Things You Learn in Therapy
Things You Learn in Therapy
Ep 105: Exploring Types of Rest: Beyond Sleep for a Balanced Life
What if rest is more than just sleep? Join me, as we uncover the nuanced differences between rest and sleep, and why both are essential for a balanced life. Through personal anecdotes, we'll connect the dots between our busy schedules and the importance of reclaiming our rest. You'll also learn how expanding your emotional vocabulary can help you articulate feelings more accurately, moving beyond the generic "tired" or "stressed" to truly understand your mental state.
In this episode, we learn into the seven types of rest as defined by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith in her book, "Sacred Rest." From physical to spiritual rest, discover how each type contributes to your overall well-being. We also explore Claudia Skowron's concept of cellular rest, emphasizing the need for intentional breaks from the constant stimuli in our lives. This isn't just about numbing out—it's about genuine rejuvenation. Tune in to gain practical strategies for integrating these diverse forms of rest into your daily routine, paving the way for a more restful and fulfilling life.
Here is a link to the article on rest: The 7 Kinds of Rest You Actually Need | Psychology Today United Kingdom
And here is a link to Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's work: Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith | 7 Types of Rest (drdaltonsmith.com)
This podcast is meant to be a resource for the general public, as well as fellow tThis podcast is meant to be a resource for the general public, as well as fellow therapists/psychologists. It is NOT meant to replace the meaningful work of individual or family therapy. Please seek professional help in your area if you are struggling. #breakthestigma #makewordsmatter #thingsyoulearnintherapy #thingsyoulearnintherapypodcast
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health concerns, please contact 988 or seek a treatment provider in your area.
Feel free to share your thoughts at www.makewordsmatterforgood.com or email me at Beth@makewordsmatterforgood.com
If you are a therapist or psychologist and want to be a guest on the show, please complete this form to apply: https://forms.gle/ooy8QirpgL2JSLhP6
www.bethtrammell.com
Hello listener, welcome back. It is the end of summer. We made it Hopefully many of you have. If you're a parent, your kids are in school. If you are not a parent, you are doing however you feel about the end. You are doing however you feel about the end of summer. Some of you might be really sad about that. Some of you may be like I'm ready to be out of summer mode and into fall. You go out into the stores and there's already shoot, there's probably Christmas stuff out now, y'all. But anyway, here we are. I'm your host, beth Trammell.
Speaker 1:I love to make words matter for good. I do my best to kind of practice what I preach. I know I don't do it all the time, but I do try as much as I can. I focus on helping people with behavior and communication strategies to increase connection and decrease frustration between one another, and so I specifically work a lot with parents and teachers anybody who's around another and so I specifically work a lot with parents and teachers anybody who's around kids. And so I might share some of my own kind of struggles in today's episode, because we're going to talk about rest here at the end of summer, kind of ironically, and last week. I had shared with you that there's kind of an ironic twist to this week's episode, and that is today's episode was not supposed to be a solo episode. In fact, my daughter, who is 16, was going to make her Things you Learn in Therapy debut and join me on the podcast to talk about rest, because I think her and I together could probably use a good reminder about many of these things and this will come up toward the end of the podcast when I talk about how we teach this and model this with our kids. But it was so hard to schedule time where she and I could be together in a quiet space that we just really ran out of time to schedule, and that is meaningful that we probably need to make some adjustment.
Speaker 1:So I want to start talking about rest through the lens of there's a difference between rest and sleep, okay, so some people are like oh yeah, you know, rest is fine, or maybe it's not, and they think well, I sleep nine hours a night or I, yeah, I have a lot of problems sleeping and so I never feel rested, and certainly sleep and rest are related. But what we are going to talk about today is that sleep and rest are actually two different things that we need both of, and so I want to share a few resources with you that I found that I think help us kind of reconceptualize the ways that we might be able to implement rest a little bit better in our everyday lives. Obviously, sleep there are lots and lots of studies that talk through how most Americans are sleep deprived, that in general we don't get as much sleep as we need, and that sleep deprivation leads to lots of other problems both at work, in our physical body, all of those things and I can share resources, if you're interested, of all of the different ways that it suggests that this sleep problem is a big problem. And so if you're a person who's listening and you're like, yeah, I get less than seven hours of sleep on average and you're like, yeah, I get less than seven hours of sleep on average, then you're kind of my friend that I'm talking to. It seems like seven or seven and a half hours is about the baseline for where most adults can function pretty well, and there's going to be a listener out there that's like nah, beth, I'm good on five hours of sleep and that might be great for you, but on average, most people need between seven and seven and a half hours, and some of us need more. You know I feel my best if I can get nine hours of sleep. I would really just love it if I could be in bed early and wake up early. Others of you might be kind of night owls, where you stay up later and kind of sleep in. Others of us, you know kind of go to bed at about an average time and wake up at about an average time, and so, however it happens for you, if you're getting less than seven hours of sleep, that seems to be the cutoff for a lot of kind of negative and maybe chronic negative impact, right? So either that's at the workplace or physical kind of body conditions that might be contributing to this sort of lack of sleep.
Speaker 1:More than that, though, I think about that question that we're often asked well, how are you doing today and how do you feel today? Or how are you today? I had a good friend who called me out during a stage of life it may have been a decade ago at this point and she said every time I ask you how you are, you always say you're tired, maybe there's something else you should do, and so I've shared that with people and I've reminded people that if your perpetual response to how are you? Is some version of I'm tired, I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed, then maybe we need to think about something else that we can do. And sometimes it's not that I truly feel physically tired all the time. It's almost like sometimes that's just the target response in my mind and I don't actually stop to think about how I actually am, or I don't actually know what word to describe how I'm feeling. And so another thing that I do in a lot of my workshops is to encourage people to develop a deeper, more complex emotional vocabulary and so actually learn other words that describe your inner experience, and so there's all sorts of lists of feeling words that might help you think through. How can I answer that question more honestly and it doesn't have to mean more vulnerably in situations where you don't want to be vulnerable, right? You don't have to tell the grocery store person like, hey, I'm feeling lonely and isolated and my partner just and I had a fight this morning. You don't have to go into all of that, but maybe your answer doesn't always have to be I'm tired.
Speaker 1:When I began exploring this idea of rest the work of Dr Sandra Dalton-Smith came up, and if you kind of search up rest her framework, the seven types of rest come up. She's a medical doctor and the author of Sacred Rest, and here's a quote from her Rest is the most underused, chemical-free, safe and effective alternative therapy available to us that we're just not tapping into right. And so she has developed this idea around seven types of rest and how we can think about if we are perpetually tired, if we kind of just feel burnt out, if we feel drained. Maybe we need to focus on intentionally fighting for one or more of these different types of rest. And so the first type of rest that she talks about is physical rest. Obviously, it is resting your body. That might mean sleep, it might mean sitting down, it might mean stretching, it might mean whatever it is that causes your body to receive physical rest. I think we think about rest in this way most often, and my kids are like mom, I want to go do this, or mom, can you come do this with me? I'm often like I'm resting, I'm just kind of sitting on the couch, I'm just kind of sitting here for a moment, I'm just resting.
Speaker 1:The second time of rest that she talks about is mental rest right, and so this would be turning your brain off, allowing space in your mind for nothingness. Some people might do meditation here, they may journal, they may just sort of sit in a quiet space, not have to think or problem solve. If you have a really intense job, if you have a really analytical job, a job that requires you to think on your feet or problem solve a lot, you may actually need a lot of mental rest, and it may be part. If you don't get a lot of mental rest, it may be a part of why you feel exhausted and burnt out. The third type of rest is sensory rest. Right, we live in a place, a world, a time where we are constantly bombarded with various stimuli, things that we see, things, we hear things, we smell. All of those, all that sensory input, all the screens, all the constant scrolling we do is really an overload to our sensory system, and so finding some space to give your body a sensory rest may be a part of what you need to feel recharged.
Speaker 1:Emotional rest is the fourth one, and I think about this one in particular, around being intentional about scheduling things that I know are emotionally taxing If you're a person who has control of your schedule, don't schedule multiple things on the same day that are just really emotionally hard. So if you are in charge of having hard conversations with employees at your job, if you have a child who you know is going to be really emotionally overstimulated at nine o'clock at night tonight, there are certain things that maybe you can reorient your schedule or kind of pass up on or say no to to really focus on emotional rest. When we can have a break from those emotionally charged situations, you might find that you feel more energized after you kind of take a break from that. Number five is for the fellow introverts out there social rest. So sometimes we just need to kind of be away from people to gather ourselves kind of back. I love being around people and then I also need a break from people to sort of catch my breath and kind of reorient as an introvert. That just kind of is how my body operates. And so if you see me at the grocery store and I may not necessarily pause to talk for a long time, it may be because I have already kind of tapped out all of my social energy for that afternoon or that morning or whatever it might be, and so finding some time for social rest may be really important for you If you've had a long weekend with friends or you've been at work all day and you might not think about work as a social thing because maybe you don't love the people you work with. But anywhere there are peers around, anywhere there are other people around, it's a social situation and kind of your social nuances or your social repertoire is required, and so sometimes you might need a break from having to implement those things.
Speaker 1:Number six is creative rest, and for those of us who are creative people, you may need just kind of a break from having to be in a creative mindset. Sometimes we get into a funk or we get kind of stuck and we can't kind of let those creative juices keep going, and so take a break, take a rest from that. And the last one is spiritual rest, and that might mean including more spiritual practices. It doesn't have to be a religious practice, but it's connecting to something that's a higher power or a higher order than what we are here as humans, and so connecting your mind and body to something higher might be something that really gives you that spiritual connection and that rest. And there was an article on Psychology Today, written by a licensed clinical professional type of rest, and she called that cellular or systemic rest. This is Claudia Skowron, I'm not sure how to say your name, I'm sorry Kind of a cellular or systemic rest around, like the things that we put in our body, the things we put into our mind, and so maybe that is you taking a break from social media, maybe that's fasting from sugar, Maybe that is doing more workouts, something that kind of resets your body. I know I've been in seasons where I'm like gosh, we've, you know we've just come back from a trip and we've been eating out a lot and I really need to kind of reset or find some rest at kind of that cellular level. So that is the work of Dr Sandra Dalton-Smith from Sacred Rest, the Seven Types of Rest. You could search her up. I can add the link here.
Speaker 1:A couple of reminders here, though. Rest doesn't just happen right. You don't just like sit on the couch, watch all the TV you want and then your body feels rested. That might be like a way to escape kind of your reality right now. It might be a way to kind of numb out from some of the things that are going on, but you really have to seek rest to have your body feel recharged, and so I'd encourage you to fight for it, to prioritize it, to find which of those seven areas you really need. Prioritize it to find which of those seven areas you really need more rest in and put it on your calendar. Maybe start with five minutes or 10 minutes, maybe it's a half a day where you can engage in one of these things and then see how you feel and hopefully the feeling will motivate you to keep doing it.
Speaker 1:And, as I mentioned, one of the things that I am realizing I'm not doing a great job of is teaching and modeling this rest for my own kids. And I see that in kind of the busyness of my kids' schedules and obviously the busyness of my schedule and realizing they need to see me resting in more ways than just kind of hanging out on the couch or taking a nap or whatever that might look like. And so, as parents, we've got to think about how can we teach and talk about the importance of these different types of rest on top of sleep, right? So a lot of our kids may be developing some poor sleep habits, and talking to them about sleep and rest explicitly may be an important part of what you can do even this week, and so the last thing I'll remind us of is we really have to pay attention to what sounds like rest versus that which is actually restful, right. So I think about this summer when we would take a trip or we'd go on a vacation over the weekend or something, and I would come back feeling even more tired and it was fun, it was great, it was filled with adventure and memory and memories and all these great things, but it wasn't restful, right. I think sometimes we get the illusion that certain activities are going to be restful and then we don't feel rested, and so you have to just recognize okay, does this sound like it's going to be restful? Does it sound like it's going to be rest? And if so, or if not, how is that going to impact me in the upcoming days or weeks? That going to impact me in the upcoming days or weeks? Right, and so fighting for those things that will be restful, leave you feeling recharged, energized, healed, are the kinds of things that we are seeking to fight for and prioritize. So if you have thoughts on this, we'd love to hear from you. How is rest going for you Reach out to me, and this kind of wraps up the summer season on Things You'll Learn in Therapy and, as I mentioned last week, I have a thrilling.
Speaker 1:I mean I can't even tell you how excited I am about the episodes that I have been recording this summer with so many amazing guests. I can't pick my favorite because they're all so good, they're so good and so I've got them all ready. You will not miss a Friday, and I'm planning to record some debrief kind of sessions where I think about the things that we had talked about during the episode and sharing some additional thoughts there. So buckle up y'all. It is going to be a great next season this fall on Things you Learn in Therapy, and you won't want to miss every single week of every guest that I have coming for. You have a great summer, get some rest. You're not going to have a great summer. You already had a great summer and now it's time to rest. Can't wait to have you back here next week.
