When working with clients, who appear to be stressed and in danger of burnout, coaches and mentors often ask about the person’s sleep patterns. But sleep is not precisely the same as rest. Sleep may be partially restorative, but well-being depends on both sleep and rest, according to research by Saundra Dalton-Smith, MD, author of Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity.
She defines seven essential types of rest that address what she calls the “rest deficit”. Ensuring we have enough rest day to day enhances resilience and boosts general well-being. Significantly, rest doesn’t necessarily mean inactivity – some forms of restoring energy may simply require a shift in focus and attention. The seven types of rest are:
Physical: getting enough (and the right kind of) sleep, either at night or in the form of naps
Mental: When we feel mentally drained, we need to quieten our thoughts and allow our brains time to refuel. Experiments with giving people a success of mind-taxing tasks found that those, who had a break between tasks outperformed those, who went straight from one task to the next. But both groups were outperformed by those, who spent a short period in play.
Emotional: being able to let go of strong emotions. For example, compassion fatigue is commonplace in the medical professions. Sharing emotions with colleagues allows us to process them and blunt their impact. Finding downtime between emotionally draining tasks also helps.
Social: Constantly interacting with other people can be draining – especially, if we have to mask our feelings. Balancing time spent with people, who we find demanding, against time with people we find energising is a practical solution.
Sensory: The modern environment is full of noise – both sound and multiple sources of distraction. Take a “tech break”, for example, or go for a walk to reconnect with the quiet of nature.
Creative: Solving problems all day can be exhausting! Even when we are in flow and don’t feel tired, we are depleting our mental energy resources. Switching to a completely different form of creativity with much lower requirement for concentration allows the bran to reset.
Spiritual: Reconnecting with things that have significant meaning for us, without needing to think deeply about them.
Reframing: Changing how we think about rest. Instead of feeling guilty about “wasting” time, we can think about rest as recharging our batteries. However, focussing too much on what we will do with that renewed energy may be counterproductive, because it interferes with the process of letting go of responsibilities and the need for action.
If you find it difficult to let yourself rest, the problem may be that you are out of practice. But we can train ourselves to become more comfortable with being restful, by practising different types of rest. The difference between the words restive and restorative is lies in choice and variety.
©️David Clutterbuck, 2026