I don’t know about you, but lately I have been feeling exhausted. Not just mentally but my god, physically as well.
After what can only be described as a cursed start to the beginning of the year – 1 x A&E visit, 6 stitches in my now permanently numb finger, 2 x chest infections, 1 x house move and 1 x vomiting episode from accidental daffodil water poisoning – I spent the months of January to March in a self-imposed hibernation for fear of causing myself more harm.
But as my curtains no longer had to be closed by 4pm and my leggings were replaced with shorts, I began to emerge from the sanctity of my flat and attempt to re-immerse myself back into society, outside of my family and core friendship group.
Now, this is the point I should probably give you a brief bit of background on me, outside of my clumsiness with everyday utensils.
I’m 36, I’m a freelance beauty journalist which means yes, I never want for a mascara, but I also get upwards of 10 RSVP chasers a day, checking to see if I’m coming to the latest rooftop party/immersive dinner experience/sunrise yoga session/canapé breakfast.
I live by myself and work for myself which I love but can get pretty lonely. I’m also based in Croydon, which means every one of these events involves a train which is most likely delayed/cancelled or on strike.
Safe to say, four months later, I think I’ve hit what can only be described as burnout, with a social battery that feels impossible to recharge and a lower back ache that just won’t go away.
As the urge to retreat back into my hibernation became overwhelming, I heard about Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith’s seven types of rest. In her book: Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, Dr Saundra claims to have found the ultimate exhaustion reset button because apparently, just going to bed at 9pm/locking yourself in your flat for months at a time won’t do it.
Her seven types of rest are physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social and spiritual. Dr Saundra’s belief is that only by restoring balance in all of these areas can you truly cure your “rest deficit”. With nothing left to lose and a commission from GLAMOUR to encourage me on my way, I set about seeing if she was right.
As a classic “sedentary worker” whose commute to the office is quite literally bedroom to front room, I would have thought I had physical rest nailed. Turns out I haven’t’ even got that right.
I started by addressing what Dr Saundra describes as “passive physical rest” aka sleeping and napping. Despite working for myself, I’m still very much stuck in the mindset of savouring my evenings. In my old job I would get home at 7 earliest which meant there was no way I was going to bed just three hours later.
With a bedtime creeping all the way up to 1.30am (on a bad night) no wonder I felt like the living dead waking up every morning. My friends in “normal” jobs tuck themselves up at 10pm, so I decided to follow suit, despite feeling like I was somehow missing out on my extra-curricular activity time. Aka watching my favourite YouTube podcast H3.
At first, I won’t lie, I got into bed at 10pm and scrolled on my phone till 11.30pm, but after a couple of days I embraced hitting the pillow on time. It doesn’t take a genius to guess I felt better for it. But my favourite result was that my new bedtime meant I naturally woke up earlier. Rather than waking up at 9am, I was up at 7am, ticking a load of things off my to do list before old me had even got up.
However, I couldn’t stick to it. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the Van Gogh Lego set I’d previously spent my evenings working on. So, while I haven’t stuck to 10pm every night, I also haven’t seen midnight since.
The second type of physical rest is what Dr Saundra describes as “active”. Think stretching, yoga, pilates, massage, anything that gets your circulation and flexibility going.
I may be 36 but my god I was feeling more like 86. If I sat too long I almost creaked getting up. My calf muscles were so tight walking downstairs in the morning made me wince and that lower back ache wasn’t going anywhere.
Now, I’ve tried yoga and pilates before but never had a full body massage as being plus-size I felt too self-conscious. Embracing my quest to feel rested, I finally found myself face down with nothing but a fluffy white towel covering my bottom.
My first-ever massage was definitely a learning experience and while I came away realising that boob holes in beds are as vital as head ones, I also discovered just how tense I am… everywhere.
Turns out my entire body is more knotted than my jewellery box, even my hands and while I had to grit my teeth as my therapist kneaded a particularly painful one in between my shoulders, I also felt like I could literally feel the tension leaving my body.
It was a healing experience in more ways than one and possibly the best thing I’ve taken from this experience. Rather than a “treat”, I now see massage as an investment in my body and have already had my second with a third being booked imminently.
With a quietened body, I turned to my very loud mind. Dr Saundra claims we don’t have to go on holiday to clear our head but instead should keep a diary off any nagging thoughts and schedule short breaks into our working days every two hours.
As someone on medication for anxiety, mental rest is something I could do with more than anything, but sadly Dr Saundra’s approach just didn’t work for me.
Admittedly being my own boss means I was never short of a work break anyway, but I found scheduling these micro ones in left me a bit lost. Should I use the time to do something else or am I meant to do nothing? Should I try and inevitably fail to do a meditation session and re-download the Head Space app? Why does my rest break leave me with more thoughts than if I was working?
The diary idea however I could appreciate as it’s something I learnt in therapy myself and while I don’t physically write them down, I do try and unpick my thoughts in my head like my therapist used to do on a whiteboard in her blue painted office.
Overall, mental rest was unfortunately a fail.
If mental rest was a failure, sensory rest was a disaster. Of course, sensory rest is all about our screen time and our always online 24/7 lives. Dr Saundra encourages “intentional moments” of sensory deprivation even if that’s as simple as closing your eyes for a minute in the middle of everyday or turning off your electronics at night.
The problem is, even if I close my eyes for one minute, I still open them to 88 unread Whatsapp chats and 253 emails that need replying to. Plus, one missed call and voicemail from the dentist.
Not to mention, multi-screening is what keeps me company throughout the day. In the absence of a colleague, I’d be sitting in silence if it wasn’t for Buffy the Vampire Slayer playing on the TV in the background.
Truly, the biggest sensory rest was my girl’s holiday to Marbella where my screen time was down to 3 hours a day and my out of office firmly on.
Thankfully, things started to turn around again with creative rest. This is all about appreciating the beauty of nature, enjoying art in all its forms whether that’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer or a Monet and surrounding yourself with imagery and artwork that inspires you.
My only nit-pick with this one is that it’s very open to interpretation. Mine was to finally get some pictures framed and hung that I’d had under my bed for years. I’m staring at them now as I type this, and I have to say I do love the brightness and homeliness they give me.
I’m also lucky that my flat is located in some beautiful grounds with loads of nature. Whilst I often curse this for the ginormous spiders it gives me, I’ve also tried to take in a moment each day to look out and truly appreciate how #blessed I am.
I even saw a baby deer (which I of course filmed and immediately Whatsapped to my family chat ruining my sensory deprivation rest in the process).
Out of all the rests, this was the one I actually think I needed the most – a break from people pleasing and a space to freely express your feelings.
Like a lot of you, I put the needs and wants of everyone before myself. For me, one of the worst feelings is feeling like I’ve let someone down or, God forbid, upset them. Admittedly this wasn’t going to change overnight but this little challenge of putting myself first for once has really sparked something inside of me. A spark I hope that will ignite an inferno.
I started by saying no to the fancy work event invites I didn’t want to go to. Yeah, sunrise yoga sounds nice in principle, not when you have to get to east London from Croydon for 6am. I don’t drink, so no, I don’t want to attend a party celebrating your new shade of eyeliners and no, I don’t want to meet up for a coffee when we only caught up last month.
I cannot tell you how much better I feel for saying no and instead saying yes with intention for the work events that genuinely excite me.
However, the biggest breakthough with emotional rest was me messaging a friend who had upset me. As an inherent people pleaser, I would never have done this before, but I felt betrayed and rather than moaning to other friends about it, I drafted a message in my notes app and advocated for myself.
Immediately my friend phoned me and apologised, and I felt a weight off my shoulders for being heard. What’s that? Oh, it’s the sound of a breakthrough.
For me, social rest really is intwined with emotional rest as it’s all about differentiating between the relationships that revive or exhaust us.
By saying no to these social work events, it freed up time, time I could spend with my niece and nephew who I love more than anything.
My parents look after my niece Lyra on a Thursday and while I normally kept Thursdays clear so I could go round and play Sylvanian Families, I’d slowly started filling my diary back up. However, even though these were events I had wanted to attend, I realised that they weren’t worth missing my Lyra time and that is truly what is more important to me.
Dr Saundra’s final step involves engaging in something “greater than yourself”, be it prayer or meditation. As mentioned before, this isn’t my first Rodeo and I know apps like Headspace and Calm only work for me when I want to listen to Matthew McConaughey read me a bedtime story.
Look, I’m sorry, but does anyone really manage to quieten their mind?
However, Dr Saundra also suggests community involvement and this I could get on board with. Whether that’s taking the time to chat to the elderly couple I see on my walk or donating my old phone to my mum’s work colleague so her son could finally have his first iPhone. For me these minor moments of human connection are far greater than 15 minutes of silence.
Overall, while Dr Saundra’s approach does seem novel, essentially, I realised it’s all about restoring the balance in your life and focusing on what and who is important to you.
For me, my exhaustion was a fire extinguisher to the joy in my life and while my back still aches and I continue to hit snooze, that burnout feeling of dread is finally gone.
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