The 7 Types of Rest - A How To

This post may contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a small percentage of any purchases, at no additional cost to you.

It’s easy to find yourself feeling run-down and exhausted, like no matter how much you sleep, you’ll never have energy again. You might even have tried it and found that yep, a few good nights of sleep just isn’t enough. What’s going on?

Well, you probably need a different kind of rest.

When we feel tired, our first instinctive response is to sleep more, but that only addresses one kind of rest that humans need. It turns out that there is a wide range of rest types, and they each fill a different need. If one of them is neglected, you’ll find yourself reacting to the world in ways that may not make sense to you or don’t seem reasonable.

Here is a look at seven different kinds of rest: physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, creative, sensory and social. They’re all important. Are you experiencing a deficit in one of these areas?

Physical Rest

Physical rest is the most common kind of rest that we think of when we feel tired. It includes sleep (and we love talking about sleep), but it can also include having a quiet day where you don’t put your body through a lot of extra effort, or a very gentle yoga morning with this beautiful Yoga Mat instead of an eight-mile run. When you’ve pushed your body hard, it needs time to recover. Give it the physical rest it needs. If you are having a tough time falling asleep or getting the sleep you need try some of the curated sleep products we have in our Myrth Shop.

Mental Rest

Have you ever stayed up all night cramming for an exam only to find that, once you’re taking the test, you don’t remember much? That’s because not only does your brain need sleep (seriously, those all-nighters aren’t great), it also needs its own kind of rest time. Mental rest is where you stop forcing your brain to work hard and give it some time to process information, make connections, and cement memories. It’s essential to learning and processing. Without it, you’ll have trouble remembering new information and seeing how it relates to other information. Why not find a meditative hobby or perhaps try Mala Beads to find a restful mental state.

Spiritual Rest

Know that spiritual rest can, but doesn’t have to, include some connection to a religious element in your life. Spirituality more broadly refers to how humans draw meaning from their lives, and how they connect to each other and the world around them. When you don’t give yourself time to experience that meaningfulness and connection, you start to feel spiritual exhaustion. To get to a place of spiritual rest, it helps to think about what gives you a sense of meaning and fulfillment in your life, and then think about how to make some space for that. Finding a mantra that resonates may be the first step.

Emotional Rest

When you’re going through emotional exhaustion, you might find that your tolerance for strong feelings is a lot lower than it used to be, that you’ll lose your temper more easily, or that you reach the tears threshold faster than usual. It might also manifest as physical tiredness, distraction, and lack of motivation. To help alleviate these symptoms, try to remove some emotional triggers from your life if possible (social media is a great thing to cut back on during times of emotional overwhelm because it’s a firehose of more emotions from other people, often negative ones). Give yourself space where you don’t have to react to others’ emotions and where you can be alone to process your own.

Creative Rest

Creative rest is closely tied to mental rest, but it isn’t the same thing. Creativity thrives on seeing things differently from how others do, and it’s hard to do that when you are so focused on creating the things you’ve already thought of that you can’t look up and explore the world around you. Giving yourself a period of creative rest means taking some time to stop doing and instead to observe, to think, to journal, to explore. You might come up with a bunch of new ideas to implement--don’t. Not yet. Write them down so you don’t forget, and then keep resting. Let yourself recharge before you plunge into a new period of making and doing.

Sensory Rest

When we live in a busy world full of sounds and sights and smells and textures, our conscious mind often tunes out some of it so that we can focus on what needs to be done. That doesn’t mean our brains aren’t still trying to process it, though. Eventually, we can become overloaded with all of the sensory input we’ve received. If you’ve spent all day in a noisy place, or somewhere with flashing lights or lots of bright colors, or maybe you’ve just gone too long with too many people trying to talk to you at once, you might start to feel overwhelmed from all of the sensory input. Try to get yourself to a quiet place with minimal sensory distractions and let yourself take some deep breaths away from all the input. A weighted blanket and an eye mask may be just what you need.

Social Rest

Even the most outgoing of extroverts may sometimes find that they need a break from hanging out with others. Social rest is important because it gives us time to connect with ourselves and experience our own company without the distractions of others. Your relationship with yourself is the longest and most constant of your entire life, and it’s the only one you can’t completely run away from if things get bad--so take time to nourish it. Spend some time reading a book, or journaling, or alone - we promise your body will thank you.

Finding and making time for rest can feel daunting, especially nowadays, especially if you’re one of the many who are working from home while trying to supervise children who are learning from home or while caring for an elderly or ill family member. It’s okay if your rest right now is imperfect, less frequent than you would like, or less thorough than you would hope. What matters most is that you try to get enough rest to get through a challenging time, and then you can regroup once you’ve made it through.

Because you will make it through. You can do this.

We wish you good rest.

Have you found yourself running a deficit in one of the types of rest? How did you figure out what was happening, and how did you give yourself a chance to rest? Leave us a comment!

P.S. - You can save and share this post on Pinterest using this image: