Sacred Rest was Right: The Types of Rest You Might Be Missing

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Eight days before my daughter’s wedding, my Oura Ring declared a snow day.  (Some of you were around for that post, At the Speed of Easy.)  Here's a little recap.

The exact message my ring sent me was, “To help your body stay in balance, only do what feels good today.”  I had many thoughts.  I didn’t not have time for that.  My baby was getting married in eight days.  My firstborn. There was figuring out what to wear, learning mother daughter dance steps, figuring out an appropriate toast and being sure the shoes were comfy.  Not to mention the interior work of being excited for her while holding the bittersweetness of watching my baby step into a new season. My solution…my one singular solution, was to take a nap. 🤦‍♀️

I’m not saying the nap didn't help, but I don’t think that I acknowledged the wisdom of the Oura ring at the time. (I know I didn't.  It took a blog post for me to sort it out.) I was irritated.  Who has time to do that between Mama tears and Mamma Mia choreography?  After reading Sacred Rest, (affiliate link) by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, I know now, I probably needed social rest and sensory rest…maybe it even knew I needed to bank some for the days ahead.  I surely needed some emotional rest from all the feels…the roller coaster of emotions from a big change.  Honestly, it’s possible I needed to tend many of the seven types of rest presented in the book.  If you’ve done the wedding thing with one of your kids, you know.
            At the time, I hadn’t read Sacred Rest,  so I didn’t know that there are seven types of rest we need…physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual.  Many of us have been trying to meet all of these with…sleep.   We’ve also combined the concepts of sleep and rest, which means we don’t feel rested. When I looked at my own rest patterns through this lens, I realized I’d been tending one or two areas and not the others.

            Take social rest. I’m an introvert. I’ve always thought the fact that social interactions wear me down was something I needed to fix.  I needed to get better at it, push through, and show up.  What I was actually doing was ignoring a legitimate need and then feeling depleted.  I’ve learned to pace myself around big social seasons now.  I build in quiet time before and protect time after.  I have learned that tending myself beforehand and after means I show up more present when I get there. This is probably why I loved Thursday so much when my kids where younger.  Thursday was the day I carved out to stay home and have a quiet day.  It was how I prepared for busy teenager weekends.

Sensory rest made immediate sense, too.  I spend my days in front of a screen, on coaching calls.  I take in podcasts, audiobooks, and trainings. I write and research.  By the end of the day, my nervous system has dealt with an enormous amount of input.  I crave quiet at the end of these days.  After reading the book, it makes total sense.

The goal isn’t to add seven new things to your list.  That would be the opposite of restful, right? The goal is to get curious about which areas you’ve been neglecting and start noticing how it’s affecting you. You’re likely craving for some of these without realizing why.  Now your know.

Dr. Dalton-Smith has a free quiz at RestQuiz.com that helps you identify your biggest rest deficit. Take and treat the results as data, not a to-do list. Get curious about what you find.  If you’ve read this far or you’ve spent any time with me, it won’t surprise you that my top two were social rest and sensory rest, which in hind sight explains a lot about a certain bossy little ring eight days before a wedding. 

Go take the test and if you’d be willing, send me an email and share your results.  I’m curious what rest deficit others have.

I’ll be cheering you on. 

Here's my affiliate link for Sacred Rest if you're interested in going deeper.   I read the Kindle version, so if you end up with the audio version, I'd love it if you let me know how it resonated.