Could our understanding of sleep be fundamentally flawed? Perhaps the universally advised eight-hour sleep isn’t the magical solution to fatigue that it’s believed to be. There’s more to combating the chronic tiredness pervading the lives of countless people than sleep alone. Essentially, we’ve erroneously intermingled the concepts of rest and sleep, which are, in fact, distinct.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, a medical professional and authority on preventing workplace burnout, contends that by mistakenly correlating sleep with rest, we’ve oversimplified and seemingly trivialised the latter. Dalton-Smith argues that quality sleep is crucial, yet it shouldn’t be mistaken for rest. Oftentimes, individuals feeling drained require rest, not necessarily more sleep. This accounts for the persistent fatigue experienced by those who obtain sufficient sleep, provided there is no underlying health issue.
Ideally, sleep should come naturally, however, many individuals grapple with achieving a healthy sleep routine. As per sleep experts, approximately half of adults suffer from sleep deprivation. Incurring sleep debt has severe repercussions, from heightened stress and anxiety levels to underperformance at work, eventually leading to burnout.
The rising prevalence of burnout is of grave concern, with more employees self-categorizing as burnt-out. In 2019, the World Health Organisation deemed the escalating instances of burnout troubling enough to catalogue it under its International Classification of Diseases, labelling it as an “occupational phenomenon.”
An analysis conducted by Lockton People Solutions last year indicated that 14% of Irish employees were going through burnout, while 70% had experienced it at some point during their careers. Recently, the Irish charity turn2me launched a campaign to highlight the top five signs of burnout, with persistent exhaustion holding the top spot.
“Sleep is merely a piece of the grand puzzle, one of the seven types of rest,” explains Dalton-Smith. “A lot of us are under the false impression that we’ve rested, simply because we’ve slept, thereby missing the other essential types of rest. The consequence? A society of highly productive yet chronically tired and burnout-prone individuals.”
Countless individuals grapple with a lack of sufficient rest, primarily due to a misconstrued understanding of its importance. Rest presents a risk-free, non-chemical, efficient alternative therapy that we seldom exploit to its maximum extent.
Dr. Dalton-Smith, the founder of Restorasis, guides businesses on work-life balance and burnout avoidance strategies rooted in her Seven Types of Rest model. She emphasises that recognising your rest shortfall is essential for personal and professional excellence. She underlines that no matter the nature – physical, mental, social, or emotional – all activities sap energy. Notably, mental, social, and emotional engagements can also severely drain our energy reserves.
Foremost among Dalton-Smith’s Seven Types of Rest are: physical, mental, emotional, social, sensory, creative, and spiritual rest. She purports that overcoming chronic fatigue means accommodating these types of rest in our daily rhythm. If we wake up still feeling exhausted after sleep, it’s likely that one or more of these assert a claim for rejuvenation.
Dalton-Smith articulated that sleep alone cannot rejuvenate us to a point of restfulness. Instead, we should start focusing on acquiring the specific rest needed. The first step in managing our rest deficiencies is identifying where our energy expenditure is highest each day.
Physical rest falls into two categories – passive and active. Sleep or napping typifies passive rest, while active rest can look like yoga, stretching routines, or massages. Mental rest involves momentarily disconnecting, taking brief respites from work approximately every two hours.
Sensory rest proves challenging in an age overrun with screens and mobile phones. Nonetheless, Dalton-Smith suggests even shutting our eyes for a few moments or silencing our smartphones and shutting our laptops can significantly reduce our sensory overload.
Resting creatively is crucial for professions that require problem-solving or innovative thinking. This can be achieved by taking time to enjoy nature or by having inspiring art within eyesight, to gaze upon intermittently. If our emotional well-being is compromised, perhaps from feeling undervalued or saddled by others’ expectations whilst not getting an opportunity to voice our own feelings, we may require a boost.
As Dalton-Smith points out, learning to decline and curbing the instinct to constantly appeal to others can be of significant help in this aspect. Fascinatingly, social rest doesn’t necessarily mean shunning people. Rather, it promotes spending more time with those who uplift us emotionally, lending us positivity and support, and reducing the time spent with ones who deplete our energy reserves.
Dalton-Smith also highlights spiritual rest as the final type of rest, which represents our ability to form connections transcending the physical and mental realms, offering a profound sense of belonging, love, acceptance, and purpose. To achieve this, we should strive to be a part of something more significant than just ourselves, incorporating prayer, meditation, or community participation into our daily schedules.