You Deserve Time To Rest with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith
“Most of us have lost all respect for rest. We have great respect for work and we see it as the end all, but we don’t really recognize that rest is actually what prepares us to be able to sustain ourselves within the work.”
Episode 01
Are you one of those people that says “I’ll rest when I’m dead?” We can relate. As busy people–partners, parents, career drivers, caretakers and a host of other hats we wear, rest seems like an elusive and sometimes impossible task–especially during the holidays. To kick off our new series, For the Love of Peace, we’re here to tell you–you need and deserve rest. And lest you think rest is just getting 8 hours of sleep at night (wouldn’t we all love that), it’s more. We need emotional, creative, physical and mental rest, just to name a few. The stats are real; when we don’t rest we have increased cortisol levels, which then add to inflammation, which then add to every type of metabolic disorder that’s out there–from high blood pressure to cancer, to stroke, diabetes and more. It’s obviously important to figure out how to fix this rest deficit–but how? There is already a shortage of time for our overloaded to-do lists, not to mention being there for family, friends, work and exercise (if we even have time to fit that in). Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith has spent her career as an internal medicine physician, looking at the ways different kinds of rest are the little levers we can pull that renew our bodies, brains and souls. And good news–some of them only take 5 minutes to fit into our lives. When we put these rest practices into our lives, we avoid burnout, health issues and depression. Before you get to the end of seeing your own value to take care of yourself, consider Dr. Saundra’s advice and begin to respect the place that rest has in your life. By allowing it to sustain you, you’ll experience other areas of life much more joyfully. You Deserve Time To Rest with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith
Hi everybody. Jen Hatmaker here, your host of the For the Love podcast. Welcome to the show. I always love these days. I love new series days. Today we’re kicking off a brand new series. We really spent a lot of time on this one. It is called For the Love of Peace, our last series of 2023, if you can even believe it. We always think critically about how to end the year, and it always just feels precious to me in a season of such activity, motion, busyness, and all this additional weight put onto the life that we’re already living to steer the podcast into a place of respite, rest, and peace. When I tell you I am eager to introduce our topic today, I was so looking forward to this conversation. We’re talking about rest today. If you’re anything like me, you’re not getting nearly enough of it, but this is more than what you think. I’m not just talking about sleep.
This tendency to let the hustle and the bustle of the holidays intrude on what our bodies need is just ubiquitous. It’s not just this season either. This is the American way of life, and so you’re probably like me in that you find and have plenty of excuses for why we’re not resting or refueling in a way that makes any sense for our bodies. There are excuses. “I’m just a really busy mom. I’ll calm down once this project is over. Let me get to this deadline. This is just a season. Once I meet this goal, I’ll slow down.” I know, I mean I do this all the time. I can constantly push off a better pace, and a sane schedule to next week, right? But we never get there. Instead, we have this national crisis of constant burnout, exhaustion, and depletion and there has to be a better way.
We deserve to feel whole, complete, restored, and work from a place of fulfillment. So I’m just really interested in that conversation. I’m really interested in a paradigm shift here, which is why I have Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, the perfect person to talk about this today with us. She is a board-certified internal medicine physician. She’s a global speaker. She’s an award-winning author and an international thought leader around this exact idea. If that doesn’t keep her busy enough, she is the CEO of Restorasis, which is a professional development agency that works with companies and employers who want to prioritize their employees and wants them to succeed and wants them to avoid burnout. She comes in as this doctor in all of these corporate environments and teaches companies and the people inside their companies how to avoid burnout, and how to really rest. She’s been featured all over the place like Women’s Day, Fox, Psychology, TED Talk, everywhere!
She has an incredible book that I am excited for you to check out. It’s called Sacred Rest; Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. She’s got a free assessment tool, which she’s going to mention here in a minute called restquiz.com. A quarter-million people have taken that free quiz and discovered where their rest deficit is. We are not just talking about sleep. She’s going to discuss with us seven types of rest and only half of one of them involves sleep. So this might be a broader conversation than you think. I know as soon as she started parsing out the different types of fatigue and exhaustion that we experience outside of hours a night, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is very possible.”
Something she talked about at the very end was tons of these tiny little levers that we can pull to renew our bodies, brains, and souls. They’re less than five minutes. We’re not talking about taking a sabbatical, we’re not talking about getting 10 hours of sleep a night. These are smaller possibilities that restore our minds and bodies because as she said, the whole idea of rest is part of the word restoration. So let’s really get into what it looks like to be restored today. I’m so pleased to share my fascinating conversation with the lovely, smart, and wonderful Dr. Sandra Daulton-Smith.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Sacred Rest; Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity
by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith
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