Season 4 Episode 8: Rest For All Seasons
In this conversation, I talk with Dr. Saundra Dalton Smith, who named the seven different types of rest and how we can treat ourselves kindly when we feel exhausted.
Here it is, our final episode in our season, all about rest! Remember in the first episode when Nancy talked to her friend Stephanie Pollock about the seven different types of rest? Well, for our last episode, we're coming full circle and talking to Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith-- the physician, author, and researcher, who literally came up with that concept! We'll learn all about the seven different types of rest and how we can treat ourselves kindly when we feel exhausted.
Listen to the full episode to hear:
Nancy's personal relationship with the seven types of rest.
Nancy's journey to accepting that rest isn't just about sleep.
Insight and information from Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, author of the book Sacred Rest.
Tips for folks with HFA who want to better understand their rest deficits.
Learn more about Dr. Saundra Dalton Smith
Go to drdaltonsmith.com to learn more about Saundra's work, how you can work with her, and buy her book.
Take the rest quiz to find out what your personal rest deficits are at restquiz.com.
Learn more about Self Loyalty School:
+ Read the Transcript
Happier Approach Season 4 Episode 8: Rest For All Seasons Transcript Nancy Jane Smith: Hey guys. It's me, Nancy Jane Smith. Welcome back to The Happier Approach, the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships. Today's episode is our final installment in our season. All about rest and I feel like we've really come full circle.
If you remember, it was a conversation with a friend that started me on this journey to get to the bottom of why it can be so hard for me and other people with high functioning anxiety to rest. During that original conversation, my friend said to me, I am exhausted. I mean soul level. And that resonated from that starting point, trying to get to the bottom of where that soul level exhaustion comes from and how to combat it.
We have talked about rest in the form of physical rest, spiritual rest, vacation, rest, and even our rules around rest. If I'm being totally honest, sitting here at the end of the podcast season and the beginning of a new year, I still feel soul level. But the difference is now I have hope and the tools to change the soul level exhaustion for the better.
Remember the first interview I did at the start of this season with my friend Stephanie Pollock. In that interview, Stephanie mentioned a book she'd read but couldn't remember the name of that shared. There was more than just physical rest. That concept that rest is more than just sleep. Kind of blew my mind.
This book said that there is creative, rest, sensory rest, emotional, rest, mental rest, spiritual, rest, and social. This idea that we need more than just physical rest spoke to me so much. So I asked each guest, we talked to what they thought about this concept. I knew I needed to talk to the woman who founded this idea.
After some Googling, I found her, her name, Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith and her. Sacred rest, recover your life, renew your energy, restore your sanity. I confess as I sat down to read Sacred Rest, I was hoping it would heal me once and for all. I hoped she had the secret formula for healing my soul level exhaustion.
In the book there is a chapter called Give It Arrest that addresses all the excuses not to rest. And when I read the. Rest means giving up. It stopped me in my tracks. That is how I felt exactly these days. My hunger. My voice for the inner critic is quick to remind me. Rest means you're going to fall behind, you'll lose your edge.
You have to keep pushing. But this isn't my first rodeo. I've been working on myself and teaching others for too many years how to build self loyalty. But even though I recognize my monger talking, I couldn't shake her. As I was preparing my questions to ask Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith. I was so. That she could finally give me some insight on how to quiet my monger once and for all when it came to engaging in rest, she could help me and therefore all of us change the idea that rest means giving up to the idea that rest means supporting ourselves.
One thing I know for sure, change is not linear. In fact, change happens in spiral. I devoted a whole episode to spirals in season two, episode seven. Spiraling up is when someone believes they have something mastered and then suddenly they're back relearning the same lesson. This is how I felt about rest.
I've taught about rest. I have led seminars on how to add more rest to your life. I know rest, and yet here I sit soul level exhaust.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: It started with basically coming home one day after picking up my kids from daycare.
Nancy Jane Smith: This is Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith. She's been an internal medicine physician for the past 20 years, and about 10 years ago, after a decade of following a grueling physician's work schedule, bouncing between the hospital and her office all day until late in the night, plus the fact that she'd recently had two kids who were toddler age at the.
Sandra realized that even though she loved her job, she was really burnt out
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:. I remember one day coming home, it was late. I remember getting through the door and I'm in the house that I had always, you know, wanted big, beautiful house with the, with the beautiful man and the beautiful babies and the beautiful life, and I was so exhausted and I'm like, I don't even have the energy to enjoy any.
And I got them in the door. I put them in front of the tv. I call her my electronic babysitter because she does a really good job entertaining when you're tired. And I just laid out on the floor, I laid on the floor and I thought, this cannot be what I've been working so hard for.
Nancy Jane Smith: That moment led Sandra down the path to researching burnout to understand why she seemed to have everything going for her, and yet she was still.
And that research eventually became a book Sacred Rest. Recover your Life, renew your Energy, restore your Sanity.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: It was really just, I, I loved my job and I wanted to figure out how can I keep doing this? You know, at the time I was only 10 years in. It's like, how can I keep doing this and not get to a place where I hate my life worse than I do right now?
Can I recover this? I felt like my life was on life. And it's like, I, you know, I'm in the, the I C U literally bringing people back to life and I feel like I'm dying, and so how do I recover my own life?
Nancy Jane Smith: The first place Sandra started looking to answer that question seemed to make a lot of sense. She thought, well, if I'm exhausted, there must be something wrong with the way I.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I spent a lot of time thinking, okay, I just need to learn how to sleep better. That has to be the problem, and I spent probably a full year trying to figure out how to get the highest quality sleep possible.
Nancy Jane Smith: Sandra was able to go a step further than most people in monitoring her sleep patterns. As a doctor, she actually set up a mini sleep study for herself, but what she found was not what she expected.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I got to a place where I had documented high quality sleep and I was still waking up exhausted. That's when the bells and whistles really went off.
It's like nothing is medically wrong with me because I have checked all the tests, nothing I can find. No reason why I am so tired. So apparently I haven't figured out some aspect of this fatigue issue and it's not sleep.
Nancy Jane Smith: Sandra realized she was tired for a reason other than not getting the proper amount of.
So she started trying to figure out what, so she started trying to figure out what that other reason was, and it began by asking herself a pointed question.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: What kind of tired am I? Because I felt like, you know, if somebody came into my emergency room and said, Hey Doc, I have a pain, I, I would look at them like, oh, and you know, what else
How am I supposed to know how to help you with that? I don't even know where to look. But I felt like that's what I was doing. I was saying, I'm so tired, I'm so exhausted, but I didn't know where to look. I didn't even know what next steps to take. So I started asking the question, what kind of tired?
Nancy Jane Smith: She started taking a closer look at what her energy levels were during the day and questioning what might have led to that depleted feeling.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Some days I was tired and it was because I physically was, you know, was on call. So I was physically up for, you know, 48 hours. Okay. Those days sleep did make me feel better. Other days I was tired and I was in my office all day. You know, I was on a circular stool, you know, . So it wasn't like I was doing anything stren. But I was expending a lot of social and emotional energy dealing with people. It's not easy to tell someone they have cancer. That's stage four. It's not easy to let somebody know you. Now you have diabetes, so you've gotta change your whole life and how you eat and everything else. I was expending energy in ways I had not appreciated. Nancy Jane Smith: After she'd gotten a better idea of how she was expending energy, then she started looking at how to pour back into those same energy. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: So I started really diving deep in how I was using energy and then going back to the research and saying, what is in the research about how you improve this area of your life? Some places there was lots of literature, lots of literature on mental energy, lots of literature on spiritual energy and physical. But Nancy Jane Smith: there were some areas where there was pretty much no research at all, like sensory. Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: No one was talking about how, how does just being in a sensory rich environment like an I C U where ventilators are beeping and EKG machines are going off, what is that doing to us, you know, who are in that environment long term Or for other people, teachers who are in a classroom where you're hearing sounds of kids, even when they're whispering, they're always noisy. There's always sound. Nancy Jane Smith: So from all that research into the well trod and not so well trod, ways that people expend their energy came Sandra's theory that there are seven types of rest that everyone needs to monitor and replenish.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative. Those were the seven that were. They crossed economic barriers, they crossed racial barriers. They weren't specific to just people in the south or just people, you know, who were of certain ethnicities. Those were the ones that, regardless of if somebody was, you know, um, a janitor in one place or somebody was, you know, , a millionaire in another location, those were the ones that seemed to be universal across the board.
And so those were the ones I started focusing most of my attention on. Looking at the research, looking at how people restored in those. Looking at the simple things people can do to P to pour back into those areas, and then starting to evaluate what, how do we identify? Because that tends to be the number one issue.
How do I identify when I have arrest deficit?
Nancy Jane Smith: Once you're able to identify where your arrest deficits are, do you need creative rest, emotional rest, spiritual rest? You can start to address the areas of your life where you need Restore. Because if you try to treat a creative rest deficit with a full night's sleep, well you're still going to feel exhausted.
But it can still be frustrating to do the work of sitting with yourself to figure out where you need to rest. A lot of us want to cure to our exhaustion immediately. Oh, I can relate. But Rio Restoration is about the journey, not the destination.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: You know, it's one of those things where you go to a physician and you're like, I have this problem.
Tell me what I have. Give me the pill. Send me on my way so I can get on with my life as is with no changes, with with no adjustments needed. Just make me feel better, doc, and do it fast.
Nancy Jane Smith: One patient came to Sandra insistent that she cure her of her exhaustion and fast.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith:. She comes in with this, all these complaints, and I'm listening to her rallying off, and I'm asking questions about her, you know, her background and her lifestyle and what she does, and the whole time she's talking, I'm like, Oh, I see what the issue is here.
You know, like, but I, you know, I do my due diligence, I order tests, I do things. Nothing is the problem. And so when I go back and I tell her what I think the issue is, you know, I, I believe you have a rest deficit. And I specified which ones I believed she had, and then we were going to work through it. The look she gave me was like, I don't have time.
You know, just gimme the pill. Do gimme a shot, gimme something, you know, that I can quickly fix this and go on about my life. You know? But what I found with, with working with her and helping her to even understand that this was, this was a problem that wasn't going to be a quick fix. It was going to, it was going to require slowing down in more ways than one. Nancy Jane Smith:. But Slowing down. That doesn't mean stopping life altogether.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I wasn't saying you had to go take a long sabbatical or quit your job or you know, go on a vacation. You know, all these things that we think about when we think about burnout. I'm not asking you to stop, because actually cessation activities would not have improved her situation.
She needed to be poured back into the places that were depleted. Stopping would've just, would've just stopped the drain. It would not have filled her back up. So she would've still been.
Nancy Jane Smith: It's crazy, but that's what most of us do. We think that resting is pulling the plug on all activity when that couldn't be further from the truth.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: If someone comes into the emergency room bleeding, if I suture them up, I have stopped the bleeding, but they're still anemic. They need blood. They need to be restored, poured back into, and it's no different with our energy levels. We pour out all week. We pour out, pour out. On the weekends, we stop, and then we say, why am I so tired?
Nancy Jane Smith: Oh, mind blown. That is a wonderful way of describing the difference between rest and restoring.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: And that's the mindset. That's why sleep and rest has gotten everything complicated. Yes. When we treat sleep and rest as if they are the same thing, like they're interchangeable terms, we omit like the other six types of rest because we're only focusing on physical, you know?
So yes. So you've omitted like such a huge part of what rest is and then you wonder why you're not feeling better, just because you slept eight. That's right.
Nancy Jane Smith: Rest isn't just sleep. It can look like a lot of different things that feed different parts of our bodies, minds and souls.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Find a playground and watch children at play.
You know, it seems like such a bizarre request, but if you're driving by any school, you're going to see some kids out playing at some point in time. , right? Most schools have playgrounds still. We as adults think that we don't need play in our lives. We forget what it looks like to be. And so that's one of the gifts of rest is the gift of freedom.
And so when you watch a child at play, they are not self-conscious. They are not caring about what everybody else is thinking and looking at them about. They are simply enjoying life. And so sometime it's helpful to almost reframe the way we see things.
Nancy Jane Smith: It's the idea that when we hear rest, we hear stop.
You say rest feels like giving. And I thought, yeah, that's totally it. Um, and it's this restore piece that I'm missing.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Yeah. I'm a doer. I'm a type A high achiever. To me, rest was for losers. That's, I mean, if I'm just going to be honest, you know, , when I started, you're preaching to the right people here. Yes.
When I started this process, you know, that's, that's how I had lived my life. From the moment I hit go and decided I wanted to be a doctor, it's like, I don't need rest. I literally, my husband will tell you I was functioning. Three, maybe four hours of sleep, and I mean, highly functioning off three and four hours of sleep, you know, um, in magazines, book deals on stages.
I mean, highly functioning with hardly any sleep. Um, living the life until it, until it wasn't possible to keep living at that level.
What I realized is that, you know, you can have a level of gifting and talent and just personality that can push you. And you can function from a stressed out, burned out state, and I feel like a lot of people are in that space. They are burned out, but functional. They're still producing. They're just producing from a place of emptiness.
And so that's where I lived a large part of my life. I produced from a place of emptiness until there was literally not enough energy to even continue to produce at that level. It was starting to drain me to the core. You know, I oftentimes look at it as this analogy between the kind of the, um, a bee, a bee is constantly producing goodness, honey, something sweet and delicious and beautiful that others are consuming, but you rarely hear about the bee consuming that same goodness for the.
And I got to a place where it's like, do I want to be a person who's producing goodness in the world? I am blessing and helping people live their best life and I'm not even taking the time to sample the same goodness I'm producing for others. Yes, I
Nancy Jane Smith: a hundred percent. You know, because it's interesting, my specialty is working with clients who have high functioning anxiety, which is right in the Bailey Wick of what you're talking about with the Type A and the push.
Push and you know, I've done so much of my own work. Building self loyalty and, and practicing what I preach with clients. But this rest piece is always something I butt up against. That's just my personal Achilles heel. And I really think when I read that line yesterday of rest feels like giving up. And I thought, gosh, that's really the thing that's been I've keep butting up against is my own gremlin.
My own monger telling. This is for losers and if you do this, you will get run over because everyone will beat you. But I'm going to crawl to the finish line. You know, like if there even is a finish line, like it's so fascinating how easy it is to get yourself hooked and once you get yourself hooked, it's so hard to stop the merry-go-round unless you're restoring
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: So true. It is, it takes time. One of the very first thing I always have clients do is we identify where are your greatest? There's usually one or two that are greater than the others. You know, we're all, none of us has perfect scores in, in rest , because you're, you're alive. If you're alive, you're pouring out energy.
That's just the reality, right? . So when you do the rest assessment, it's kind of just taking a snapshot of where your energy is on that particular day and that particular situation. But it can give you a lot of insight, particularly if it's a day you're like, I'm so tired. You know? It can give you some insight on the places where you're more prone to have a.
And so once you identify, oh, looks like I tend to have deficits, more so in the emotional and social areas, let's say, then you can become more intentional about making sure you do restorative activities to pour back into those areas. Sometimes there's one or two places that maybe you didn't even know existed was you didn't even think of it as a type of rest.
Nancy Jane Smith: For example, when she first took the time to identify her rest deficits, Sandra realized that she had a creative deficit from creatively thinking to diagnose patients all day. She hadn't even thought about diagnosing as being creative until then, but once she noticed and began to pour back into her creative self, she began to feel more energized.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Once you start realizing kind of the snowball effect, the positive snowball effect of when you actually rest well and how it affects your life, your personal and professional life, it becomes a lot easier to do it because then rest doesn't seem like the side thing that you do. When you find time, it seems like part of what you actually do to grow and part of what you do is part of your resilience within your, your, your personal and professional.
Nancy Jane Smith: So what is your personal relationship with rest today?
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: It's an evolving journey. Um, my life has completely changed, you know, since, since the book was written and since I went through the entire process. Been most of my days now, um, working with companies. Um, you know, not so much in the hospital. I'm more of an advisory role.
My hospital and medical staff now, but what I find is I'm actually busier now than I was when I was in medical practice, surprisingly enough. So I actually have to be very intentional about getting rest because it's very easy to say, yes. I'll go speak at your conference and I'll go to your board meeting, and yes, I'll go officiate your executive retreat.
And yes, I'll take five. Private cl you know, it's, it's very easy to get very out of, out of sync with rest just because of the desire to help people, the desire to, um, to serve. And so I'm constantly having to evaluate my own energy level
Nancy Jane Smith: because her life is so busy. Sandra is very intentional about checking in with herself around the areas of her life where she needs to rest.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: Every morning I wake up and I say to myself, do I feel ready for today? If I wake up and I'm dragging, then I know that I did not do something, did not get properly restored the day. If I'm drained this morning, what didn't get depleted yesterday that is now so deficient that it's affecting me this morning, and so then I can at least focus on that one area today so it doesn't continue to kind of pull me down.
That makes a lot of sense.
Nancy Jane Smith: A lot of times I'll tell myself I shouldn't be tired. Like I have a hard time getting to the honesty of that answer because I shame myself for not being more restored. Just, you know, because I should be, because. I slept eight hours.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith: I look at it the opposite way. So when I wake up in the morning and I say, okay, do I feel ready for today?
If I, if I say no, I feel like that's an empowering statement. I know me well enough to know when I'm not my best self, and so I wake up in the morning, I ask. Do I feel ready for my day? If I feel like, you know, I'm kind of sluggish today, or, you know, my attitude's not good today, or, or, you know, whatever it is, you know, my mind's foggy.
What, whatever it is that I'm feeling, I stated from a standpoint of empowerment, it's like I know me and I need to be straight. If I'm not straight with me, nobody else is going to be straight with me. . So, so I'm going to be straight with me and then I'm going to look at whatever that thing is and decide how do I love on me today.
Nancy Jane Smith: As I read sacred Rest, I had one aha after another, and during the interview my mind was spinning with ahas and ideas to implement what she was saying. Later I shared with Doug my number one aha. Rest isn't about stopping anything. It is about restoring ourselves. He looked at me strangely. Those aren't ahas.
He said, you already know that stuff. Don't you have a handout on that concept? He was right. I do have a handout on the concept of rest as restoration. I've taught the idea of adding restorative exercises to life, practicing self loyalty and not shaming my need for rest. But the beauty of spirals is yes, it might seem like I'm learning these concepts over.
But I was learning about rest as restoration at a new level. I was spiraling up in my understanding of rest. Yes, I know about rest in the past, but now I'm dealing with different challenges on my time and new emotional drains. In short, I've spiraled up. We will all spiral up even though some days I will feel like I'm repeating a lesson for the 10th time, but I don't unlearn all I've implemented Before I repeat the lesson, one spiral up with new perspectives.
Challenges and information I didn't have the last time the lesson came into my life. So it turns out this season I did learn about rest. I learned to think outside the box. When it comes to rest, it is so much more than getting eight hours of sleep. A night rest is being loyal to our emotions, our experiences, and our needs.
Rest means having our own back. Rest means restoration.
That's it for the season of the Happier Approach. Well almost we've got a bonus episode coming your way to tide you over until our next season drops. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss my full conversation with Katherine May, author of Wintering. That bonus episode will be coming to your feed in a couple weeks.
The Happier Approach is produced by Nikki Stein and me, Nancy Jane Smith. Music provided by Pod five and Epidemic Sound for more episodes. To get in touch or to learn more about quieting high functioning anxiety, you can visit nancy jane smith.com and if you like the show, leave us a review. It actually helps us out a.
Thank you to Dr. Saunder Dalton Smith for speaking with us today. You can learn more about Dr. Dalton Smith and her work@drdaltonsmith.com. You can also identify your rest deficits by taking the rest quiz@restquiz.com. It's a great way to get started with addressing the specific ways that you need to rest.
Thank you so much for listening to this season of the Happier Approach. We'll be back soon. In the meantime, listen out for our bonus episode and try to take the lessons of this season to heart and rest. Take care until we meet again.