Rohit Nalluri

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Why We Need 7 Types of Rest?

Modern human lives are an avalanche of decisions, complications and emotions, leaving us anxious, unsatisfied, and craving for the simplicity of a cave and a spear. We like to play life at the highest difficulty setting, so we add to our gameplay the dopamine-demolisher called social media, the gut-destroying highly processed food, and long hours of sitting hunched over a monitor to further destroy the mind and body, not to mention the surprising ability to deceive ourselves into believing that we indeed deserve to feel the way we feel in that moment, exactly for how long we are feeling it, and there is nothing we or anyone else can do about it. This is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, and because we so strongly believe in that lie, we don’t even know that we can escape the circle of certain feelings. We are also in our head a lot, and what’s in our head is most often what we feed it, and a good majority of that is probably coming from Instagram or TikTok.

We are rewiring our brains to be seduced by 10-second content for 1-second burst of micro-dosed happiness, so much so that anything longer than a minute is boring already, and dangerously, we don’t know how to be happy for more than a second! It is no wonder then that we live in an entitled world, a world of increasingly short attention spans and instant gratification where we compare our lives with everyone else’s and nobody is satisfied, but even this dissatisfaction is brief, as we immediately forget to be not satisfied and move on mindlessly, dragging an unexplainable sense of unease through our disillusioned lives.

Sprinkle on to this misery cake some uncertainty due to the shifting political landscape, looming wars, and whatever latest state of fear people are trying to keep us in to make a quick buck, and you begin to wonder how the human body survives even 30 years, forget 80.

I can feel the weight of that paragraph, and maybe you do too, so let me alleviate some of that depression by sharing this beautiful quote I found on Reddit many years ago. When things get too murky, I return to this:

No matter how real the consequences would be, if say, you quit your job and walked out into the streets naked, these consequences would be imposed by other human beings who are doing so only because they were taught they should impose those consequences upon you. No additional layer of existential obligation exists beyond those consequences – unless you say it does. Now, I think it’s common for us to understand conceptually the ultimate purposelessness of our anxieties, but I encourage you to take a moment right now and really feel it. Look around the room you are in, or at the landscape if you are outside. Pick an object, and ask if it depends on your continued existence and effort. Chances are, no. Become viscerally aware of your breath right now and feel your body from the inside. Stay with it for a moment. That peace? That stillness? It’s telling you that you’re forever and already off the hook. There is absolutely nothing that you are supposed to be doing right now. If you choose to get back to work, fine. But whatever it is, know that it’s a game. If it doesn’t evoke your enthusiasm, then it probably doesn’t deserve your anxiety either. You are not even ‘supposed’ to relax, meditate, take psychedelics, exercise, eat healthy, etc. If you’re doing those, then awesome, but you are not completing some divine checklist by doing so. Nirvana is already in you, if only lurking in the stillness waiting patiently for you to notice.

MindofWinter

Feeling better? I do.

But how do we hold on to this feeling of elation through our busy, chaotic lives?

One gentle way to nurture ourselves is by incorporating these 7 types of rest into our lives: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Sensory, Creative, Social, and Spiritual. Each of these aspects faces relentless pressures that can leave us feeling depleted.

Consider if you often feel fatigued or experience chronic pain; this is a signal that your body may be craving physical rest. If you find yourself feeling anxious, forgetful, or drifting away during conversations, it could be a sign that your mind needs some respite. When emotions run high, and feelings of overwhelm or anger take hold, it’s essential to seek emotional or sensory rest. If creativity feels stifled or boredom creeps in, that’s an indication that you may benefit from creative rest, among other signs.

There are various comforting exercises and practices we can embrace to rejuvenate both our minds and bodies across these areas. My intention is to help create a nurturing weekly rest calendar that acknowledges and addresses these often-overlooked aspects of our lives. This will not only assist us in unwinding but also fortify us.

And How To Get Them?

Let’s dive into each one of them and find a practice or exercise that will help:

• Physical Rest:
  • The easiest way to physically rest is to take a power nap or do some stretches. Especially for those who are in a desk job, stretching for 20 minutes is a great way to undo the damage caused by sitting for too long. There are tons of stretching exercises on YouTube.
  • Since the pandemic, there has been an increased in Google search trends around the lines of ‘why am I always tired’. This is because a day in the life of a modern human being is an overwhelming tsunami of decisions, both small and large. Studies show that by 5 PM, we’ve made more than 5,000 decisions, taxing our overworked prefrontal cortex. No wonder we are tired all the time. A 20-minute power nap (’Hey Google/Siri, wake me up in 20 minutes’) in the afternoon has been shown to eliminate decision fatigue, clean up any garbage collected in the brain, and energize you for the rest of the day. It’s almost like restarting the day all over, essentially giving you two days per day.
• Mental Rest: The easiest way is by practicing meditation, or structured breathing exercises.
  • For guided meditation, I default to Waking Up, Tara Brach or Headspace, in that order. (add links)
  • For breathing exercises, I use the One Deep Breath app (I find the features in the free version to be sufficient for my use).
  • Spending time in solitude, listening to peaceful, classical music, journaling, and long walks will have overlapping effects, and add to your mental resiliency. You will be doing these other exercises in your search for other forms of rest, so they all add up.
• Emotional Rest: This is a big area – there are many ways to address emotional rest, and its a good thing because most of us are emotionally ‘tired’ without realizing it.
  • One way to get some rest is to identify people in your life who are energy vampires, who soak up all your positivity with their negativity, and leave you gasping at the end of the conversation. Avoid them, and if you can’t, only talk to them on your terms, on specific days when you know you are free and unencumbered. For example, you don’t want to be talking to them on a Monday morning. Bad idea.
  • Second, talk to a close friend – laugh, share, gossip – it is the best way to release some of the psychological toxins we tend to pick up as we muddle through life.
  • The third option is to write and maintain a journal. I have been Journaling in some way or form for a long time now, but structured journaling addressing specific topics has been a revelation to me in the past few months, and I am hardly disciplined about it. Even at the pace of journaling once a week, this practice has improved my mood, confidence, clarity of thought, and creativity (in just a couple of months since starting to journal, I have accumulated a huge backlog of topics for new blog posts, and I continue to add more). This article itself is a result of my journaling. A simple way to journal is to have a ready template that you can return to every time, with a set of common questions or topics that you want to address, without needing to think about what to write which can add friction to the process. Here is the template that I have made for myself for my journal. Feel free to use/modify as you see fit.
• Sensory Rest: We are bombarded by events, meetings, personal calls, gatherings, and various forms of entertainment that overwhelm our senses with a continuous wash of information and data that our brain struggles to process.
  • And the remedy is simple: close your eyes and go within yourself for a few minutes. Sensory rest is also addressed by Meditation.
  • Introduce gaps in your day where you don’t do anything. For example, sit quietly for 10 minutes in the balcony, with nothing to distract you. Or go on a solo walk.
  • One could also try sensory deprivation or floatation tanks, but this should not be a daily or weekly practice.
• Creative Rest: If you are low on creative energy, there’s no better way to get the juices flowing than by interacting with any and all forms of art.
  • Slow your pace and explore a local art gallery, lock yourself in a room and listen to the Moonlight Sonata, grab a pair of binoculars and scan the night sky, attend a pottery class, or read that book you’ve been putting off.
  • I have a few shortcuts that I use to really feel creatively inspired: I sit down with a cup of coffee and read 10 or 15 quotes from my collection of quotes gathered over 15 years, I open any article on The Marginalian and read it (The Marginalian is a gold-standard encyclopedia about the most inspiring and beautiful people in the world, their art and how they overcame their unique challenges), or I listen to either The Moth podcast (if you love small, thought-provoking personal stories told live on stage by their owners, you will love The Moth) or Button Poetry.
  • Most of my inspiration comes from the poetry of language and the written word, so you will see a literary bias here. But you can get some creative rest through any art form that calls to you – music, singing, painting. Just find your muse and immerse yourself.
• Social Rest: Intuitively, you’d think that getting some social rest is by avoiding people, but it’s more nuanced than that.
  • The ideal way to get some social rest is to hangout with the people with whom you can be fully yourself, where you can drop the social ‘mask’ that we wear. I am sure you are mentally making a list of people with whom you can be mask less – cherish them, and relish the mask less-ness.
  • Another way to get some social rest is by going into yourself, embracing your aloneness, maybe on a long walk in the woods. Unenforced solitude is nourishment to the soul, and can have far reaching benefits beyond just social rest. See how long walks keep coming up again and again? They are a panacea for many ails.
• Spiritual Rest: Spiritual Rest is about connecting with your faith, asking the largest questions of purpose and meaning. There is no single exercise that can answer these vast questions, but the important thing is to try. Spiritual Rest is about being seen, about feeling that we belong, and knowing that we have a reason to exist. Every other form of rest described above will inform and feed your spirit.
  • Spiritual Rest can be achieved through volunteering, or acts of charity, or any action that one does where the the purpose is higher than oneself. It is a poetic irony then that one way we find a reason for being is by not being merely for ourselves. If the quote above from MindofWinter had you worried about the whole purposelessness of it all, may I offer some reprieve: if life is ultimately purposeless, then our shared humanity is made all the more beautiful and fragile when we work hard to impart some purpose to our lives. Indeed, the freedom to choose our own purpose for this thin sliver of existence is such a freeing thought.

It is solved by walking.

St. Augustine

Now the most important question –

Who has the time!?

To incorporate these different forms of rest and their exercises into our busy lives, we can dedicate 20 minutes each day for each type of rest. But no one has that kind of time. However, the benefits accrue only when we do some of these daily, especially the naps and meditation. Walking came up a few times, and across different aspects of rest, which got me thinking – instead of focusing on the types of rest, why don’t we build a calendar centered around the solutions/exercises.

I quickly gathered that Mental, Sensory, Social and Spiritual rests have overlapping solutions: Meditation and Walking.

Physical Rest can be addressed with a 20-minute nap, and one really shouldn’t be disappointed if they are asked to sleep for 20 minutes a day. That’s not an obligation, that’s a gift!

Emotional Rest is a mix of what to do (journal) and not do (spend time with vampires). Which leaves us with the multiple options available for creative rest.

With this simplified structure in mind, let’s draw up the Weekly Rest Calendar:

Of course, this calendar is just a template, and you can adapt it to your needs and circumstances as you see fit. For example, you may feel like you want to spend more time with your BFF than poring over a piece of paper, or spend more time on Creative Rest than other types.

Your calendar should ideally be determined based on the type of rest(s) you are severely lacking, and you can use this quiz to find out how exhausted (or not) you are across these aspects.

By adopting this calendar, or something similar, we can nurture our mind, body, senses, creativity, and emotions and maintain that balance for less than five hours a week. That’s a small investment for maintaining a healthy mind and body. The best part? Nearly half of that time is spent napping—a delightful bonus.

I wish you a deep rest.

If it doesn’t evoke your enthusiasm, then it probably doesn’t deserve your anxiety either.