You find yourself running on empty all the time in this day and age. Most of us are running exclusively on our bodies’ fight, flight or freeze response. We are constantly stressed, constantly up against things that are putting us into that reaction and therefore in order to combat the stressors of modern living, we have to set aside intentional time to rest.
It’s common to think that finishing work and jumping on the couch to binge your favourite Netflix is rest but that’s unfortunately not the case as what you’re doing is overstimulating yourself even further. You’re downloading even more information into your mind. So below are 5 types of rest that really will give you the proper type of rejuvenation that you need.
We need to do this to recover our body. Maybe our Muscles are tense, we have a headache or we’ve not gotten enough sleep. We need to make sure we get a really good, deep sleep. This means no blue light an hour before bed so that your receptors can really understand that it’s time to sleep and that there is sufficient melatonin production.
We sleep in 90 minute cycles so try to work out back from the time that you need to be up that it’s ending at a 90 minute cycle. Eg. If your wake up is 7:30am then ideally you should go to sleep by 11:30. This will hopefully allow you to wake up feeling more refreshed.
2. Social rest
We often can get stuck in the cycle of only socialising with our family and although our family love us so much, and we love them, they also often need a lot from us socially. So social rest is being around people who don’t need anything from you. Just having a good laugh with friends, having an evening dinner or getting together on FaceTime or on a netwomen event and just talking and having a good time! Social rest is especially good for extroverts.
3. Mental rest
Mental rest is taking a break from overstimulation. Not putting more information into your brain. For example, putting away your phone for a bit and/or no phone in the morning or right before bed. And in our evenings we could meditating to clear the mind fog. Just by focusing on the breath and if thoughts come, then just let them go one by one. There’s a whole TikTok trend about this at the moment and its called the joy of doing nothing. It’s an Italian concept. For a set amount of time (bonus points if you do it in nature) just do nothing and just be.
4. Emotional rest
This type of rest is new to me and I’ve recently come to understand that it can be so powerful. It is to allow yourself to be true to your own emotions and be true to how you really feel. This has been hard for me as a people pleaser, maybe you can relate, but it is very important for us to try. It can be such a relief to just be you and if you’re with people and you’re not feeling so good, you don’t have to fill the silence with ramblings just to make other people feel more comfortable. Emotional rest is also spend your time expressing emotions intentionally. Perhaps to a friend who is in a good place to listen to you. Or even better, a therapist or a life coach to express yourself to. Breath work and having a really good cry is emotional rest too as it lets us diffuse all of those extra emotions and stress chemicals from our body.
5. Creative rest
Let your eyes eat and feed them well. True creative inspiration in a relaxed setting can really feel like nourishment. The next time you see something wonderful, know that you don’t need to do anything about it. You don’t need to Monitise this beautiful thing or make it something productive. Just take it in and absorb the moment. For example you can watch a sunset or sunrise, you can look at the stars, you can go to an art gallery or you can do a creative hobby just for fun.
By Farlan netwomen ambassador
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