The Sleep-Restfulness Conundrum

The thing that we secretly desire to do on a Sunday is ‘not doing anything’ which in common parlance broadly comprises a post-lunch siesta and a good night’s sleep.

The symptom of need for rest usually starts showing up in our minds from Wednesday. That is why Wednesday is called the Hump Day. Because if we had started our week on a Monday, we would have reached our peak by midweek and are expected to drag ourselves till Friday and take rest on the weekends and revive.

The brain has been conditioned to seek rest and feel restored if we sleep well. The belief being that even God rested on the 7th day after completing all his work of creation. The humans are expected to get ready from Monday to take on the workload of the weekdays. The cycle continues routinely like a point on a Sin X curve plotted on a sheet of graph paper or it’s expected to behave in that pattern normatively.

The big questions for us to answer are:

Are we at that stage where our work and life are well balanced?

Do we understand the message sent out by our body and mind of their requirement for rest?

Is sleep the only circuit breaker we know of to rest and rejuvenate our body and mind to take on the next batch of workload?

Our own experience shows that many of us even after doing our Sunday rest, and sleep routine feel mentally overwhelmed, emotionally drained and physically tired by Tuesday.

The weekend looks far away – why?

Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith, well-known  work-life integration researcher, seems to be having the answer. She says: “Identifying your rest deficit is the first step in being your personal and professional best self.” As a busy physician, author and mom, she understands that life’s demands can leave you feeling mentally overwhelmed, emotionally drained and physically tired. Daily she helps high-achievers deal with their work-rest imbalance and find actionable answers to the thriving lifestyle they desire.

She says sleep and rest are not the same things. We’re suffering from a rest deficit because we don’t understand the various types of rest we need and their true power. She says there are 7 types of rest that every person needs. Rest should equal restoration in seven key areas of your life. Seven! And we were trying to open all the locks with just one key – sleep.

The first type of rest we need is PHYSICAL REST, which can be passive or active. Passive physical rest includes sleeping and napping, while active physical rest means restorative activities such as yoga, stretching, and massage therapy that help improve the body’s circulation and flexibility.

The second type of rest is MENTAL REST. We all experience that when arrear work builds up on our desks. We lie down at night to sleep; we struggle to turn off our brains as conversations from the day fill our thoughts. Ideas and worries come visiting us in our sleep and keep knocking on our mental doors. Despite sleeping seven to eight hours, we wake up feeling as if we never went to bed. That is being a mental rest deficit.

The third type of rest we need is SENSORY REST. Pressure to stay alert during long commutes, reading traffic signals during driving, bright lights, computer screens, background noise, and multiple conversations touching multiple issues — whether they’re in an office or on a VC — can cause our senses to feel overwhelmed throughout our active hours of the day. It’s effects can eat well into the time we dedicate to rest.

The fourth type of rest is CREATIVE REST. The pressure to come up with new ideas to solve problems at hand and to anticipate them to prevent them from happening occupies the mind of the senior management. They are also expected to brainstorm new ideas to come up with newer value propositions for the organisation they lead. The pressure of this leaves them staring blankly at a wall. This type of rest is especially important for anyone who must solve problems or brainstorm new ideas. Creative rest reawakens the awe and wonder inside each of us. Allowing ourselves to take in the beauty of the outdoors — even if it’s at a local park or in your backyard — provides us with creative rest. Select companies are offering unlimited paid vacations to their C suite executives to let their creative juice flow.

The fifth type of rest is EMOTIONAL REST, which means having the time and space to freely express your feelings and cut back on people-pleasing. Deep inside us we feel ignored, neglected, and used by our family members, relatives, friends, and colleagues at our workplace. We are conditioned to say ‘I’m good’ with a sunny smile each time someone wishes us a ‘how are you? We are taught to rise spiritually and not to complain but accept things as they are. This can lead us to a pressure cooker situation which can explode unless released periodically. With our ever-expanding social and professional circles, we can ask ourselves if we have that person, we can be open with our feelings be it sharing our joy, frustration, and sadness, and hope to be understood?

Unknowingly we could be suffering the sixth type of rest deficit which is SOCIAL REST. Many a time we find ourselves in situations in which we are inseparably intertwined with people who exhaust us with their predictably frustrating behaviour. Despite flagging it politely, objecting to it, and warning them not to repeat it, people who are close to us force us to bring out the worst in us. Repeated exposure to these situations exacerbates it. To experience more social rest, we need to surround ourselves with positive and supportive people who inspire us to ignore our situations and revive us.

The final type of rest is SPIRITUAL REST, which is the ability to connect beyond the physical and mental and feel a deep sense of belonging, love, acceptance and purpose. To receive this, we must engage in something greater than ourselves and add the practice of gratitude, prayer, meditation or community involvement to our daily routine.

The present-day society celebrates only the success of a high-achieving, high-producing performer. This puts enormous pressure on its actors. It doesn’t bother to know what the person is going through in his personal life or deep inside his brain.

We all experience residual fatigue even after resting well the day before, we call it by so many names stress, irritable behaviour, frustration, feeling used, defeated and exhausted. As you can see, sleep alone can’t restore us to the point we feel rested. Now we know that each word above points to a completely different cause which is behind the feeling of rest deprivation.

So, it’s time we focused on getting the right type of rest our body and mind need to function normally, or else we will be a society of high performing, high achieving, chronically tired, and chronically burned-out individuals which is ripe to pop anytime like a soap bubble.

The choice is ours.