In one of his recent voicenotes, Ben got to the crux of why we are here:
“You’re right, Emily, I think I do need a rest day. But what would that even look like?”
Excellent question, Ben.
He went on to mention some things that would not feel restful: a day spent watching Netflix would perhaps feel like a break in some ways but Ben knew it would not leave him feeling rejuvenated; switching from the project he has been working on for weeks to tackle a different workload would test the theory that a change is as good as a rest and ultimately disprove it; and, going big, taking a day trip somewhere far from the norms of everyday life to seek rest in escape would prove too logistically demanding for an already exhausted mind. So, what is he to do?
According to Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith, we humans need 7 different types of rest:
Physical
Mental
Social
Emotional
Sensory
Spiritual
Creative
Looking at this list, the first thing I see is not different kinds of rest, but different flavours of exhaustion. Maybe you recognise them that way too. Social exhaustion will be familiar to even the most extreme extroverts among us. In our post-lockdown world, when suddenly we were allowed to socialise again and many of us dived right back in with zero re-acclimatisation period, this one hit hard. Emotional exhaustion, my old friend that makes me want to take a nap after every therapy session. I know mental exhaustion has hit when I can no longer form a cohesive sentence. Sensory exhaustion can be found everywhere from nightclubs to children’s television. Creative exhaustion is the exact opposite of getting your creative juices flowing: it may feel like you are out of ideas, that you are stagnating, or even a little disillusioned. If we define “spiritual” as being connected to something bigger than ourselves, we can perhaps imagine a state of exhaustion that feels like running on empty because we’ve simply been disconnected, from ourselves and from community, for too long. Again, a big player in a global pandemic. And, of course, there’s physical exhaustion, experienced in the aftermath of exercise, moving house, illness and so much more.
These examples may resonate with you, but they may not. Your triggers for sensory exhaustion may be very different to mine. You may have never even been consciously aware of spiritual exhaustion at all. For some of us, it may feel like our various states of exhaustion fit across more than seven flavours, for others it may be fewer. And so on and so on. Although we may sometimes sync up, ultimately exhaustion is an individual experience.
And rest is too. How we find rest and how different practices rejuvenate us is a very personal experience. What I have found is that referring to these seven categories has helped to broaden my understanding of what rest can look like for me and when I might find particular activities restful. It remains a conscious effort (and often an unsuccessful one) to understand what I am feeling and what I need in terms of rest. Each instance feels like a bit of an experiment, the results of which are only applicable to one human (me) in one particular moment (that has now passed). But the practice feels promising.
In terms of what these different kinds of rest all look like, that feels very personal too. I think this is why I see the list as kinds of exhaustion rather than types of rest: I struggle to think of restful examples in my own life for all of these categories. But I’ve been doing some brainstorming, and sharing my ideas with Ben to encourage his rest experiments too: