By Victoria Brodsky
Rest is an incredible important pillar of health, but it’s also key to your personal evolution and insight. If you’re on a journey of personal growth, consider taking more time to evaluate your rest habits.
Why Rest is So Important to Your Personal Growth
If you’re on a journey towards a higher understanding of yourself, your character, and your personal beliefs, optimizing your rest is more important than you think.
Although each of us has a different biorhythm, most human adults need 7-9 hours of sleep per night to be fully rested.
No matter your personal beliefs about sleep, it’s been proven that not getting enough sleep can negatively impact brain function, our hunger/fullness hormones, and our overall mood. If you’ve ever gone a few nights with little sleep, you may have felt extra hungry, extra grumpy, or extra slow when it came to communicating with others and getting work done. That’s why sleep is so important for healthy weight management and overall productivity.
Rest isn’t just about the sleep you get every night, though. On your journey of character exploration you may realize that even if you’ve slept eight hours, certain activities or people may leave you feeling exhausted.
For example, during these last five months I’ve come to find that I can only handle one or two virtual meetings per day. This was surprising to me because I’m normally an outgoing person who enjoys interpersonal interaction. However the extra attention it took to keep from getting distracted or trying to decide when to speak made this activity much more tiring for me.
As you navigate your personal growth journey, think about where in your life you could use more rest.
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How to Know if You Need More Rest – Three Questions to Ask Yourself
Whether you need a better night’s sleep, or rest from certain activities, thoughts, or people, here’s three questions to ask yourself to determine if you need more rest:
#1. Are you spending at least ten minutes of alone time everyday? Alone time meditating, journaling, exercising, or just partaking in a self-care activity is crucial for human character development. Spending quiet time alone with yourself gives your mind the opportunity to reflect on your insight of what is going on around you. This is also a type of rest that allows us to sit with our own mind, instead of being busy communicating with others and doing other things.
No matter how busy my day is, I spend at least ten minutes alone in a quiet place just to focus on my breath. This type of rest allows me to recharge so I can be a better human the rest of the day.
#2. Are you proud of how you interact with others? How we interact with others can reveal a lot about our own energy levels. Ask yourself – are you proud of how your daily interactions with other people go? If not, consider that you’re not giving yourself enough sleep at night, or enough breaks throughout the day. When we are tired or overworked, we tend to lack patience for others and therefore are unable to communicate effectively and with love and compassion.
#3. Are you always hungry or craving rich foods despite being well fed? When we don’t get enough sleep or have not rested enough to get in-tune with our bodies, our bodies may trick our minds into thinking we need sugary sweets or other rich foods. Those signals may feel like food cravings, but they may just be a need for rest. If you’re finding yourself constantly craving unhealthy foods, consider taking a walk or a cat-nap instead of reaching for the cookies. All you may really be needing is to reconnect with your mind and your emotions.
How to Commit to Better Rest Habits
If you’re digging deeper into your personal character or want to improve your professional development, rest should be considered a top priority.
Not all rest looks like eight hours of sleep – you may need rest from other people, work, or from thinking about a certain thing.
If you think you want to commit to better rest habits, consider evaluating the following, and taking the next steps:
Create boundaries: You may feel that you always have to be available for work in order to optimize your professional development. But this may lead to lack of rest and therefore poor performance. Create boundaries for yourself that allow your mind to be free from work thoughts.
Create a sleep routine: If you think your sleep hygiene is impacting your ability to be self-aware and therefore be reflective on your human character, create a sleep routine. By this I mean create a night time and morning time routine of things that will calm you down for a good night’s rest. This may include turning off your computer and getting into pajamas by a certain time, and alloting yourself at least eight hours a night for rest.
Take breaks when you need them: Taking a break doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means you’re human. Be honest with yourself and those around you when you feel you’re getting tired and need a break.
Although not always obvious, not getting the right amount and the right kind of rest can hold you back from your personal growth goals. Take some time to think about where you need rest in your life, and the types of rest you can implement in your life today. Each of us is unique, and therefore so are our resting needs.
Photo by Spring Fed Images on Unsplash
