#254 Rest That Actually Works

We unpack why sleep alone doesn’t fix burnout and map seven types of rest that match different kinds of exhaustion. We offer simple tools to schedule recovery, set boundaries, and build a kinder mindset so stress has a healthy counterweight.

• redefining rest as active and passive practice
• the double vs half life audit to guide habits
• how stress evolved and why it misfires now
• scheduling rest with Pomodoro and break design
• physical rest tools from naps to mobility work
• mental rest through journaling and low‑stakes creativity
• emotional rest via expression and safe limits
• social rest for extroverts and introverts alike
• sensory rest strategies to reduce screen load
• creative rest to refill wonder and ideas
• spiritual rest to reconnect with meaning
• treating rest as an energy investment

As always, send us any questions you have
You can DM us on Instagram @theuniversalradio and let me know what topics you'd like to see on air

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome, Vibes, And Listener Prompts
• 2:24 The Double And Halve Life Exercise
• 4:20 Reframing Rest Beyond Sleep
• 6:10 Stress Response 101 And Modern Triggers
• 11:20 Types Of Rest: A Holistic Map
• 14:00 Physical Rest: Passive And Active
• 19:22 Mental Rest: Breaks, Pomodoro, Journaling
• 25:20 Emotional And Social Rest Boundaries
• 28:50 Sensory And Creative Rest In A Screen World
• 33:40 Spiritual Rest And Meaningful Recharge
• 36:40 New Year Reset: Make Rest An Investment
• 39:20 Closing Notes And How To Connect

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:08

Welcome to the Universal Radio Networks Podcast. This is Grigit, and in today's episode, we are discussing rest and relaxation. Specifically, how there's different types of exhaustion, so we should have different kinds of rest that meets those needs. Enjoy the vibes and just have a good well-being Wednesday. As always, send us any questions you have. You can DM us on Instagram at the Universal Radio and let me know what topics you'd like to see on air. I always have such a wide variety of topics coming my way. And whenever I see one that piques my interest, I pull it up. Or if it's something that I've had kind of sitting on the back burner for a bit, I put it on the list because sometimes things work with seasons. For example, a while back I had one about kind of siblings and how they incorporate like sibling relationships in South Asian family dynamics. And that was something that I covered a little while back, but it made sense too at the time, even though it was a suggestion I'd been sitting on for almost a year. So let me know what interesting topics you'd like to see coming up in February, because we have a jam-packed February coming up. All right. So today's topic is actually going to be about rest and relaxation. So before I get into that, I want to bring to you your question, your journaling assignment. Okay. And this is actually a really cool one I got from a random newsletter I'm subscribed to. And it really got me thinking. So maybe today we'll do two different journalingslash thinking thought-provoking questions. I used to call them gratitude exercises, but I realize they're not necessarily always about gratitude. And I find that can get a little bit stale sometimes. And I just don't want it to get boring. So I have a fun new question lined up for y'all. And here it is. Here's a question. Which activity in your life, if doubled, would make your life better? And on the other hand, which activity, if halved, would make your life better? So this one really got me thinking because it's basically asking if you could double your efforts and double your time into something, what would make your life better? And if you could reduce your time spent on something or reduce the energy spent on something, how would that make your life better? So I kind of approach this topic from a place of kindness. I want to acknowledge what I can do more to make my life better, what I can do less to make my life better, without judging myself, without shaming myself, and without shoulding myself. If you're not familiar with the topic of don't should yourself, basically saying don't throw shoulds into the mix, like, oh, I should be reading more, I should be more active, I should be eating healthier, I should be working harder, I should be applying for more jobs, I should be studying more, I should be getting better grades. Get rid of that. It just adds pressure, it makes life stressful. Don't should yourself. I could be reading more, but I'm so busy with other things in my life. I could be eating healthier, but I'm not unhealthy. So I don't really need to adjust my eating habits. I also could be exercising more, but I'm doing as much exercise as my body and time allows at the moment. So it's giving yourself grace. So think about it. Which activity, if doubled, would make your life better, and which activity, if halved, would make your life better? We're gonna talk about rest and relaxation today. Don't go anywhere. And I'm so excited to be talking about rest and relaxation with y'all today. So, one thing I just want to get out of the way is I think it's kind of important to reframe rest. Rest isn't just something where we do nothing. Okay, rest can be active. There's so many different forms of rest. There's also so many different forms of exhaustion. If I worked an entire day doing physical construction work, I'm not gonna need the same amount of rest as if I were working a strenuous office job where I'm just staring at a computer screen and sitting all day. The demands for rest look different. So another important reframing that we have to do with rest is how we incorporate rest into our daily lives. It's important to prioritize it. Just like bacon and rest period between sets the gym or having moments of silence between listening to different orchestral masterpieces when you're listening to music live, you have to schedule rest and treat it as a vital part of your day, the same way we treat meetings, classes, and deadlines. You have to view rest as something that has to happen, something that's a non-negotiable to skip, like getting sleep, getting food. It needs to be as important to you in order for it to be as beneficial to you as it is. Because a while back we had this glorious revolution where everyone was like, sleep health is the most important thing. Check your sleep quality, buy the aura ring, buy the subscription service for the aura ring, track your sleep, figure out what's going on with your sleep, and that will make you feel rested, that will make you feel energized the next day. And that can be helpful, but it's not the whole picture of what rest looks like. All right. So rest needs to be integrated into our lives, and the rest that we have needs to be scheduled and prioritized as if it were important as our work. Because just like we have those rest between sets at the gym, we rest so that we can continue to lift at the same weight, we can continue to build muscle at the same speed. And without rests, you risk injury, you risk muscle strain, and you risk reducing the impact or hypertrophy of your muscles. So I'm sorry, I'm using a lot of like muscle terms, but it's just the way I view, I view the mental and the physical so related, and I have a background in the physical, in the physical sense that I can use to directly relate to the mental sense. So I'm sorry if it's like a little bit too gym bro y. I hope it makes sense. But you if you're looking to grow muscles in the gym, you have to bake sense in. And if you're just doing repeat exercise after exercise without rest, you're training endurance as opposed to training to lift heavier and look bigger. That's just a priority with lifting. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds with my lifting example. So it's important to acknowledge rest as a super vital building block in our lives. And stress, even though it can interfere with your ability to function, it has a purpose in our lives as well, just like rest has a purpose. So stress was originally a physiological mechanism to help us meet challenges. And the challenges used to look like fighting off a pack of wolves, fighting for food, chasing down bears and lions and mammoths. That's what stress used to look like. Stress used to be being hunted by a predator and having all of your body mobilized to produce faster heart rate, to move your blood faster, to get you energized for the challenge that you're meeting. So we're gonna talk a little bit about how stress is an important part of your life, but so is rest and how the two connect. If you've ever seen those like cute little comics that portray life and death as two like characters and how they're both super important for the cycle of life, it's kind of rest and stress work the same way. Stress originated as a way for our body to meet specific challenges, and those specific challenges used to be straight up like natural predators who are going to eat us for lunch if we're not fast enough, if we're not mobilizing energy, if we're not mobilizing blood to our muscles, if we're not stopping kind of the non-necessary human functions, like emptying your bladder when stressed is a natural physiological response. If you've ever had stress poops, that's why. Sorry, I don't make the rules, but it's a natural response. Your body's like, we need to get rid of dead weight, ASAP, so we can run faster away from this lion, and that's exactly what your stress response is doing. It is getting you to lighten your load as you're on your way late to work, and that's the stress that you're facing, being late to work. Just like the fear of being eaten by a lion, the threat of having your manager not be happy with you, getting written up at work or losing your colleagues' respect, getting uh walking into a busy classroom late, any sort of thing, missing a deadline and having to email your professor, all of these things are now causing a stress response because as humans have evolved, we've evolved outwardly pretty fast. Our stressors have changed quite a lot. Nowadays, you don't have to worry so much about being eaten by a large cat of prey. Instead, you got to worry about all these like silent stressors. Although, funny story about that. Um, I knew this one guy, he and I would ice climb, and he was an avid member of like the mountaineering community in Edmonton, and he told me this story because he's um he went for his undergrad in Mumbai, and he straight up had jaguars and Kumas. I don't remember the actual name of the big cat, but he had like a cougar or puma or jaguar or something like on his campus often. And one time he was at like an engineering lab and they couldn't go into the lab because they were pretty sure there was a jaguar in there. So they took a little RC car with a camera strapped on it to circle the lab before it came back to them so that they could see if there actually was a giant jungle cat. So maybe not everywhere has the need for your stress response to stray away from keeping you safe from large predators. So maybe it's good that we still have it baked in because I still think that's wild. Imagine trying to go to Rutherford Library and you gotta check the book stacks for a jaguar before you can sit down and pick a spot close to an electrical outlet. That is nuts to me. Anyway, I'm getting away from myself. So the stress response kicks off a whole bunch of chain reactions in your body that primes you to fight and think faster and act faster. Your heart beats faster, your blood's flowing to your muscles, your stress hormones are flowing, and all those other chemicals are flowing in your body, and suddenly you are alert, you're in a hyperstate. So this gets you ready for fight or flight or fleeing. And if you're even if you're just anxious, waiting for a reply to an email, that whole process is kicking in, and suddenly your body is ready for action, it's ready to fight. But really, all that's happened is you've had a deadline. Similarly, we feel like our rest needs to be super advanced with like red light mass and bubble baths, but I think our rest can be as primitive as the rest of our stress responses. So we're gonna talk a little bit more about how to respond to this stress response that is super old school, even though it's applying to new school situations. Like my muscles having more blood flow, me feeling less hungry, and my immune system being boosted isn't gonna support me in responding to a very stressful, angry email from a customer. That doesn't help me at all. It's not gonna help me have a conversation with a professor about how I need an extension. It's not gonna help me call my family doctor to book an appointment. First of all, it's not gonna help me get a family doctor, okay? These are all modern-day stressors, and unfortunately, the old school stress response just doesn't hit the same. And we kind of feel like our rest needs to be super advanced in the same way. Humans are so evolved. My rest needs to look like spending$235 at a therapy appointment. My rest looks like buying a$200 red light therapy mask, my rest looks like a bubble bath, my rest looks like a shopping spree, it looks like booking a trip, it looks like using substances. Everybody's rest looks different. But I do think we can simplify it, and we can dumb it down to the point that we can apply it all the time. And maybe in some cases we've dumbed down rest too much, and we feel like all rest is is sleeping or doing nothing and sitting and scrolling on your phone on the couch or sitting and watching TV. And I feel like there's a lot of people who would have something to say about that. And one of those people is Sandra Dalton Smith MD. She wrote this book called Sacred Rest, Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. And it basically explores this kind of holistic approach to rest. And she's actually quoted as saying that we've incorrectly combined the concepts of sleep and rest. And in doing so, we have dumbed down rest to the point that it appears ineffective. So we've oversimplified rest and over-complicated self-care to the point where our rest isn't restful anymore. And if our rest isn't restful, what's the point? It's really, really important to rest properly in order to avoid fatigue and burnout. Rest is what gives you a chance to be resilient in your everyday challenges. Rest is what separates you from breaking down because you're out of gas in your car in the morning. And the difference between seeing that and being like, okay, I just gotta text my manager, I'll be five minutes late because I gotta stop for gas. Rest is the difference between that being a stressful situation and that being a manageable situation. And we've all been there. We've been there to a point where we're so overstimulated, so overburdened, so overwhelmed that the littlest thing added to our plate feels like the end of the world. It's what changes us from being okay if someone cuts in front of us in traffic, or okay if someone cuts us off in the middle of a conversation and being upset about those things. So without rest, we're kind of like elastic bands that are stretched all the way to the end, to the point where any other tension force is just gonna make it break. Okay. Rest is what decreases that tension so that when we do have those stressful life experiences, like someone cutting you off in traffic or cutting you off in the middle of a conversation, you're ready to handle it as a normal person, as a sane person, as a well-rested person. It's making sure that you don't snap by reducing that tension. So I would say it's a self-care that kind of gets overcomplicated. We think that we have to do these momentous things in order to take care of us. Or on the other hand, we feel like all we have to do is sleep, and that should be good enough, right? Wrong. Now, I don't I hate to put you down like that, but there are different kinds of rest. So, Dr. Dalton Smith, she talked about physical rest, mental rest, emotional rest, social rest, sensory, creative, and spiritual rest. So, all the different kind of faculties and points that we have in our mind and body, all of these different things, we get tired in different ways. For example, have you ever been mentally tired but not physically tired, or vice versa, felt very physically tired but not mentally tired? That's kind of picking up on what Dr. Dalton Smith is putting down. So, for example, physical rest is just what it sounds like. It's about restoring your body's physical energy. And this could include prioritizing sleep or taking a nap when you need one. Yes, naps can disturb our natural sleep cycle, which would then make us more physically tired, but oftentimes it's not wrong to listen to your body when you need it. I can give you all of the mental health information, all the well-being information in the world, but at the end of the day, you are the one who knows yourself best. And the more information you receive, either from me talking about healthy sleep practices or talking about how you should sleep when you feel tired, take these bits and pieces of information and use them whenever it's appropriate for you. You're always gonna be the professional and the expert in your own life. So there's also passive forms of physical rest, which include fueling your body with good food, sleeping, laying down and watching TV, wearing comfy clothes that feel good on your skin, sitting in weird postures that feel comfortable to you, or sitting in really proper postures. Sometimes even laying down on a really hard surface like the floor or a mat can feel really nice because it just kind of resets your spine, makes it nice and stiff, and you're not having to curve your spine in ways that might feel uncomfortable. For example, it might be helpful if you've been sitting all day for school or work. There's also active forms of rest because physical rest doesn't mean you just have to stay still and mush out on your couch or bed. You can have active forms of physical rest. That looks like getting a massage, using a muscle gun. It looks like light stretching instead of doing a hard workout, opting for a yoga class or a 15-minute stretching video on YouTube instead of a usual workout. It's about listening to your body and seeing what it needs. Rather than simply increasing the duration of your nightly sleep, you can also take active steps to improve its quality. That way, you're improving the amount of passive rest you get. You can minimize screen time, you can use soft warm lights to naturally induce sleep, you can avoid coffee after 3 p.m. or 5 p.m. to avoid having large amounts of caffeine still in your system by the time you're getting ready for bed. It's also easier to spot when you need physical rest than it is when you need to spot like mental rest. If your job is inherently physical and it keeps you moving, or if you're a new parent who is constantly picking up 10 to 20 pound toddlers, you might not even notice that your body needs rest because you're so used to feeling that tired all the time. But take this moment as an opportunity to feel out what your body is saying and take the rest to act on it. And if some of the music we play tells you that you gotta dance it off, then dance it off, my friend. Dance away. Up next, we're talking about mental rest. So this is when your brain might be active for a really long time and you might start to feel mentally drained. And of course, this mental drain feels different in a lot of people. I myself feel my mental drain in my eyes really often. I'll notice that it's getting harder for me to visually focus on things because oftentimes I'm reading or I'm constantly looking at a screen when I'm looking at like long mental periods of work. It's very rare that I'll be not using my eyes for long periods of mental heavy work. So I always recognize that sign in my eyes. Some people feel it in. Forgetting things or struggling to even read sometimes, where your brain is just like, I'm too full of information and I'm so tired of working. I suddenly can't read the words on my screen or on my book. Mental rest is important because that means finding ways to quiet your thoughts, to give your brain a chance to refuel. At work or even at school, giving your brain that little bit of a break it needs can look like scheduling breaks from mentally taxing work or swapping draining tasks for low-stake mindless ones and going back and forth. For example, using the Pomodoro method is a really interesting way to do this. So if you're not familiar with the Pomodoro method, it's about a scheduled time of a certain increment of time working and then a dedicated rest time. So for some people, they break it up into an hour where it's 25 minutes of work, five-minute break, 25 minutes of work, five-minute break, and that's your one-hour increment. And you've done two Pomodoros. Your Pomodoros are considered your working sessions. Some people also like to do 50 minutes of work, 10-minute break. It depends on what you're feeling. So I really like that method because it forces me to take dedicated rest periods. And I'll even add on to this: I will keep a distraction list next to my workstation. So when I'm doing Pomodoro sessions and I'm dedicating it to a task, for example, if I have to write out like a certain project or if to read a certain chapter of a textbook, I'll tell myself, okay, 25 minutes on, five-minute break. And during that 25 minutes, if my brain ever comes up with a reason to do anything else other than do the task at hand, for example, oh, you need to change your laundry from the washer to the dryer. Oh, you forgot to email this person back. You should do that. Oh, you forgot to check your schedule for next week. Wait, didn't you book a physio appointment? When is that physio appointment? Any of those thoughts that come up to distract me from my period of dedicated work, I write those down. And then when I get to my five-minute break and I look at the list and I'm like, was this really that important for me to do? And I decide sometimes, yeah, I will go check what my next physio appointment is, like I said. Or I'll see, oh, I forgot to send that email. Ah, it's not even that important. I would rather spend my five minutes resting on my phone instead of working. So Pomodoro method is really good for scheduling and dedicated rest time and giving your brain a break. You can also swap between tasks that require different kinds of work. For example, when I was in university and I was taking stats and copsci courses, I would break up my psych courses with that coursework because they were very different. Psych was a lot of reading and understanding and memorizing, and copsi and stats was a lot of math. So it was nice to give my brain a little bit of break. And so I'd rotate between the two so that I could use different parts of my brain, and one part wasn't getting too tired too fast. So that's always something to consider. Now, don't get me wrong, folks, mental rest is a lot more complicated than just choosing to do dedicated tasks when they're assigned and swapped in between tasks. Mental rest can look like many different things. So it can also look like journaling because sometimes you're not getting mentally tired because you're working steadily. You can also get mentally tired because you have racing thoughts or you have anxiety. If you've ever spoken to someone who has anxiety, they will tell you it is exhausting to have your thoughts racing so constantly through your head and just getting carried away. So something like journaling looks like a really good method of active mental rest because you can get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper. And by doing that, especially if you're doing it by paper and pen, it forces your brain to slow down and process your thoughts. And it helps you sift between the ideas and challenge maybe unhelpful thoughts that you've had in the past. For example, it's really easy for your brain to be like, oh my god, I can't believe I forgot my friend's birthday. I am such a piece of garbage. But if you were to write that down and you were to write out that thought word for word, I forgot my friend's birthday, period. I am such a piece of garbage, period. You would stop and think, hold up, this is kind of harsh to say about myself. So forcing yourself to slow down and write is a good form of mental rest, especially if you if you experience racing thoughts or feel exhausted because of what's going on in your mind 24-7 all the time. Practicing mindfulness or meditation can also be helpful because it redirects your focus on physical sensations rather than your mental to-do list. The world right now is so cerebral. We have such an investment and stock put on being mentally strong, being smart, being clever, being active, being creative, being a problem solver. And it's all of this thinking, doing, working in our brains that it takes us out of our body. Sometimes we don't even feel things in our body. And doing mindfulness and meditation that focuses you to feel the sensations going on in your body takes you out of your brain and gives it a little bit of a break. It shifts that focus and gives it good, well-earned rest. Other forms of active mental rest include creative hobbies. It forces you to rest your work brain and focus on less intense, lower stakes creative tasks. Even something like coloring or doodling gives your brain a break from effortful actions and it gives you time to rest because you don't have to think super hard about coloring or doodling. Again, it's that low stakes piece where you can just let your brain rest, veg out. It's like light stretching for your brain as opposed to hard creative thinking, which would be like the heavy-duty workout for your brain. Exercise is also a great rest activity. And it might not feel like it because you're like, oh my god, exercise is so effortful and difficult. And you'd be right, but for different reasons. Exercise is great active rest because it combines both physical rest and mental rest together. It's a great form because by working out, you're focusing on your body movements, and that helps you get you out of your head. And in the same way, it also provides you some physical rest. For example, if you've been sitting in an office chair all day and you haven't moved, your physical rest demands are going to be a lot different from someone who's actively on their feet and standing all day at work. If you're opting for exercises that are going to strengthen the functional or are slow, gentle exercises that'll just kind of tease your muscles into movement and action, those are all great forms of physical rest. And again, focusing on that physical movement takes you out of your head, puts you into your body, and gives your brain a break as well. One thing that's important to keep in mind about rest is that it doesn't have to be passive. As I've said before, and I will say again, it's very common during do nothing rest periods that we're often doing something, even sleeping and meditating. You feel like during sleep your body and mind are zoned out, but that's not true. Okay, your body and your mind are still working because your body does work at 24 hour cycles, and our sleep cycles have a whole host of different processes and operations that happen. While we're sleeping, our body and mind is still active, it's processing, it's healing, and it's building. While your body's daytime demands have finally quieted down, now's the time for the night shift to come on in and do their work. They're quite literally like the night shift cleanup crew in any office building or school or campus where they come on in quietly, you don't really recognize that they're even there, and they disappear by morning by the time everybody else is back in the building, and yet here you are, able to continue the next day's operations smoothly without a hitch and cleanly. Meditation is also a lot like a muscle. You're training your mind to see thoughts come and go, but not necessarily interact with them, and that's very difficult to do. We're so cerebral as human beings that we give credit to every single thought we have in our head, and it takes a lot of work to dismiss thoughts in our head and to get them to go away, and that's a muscle that's built up like anybody else. And if you're able to do that without any other training, props to you, my friend, because that is no easy feat. You're still lowing growing and learning as you do these quote-unquote do-nothing rest activities. So rest is in fact not passive, and rest is also in fact not optional. Emotional labor is something that we often hear about. It can be a really exhausting experience, and emotional rest has some that need. So some people say that emotional rest involves finding different ways to express your feelings and kind of free you from that pressure of holding it together. It can look like a safe place for you to process your emotions. So talking to a friend, talking to a therapist. And it's important to give credit to those emotions and feelings rather than pushing them aside or saying no, especially to emotionally intense activities. You can also set limits and boundaries with emotionally draining people and roles, and even give yourself permission to turn your phone on, do not disturb. You don't have to be reached at all times, and you do deserve an emotional rest. So if you have a friend that's often needing advice or often likes to complain about their own life, which is again nothing inherently wrong with that. As friends, we do share in our lives, but if you think that you need that emotional rest, take that time out. It's important to you, and it also makes you more sustainable in the long term to be a good friend to that person. This also kind of ties in with social rest because not only introverts need social rest, okay? Being around people all the time means the won, which can be draining for anyone, okay? Even the biggest extroverts feel this way. And trust me, I know because I am a massive extrovert. Social rest might include scheduling fear activities during the week, or spending more time alone to recharge, or spending intentional time to be alone and recharge. So blocking out like a Thursday or Friday or weekend day to just be like, this is frujit day, this is me day. I'm not doing anything with anyone, I'm just focusing on me and myself alone. We're gonna talk a little bit more about sensory rest as well as creative rest. Sensory rest is also equally as important because, again, we have so many modalities and ways in which we can get tired. So our rest also needs to match all those things that make us tired. For example, the world can be super loud in being constantly exposed to technology that works like slot machines in your pockets, where they're always demanding your attention, always demanding your eyes, demanding you to click this link to see this sale and see this and see this and click this and spend your money here. All of that noise, whether it's visual, verbal, audible, all of that noise can be overwhelming. It's important to try and take little breaks from anything you rely on your senses to register, whether it's background noise or screens or loud, bright lights, it's important to take a break from it. And if you take a tech break, you can always replace screens with looking outside, spending time outdoors, or talking to people because that removes you from screams. For example, one of my favorite hobbies of all time is video games. Okay, I love to play video games, and video games requires a lot of screen time. So unfortunately, now that my work requires me to look at a screen a lot more than it used to, I have not been playing video games as much. Because when I get home from work and I'm tired, and I'm tired of being under bright white fluorescent lights and looking at bright blaring computer screens all day. The last thing I know I need to do to get rested is to look at another screen for more time. So I've tried to incorporate it a little bit before bed by playing on my little switch while I'm like cozy and I play like 20 minutes max and then I call it. But it is very sad. I miss my video games, but it's not worth it for me right now, to be honest, because I know I need that sensory rest. I need to look at something that is not a screen. Oh my goodness. Screens will actually be the death of me. They're so tough. Creative rest is also important. If you have a job that's constantly required, you come up with ideas, problem solve, be creative, brainstorm, then it might be time for some creative rest as well. Along with giving your brain a little bit of a break from those demands, find ways to engage in creative hobbies like knitting, writing, baking, painting, any anything that's creative that still uses those skills, but is again low stakes, low bar, just for fun. Participating in activities that make you feel creative, like doodling or arts like that, it just fills you with the sense of wonder, it fills your creative reserves, even taking in natural scenery. So, right now, our sunrise and sunset times are kind of ideal around people's work schedules. So if you can, just take the time to appreciate the sunrise and sunset. Because honestly, guys, in the last week or so, we have had some of the most gorgeous sunrises and sunsets I've ever seen. Edmonton skies just they give, they give, they give. All right, they're beautiful, and I find them so healing and resting just to take some time to look at them. Spiritual rest is also important. If you have religious or spiritual practices, rest can sometimes mean stepping back from really restrictive, rigid ways of thinking that can cause stress or pressure. Uh, Ayanna Abrams, who's a Psy D U clinical psychologist and actually founder of Ascension Behavioral Health in Atlanta, Georgia, says that stepping back from religious or spiritual practices in a restful way means kind of changing yourself away from rich ways of thinking. Because our religious practice and our spiritual practice can be restrictive and make us feel like we're in a box. Spiritual rest can also be taking steps towards feeling what nurtures you and pursuing that, refilling your tank by connecting to a cause that's meaningful to you, or simply take time to enjoy the beauty in nature, volunteer, take a look at those pretty sunrises and sunsets I mentioned, do what you need to do. Oh man, time just flies on by. I have been having such a fun time talking about rest and relaxation. I don't know why. All the topics I do that are just about being chill, like the sleep topic I did and have re-aired since then is one of my favorites because it just makes me feel so inspired to rest well and get good sleep. And talking about rest and relaxation, I strategically plan this kind of around the end of February or January, sorry, because we come in hot into the new year during a time where our bodies are honestly very much in rest and relaxation phase. You just spend so much time with your friends and family, you get time off work, you have holiday parties, you know, Edmonton, the whole vibe of the city just shifts to be more about relaxation and rest and just spending time with loved ones, that it's infectious, that even if you don't celebrate Christmas, it's really hard to skip that kind of vibe that's taken over the city. So I planned this for New Year's or a little bit after New Year's because I wanted to give you a reminder that rest is important too. So maybe if you haven't set New Year's resolutions yet, or you have and you've already given up on them, maybe corporate one about rest. Just be like, I'm gonna spend 20 minutes looking out a window without any music on, without my phone, and I'm just gonna stare. I don't know if you guys have seen this on social media, but this also kind of inspired this topic. But people who are just raw dogging, and I don't mean that in like the inappropriate sense, okay, get your mind out of the gutter. I mean like they just stare into a camera and they have like an iPad timer going off, and it's like three hours of me just raw dogging, staring at my wall, and it's a like a time lapse of these kids just staring at a wall. And honestly, that's what I gotta do. That's what we gotta do. Okay, that is rest, that is meditation, that is learning how to mentally, emotionally, maybe even physically rest if you're lying down while you do it, go for it. Reframing rest and turning it into a social media trend like raw dogging staring at the ceiling, like go for it. If you find yourself resistant to rest, it's important to reframe the idea, okay? Make it attractive, make it something you want to do. Treat it like something that's productive if that helps. You don't always have to be like rest has to be totally counterproductive. I'd argue that no, rest is important in order for you to be productive. Rather than a passive act that stops your progress, think of it as an investment into your energy store. So thinking about it like if I had a bank account, I'm depositing energy into it by resting the same way I would deposit money into my savings. Because so often we're making withdrawals, we're making transactions, we're making so many expenditures that we're not really worried about the deposits, we're not worried about our savings. So when you're really resting, you're building up a healthy portfolio of quote-unquote investments. At least that's what's according to Till Orion, who's well spoken on this topic. Keep in mind that focusing on productivity, you're thinking about what taking a break can help you achieve, can make the experience kind of productive. But if it helps you, go for it. You don't necessarily have to tie rest to an outcome because that can add pressure. But if you treat it like if I spend 30 minutes doing a non-screen related activity, whatever it may be, whether it's baking, whether it's knitting, whether it's doodling, whether it's reading, whether it's working out or doing a stretch, when you tie it to something like that and you say, if I do that 30 minutes, I'm gonna be so much more productive at work. If that helps you get that 30 minutes of rest in, then go about it. Think about it. And if you feel yourself being bored or agitated while resting, give yourself permission to feel bored and agitated because those feelings are true for you in that moment. And remember, how you rest should be as unique as you are, and you're pretty darn unique, guys. You're pretty special to me. So I hope you take this time to rest and enjoy your evening. Goodbye, and I will see you another Wednesday. Grigit out. Thank you for everyone who tuned in. 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