Getting The Rest You Need (Even When You're Not Getting Enough Sleep)

Sleep alone is not enough. You need 7 types of rest, according to researcher Dr. Saunda Dalton-Smith.

In America, most workplaces give people a total of two separate, single days for rest around the Christian holiday: December 25th and January 1st. These are two of the eleven official, federally-observed holidays, and you’re expected to be back to work exactly a day later, or else use up the precious vacation day allotment you’re allowed.

December is a busy month, because in addition to regular work, there is seasonal work. Many people also need to finish up year-end projects, create extra reports, do client billing, send client gifts, and more. Plus, the end of the year brings additional optional projects like year-end recaps, holiday cards, holiday parties, New Year’s goals and resolutions, travel and family gatherings, gift purchasing and wrapping, teacher gifts, and more.

Just as we’re entering the moodiest, darkest time period on earth, frantic humans on (some parts of its) surface decided that the goal for the winter is actually for everyone to hurry up, get everything done, get super busy with last-minute projects, wrap everything up, and then make sure to relax already. The holidays should be relaxing—AREN’T THEY SO RELAXING? HERE, RELAX NOW. Now go back to work!

The results, of course, are predictable: spending the holiday checking email while on sub-par time away with family members and everyone gets an illness along the way. This version of December doesn’t work so well for me. I’m tired of being a coughing, blurry-eyed person trying to hold onto a wall to stay in an upright position.

A quick poll—how’s your rest situation?

Taking time off to rest is counter to American Culture.

American culture doesn’t actually have a strong culture or ethos of rest. We cheer for continuous hustle and working non-stop hours, brag about being ‘insanely’ tired, and ignore the dark sides of hustle culture. In analyzing over 2000 holiday letters in 2014, Amy Burnett, a professor of communication at North Dakota State University in Fargo, found that in the 15 years prior, holiday letters increasingly started talking about the fast pace of life, how much people were doing, and were becoming “brag sheets” of correspondence. Today, people write about how busy they are, the frenetic pace, and list out “everyone’s achievements like a communal resume.” The most frequent words to describe our days? Busy. Crazy. Frenetic. On The Run.

No wonder so many people are so deeply exhausted.

Rest is essential to who we are as humans.

Nearly everyone needs more sleep and more rest. Most people are woefully under-nourished when it comes to getting the rest they need. “Rest is the energy, time, and attention you return to yourself,” Jordan Maney, a rest lab creator and radical joy coach told me. When I learned about the seven types of rest—and why sleep isn’t enough—I realized how much more was possible.

thejordanmaney

A post shared by Jordan Maney | Rest Coaching & Strategy (@thejordanmaney)

Jordan has joined us as a guest teacher at Startup Parent five times so far in our women’s leadership program, and we hosted an Instagram Live together all about finding more ways to rest. Rest is so much more than sleep, Jordan explains. Rest is about longevity, it’s about resilience, it’s about recovery. Especially when you’re working towards justice, equity, and joy, rest isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s essential.

If you’re following her on social media, Jordan Maney talks about how to rest when you are burned out, when you have ADHD, when you’re conditioned in hustle culture, when you need to protect your mental health, when you’re packing your weekends too full, and when you don’t look or act the way that society expects you to (ahem, thin, slender, tall, white, quiet). Jordan’s work sits at the intersection of social justice, rest, and radical joy, and I am continuously learning from her.

Now I’ve certainly muscled my way through low-sleep days, especially as a new parent. But even when I am paying careful attention to my sleep and making sure I get enough, there are times I still feel completely exhausted. What gives?

It turns out that sleep alone is not enough.

Sleep and rest are not the same thing.

The idea that rest is more than just sleep was a wake-up call (no pun intended). Jordan Maney introduced me to the work of Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, who analyzed the ways in which people rest, and found that there are seven core types of rest that people need. Sleep and rest are not the same thing, Dalton-Smith explains. Humans need all sorts of rest, and if you’re tired, you might not be getting enough rest in one of these seven core areas.

Because we all have different rest needs, we won't all benefit from various techniques. For some, journaling or meditation works, but for others, you might have too much mental space and actually need more social settings that feel relaxing. Some of us need an information detox to help rest our minds, and others find social media to be a passive form of socialization that feels good. It depends on what your needs are right now. Next, we’ll go over the seven different types of rest, with pictures for each type.

"If you are not purposefully resting, you are not building resilience in your life."
— Dr. Saunda Dalton-Smith

The 7 types of rest we all need

Most people think that rest just means getting more sleep. Yes, we all need quality sleep. But we also need "to replenish all the ways we become depleted," says Dr. Dalton-Smith. Getting more sleep does not resolve the deficits that build up across all of our rest needs. Knowing what rest you need is about self-discovery, and identifying where your deficits are. 

These are the seven types of rest:

EMOTIONAL REST — being emotionally rested means being able to express your feelings and cut back on people pleasing. To get this rest, some ways to do it include identifying people who drain you, reducing time spent with them (or limiting chats and messages to a certain time. I love the mute functions on text messaging!). Also, practice finding a way to be more honest about setting boundaries and communicating what you need.

One of the ways I rested over the holiday was by taking chat apps and messaging off of my phone. The relative quiet from ongoing conversations was very restorative.

MENTAL REST — is about being able to quiet your mind chatter and focus on what's important. If you're in your head, stirring up worries or rehearsing past conversations, you need mental rest. Journaling, venting, mindfulness exercises, or focusing your energy on solving the stickiest hang-ups can help here. There’s a reason why labyrinths and forest walks have been known to be meditative and relaxing—it’s another way to give yourself mental rest.

While it’s unlikely that I’ll have a labyrinth close by, picking a certain route through my neighborhood that I can go on easily has a similar meditative quality to the walk. We have our 15m, 20m, and 30m loops that we can do depending on the day.

Journaling can be a wonderful way to get the chatter out of your mind and onto the page – there’s a reason why hundreds of thousands of people love morning pages.

Therapy or counseling can be tremendously beneficial. While the session itself might be hard, having a place to unpack what’s stuck in my brain and causing a spin cycle of worry or pain can create a lot of mental freedom and rest down the line.

SOCIAL REST — this can be active, like taking walks with friends, or having a lovely tea and down-time with a friend. Passive social rest can include things like scrolling before bed. Jordan says "It's fine when it helps you zone out, but make sure you switch to active rest too to fill your tank.”

Social rest and down time with friends AND creative rest! Coloring is so soothing.

Social rest and also physical contact, aka sensory stimulation that might create sensory rest as well. I don’t like the metaphor of killing two birds with stones, so the better metaphor might be “the longer the robin sits on the egg, the better it grows” (work in progress here).

CREATIVE REST — is the rest that comes from being creative (if you need more of it in your life), like sewing, painting, crafting, cooking, or doing puzzles. But it can also mean resting from creativity if your job requires a high demand from you.

Turn off the phone and the work and play around a little. If music is your work, take a break from work!

Hand-crafting, whether cooking or paper or something else, can be very relaxing.

I’ve recently taken up coloring books, and I listen to books or podcasts or music and I love it.

SENSORY REST — is about reducing stimulation, like turning the noise down, dimming lights in the evening, or even taking a warm bath with lavender and salt in a candle-lit room. (For me, I dim lights, play very quiet relaxing music, and sometimes wear headphones to reduce kid noise! I also love a weighted blanket in a dark room for 15 minutes.)

SPIRITUAL REST is about having a sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself. This can be faith-based, like meditation or prayer, or this can be about the groups that you belong to, from support groups to regional groups and more. Volunteering with others, being part of an alumni group, or joining a local choir or music group can all be a form of spiritual rest.

A prayer group or singing circle.

A community gathering or regular place of faith can be restorative.

Last but not least, there is PHYSICAL REST. This is about resting our physical bodies. Passive physical rest includes sleeping and napping. She calls these "cessation activities," which is where you don't physically do anything. But there is also active physical rest, which are restorative activities "that improve our circulation and lymphatic systems and help relax our muscles." This can include leisurely walks, stretching, dancing, yoga, massage therapy, and more. 

Sleep is also an important part of this mix. Sleep alone, however, is not all there is to rest.

We need more cat naps on a regular basis.

Rest can be active or passive.

Within each category of rest, there can be passive rest (where you don’t actually do anything, or you take a break and time away from doing something more intensive). There’s also active rest, in which you proactively do something to encourage rest—for example, getting a massage, going for a walk, actively taking steps to text friends and socialize, for example.

For me, because I work from home, I don’t always get enough in-person socialization! There is a real connection between laughing with people after work, playing games, chatting it up, and the real sense of rest and distance I get from work. I’ve noticed that sometimes, being social at the end of the day can help me better unwind and get even better sleep. For others who are extremely social or in meetings all day, the opposite might be true, with the need to take a break from social events a very real rest need.

Looking at the list, sensory rest is also a huge priority for me, especially with the noise and clutter of children. At the end of the day, when I feel completely shattered by all of the parenting choices and activities, I’m trying to practice more active sensory rest—deliberately getting into a bath with candles and low lights, and sinking under the water so I hear only the soft sounds of gurgling water.

Rest doesn't necessarily mean stopping everything. Rest is about restoration. "If you are not purposefully resting, you are not building resilience in your life," Dalton-Smith says. Resting is also about resilience and longevity. "Just stopping is not always restorative. Sometimes something has to be done to pour back into that area where you are being depleted," she explains. Functioning optimally is about restoring all of the buckets that need to be filled. When we fill up our buckets, a ripple effect happens: we can get even better sleep, too.

Over the holidays, I took two weeks away from work.

I signed off Slack, logged out of email, took social media off my phone, and turned off my favorite messaging apps. My teammates paused work, and we told everyone in the community that we’d be away. Since so many people take the last week of the year away from work, I knew it would be a time that I could slip away for a bit. It was even easier to do it this year, because pandemic parenting brought me to the cliff’s edge of burnout, and I’m not interested in being back there again.

I loved the break. It felt wonderful to turn into a sloth and sink into the couch. I read no books, I consumed no podcasts, and I watched my favorite reality television shows and the two episodes of Knives Out. We played with cousins and ate cookies and I honestly don’t remember what else I did. I’m sure I had a cold in there, too.

“But didn’t you have your kids at home for two weeks?” my friend asked me. “That’s not a real break.” Fair. Yes, the kids were around the entire time, and our house became a disaster zone of toys and laundry. But it still felt like a break, because now that my kids are four and six, they actually play together. Not only that, they can play independently and they can watch television for hours. They watched every episode of Paw Patrol and Rescue Riders, plus movies with us at night, and they even made cookies with the grandparents.

In short, I spent this holiday differently than I’ve often done in the past, and it reminded me yet again just how crucially important rest is. Rest is what allows us to expand and stretch. The greatest athletes in the world don’t workout 24 hours a day—they spend more time resting than working. That’s part of the recipe of greatness. Burnout is toxic, widespread, and dangerous. Yet most of us are more burned out than we realize, and caught in the trap of American Hustle.

How can you get more rest?

Which buckets of yours need to be filled right now?

Looking at the list, I know that sensory rest is a huge priority for me, especially with the noise and clutter of children. At the end of the day, when I feel completely shattered by all of the parenting choices and activities, I’m going to practice more active sensory rest—deliberately getting into a bath with candles and low lights, and sinking under the water so I hear only the soft sounds of gurgling water.

If you're overwhelmed by all the rest you might need, here's what Dr. Dalton-Smith says to do:

• First, start small, she reminds people. If you add a whole bunch to your todo list all at once, it’s not going to be helpful, it’ll just make you more exhausted.

• Rest is not about a major sabbatical or an elaborate vacation. When you start daydreaming about a major sabbatical or a huge vacation, this is a sign that you need more rest in your everyday life, and to start to implement new habits or patterns to get rest within your current situation (in possible). Plus, people are often more tired after vacation because it requires a lot of work and planning, plus you might do a whole slew of activities that don't fill up any of the rest buckets you really need—it's an adventure or a trip, not a respite.) Believe it or not, but a vacation or sleep might not actually solve the tired, but it's 95% of what's thought of as "rest."

• Start with the bucket that feels most depleted. If you feel like you’re mentally over-stimulated at work and you don’t have any creative space in your life, try unwinding at night with a coloring book for five minutes just to doodle and add a little delight back into your life.

• Rest does not need to be BIG to count. Rest is about all the little things we fill ourselves up with.

Start small rather than not start at all.

What's the smallest thing that would put a drop in the rest bucket you need most?

• Three minutes of closing your eyes and doing 2x breathing?

• Five minutes of doodle-sketching while listening to beautiful music?

• A short little walk outside to look at the trees?

• Watching a comedy special to laugh more in the evenings?

• Taking an hour away from social media on your favorite day of the week—or—taking an hour specifically to text and gab with whatever friends are online?

How much more rest do you need?

When I was newly pregnant, a doula told me that getting 8 hours of sleep as a parent would be hard, but so important. “It’s not about getting eight hours of sleep in bed anymore,” she explained, “but it is about staying in bed as long as it takes to get the hours that you need.” I asked her how many hours that was, and she said, “some days, you might need to be in bed for 16 hours to get all the sleep you need.” I remember how true this was. Some days, it’s still true.

Getting the rest you need might not even be about sleep. It might be taking a restorative shower, giving yourself a break from household chores, saying no to a play date, having someone else cook for you, or getting to see someone you love so you can share your birth stories. Rest can mean taking five minutes of quiet time after a meeting, lying down on the floor in the middle of a work day, putting noise-cancelling headphones on, or strolling outside in nature for a few minutes. Rest can mean dancing, singing, and painting with glee.

Sometimes I observe how my mind still wants to set a “time limit” on my rest needs. For example, I’ll plan to take two sick days and then decide that that’s enough, and in three days surely I’ll get right back to work. Sometimes my agenda is forced on top of reality, instead of being responsive and flexible to the needs of the current season.

What if it took the time it took?

Rest is about refilling and refueling yourself in dozens of ways, until our needs in each bucket are full. Rest can be a radical act. We’re not supposed to merely survive.

Rest allows us to be more resilient, vibrant human beings.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

PS: What do you do to get enough rest? Leave a note in the comments.

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KEY IDEAS & TAKEAWAYS

• “Rest is about the time, energy, and attention you return to yourself,” says Jordan Maney.

• “If you are not purposefully resting, you are not building resilience in your life,” says researcher Saundra Dalton-Smith. “Just stopping is not always restorative. Sometimes something has to be done to pour back into that area where you are being depleted."

• There are seven types of rest: emotional, mental, physical, social, sensory, spiritual, and creative. You can get passive and active rest within each category.

• Getting enough rest is a profound act of resistance and rebellion—especially for Black women, people of color, and people most affected by the isms—racism, sexism, ageism, classism and other systems of oppression.

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