I get it, you’re a busy person! You work, have a family, a social life, tv shows to watch, exercise to perform, food to eat, hobbies to engage in, the list is never ending!
So much to do and so little time!
Would you call me crazy if I told you, that you also need to factor in ‘rest’ to your life?
Hear me out.
If you neglect rest, every aspect of your life will suffer.
Read that again and let it sink in for a moment.
Now why can I make such a bold statement?
It is a well-known fact of the benefits of sleep!
What do I mean by rest?
- Rest may look like taking time for yourself
- Reading a book
- Letting your mind wander
- Taking a nap
- Switching your focus from work / business to family
- Going for a walk
- Listening to a podcast / music
- Learning a new skill
Resting is an art. Often times we can be so focused on the task at hand we never switch off. Have you ever been stuck with a problem and it wasn’t till you stopped thinking about it that the answer came to you?
That is ‘rest’. Letting your mind switch gears, can often give us time to find a solution.
Ever wonder where the saying ‘sleep on it’ came from?
The benefits of rest are vast and tap into every aspect of our life.
Every person will have their own unique priorities across their day, maybe they run a business, maybe they have kids to raise, a network to engage with or love spending their time volunteering for a cause, maybe they even do all these things!
Whatever the case, the simple fact is everyday we each get the same number of seconds each day – that is 86,400 seconds per day.
Resting is a key component of our day, in fact we should be spending 1 / 3 of our lives asleep (8 out of 24 hours per day) or 28,800 seconds out of our day.
Now the real question is do you value or prioritize rest to allow it to be a key component of your day?
The small moments we take can give us a host of benefits to these various aspects in your life, some of these may include:
Work Life
- Improving your productivity
- Enhancing your focus
- Giving you creative solutions to problems
Personal Life
- Improving your mood
- Allow you to perform tasks that make you feel happy / fulfilled
- Reduced stress
- Better health / wellbeing
Social
- Make you more interesting as a person (rather than 1 dimensional from fixating on problems)
- Allows you to be more present / in the moment
- Improve your enjoyment from your interactions
Each of these is a by product of ‘rest’, taking a moment between bouts of work, or family time or your personal life can allow us that reset we need to live as our best version of ourself.
How do we rest?
1. Prioritize sleep! An obvious but often overlooked concept. Getting quality sleep is not a waste of time, in fact in will likely boost your productivity in the long run.
2.Rest! The moments that we switch off during a day is our recovery time. Imagine running 100m, then trying to match it straight away once you finish, you have no hope without that rest period. Why is your life any different?
3. Figure out your priorities / values – Jot down a list of 10 components of your life, where does sleep / rest factor in? Is it time to re-evaluate.
4. Work around sleep. We know sleep is a non-negotiable so rather making your sleep revolve around your life, why not try flipping it and make your life revolve around your sleep schedule?
5. View your journey as a marathon not a sprint, we have 86,400 seconds per day, its impossible to get everything done in one day, zoom out and view the big picture rather than fixating on the tasks of the day.
6. Don’t try so hard to ‘switch off’ your thoughts. They will come, that’s a normal part of living, the secret is not giving your attention to all of them, we can let them pass just as easy as they popped into our head in the first place.
Move Right. Live Right.
Check out our new book ‘Move Right. Live Right’. Available on Amazon, Booktopia + More! A book to empower you to take control of your health, lifestyle, training + more!
