Rest And Digest: Breaking Away From the Grind
Hi there. Welcome to One Day You Finally Knew: A Podcast For Women Breaking Away. I'm your host, Jessica Chasnoff, and I'm super excited about walking together on this journey home to ourselves. Let's see where our walk leads us today.
Hi there. Oh, I've been thinking about you and wondering how you are doing with your self-care practices. Shortly after recording that episode, I started preparing for the annual trip to the mountains with the dogs. So far, we've managed to not have any run -ins with barbed wire, which is great. So we have a few more days out here and we'll see what happens. I'm in this location recording this week's episode. I've been feeling into so many things. This is such a wonderful place to come and just let go of all the things that are happening in my work world in my interpersonal world, and just kind of letting go of what's happening out in the world at large. I make a commitment to myself even though there is Wi Fi here that I can hook into to really try to give myself a break from all the things. Got on IG to post about last week's episode. But that's it. I'm not looking at the news. I'm not scrolling. I have read some amazing books while I've been up here. I've read three books already in the time since we got here a few days ago.
And it's just glorious to just sit and read and take beautiful walks. There's times when we go for our walks down the lane and there are a couple of beavers that are building their dam and just getting to hear them communicate. They make these really sweet sounds. I don't think I can make them here. They're kind of just like, I'm hearing in my head right now. But like I know that what would come out of my mouth is not what I'm hearing in my head. So I'm gonna, I'm thinking better of it. I'm not gonna try it. But they just make these sweet sounds and then they glide through the water. Both of the dogs are kind of looking incredulously at this scene. I'm wanting to just watch how amazing it is to see these beautiful creatures doing their thing and also having to kind of make sure that my dogs don't disturb them. They spotted a deer on the other side of the property where we are and they both bolted earlier today. I know that they're quite capable of taking off and running after an animal. And while I know they won't catch a deer, I don't know what would happen if they had a tete a tete with a pair of beavers.
The things that I get to see out here and hear out here and smell out here and feel out here and taste out here. The garden. Amazing. My digestion changes when I start eating the food from their garden. Everything in me just goes into this rest and digest mode, which is really something. When we talk about resting and digesting, you've probably heard this before. And that is basically what I am going to be talking about today. When we hear "rest and digest", we think about our food, right? The way that this works is, we really are only able to fully digest our food when our nervous system is in a state of rest. When the parasympathetic nervous system, which is about relaxed alertness, being able to chill out and be at ease. When that aspect of the autonomic nervous system is on, we can fully digest our food. When we are in the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, which is about being activated, potentially needing to fight or flee, and then if that doesn't work, freeze or collapse, then we can't fully digest. Rest and digest, it's about really being able to let the body move into a state of ease and comfort and relaxation so that digestion can really happen. If we're in the midst of fight or flight, the last thing the body is interested in is trying to digest food. All the blood is going to the large muscle groups to get us to move if we need to. The blood actually moves away from our viscera. This is why sometimes actually, if somebody has eaten and then they go into a state of fight or flight, they might even throw up because the digestion just needs to stop and everything needs to go toward fighting or getting away. We feel these things. We might not be in fight or flight, but we might not be relaxed either. And so that can certainly impact our digestion. So that's what rest and digest is all about.
The way that I want to talk about it today, though, is around resting so that we can digest new, emotional, psychological, energetic material. This is something that I'm deep in the dance with right now. There's so many new explorations that I'm in. The podcast, and then also writing a book. My book proposal is done. And I'm getting ready to start querying literary agents, because I would like to get my book published by a traditional publishing house. Those are a couple of really new explorations, including the learning that if I want to increase my chances of a publisher, taking the risk to publish my book, I really need to start building an audience. I'm in this exploration of becoming very public and showing more of what my life looks like both as a professional and also personally. Great journeys to be on. They're exhilarating, and also totally unnerving. Both/And there. And so in this newness, I'm having to integrate a lot of new material. While I'm out here, having this glorious time, away from work and away from the socials and away from everything and everybody, but my own damn self and my dogs, I'm realizing I need this time to digest these changes, and integrate the new material. Integrate in a way that my nervous system is able to stay in a place of regulation.
It doesn't mean that I don't have emotions that come up or the difficulties that I've shared, the challenges with the worry and anxiety that come up, the being unsure, sometimes feeling a bit out at sea with the newness. It doesn't mean that those feelings aren't going to come up. Those are going to come up and they're appropriate. It's about whether my nervous system can stay regulated while those emotional states are moving through me. The work of regulating the nervous system takes having this foundation, having been doing this work for a while. I've been doing this work through Somatic Experiencing a wonderful naturalistic therapy that's able to help us learn how to regulate our nervous systems, how to complete nervous system cycles of activation and deactivation that, for one reason or another didn't get to complete and we might still be in spaces of fight/flight or freeze/ collapse. While there's many different kinds of work that can help with the nervous system regulation, I have found Somatic Experiencing to be profoundly helpful, life changing, and so much so that that's why I'm in the three year-training.
Last week, I talked about self-care, and rest is a pivotal piece of self-care. The need to take time to rest and integrate new material. Now, before I go further into this, I do want to make this disclaimer. I feel like this is going to be a necessary disclaimer for so many of my episodes. I want you all to know that this is on my mind, and I'm actively working with it, even though I feel like I can be awkward and clunky around it. That's just part of my learning. And so I'm showing you my clumsiness and clunkiness around it so that we can all be okay with ourselves. You can be okay with yourselves too, in that space, because we're learning and learning is clunky. There's all this unlearning we're doing while we're learning. So that is going to be clunky. This disclaimer is, I am aware that when I talk about self-care, when I talk about rest, like I'm going to talk about today, that different people have different situations. What I am able to offer myself for self-care, for time off, for rest is not what other people are necessarily going to be able to offer themselves. And I particularly want to point here to how folks of color don't get to rest the way that white people get to rest. I get to walk outside my door every day and get into my car. I don't have to worry about being pulled over because of the color of my skin. That's a privilege that I have to not have to be on guard around that. That's not the way it is for people of color. And I really want to honor that here. I am cognizant of my privilege. I do see it. I'm working with myself and my unlearning and relearning as much as I can. I'm going to make mistakes. I'm willing to be called out and called in for them so that I can do better. That's something that I feel like I have tried to say from the beginning and I will keep saying.
There are ways that I get to rest as a white person. Folks of color are not going to have that opportunity. Which is wrong in so many ways. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. Everybody, everybody, everybody deserves rest. Everybody deserves to feel like they can get in their car or walk into a store or walk through a neighborhood or do whatever they want to do without feeling like they're going to be profiled, without having to take certain precautions. Black children should not have to be sat down and given the talking to by their caregivers around what to do when they are confronted by a police officer. And that is the way that it is. I hope that things are changing. It's slow. It's a long game. There's amazing things happening. There's people working for equality and justice and it moves slowly. The moral arc of humanity may bend toward justice. But it goes back and forth a lot, as we're seeing in so many ways. I do just want to say that here, as I'm moving into talking about rest. Everybody deserves the kind of rest that I am able to give myself. I don't deserve it any more than anyone else.
Even if you are not in the position where you get to take a week off and get away from it all, you can still find ways to take breaks and rest. I can find ways to rest when I'm back at home that aren't as easy to take as when I get myself out into the mountains and I'm away from all the things that I have to do. I'm keenly aware of how much easier it is to take the break when you are away from all the things that you generally do in a day; just getting into that different space. But we do need to make it part of our practice. Again, broken record here, we have fights ahead of us. And so we need to rest when we can to make sure that we have the energy for the battles ahead. If you don't get a week off, but you do get weekends or even if you get a day off at a time, it is important to cultivate some kind of practice around rest. I'm a big fan of taking the phone and putting it in a drawer somewhere, so that you can't even look at it. Turning off all the screens, making sure you're getting out in the world, perhaps in nature, or just even if it's a city walk, doing something where you are out and all of your senses get to feel enlivened, that it isn't just this doom scrolling that we're doing, or it isn't just staring at the screen, because this is what we're accustomed to doing. Even if it's a great show that we're watching. I mean, thank goodness for great shows, right? And... to be able to get out and look and feel and touch and taste and smell and hear. To step away from what we normally do. Okay, that is rest.
One of the things that I notice when I'm out here is, for several years, I was really kind of feeling like I needed to be getting out and taking walks and taking hikes more. What I'm noticing this year, which I love is yeah, we take our couple daily walks or longer, like we had a couple hour, more strenuous walk today, the dogs and me. But it isn't about the moving around. It's also about the being still. Finding a way to have some kind of stillness is really important. Getting in the tub. Listening to music. Lying in bed or sitting up in bed and just looking around. If you're a meditator, you can have a meditation practice. But even to just sit and do nothing, even if you just do that for a couple of minutes a few times a day it is incredibly restful. Even if you can, in the midst of what you're doing, stop and take five breath cycles where your exhale is longer, a little bit longer than your inhale. That's rest.
There's so many ways to do it. It doesn't need to be-- I mean, if you can get a week off and go somewhere, by all means, do it. If you have the ability to make it happen. Again, I'm very fortunate. I work for myself. I have the ability to take a week off. If you can't take a week, on your weekend, make sure you're getting some time to just rest nothing else but rest. If you don't get two days in a row for a weekend, on your day off. If you don't feel like you can shut off the phone for the whole day, try it for four hours. Try it for one. Start having a practice where you're actually developing the muscle for being able to rest. We're so far from that now.
We think about, like, you go into the gym. You want to get your biceps all swole. Ya gotta work them out. It's the same thing with rest. If we're not actively engaging in some kind of practice that ability to rest will atrophy. Just like biceps will atrophy if we don't go in and keep working them at the gym. Really gonna encourage you to find some ways to add this into your life. More is more. There's some things where less is more. For rest, and especially now, all self-care practices, more is more. And there's so many self-care practices that don't have to cost money, right? Same thing with rest. Rest doesn't have to cost money. I know that when I take a week off, that's a week of income I'm not going to get because I don't get paid time off. Totally worth it to me. The prioritization of the rest is so important.
Let's talk a little bit about using the rest to integrate. Like me, you might be going through new things. You are even if you don't realize it. We're all in some pretty major new stuff. None of us were given a manual about how to be with COVID. So many of us had hoped that this would be so much better by now. COVID might not be eradicated. But we had hoped that there might be herd immunity, enough people would have gotten vaccinated. That's not happening. We're constantly needing to integrate new information. And it's very difficult for the nervous system to be in a state of limbo. This unknown all the time, right. And we've been through a lot of... we think things are getting a little bit better...and then not so much. The rest is an important way to allow ourselves to digest new material that's coming in.
I also want to say something about sleep. I really do believe that people need at least seven hours a night. So many people don't get that amount. I think about some of my precious clients who have babies and young children. I don't know how parents with children that aren't sleeping, or are in changing sleep cycles, or sleep regression, I don't know how they do it. I don't know how they manage to keep it together. If I have a few nights of sleeping fewer than seven hours, I don't even feel like a human. I salute all the people out there with young children and new parents. And I also salute anyone who's gone through a period of time with insomnia. It's very difficult. All it takes is a couple of days of less than optimal sleep, or fewer hours than optimal and people's driving is impaired. That's frightening because think about how many of us are going around on sub optimal sleep and have sub-optimal sleep schedules.
Our quality of sleep is not necessarily in our control. That being said, I do want to talk a little bit about sleep hygiene here. And that's exactly what it's called, sleep hygiene. There are things that we can do to make our sleep come more easily and to stay asleep more easily. They don't always work but they can absolutely help. If you're not already doing these things and you're not a great sleeper, try these things.
Okay, first is to get off the screens at least an hour before you're getting ready to move into bedtime. If you can not even have the screens in your room, that's best. There was some piece of research I saw on the electromagnetics around cell phones. If you can get at least two feet between your body and your cell phone during sleepy time that is going to help you. And same thing with any other electronics. If you can even move them out of your room, that's great.
The bed is best kept for sleep and sexy time. I just sounded a little Borat. . . sexy time. Ha! Anyway, yes. Sleep and sex. That's what the beddy is for. Anything else that you're doing in bed, watching TV, even reading, it's best kept outside of bed. Now who does this, right? There were times in my life when I would not have my screens in the bedroom. These days, yeah, I'm watching something on my laptop in my bed. I do make sure that that screen is closed down an hour before I want to go to sleep. So try to keep that boundary if you are going to have screens in your room.
I actually am somebody who, I read in bed. It prepares me for sleep. For some people, that's not the case, see how you are with that. Try it. See if you notice a difference when you power down your screens and other electronics an hour before sleep time. And if you do have some disturbed sleep and you are a reader in bed, you might want to consider getting out of bed doing your reading in another room on the couch. And then when you start to get sleepy, then getting in bed and having the book stay out in the other room. That can be helpful, okay.
Other things that are helpful. No caffeine after 3pm. Some people, I'm a little bit like this, depending on what the drink is. I can have a cup of tea, no later than three. but cannot have coffee at three. If I'm going to have another cup of coffee, which I generally don't do-- once in a blue moon I will. Generally, I've got to stop that amount of caffeine at 1pm. Keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that things like green tea or your energy drinks, they've got caffeine in them too. So really watch your timing around that. Chocolate also has caffeine in it. A little bit, no big deal. But if you're somebody that likes chocolate in the evening time, then notice if that changes your sleep a little bit if you don't have as much or if you move up the time in the day that you're eating your caffeine containing treats.
Same thing with not too much sugar before bed. Sugar is a stimulant. Anything that is a stimulant, which includes exercise. Exercise can also be a stimulant. So, if you are somebody that needs to do your exercise in the evening, trying not to do it too late, too close to bedtime.
Another one, and this is a tough one. I mean, not gonna lie, I have a hard time with this one myself. If you find yourself tossing and turning, it's really best if you only let yourself do that for about 15-20 minutes, get up, and then go into another room to sleep. When I actually do this, when I'm actually like, "Alright, Chasnoff, just get up and go in the other room", moving into another room, I usually am able to get back to sleep. Staying in bed and doing the tossing and turning in the place where the tossing and turning began can make it more difficult to fall asleep. And I know how hard it is, right? Because you think "okay, I'll fall asleep. Now I'll fall asleep. Now I'm really going to fall asleep". And that sometimes doesn't happen.
Another thing that I just want to offer you here is if you're up and your brain is twirling to try to do a mindfulness practice of some sort. There's various things that I can suggest here, I will sometimes do a body scan, where I just start focusing on different parts of my body and slowly go through, you know, starting at my toes, and then my feet, different parts of my feet. And then generally, if I can stay with that, I'm asleep by the time I reach my calves. So, you can try that. Another thing that I will do if I'm finding myself twirling is, I will say to myself, nighttime is not when we make these decisions. And I say very gently. We don't want to yell at ourselves about this, but just a gentle, "nighttime is not the time that we make these decisions. This is we do that in the daytime". And sometimes that can be enough like, "okay, you can get twirly during the day. But now it's not really going to help us for you to be twirly". So those are some sleep hygiene ideas for you. Things for your toolkit to get sleep, which is part of rest. However you move into this piece of work, I know you'll get creative. I know that you'll find something that works for you.
The last thing I want to say here is I've seen people talk on social media about rest as resistance, and rest is warriorship. And I absolutely believe that that is true. And I do think that a good portion of that appropriately is geared toward communities of color. Because they're basically saying, look, we actually have to rest if this is going to be sustainable for us. That is so true. And we really all need that, right. Any fight we're going to be in, any work we're going to be doing we need to have rest so it's sustainable. I believe in what they're saying there about rest. And I also feel that this is something that can become performative. I have literally seen folks saying, you've gotta rest, you've gotta rest, rest, rest, rest, and then I do not see them resting. They're saying how important rest is, but they're not really showing up in that way. I think part of that is about this hustle culture, right? Like, you can't rest. You've got to make sure that you're doing all the things. You stop doing all the things, you stop being in this grind, then you're not worthy of getting what you want or what you need. And that is a problem. It's a huge problem, right? It's a societal problem.
It's something that I'm struggling with myself. As I am growing my audience on Instagram I'm seeing I need to be posting twice a day until I get to like 5000 followers. I don't even know if that's gonna happen, but I'm playing with it. As long as this process is creative and life-giving for me, I will engage in it. But yeah, it's hard to be like okay, I need to balance my rest with this learning that I need to be posting a certain amount. So I have been getting into a rhythm of posting a couple times a day and at the same time, all really needing to listen to myself very deeply every day about whether that's what feels right for my needs. That's a really important piece that I want to include here. I don't want to be one of these people that's "Do as I say, not as I do". I really want to show up for me, show up for you and model how this could work. I mean, I make errors. I'm learning by messing up and that's cool. But yes, needing to still find that rest as part of balance with the doing and making sure that the rest is not performative. Remember that rest is so deeply important.
Okay, I may have missed something there, but doing the best that I can with my brain being a little bit in the state of general power down. But, it is so great to come and spend a little time here talking to you. And I hope as always that it is of benefit. May you get some good rest this next week. If there's any sharing you want to do about how you're doing that for yourself. I would just love to hear it. All right. Until next time. If you are enjoying this podcast, please subscribe and give it a five-star rating. If you're someone who's a fan of reviewing, I would certainly enjoy reading your review. And if you'd like to connect with me, I'd love it. My socials are in the show notes See you soon.