The seven stages of rest

National Stress Awareness

Yesterday was National Stress Awareness Day, which also happens to fall within Men’s Health Awareness Month. If you’re doing anything to support Movember as well, you’ve got a triple whammy of activities related to supporting mental health. 

It’s a difficult time of year as well. Here in the UK, the weather is changing, the nights are drawing in, which may be particularly problematic if you have Seasonal Affective Disorder. Social calendars tend to get busier as well; start of the school year, Halloween, and then the long run up to Christmas. 

All of this happening can quickly lead to feeling burned out. If you’re feeling exhausted all the time, struggling to focus, brain fog, little motivation, maybe that applies to you. But how might you support yourself? 

The idea of burn out implies that you need rest. You might then think physical rest, get a good night sleep, that sort of thing. But is that really what we need?

To give you an example, how many of you have been feeling under pressure at work, and long for your next holiday to get away from it all? Or, perhaps you’ve got a social engagement coming up that you really can’t bear the thought of going to? 

Mapping the seven stages of rest

Is getting a good night’s sleep, as an example, going to help? It might, but there might be other underlying reasons for why you are feeling the way you are. That then influences what you might do to feel better.

There are seven identified stages of rest, which relate to different aspects of what we do. These are:

The seven stages of rest are typically described as all being necessary to feel fully rested. It is good practice to take time to ensure you do take that rest. It’s also important to understand that whilst we talk about rest, in this context for some of these stages there might be associated activities. For example, in creative it may not involve stopping being creative, but finding time and space to explore your creativity. 

It’s not always easy to ensure that you receive all seven stages of rest. Instead, how can we incorporate the principles of needing different types of rest into our daily lives? Ensuring we have appropriate rest, even if it is not the full rest reset we sometimes need, helps us to manage. 

It’s important to recognise that we may be experiencing one or more of these different types of fatigue, and therefore need different types of rest to help. Immediately we can see that with this many types of rest, there’s not necessarily going to be one thing we can do to recover.

Your personal rest map

So faced with this dilemma, what can we do?

Two things. Reflect, and experiment. Each of us will have different rest needs, or rest activities that work for some types of fatigue but not others. It will help if you have some idea of what you are struggling with. This is where reflection comes in. Reflection is taught as part of studies at OCA, but you can apply it in your personal life as well. 

First, try to identify your personal rest dynamic. From the seven elements, which are most important to you? For example, perhaps creativity and sensory are most important to you, but physical and spiritual are less important. Your personal rest map might look something more like this:

Once you’ve established your personal rest map, you can then use this to identify specific activities or actions that support that rest. 

In this example, we’ve identified that Creative is the area that affects us the most, followed closely by Sensory. 

So what within those areas might support you? Take sensory as an example. Sensory overload can take lots of different manifestations, including both physical and mental. If you are a parent you’ll likely get both of these, with constant touch and noise inputs. We’ll use this as a scenario, to map out what you might need to take a break from to give you rest.

Taking action and further help

This is a really simple sketch out of the process you could take to start to plan out what you are struggling with. From this you can consider what you need to do to get help and get rest. There are lots of other tips and ideas for breaking things down, planning your time, and so on in the Student Handbook. You should also consider WRAP, the Wellness Recovery Action Plan.

As we said before, you may be affected by more than one aspect and therefore need multiple types of rest. These are also perhaps unlikely to be affected in isolation, i.e. one aspect of rest will influence another.

In the example above, if you are struggling with sensory overload, that is likely to inhibit your ability to be creative, which may be a key outlet for you in maintaining positive mental health. Once you’ve freed up the space to get away from sensory overload, could you then use that time and space to be creative?

Hopefully you can start to see that to be restful we need to be intentional. There’s a lot that goes into rest and wellness, beyond physical and mental rest. To be well rested, and maintain that rest, involves reflecting, planning, and acting to ensure you stay well. OCA has lots of resources to help you with this, in the Student Handbook, and through the OCAWellbeing App, which you can download through both the Google Play and iPhone App stores. And if you need further help with this you can also request to speak to one of our specialist advisers.