The 7 Types of Rest and Why They Matter to Pilates Native
We spent the month of August focusing on the 7 Types of Rest in the Pilates Native Facebook group. I gotta be honest, I had no idea there were 7 types. My research was pretty eye opening and really revealing as to why we feel so damn tired all of the time. It all comes down to the type of rest we’re needing and surprisingly, more sleep isn’t always the answer. As I was compiling research and reading article after article, it really struck me how terribly wrong the advice for managing exhaustion actually is.
When it comes to dealing with exhaustion, the majority of articles and advice focused on self care. And by “self-care” the extremely narrow advice was for women to focus on massages, pedicures, and bubble baths. Men were told to stretch after weight lifting and maybe eat some vegetables. Not a single article I read on self-care mentioned that there are seven different types of REST!
Speaking from experience, massages and pedicures do NOTHING to cure my exhaustion. In fact, they can sometimes make it WORSE because I’m still tired and I just paid a ton of money for something that didn’t make me feel better. Cue the guilt and self doubt! What’s wrong with me that a massage didn’t feel relaxing?!?! Am I so exhausted or stressed that I’m beyond help?
Nope. Turns out massages and pedicures aren’t the type of rest I need.
Before we dig in, let’s talk about some interesting things that came up.
Rest can be a type of self-care. In fact, many of the rest modes are types of self-care. But self-care isn’t always rest and many modes of self-care aren’t rest modes.
At its most basic, self-care is all of the stuff that allows us to maintain proper health, nutrition, hygiene, relationships and boundaries. So while eating vegetables and flossing are types of self-care, they are not types of rest. Make sense?
Ok, let’s dig in.
The 7 Types of Rest
The 7 types of rest are Physical, Mental, Emotional, Spiritual, Creative, Sensory and Social. A quick break down of each is given below. For the full study I did on the 7 types, including fancy graphics with how to get each type, how to know when you need each type and more info for each type check out this blog post.
Physical Rest
Physical rest is what we typically think of as rest. Sleeping, naps, stretching, yoga.
The biggie for athletes or active folks to take note of is that one of the signs you need physical rest is increased muscle pain or soreness. If you’re tired and your athletic performance is suffering, you can’t solve that problem by increased training. You NEED physical rest.
Active rest through Pilates, Yoga and Stretch Therapy paired with passive rest through naps and days off will change your entire training game.
Mental Rest
Mental rest means we are giving our brain a break from constant stimulation and allowing for breaks between intense bouts of intense mental activity. This can be practicing meditation, taking social media breaks, going outside and practicing good time management skills. Expecting our brains to fire at 100% for 100% of the time can actually increase mental fog, frustration, annoyance, irritation, trouble sleeping, and just being totally overwhelmed by normal everyday activities.
Emotional Rest
Emotional rest is having the time and space to freely express your feelings, allowing yourself to be aligned with your feelings and having safe people to share your feelings with, while also being able to cut back on people pleasing.
What’s interesting about Emotional Rest is that it requires us to uphold our boundaries and remove ourselves from relationships and situations that plunge us into negativity or door-mat behaviors. It also requires us to be honest with how we’re actually feeling and how we’re actually doing in a particular situation.
If you’ve been dealing with a chronically emotional situation, like the long term care of a sick family member, personal health issues, financial distress, or a rocky relationship, emotional rest may seem like it’s a little too far to reach.
But really, it’s as easy as taking a news or social media break for a day, saying “I feel like shit today” when someone asks how you are, saying “no, I can’t help you today” to the friend that always needs something, or even just allowing yourself to acknowledge that you’re tired or sad or frustrated or need a little TLC.
Those little steps are often enough to get the ball rolling and can help carve out a little safe space for some emotional rest.
Spiritual Rest
Spirituality isn’t just religious or faith-based practices and beliefs. It’s also finding a deeper connection or greater sense of purpose in life. If you’re feeling disconnected or lacking in purpose, engaging in fellowship or community service may help you find that deeper connection we all need and give you a good dose of spiritual rest.
Creative Rest
Creative rest is when you allow yourself to reengage with the wonder and beauty of the world. Whether it’s hiking, painting, watching a bee pollinate a flower, or taking in a new improv show at a local theatre, creative rest is when we really appreciate the world and find inspiration from it.
Something that I want to point out with creative rest is our obsession with hustle culture and turning our hobbies into income streams. We all have that friend who is insanely talented at something. Whether it’s painting, making wreaths, metal art, baking, jewelry. Our typical response to those amazing creations is that they should monetize them!
But here’s the thing. The minute we monetize a hobby, it magically transforms from a thing we enjoy doing and have creative freedom to tinker with, to fail, to start over, to scrap, and it turns into A JOB. A thing that requires attention to detail, specific parameters to be met and a quality that merits trading our work for other people’s money.
There’s nothing wrong w/ turning a hobby to side gig to full time gig (heck that’s how I ended up with a Pilates studio!), the problem comes when we lose all of our hobbies and all of our creative freedom completely.
Part of allowing creative rest is allowing ourselves to just create for the sake of creating without any expectations. So if you’ve been wanting to hit that hobby but feeling too much pressure to have it be perfect, today is a great day to just scribble with some crayons, play with some sidewalk chalk, messily decorate some cupcakes, and of course, go outside!
Sensory Rest
The best way to describe sensory rest is to describe it’s opposite, which is sensory overload. Sensory overload is when our brains take in way more stimulation than we can process. When the brain is overwhelmed by too much information, the nervous system responds by dropping into fight, flight or freeze. Once we hit that mode, we feel unsafe, panicky and respond to everything from a place of overwhelm.
Sensory rest, then, is making sure we are not overloading our brains and giving it ample space and time to process what we’re throwing at it. Whether it’s screen breaks, taking a walk outside, driving home without music, or meditation, our brains NEED time to chill. (Interesting side bar, boredom is actually a fantastic stimulant for creativity. Most likely, it’s related to boredom=lack of stimulation.)
Social Rest
Social rest is an interesting rest type. Kinda like how too much physical rest makes you even more tired, too much social rest leaves you isolated. I found this type of rest the most thought provoking, because it requires that we spend time with people who accept us as we are and embrace all of the messy bits.
With social media, the norm is to hide the messy bits and to show the extremely curated highlight reel. But humans are complicated messy beings and showing up perfectly curated all of the time is exhausting.
Why The 7 Types of Rest Matter to Pilates Native
Pilates Native is built around 3 pillars: Rest, Recover and Restore. Rest is the very first pillar! Here’s why Rest is so important to our training and recovery.
1) Overuse injuries are rooted in over exertion. Injury prevention is rooted in good rest.
If you are always tired, your training is going to suck. If you train harder, faster, heavier to get those gains while also skipping out on rest and recovery, you end up physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted.
If you aren’t able to properly refill those rest and recovery buckets, that exhaustion quickly leads to burn out, compensations, improper muscle engagement/recruitment. Those things lead right to INJURIES.
(guess who runs an injury recovery and prevention space?!?)
2) The nervous system and its function are paramount to proper training. If you’re overstimulated, your training is going to suck because your brain is already fried and struggling to keep up.
3) Movement is medicine. Everything in the body is designed to move. Movement helps get the blood flowing, the lungs expanding, and the synovial fluid lubricating through the joints. Like a motor that’s designed to run and rusts/corrodes/rots when it sits too long, our bodies need movement to keep us healthy. Pilates, Yoga and Stretch are all amazing ways we can move to heal our bodies.
Pilates Native provides rest in these ways:
If you go through each graphic, you’ll see the various methods for getting the different types of rest. Here, I’ve highlighted how Pilates Native supports the different rest types.
Physical Rest: Yoga, Pilates, Stretching, Breathing Techniques, and Muscle Release Techniques
Mental Rest: Yoga, Pilates, Breathing Techniques, Focus (no multi-tasking!)
Emotional Rest: Providing a safe place to take a break from shame and judgement from current movement patterns, injuries, body stuff, mental health stuff. Promoting clients enforcing boundaries and helping clients find their power in saying NO!
Social Rest: Providing a community of folks with similar interests.
Sensory Rest: Focus (No multi-tasking!), soft lighting with big bright windows, beautiful blue and gray walls, quiet and clean studio space to work in.
Creative Rest: Allowing and supporting clients to move with curiosity and explore where those movements lead.
You know I totally spreadsheeted this info
While creating graphics and posts for each of the rest types, I noticed that many of them shared rest modes. In my obsession with spreadsheets and efficiency, I decided to spreadsheet the 7 rest types and how to get them, with overlapping methods highlighted.
The idea was that by focusing on the modes that covered the most rest types, I’d get the most efficient approach to rest. Interestingly enough, the three biggies were taking social media breaks, going outside and taking breaks throughout the day from various things. My super low tech spreadsheet is below so you can take a look! It’s an 11×14 size, there was A LOT to include. You can download the PDF as well for a better look.
In the midst of this rest study and figuring out how to best schedule social media breaks, my phone died, forcing a massive disconnect from the modern world. 5 days without a phone while running a business, having a spouse out of town and getting a kiddo back to school was an interesting experiment. Random troubleshooting scenarios aside, I enjoyed a lot more down time and slept a whole lot better the week w/o a phone, so I’ve been trying to be a lot more intentional on phone use and screen limits. This does mean I’m a little slower to respond to client emails/texts. (Sorry, not sorry?!?*shrug)
As always, I’d love to hear from you! Which rest mode resonated most with you?
See you soon!
-R