What kind of tired are you today? How are you dealing with tiredness? Did the sleep you got last night leave you feeling rested today?
Tiredness is something we all experience, and for many different reasons. And sometimes, when we are tired, it feels like getting more sleep simply isn’t hitting the restoration spot like we need it to. We often equate rest with physical rest and needing more sleep. This narrow concept of rest can feel it is missing the mark, an unhelpful one-size-fits-all solution to our body, mind and soul tiredness.
What is your body telling you that you need? How easily do you switch your brain off from the constant internal To-Do lists, mental wrangling and overthinking? And how well are the relationships in your life in this season feeding and nourishing your soul? Perhaps it is the ever present visual and auditory noise of our modern constantly-switched-on world that is playing havoc with your energy levels?
Here’s the thing: just like there is more than one way to be tired, so too is there more than one type of rest.
There are seven different types of rest that we need.
This is the concept I came across recently, in a book by Saundra Dalton-Smith entitled Sacred Rest.
In it, she outlines how, as a medical practitioner, she identified these different types of rest that we need after seeing multiple patients come to her with weariness and exhaustion that was not being eased by more sleep.
I find her work both enlightening and very encouraging in dealing with tiredness. I am a practical, problem solving sort of person. And this idea of there being different types of rest gives me the framework and toolkit I need to help me understand what I can do differently when I feel tired.
First of all, I need to identify what kind of tired am I?
Until I know what kind of tiredness I am experiencing, how can I know what I need? This is the first key to dealing with tiredness. As Dr Dalton-Smith says in her book:
All rest is not created equal. Much of what we consider rest fails to work because it is not restful….The most effective rest occurs when we are purposefully reviving the parts of our life we regularly deplete.”
{italics mine}
This is not about judgement. Nor is it about heaping yet more weight onto your already overburdened head by adding to your mental load more things to work out and remember.
But as always, we cannot know what we need to do until we know where we are starting from. As James Baldwin, Civil Rights Activist, says, “nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Awareness is key.
Stopping, noticing and asking ourselves questions is a great start here. This does not need to take a lot of time. But we are not always very skilled at self-reflection, and it can be the first thing to fall off the list of what needs done each day. Sometimes it can be uncomfortable or painful to take have that inward rummage around because what if we don’t like what we find? What if we feel we cannot change what we find? The first half of that Baldwin quote says
Not everything that is faced can be changed….”
And this is undoubtely true. However, I know that there is always something that we CAN do, and we have more agency over our choices than we often believe.
Secondly, knowing the different types of rest brings clarity.
Over the next couple of blogs I am going to talk about these in more detail. But to get you thinking, here is Dr Dalton-Smith’s list of types of rest that we need:
- physical
- mental
- creative
- social
- emotional
- sensory
- spiritual
What strikes you about that list?
What immediately resonates with you? I was outlining this concept to a client earlier this year, and as I talked about sensory rest, I could see her body literally shift as she let out a huge exhale of what she did not know she was carrying. Rest from the noise of our world, from sensory overstimulation – this was the type of rest that she did not know until that moment that she needed.
What about you? In whatever is going on in your life this week, notice how you are dealing with tiredness and start to ask yourself what kind of rest you need. More next time.