When Depression is in your bed

Beyond Sleep: Expanding What Rest Means So We Can Have Daily Practices That Renew

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Episode 36

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Rest doesn’t have to mean sleeping in or finding a three-hour window for a nap when time is not something you have in excess. We reframe rest as a spectrum of accessible practices that fit into busy, real lives—rooted in the nervous system, informed by your inner wisdom, culture and community, and designed to restore capacity without adding pressure. Drawing on a polyvagal perspective, we explore how to move from shutdown or overdrive into “safely still,” and why even 90 seconds of breath, grounding, or time in nature can create real change.

We walk through eight kinds of rest—physical, mental, restorative, emotional, social, creative, sensory and ancestral/cultural/community—and show how each can be a part of a comprehensive, replenishing daily support to our systems. You’ll hear a few simple, repeatable ideas, with more practical suggestions to come in the next episode.  We discuss how honoring intergenerational exhaustion can allow space to reclaim rituals, community practices, and collective stillness as a way to support individual rest practices and that also heal backward and forward through our lineages.

This episode invites a new, expanded definition of rest as a conscious choice that can be made to allow a meaningful, mindful connection to your Self, your body, your ancestors and the greater world so that you have increased capacity to live the life you want to live.

 If this conversation opens something for you, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs gentle permission to rest. Your one small step can shift your week—and maybe seven generations.

- If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat!

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, and welcome to the When Depression is in Your Bed podcast. The conversation today continues about rest, and in this episode, I will invite you to begin to expand your definition of what rest means as a way to take a step towards thinking about how you can incorporate more restful practices into your daily life. I'm your host, Trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. In the last few episodes, I've been talking about the importance of rest from a biological perspective, even though our society often tends to discourage restful practices, at least for many people. And I've also spoken about rest as being political because policies and practices and systemic structures influence who really have access to rest. And I've been having these conversations really in hopes of trying to move towards having a conversation about how more people can have more access to rest. And what I noticed as I was thinking about all of these ideas is that if you think about rest as going to bed earlier or sleeping in late or being able to take a three-hour afternoon nap, then you may never even try to begin to incorporate more restful practices into your life because those options are very limited and not really accessible to most people. If you have a job, you have to be there at a certain time, or perhaps late at night is your only time to reconnect with yourself. And most of us don't have three hours in the afternoon where we can just take a nap, at least not in the US. That is not a part of our culture, generally speaking, here. And so I want to start to expand this idea of what rest can mean so that you can begin to think about how to incorporate these much needed and much deserved practices into your everyday life so we can really have everything that we need to be able to manage and respond to and navigate our incredibly busy lives that many of us tend to live. As I start out talking about the idea of physical rest, physical rest is of course incredibly important. Being able to sleep seven to nine hours every night and being able to go to bed at a decent time or sleep in until a decent time. Although, like I said, I know that that can be really hard depending on what your life looks like with your job, with kids, with pets or other things that need to be taken care of in the morning. But of course, physical rest is incredibly important. And when you start to think about how to incorporate more restful practices in your life, I certainly encourage you to think about how to increase the number of hours of physical sleep and rest that your body gets every day. But I know that that's a real challenge for many, and we will be able to start talking about that a little bit more and why that is and what to do about it in the next couple of episodes, but I won't focus on that for today. What I want to do today is to help us really think about rest in many different ways. And in addition to physical rest, many of us also have a concept of having mental rest, being able to lay down our mental load and be able to take a break, whether that means take a break from work or maybe take a break from thinking about all the household responsibilities that we have or caregiving responsibilities, or just kind of like figuring out the day-to-day tasks of life, being able to take a little break from that is also incredibly important. And certainly, just like with physical rest, can be very challenging when there's so much that needs to be done and there's only so many hours in the day. It can feel challenging to figure out how do I take a break from all that actually needs to get done. While taking mental rest is also incredibly important, physical rest and mental rest are not the only two types of access that our body, our hearts, our minds, and our souls need when we think about actually incorporating restful practices into our day-to-day lives. There's also practices which I will call restorative rest. And when I think about restorative rest from a nervous system perspective, and this is from polyvagal theory that I've talked about many times, which is the work of Dr. Stephen Porges and then clinically of Deb Dana. And from a nervous system perspective, when the dorsal vagal part of our nervous system, which is our rest and digest part of our nervous system, when it's dysregulated or when we're in survival, that's also the collapse, withdraw, avoid, freeze response that we have. But when it's regulated, which means that it has ventral energy, which is the ventral vagal state of our nervous system, that's actually the entire parasympathetic branch of our nervous system. When those are working together, when they're both present, we have an experience that Deb Dana calls safely still. I am thinking about that safely still experience as restorative rest practices. And that might include meditation, it might include time in nature, it could include walking barefoot through the grass and grounding yourself. It certainly could include disconnecting from devices and screens to be able to give yourself that break that your mind and body need that's more slow and peaceful and mindful. And I think that restorative practices can really be very accessible to people. I know a lot of people say they don't like meditation or they don't know how to meditate or they don't like breath work as a practice, which is another type of restorative rest. But there are so many different options. Meditation and breath work do not have to be a specific thing. There's not only one way to do those practices, and they also could be very brief practices. You could spend 90 seconds doing breath work or 90 seconds walking in the grass in your backyard, and they can actually have a really positive impact and they're a lot easier to start to weave into your day-to-day life. I'd also encourage you to think about emotional or psychological rest and what that means to have spaces where you can just let it go, the pressures, the supposed to's, the have-to's, the mask that many of us wear in order to get through our day, who we think we need to be in this world or how we have to show up, and be able to have spaces where we can be soft and vulnerable, perhaps in the presence of other loving, supportive people, or perhaps just space where we alone can let go of all of these incredible pressures that so many of us carry. And being able to give us that little breath, that little bit of space to be free of the striving. And again, from a polyvagal nervous system perspective, that sympathetic drive, that fight or flight energy can be very push, do, make happen. And really to rest, we need to be able to let go of some of that pressure and that striving. And so being able to create practices and whatever that means to you, to be able to put all that down can be an incredibly restful practice. And I think that it's something that many of us truly need, especially in today's society. I also would encourage you to think about what social rest means to you. Many of us are replenished and renewed by interacting with people. And yet many of us need to have some downtime from those kinds of interactions in order to really replenish our energy reserves. And no matter what kind of person you are, having a little bit of that downtime, particularly from, again, as I mentioned before, screens, which can be very connecting for many, but also very disconnecting in many ways. But also in thinking about the types of social relationships that we have, we sometimes may need to really consciously take a break from depleting or negative relationships that we have in our life. And of course, sometimes this is hard to do. Sometimes it's our family or a friend we've had for a long time, or a boss or coworker, or someone else in a space where we are regularly. So consciously thinking about how I can take a social break to restore and replenish when a lot of the drain is coming from certain people or certain types of people and being able to slow down in such a way that you can disconnect from that and plug into something that feels better even for a little while. I would also encourage you to think about what creative or playful rest could look like because we do think about rest as again, napping or slowing down or disconnecting. But rest in a creative or playful way can mean engaging with beauty and joy and music and art and playful things, having unstructured time to just be. It could just be sitting with a piece of art or a piece of poetry, or even thinking about creating something yourself. And that kind of break can be incredibly replenishing when you think about the reserves that we have depleted in our day-to-day lives. Being able to consciously choose to allow space for you to be creative and to play can be incredibly beneficial. And I would definitely put that in the category of rest. Certainly, there's types of creativity and play that may feel less restful, that may also be very energetic. I don't feel the need to make hard lines on that at this particular moment, but just thinking about what kinds of creativity and playfulness feel restful for you, feel rejuvenating for you. We also live in a society where there's a lot of sensory overload. So I would encourage you to think about what sensory rest means for you. Again, I've mentioned screens. Certainly, this is one place where that could definitely apply. But also, if you think about the bright lights and the loud noises that we have or the clutter, the physical clutter that we surround ourselves with, sometimes being able to dim the lights, lower all the noisiness in our life, maybe clear out a little bit of a space for us, you know, maybe just clear off a tabletop or something like that can allow a lot of easy breathing, allow a lot of release and relief to come with that practice. When you move into something like decluttering, that could sometimes feel very overwhelming. But if you think about, well, how can I just do one small piece that creates relief? Like how can I stay in that relief space? Again, I'm not talking about this is active decluttering, although that certainly could support wellness in a lot of ways. But to think about, okay, if I fold this blanket or put this pillow nicely on the couch and maybe clear off my end table or something like that so that I could sit in this space again with that sense of relief, that could be a really beautiful restful practice. And if you consistently do things like that, you may find that over a long period of time, you actually may be able to clear out some of your space and create more restful physical spaces in your home. And then the last type of rest I'll be talking about, at least for today, is what I'm thinking of as ancestral or cultural rest. And I've touched on this in the last few episodes about the epigenetics of trauma, that we know that trauma is carried generation to generation and the exhaustion that many people feel, many different cultures, particularly cultures where their ancestors' labor has been needed for their ancestors to survive. So there's a drive that's innate in many cultures that I have to keep working in order to keep going. Otherwise, there might be actually some sort of life threat that is in some of our DNA. And that can make rest really challenging. And there's also ways to reconnect and create generational healing. Of course, there's generational trauma, but there's also generational healing. There is a both end there to acknowledge the pain and suffering that we might be carrying, and also to empower us to move towards being able to heal that and becoming conscious around what can create ancestral or cultural rest for you and your culture and where you come from. Certainly, it's very unique to each individual person and their history, but I think it's really worth thinking about. And some ways to do this might be to reclaim rituals from your culture. Maybe it's something that you grew up doing, or your grandparents or great-grandparents grew up doing. You heard about, maybe you never practiced it. Uh, maybe it's something you actually had an aversion to growing up, as a matter of fact, but now you're starting to think about, maybe you're starting to wonder now if it has a place in your life. That's a really beautiful practice. And also just the idea of naming that this exhaustion that many people carry with them is real. And it's because of something we know there's evidence, there's research, there's proof. As if we needed all that proof. I think that people carrying this and seeing this in so many places and so many people and so many cultures and so many communities is proof enough. But now we have evidence that this is something that's happening and to be able to name that and that it's not that somebody is crazy or lazy or mentally ill. It's not that something is wrong with somebody. It's actually that we are carrying these generations and generations of pain and trauma and suffering. And rest is one of the ways of healing those things, and being able to name that and allow some more space for rest that doesn't just help you, but actually helps your ancestors. And they say it goes seven generations back and seven generations forward, which I find to be a very heartwarming statistic. Uh, statistics not always heartwarming, but to think that something that you could do today for yourself heals that many people in your lineage back and forwards, I think, is a really beautiful thing. And I also think about collective rest, and this is certainly in the realm of ancestral and cultural and community rest that being able to share safely still space with others. I recently had a really beautiful experience of this at the polyvagal retreat that I was at a few weeks ago. I was invited to join someone in some sacred stillness and some shared meditation practice, and it was really quite a beautiful thing. And there's many collectives where that can happen in different ways. Like I said, meditation practices and breath work practices. I'm starting a new training in the new year for a breath work practice, and they offer weekly communal breathing practices and they talk about breathing together, which just sounds truly delightful and replenishing to me. It's part of why I'm joining their community. I think it's a beautiful healing experience and certainly something that creates rest for me. And you can think about what creates rest for you. There's ways of praying together, drumming together, being present together. That could be really healing. And sometimes, if it feels less reachable to think about your own individual rest practices, sometimes joining a collective or community practice could be a really beautiful place to start. So in the next episode, I will be talking practically and giving ideas how you can start to incorporate rest into your everyday life, even if taking naps and sleeping late do not feel like choices for you at this very moment in your life and they don't really fit into the structure of your life right now. So I really encourage you to think about rest as a conscious choice, something you choose. And it could be something you choose to do, or something you choose not to do, or something you choose to get help with, perhaps, that allows you to slow down enough that you can be more present and more attuned in order to connect with yourself, your body, your spirit, your ancestors, your community, the greater world, so that you have an increased capacity to be able to do all the things that you need to do and that you want to do. Also, I think. I hope. As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments because I want to thank you for showing up today. And I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey. In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be, the path may seem long or unclear or unknown. And I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride. And that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one. Any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action or towards rest or connection or self-care or whatever step makes sense to you. I invite you to take a step today because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed. If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trish.sanders.lcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes, and I love hearing from you. Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.