wellness.
“We live in a grind culture: you’re a nonconformist if you have personal boundaries in place and strategies that help you function at your best. It’s more courageous to be that kind of person – rest is not for the weak.”
