You could say that Dr. Sondra Dalton Smith wrote the book on rest. And that’s because she did. After five years of practicing clinical internal medicine and caring for two young children, the author of the book Holy rest He was exposed to severe fatigue. At first, she thought she needed more sleep.
“At that point, there wasn’t a lot of talk about fatigue. The main conversation was about sleep,” Dalton Smith recalls. “That was around the time Arianna Huffington was doing the big sleep revolution. So, when burnout hit, my initial thought process was based on research that said if I get adequate, high-quality sleep, I won’t feel exhausted anymore.
That’s when the doctor started digging a little deeper. while Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dalton-Smith recommends at least seven hours of sleep a day, and 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 solve this problem.” What do you do when you’ve slept for eight hours and everything tells you that you got sleep? Perfect and still exhausted?”
That’s when I realized that sleep does not mean rest. After completing various tests that all determined there was nothing medically wrong with her, Dalton-Smith began thinking about other ways people could be led to burnout. That’s when her revolutionary framework “The Seven Types of Comfort” was born.
“I started asking this question that became the foundation of my work: What kind of tired am I?” She says. “And it took me on a journey of realizing that if I’m feeling tired, something must be drained. What exactly has been drained? If I can figure out what’s been drained, I can rebuild that tank again to make it feel healthy again.”
7 types of comfort frame
The premise is simple: in order to feel good, you have to return your energy to the places where it was depleted. After making a list of all the ways she felt drained, Dalton-Smith decided that there were seven types of rest we all need to feel our best and most energized. These seven types are:
- physical
- mental
- sensory
- creative
- passionate
- social
- spiritual
“When I looked at the physiology of some of the things I wrote, there was an overlap in the physiology of the body and how it works,” Dalton Smith explains. “People will ask me if mental and emotional well-being are the same thing and I say no. If we think about it, mind, emotion and sensory all deal with the brain or nervous system, but they are all affected very differently. So this is the approach I was looking for: physiology , psychology, and environmental aspects that go into each type of comfort.
What kind of rest do you need?
Determining what type of rest you need requires a personal evaluation. To help, Dalton-Smith has developed… Online questionnaire This 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 starts with being aware that you may feel overwhelmed in different ways,” she says. “Most people haven’t thought about their creative exhaustion or their social exhaustion.”
Next, Dalton Smith invites people to think about all the ways they expend energy throughout the day—whether at work or in their daily lives—and to think about where they don’t have a system for energy to flow back. Bucket of energy.
“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 that they haven’t thought about that can come back to bite you in the back because you’re not doing anything to improve that area.”
If you find that you need relief in all seven categories, Dalton Smith suggests starting with the area of greatest deficit. Once you take 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 start filling in the most depleted area, you start to feel better once the large rest deficit improves.”
Develop your personal comfort strategy
“If you’re a high achiever, you won’t be able to continue working at high capacity for long without regaining your energy,” explains Dalton Smith. “So, if you want to have sustainability, continuous innovation and a high level of performance in your career, it will require that you have a strategy for rest.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean offering more PTO, taking longer vacations or even taking a sabbatical. The most beneficial rest strategy is 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 what work-life integration should 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 in which they live. For example, a person who works in an open-plan office may be using a lot of sensory energy to tune out background noise and block out conversations happening near them.
“This adjustment process uses energy,” says Dalton Smith. “Your brain is actively filtering out that noise. If you’re doing that for eight hours a day, it’s very likely that you’re going to feel some symptoms of sensory overload, like irritability and arousal, which are those psychological experiences that come when you’ve overworked your senses.”
In this case, Dalton Smith recommends using noise-cancelling headphones. However, the key is not to play music instead, although white noise may help you focus.
“There’s no need to overwhelm yourself sensory-wise in this position, especially if you’re trying to do deep work,” she says. “You will free up brain space and brain energy by paying attention to how you use energy.”
For people who may use a lot of creative and mental energy throughout the day to solve problems, Dalton Smith suggests looking into mindfulness activities, such as walking, jogging, yoga, or meditation.
“Most leadership skills can be improved through better restorative practices. Our connections improve when we have more emotional and social rest practices built into our lives. Our ability to think outside the box and be more innovative improves with better creative rest,” she says. Even our bodies improve with better physical rest.” “If high-level athletes need to understand rest and recovery to perform their best, wouldn’t every other type of high-level position need the same information?”
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