Getting enough sleep but still exhausted? These 7 types of rest can help
It is possible to say that Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith wrote a book in rest. And that’s because she actually wrote it. After five years in her internal medicine practice and caring for two young children, the author of “Sacred Rest” experienced an extreme case of burnout. Initially, she thought she needed more sleep.
“At that time, there wasn’t much talk about burnout. The main conversation was about sleep,” recalls Dalton-Smith. “It was around this time that Arianna Huffington was promoting the great sleep revolution. So when I experienced burnout, my initial thinking was based on research that said if I got adequate, high-quality sleep, I shouldn’t feel more exhausted.”
It was then that the doctor began to investigate the matter further. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends at least seven hours of sleep a day, Dalton-Smith found that even nine hours of sleep wasn’t enough.
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“I was getting seven, eight, nine hours of high-quality sleep documented in sleep labs. I mean, I was fanatical about it because I was trying to figure out how to solve it,” she says. “What do you do when you’ve slept for eight hours and everything is saying you had a perfect sleep, and you’re still exhausted?”
It was then that she realized that sleeping is not the same as resting. After running several tests that determined there was nothing wrong with her health, Dalton-Smith began thinking about other ways people can feel exhausted. And that’s how his revolutionary “7 Types of Rest” framework was born.
The 7 Types of Rest
The premise is simple: to feel rested, you need to replenish energy in the places where it has been depleted. After making a list of all the ways she felt exhausted, Dalton-Smith determined that there are seven types of rest we all need to feel our best. These seven types are:
- Physical
- Mental
- Sensory
- Creative
- Emotional
- Social
- Spiritual
“When I looked at the physiology of some of the things I wrote, there was overlap in the physiology and how the body works,” explains Dalton-Smith. “People ask me if mental and emotional rest are the same thing, and I say no. If we think about it, mental, emotional and sensory deal with the brain or nervous system, but they are all being affected in completely different ways. So that was the approach I was considering: the physiology, psychology and environmental aspects that influence each type of rest.”
What kind of rest do you need?
Determining what type of rest you need requires a personal assessment. To help, Dalton-Smith has developed an online quiz that can help you get to the root of your burnout. If you prefer an offline approach, Dalton-Smith encourages you to start with awareness.
“It all starts with realizing that you can be fatigued in different ways,” she says. “Most people haven’t thought about being creatively exhausted or socially exhausted.”
Next, Dalton-Smith invites people to consider all the ways they expend energy throughout the day — both at work and in their daily lives — and to think about where they don’t have a system in place to replenish that particular energy source.
“Most people don’t need to focus on all seven types of rest,” she says. “Most people already do some of these things naturally. But usually, if they’re tired, there’s one or two guys that haven’t thought about it, and that’s the one that can come back to bite you because you’re not doing anything to improve in that area.”
If you find yourself needing rest in all seven categories, Dalton-Smith suggests starting with the area of greatest deficit. Once you’ve taken an honest look at where you’re spending the most energy in your life, you can start thinking about ways to replenish that area.
“You can’t eat the whole elephant,” she says. “When you start to fill in the area that is most depleted, you start to feel better just by improving that biggest rest deficit.”
Developing Your Rest Strategy
“If you’re a ‘high performer,’ you can’t continue to perform at high capacity for long without restoration,” explains Dalton-Smith. “So if you want to have sustainability, continuous innovation and a high level of performance in your career, you will need to have a rest strategy in place.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean requesting more days off or taking a longer vacation, or even a sabbatical. The most beneficial rest strategy is the one you can incorporate into your daily life, says Dalton-Smith.
“Restorative processes can be integrated into our lives,” she continues. “That, to me, is really what work-life integration needs to focus on.”
Each type of rest has a corresponding set of restorative practices that are also unique to the person and the type of environment they are in. For example, a person working in an open-plan office may be using a lot of sensory energy to ignore background noise and block out conversations happening near them.
“This process of ignoring is using energy,” says Dalton-Smith. “Your brain is actively working to filter out that noise. If you’re doing this for eight hours a day, you’re very likely to experience some symptoms of sensory overload, like irritation and agitation — those psychological experiences that arise when you’re sensory overloaded.”
In this case, Dalton-Smith recommends using noise-cancelling headphones. The key, however, is not to play music, although white noise can help you focus.
“There’s no need to overload yourself sensorially in this situation, especially if you’re trying to do deep work,” she says. “You will clear mental space and energy by being conscious of how you are using your energy.”
For people who may be using a lot of creative and mental energy throughout the day to solve problems, Dalton-Smith suggests considering mindfulness activities such as walking, running, yoga or meditation.
“Most leadership skills can be optimized with restorative best practices. Our communication improves when we have more emotional and social rest practices incorporated into our lives. Our ability to think outside the box and be more innovative improves with better creative rest. How we feel even in our bodies improves with better physical rest,” she says. “If high-level athletes need to understand rest and restoration to perform optimally, wouldn’t every other high-level position need the same information?”
