These Are The 7 Types Of Rest You Need
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I wouldn’t say that I’ve always been a “well-rested” person. Historically I’ve had trouble getting enough sleep (I’m usually up very early for that reason), and whenever I’ve felt tired or burnt out, I assumed it was because I wasn’t sleeping. That was until I came across the work of Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, a physician, researcher, author, and speaker, who has worked in internal medicine for 20 years.
In her book, Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, she talks about the seven different types of rest we need to live healthy and fulfilled lives while decreasing stress, fatigue, and feelings of burnout. (As you can imagine, these go far beyond just sleeping.)
I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Dalton-Smith, and let me tell you, she’s a delight. If you yourself feel like you’re on the brink of burnout, or you feel tired all the time and don’t know why, this blog post is definitely for you! Read on to learn more about the seven different types of rest and how you can make sure you’re getting them. (My questions are in bold, and her responses are underneath!)
In your book, you unpack the idea of rest… in your own words, what do you think it means to rest?
I defined rest as those restorative activities that pour back into the places that we deplete when we do our work. When we look at it that way, we remove the ideation that rest is simply about the cessation of activity, because while the cessation of activity can sometimes “stop the bleeding,” it doesn’t actually restore the depletion. Rest is not simply sleeping—that’s a mindset shift that many of us have to make to truly understand what it means for us to be rested.
For those who haven’t read your book yet, what are the seven different types of rest?
The seven types of rest are:
Physical rest
Mental rest
Emotional rest
Social rest
Sensory rest
Creative rest
and Spiritual rest
Physical rest has two components: active and passive. Passive physical rest is what we normally think of as rest, aka sleeping and napping. Active physical rest includes things like yoga, stretching, getting a massage, etc.
Someone with a Mental rest deficit might find themselves lying down to go to sleep at night and their mind’s racing and they’re not able to quiet it and fall asleep. They also might have trouble concentrating and recalling information.
Emotional rest specifically refers to the rest we experience when we feel like we can be real and authentic in how we share our feelings. In other words, when we have the freedom to be open about what we’re feeling and put down the emotional load we’ve been carrying.
Social rest is the rest we experience around life-giving people. Most of us spend the majority of our time with people who are pulling from our social energy—our spouses, kids, coworkers, clients, etc. Anyone who needs something from you is pulling from your social energy, while people who give energy to you provide you with social rest.
Sensory rest has to do with all the stimulation we’re constantly exposed to: the sounds, movement, lights, etc. Getting too many sensory inputs can lead to sensory overload (a term you may have heard before), which can manifest in feelings of agitation and irritability.
Creative rest is the rest we experience when we allow ourselves to appreciate beauty in any form—think music, dance, art, cinema.
Finally, Spiritual rest has to do with the need we all have to feel like we belong—that need that we feel for our work and our efforts to contribute to the greater good. Our desire and need to feel like we’re pouring ourselves back into humanity.
Where did these seven types of rest come from? Did they stem from a particular experience you had?
Yes, they came from my own experience with burnout. I'm an internal medicine physician and I've been in practice for 20 years. About five or six years into that, I was a new mom (I had two toddlers both under the age of two), and I found that it was very difficult to care for myself and my own rest needs while working full-time and trying to raise a young family. So that’s what ignited my interest in this research in general—I wanted to figure out how to continue doing the job and the work that I loved in a situation where I was feeling drained all the time.
I also had a lot of patients coming to me with the same complaint—that they were feeling drained all the time. The more I looked into it, the more I realized there were just some gaps in the existing research on rest. There was a ton of data about sleep, so that's where I initially started. I thought: “Okay, let me determine how to get higher quality sleep.” But even after I was sleeping seven or eight hours of documented sound sleep, I was still waking up completely exhausted. I thought maybe I was broken, but my lab tests were telling me that wasn't the case. That made me realize that there was something else in me that was being exhausted that I wasn’t treating, and that's when it really kind of dawned on me. There was something I wasn’t getting to. And so honestly, that desperation was what drove me to do the research. I needed to help myself.
How do we know which types of rest we need? How can we figure out where our deficits are so we can address them?
The best way to determine your deficits is to take the Rest Quiz online (linked here)! The quiz consists of 70 rapid-fire questions, which should take about five minutes to complete, and at the end you get an email that gives you a synopsis of your scores for the seven types of rest. Then, you can compare that to the ideal score range (e.g. you could score a 40, and you would see that that’s a high score because the desired score range is between 10 and 20). I always tell people, your score will never be zero. You’re never going to have zero stress in any area, as long as you’re here and breathing.
Once you get your score, you can sign up for our email list to get additional support, where you’ll get tips and tricks for addressing your rest deficits and getting your scores within the healthier ranges. My book also has a ton of techniques and advice.
Across your years of research, have you noticed any specific types of rest that women tend to not get enough of?
We’ve had over 250,000 people take the Rest Quiz, so we’ve definitely noticed trends. We’ve consistently seen that women score higher on the need for emotional rest and mental rest. So generally speaking, women aren’t getting enough emotional rest and mental rest. I suspect this is because as women, we tend to be very busy-brained and we do a lot of emotional labor for ourselves and others, which weighs on us overtime.
Obviously addressing rest deficits is an ongoing process, but how do you know if you're satisfying those rest levels? What does that look and feel like?
Knowing if you’ve addressed the deficit comes down to self-awareness and understanding how you want to feel in life. Taking the Rest Quiz is a form of self-assessment so you can see where you can improve. Let’s say you take the quiz and you have a physical rest deficit. The next step may be reading about what the signs of a rest deficit are in the book and learning the different ways to get more physical rest. After doing that, you can see if you still have symptoms. I look at this similarly to how I look at any other kind of health issue—whatever the problem is, it should start getting better and going away.
Another example: If you have a mental rest deficit—meaning you have a busy brain and trouble concentrating, and your mind is racing before bed making it impossible for you to sleep—you may try a mindfulness technique that we recommend and now you fall asleep immediately. That’s how you know you were right. Whatever that thing was that, whatever the issue was that you were battling, you’re starting to see some improvement. --
I hope you found this blog post helpful, and that you take Dr. Dalton-Smith’s Rest Quiz for yourself! To me, the results have been invaluable in terms of identifying places in my life where I can devote more of my time and attention.
You can get a copy of Dr. Dalton-Smith’s book here, check her out on Instagram, or head over to her website to learn more about her work.
Until next time, xo,
Renata