You can say Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith wrote the book on rest. And that’s because she did. After five years into her clinical internal medicine practice and caring for two young children, the author of Sacred Rest underwent an extreme case of burnout. Initially, she thought she needed more sleep.
“At that point, there wasn’t a lot of conversation about burnout. The main conversation was about sleep,” recalls Dalton-Smith. “That was around the time that Arianna Huffington was doing the big sleep revolution. So when I burned out, my initial thought process was based on research that said if I get adequate, high-quality sleep, then I should not feel burned out anymore.”
That’s when the physician started digging a bit deeper. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends at least seven hours of sleep per day, Dalton-Smith found that even nine hours of sleep wasn’t enough.
“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 resolve this,” she says. “What do you do when you’ve slept for eight hours and everything’s telling you that you had perfect sleep and you’re still exhausted?”
That’s when she realized sleep does not equate to rest. After completing various tests that all determined there was nothing medically wrong with her, Dalton-Smith began thinking about other ways that people can be exhausted. And that’s when her revolutionary 7 Types of Rest framework was born.
“I started asking this question that became the foundation of my work: What kind of tired am I?” she says. “And that took me on a journey of realizing if I’m feeling fatigued, then something has to be drained. What exactly was drained? If I could figure out what was drained, then I could build that reservoir back up to get it feeling healthy again.”
The 7 Types of Rest Framework
The premise is simple: In order to feel rested, you need to pour energy back into the places where it’s been depleted. After making a list of all the ways she felt drained, Dalton-Smith determined there are seven types of rest we all need to feel like our best, most energized selves. Those seven types are:
- Physical
- Mental
- Sensory
- Creative
- Emotional
- Social
- Spiritual
“When I looked at the physiology of some of the things I wrote down, there was overlap in the physiology and how the body works,” explains Dalton-Smith. “People will ask me if mental and emotional rest are the same thing and I say no. If we think about it, mental, emotional, and sensory all deal with the brain or the nervous system, but they’re all being affected completely differently. So that’s the approach I was looking at: the physiology, the psychology, and the environmental aspects that went into 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 questionnaire that can help you get to the root of your exhaustion. If you prefer an offline approach, Dalton-Smith encourages you to begin with awareness.
“It begins with the awareness that you can be fatigued in different ways,” she says. “Most people haven’t thought about being creatively depleted or being socially depleted.”
Next, Dalton-Smith invites people to consider all the ways they expend energy throughout the day—both at work and in their day-to-day lives—and consider where they don’t have a system in place for pouring back into that particular bucket of energy.
“Most people don’t need to focus on all seven types of rest,” she says. “Most people are already doing some of these things naturally. But usually if they’re tired, there’s one or two types that they haven’t thought about, and it’s the one that can come back to bite you in the behind 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 brainstorming ways to replenish that area.
“You can’t eat the whole elephant,” she says. “When you begin to fill up the area that’s the most depleted, you begin to feel better just from improving that greatest rest deficit.”
Developing your personal rest strategy
“If you’re a high achiever, you cannot continue to function at a high capacity for long without restoration,” Dalton-Smith explains. “So if you want to have sustainability, continued innovation, and a high level of performance within your career, it’s going to require you to have a rest strategy in place.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean submitting more PTO or taking longer vacations or even a sabbatical. The most beneficial rest strategy is one that you can incorporate into your daily life, says Dalton-Smith.
“Restorative processes can be integrated into our life,” she continues. “That, to me, is really what work-life integration has to focus on.”
Each type of rest has a set of corresponding restorative practices that is also unique to the person and the kind of environment they’re in. For example, a person who works in an open-floor-plan office may be using a lot of sensory energy to tune out background noise and block out conversations happening near them.
“That tuning out process is using energy,” says Dalton-Smith. “Your brain is actively working to filter out that noise. If you’re doing that for eight hours a day, it’s very likely that you’re going to experience some sensory overload symptoms, such as irritation and agitation—those psychological experiences that come when you’re sensory overwhelmed.”
In this case, Dalton-Smith recommends using noise-cancellation headphones. The key, however, is not to play music instead, although white noise may help you focus.
“There’s no need to overwhelm yourself sensory-wise in that situation, especially if you’re trying to do deep work,” she says. “You will clear up brain space and brain energy by being mindful of how you’re using energy.”
For people who may be using a large amount of creative and mental energy throughout the day to do problem solving, Dalton-Smith suggests looking into mindfulness activities, such as walking, jogging, yoga, or meditation.
“Most leadership skills can be optimized with better restorative practices. Our communication improves when we have more emotional and social rest practices embedded into our life. How we are able to think outside of 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 top-level athletes are needing to understand rest and restoration to perform at their best, wouldn’t every other type of high-level position need the same information?”
More on sleep and rest:
- I took Headspace’s guided sleep course and I’m finally getting a good night’s rest. Here are the 5 habits I learned
- How late in the day can you drink coffee? What time you can have your last cup and still fall asleep at night
- Can’t get a good night’s rest? 8 ways you may be sabotaging your sleep
- 7 ways to beat burnout and feel better at work
