Award Winning Author & Physician | Dr. Saundra Dalton Smith on The 7 Types Of Rest We Need To Thrive

What you’ll learn

• The 7 types of Rest
• Functional Burn Out
• The REST Method
• How to create space to rest within organizations

Transcript

Intro [00:00:00] Rest is a luxury. No, rest is a necessity that each one of us need if we want to be our personal and professional best. Sixty seven percent of workers say they felt burned out since the pandemic. That’s a lot of people who are going into work every single day as functional burnout. And that’s the term that I use. That’s why I feel a large portion of the work in the labor force are functional. Burnout with the World Health Organization defines burnout with three characteristics. The first one being you’re tired all the time. That’s a lot of people.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:00:53] Hey, everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the future of our podcast. This is Daniel Lamadrid from the Allwork.Space team. And today, I’m very excited to be speaking to Dr. Saundra Dalton Smith about rest, the types of rest there are and why we’re not getting enough for them. If you ever felt like you’re going to bed early and you’re still waking up tired, you probably should tune in to this episode to find out which types of rest.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:01:21] Welcome, Dr. Sandra, how are you?

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:01:23] I’m doing great.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:01:24] Thank you. Awesome. It’s really, it’s nice to have you here. As I mentioned before we started recording, this is a topic that is very dear to me because I’ve always struggled with lack of rest. We wrote an article on Allwork.Space about your book and the seven types of rest that there are. When I first read the seven types of rest that you suggest, I was like, oh, I’m practically missing six of them, you know, because I think rest is something that, in fact, we’re not getting enough of. And people think that rest is the same to sleeping, which is not.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:02:00] So true that that is the misconception. I think that keeps most of us fatigued because we are putting all our eggs into the sleep basket. And what happens after you get eight hours and wake up so exhausted?

Daniel Lamadrid [00:02:12] Yeah.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:02:13] If you don’t recognize those other types, you just think, well, that didn’t work. Now what?

Daniel Lamadrid [00:02:18] And just before we kick things off, I’d like to officially introduce you to our audience. Dr. Saundra Smith is a Board-Certified Internal Medicine Physician, Speaker, and award-winning author. Thought leader featured in numerous media outlets, including Prevention, MSNBC, Women’s Day, Fox, Fast Company, Psychology Today Inc, CNN Health, TED.com and right Now on Allwork.Space. She’s the author of numerous books, including her bestseller Sacred Rest, How to Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy and Restore Your Sanity, which we will be speaking of in this episode, and we’ll be linking the book itself in the resources section. So, keep an eye on that. This book itself, which we will get into, includes insight on the seven types of rest needed to optimize their productivity for overall happiness, overcome burnout and live your best life.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:03:15] So let’s dive right in, Dr. Saundra Smith. I took the quiz on your site and like I was telling you before, it basically told me that you need more rest. Why do you think right now people aren’t getting enough rest?

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:03:31] Yeah. So, the quiz, when you go to the side, it requires that come and take the assessment. What I find with most people is usually there’s one or two of the seven types of rest that they’re more deficient in. Because most of us, we are automatically getting some type of rest. We would not be functional if we were completely burned out. The most of us are getting some of the seven types, just not all of them and oftentimes not the ones that are really draining us. So, we’re not getting rest in the places that we’re depleting within our day. And so, I think the big component of that is too often when we think about being fatigued or tired, we’re not specific enough. You know, as a physician, if someone comes to me and say, hey, Doc, I heard I would, I would be like, OK, what am I supposed to do with that? You heard what hurts. This is your head, your chest, your leg. But we always say things like, I’m so tired or I’m so drained, and it’s no different than saying, I hurt you. That’s not specific enough. You can’t really diagnose or treat that you need a little bit more detail to be able to know where the problem is so that you have some hope of getting up to a solution.

[00:04:43] We we’ve already determined that rest and sleep, they’re not the same thing. Sleep is one of the seven types of rest it is. People aren’t getting enough of the other six types, and this can lead to. Affects people’s mental health overall, especially with problems with insomnia and burnout, which eventually correct me if I’m wrong. Lead to more severe problems like anxiety, depression and it’s not just getting sleep to wake up in the morning rested, which yes, that’s one of the points, but it also affects mental health.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:05:23] Absolutely. You know, when you’re looking specifically at sleep, you’re right. Sleep is one of the types of rats it falls under the physical with physical having two components the passive, what you’re napping and sleeping. And then even physical has other parts to it, including the active parts of physical rest like yoga or stretching or massage therapy. So, you know, when we’re looking at all the other types of rest, including the mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative, you know, when you’re missing out on some of these, particularly, let’s say, emotional or social. All those different types of rest are affecting how you can function in the world. So, someone who has an emotional deficit typically is someone who’s going to over time. If that’s not addressed, going to start feeling very isolated, they’re going to have more insight, more likely to have depression and they are going to start. It’s going to start affecting their relationship, which then starts playing into their social deficit because their relationships are going to suffer because they’re not feeling at liberty to be authentic and real about what their feelings are, they’re going to be holding back. You know, sometimes we function behind our math and that’s exhausting. So, what ends up happening is it’s like this downward spiral.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:06:41] You are keeping your mask on, so people don’t know your emotions and that you’re keeping your feelings in check, which is in part draining you and then causing your relationships to suffer because people don’t feel like you’re authentic. So, we must realize that not addressing it just prevent this creates really this kind of vortex that takes us in. And that’s why people end up severely clinically depressed at levels of burnout where they truly cannot function within their careers anymore.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:07:11] Yeah. I mean, it’s sort of like a snowball effect, right? There’s this tendency, especially in the financial industry, and I have a lot of friends who work in finance who brag about not sleeping. Why do you think some people see rest or sleep as a weakness? Because to me, that’s just I mean, and you see them always on Red Bull, but that that also makes things worse, adding to your body. They don’t allow it to sleep, right?

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:07:41] Absolutely. Red Bull, five-hour energy, Mountain Dew Really, any caffeine fix coffee and caffeine fix? Somebody can get into them to try to read them up, right? You know, the thing about the reason I think so many people struggle with getting the rest they need is because of what you just stated. Our culture has created this negative connotation associated with rest. You know, we look we look favorably upon those people who are doers and producers and getting things done. And sometimes we don’t really consider if those people are happy and enjoying the work that they’re doing. Because what I often find time in the work that I do with corporations and leaders and executives who are going through burnout or who are in businesses that are going through some severe employee issues because the entire culture is built around a burned out non-well-being type mindset is that when that occurs, we start thinking, well, this isn’t just this just how hard it is for everybody. And the reality is we have to we have to be able to start changing that because that’s the problem. The problem is we have gotten to a point where we put more value in the work, not recognizing that most people, you know, since the pandemic.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:09:03] A recent study came out a couple of months ago that talked about since the pandemic, over 70 67 percent of workers say they felt burned out since the pandemic. That’s a lot of people who are going into work every single day as functional burnout. And that’s the term that I use. That’s why I felt a large portion of the work in the labor force are functional burnout, where, you know, the World Health Organization defines burnout with three characteristics. The first one being you’re tired all the time. Yes, that’s a lot of people. The second one is you no longer find joy in the work that you do. So you go to work, but you’re, you know, you may have been passionate about that job in the beginning, but now it’s like, OK, here we go. Another Monday. You’re just there to earn a paycheck and to get out at the end of the day. And then the third component of that is that even the work you produce is. Not at the caliber of what it could be, your productivity, your ability, your creativity, all those things that really make work fun for most of us. Decreases. And so, you’re producing a lesser quality product. And so, you know, nobody really wants. You really can’t grow a business like that. You can’t stay innovative and the top of your game. You can’t move up within your organization like that. What ends up happening is people get in this stagnant place within their careers and then you feel even more burned out because you are just kind of cycling around because you are still, I must keep producing to be able to advance. But you’re not by not stopping, by not filling back up, by not restoring the places that have been depleted. You make it almost impossible to do that.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:10:47] Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. And you just touched on a lot of topics that I can relate to. But I would use to think that the more I worked at timewise is, the more I would produce came a point where my brain was sort of like that and I had no creativity. I thought I was a problem. And then I started taking these power naps right after I had my lunch. I would wake up with so many ideas that I would have never thought of if I didn’t just have some space to myself to rest. And like I was saying, I think this whole working from home, which a lot of people are doing right now, is very difficult to draw the line between life and work. What used to happen to me, and I think a lot of our listeners can relate this to you. Well, you’re working from home. You have your computer there on your desk. Very easy to just be like, oh, let me just go, answer some emails. Oh, let me just do this. Let me edit this podcast episode. You know,

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:11:51] That’s a great point, because, you know, I think I think that is why there was such an increase in burnout. You know, when I when we look at the results for the rest quiz over the time of the pandemic, you know, before the quiz has been out since 2017, so long before the pandemic, we had lots of research and lots of results. Then when everything happened with COVID, we saw a huge shift in the result. Mental health has always been an issue for most people. Most of us are over thinkers. We were always thinking our minds always racing. And so that’s always been high.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:12:28] But when the pandemic happened, there was a direct uptick in the sensory overload for a lot of people. And I think a big part of that is because even jobs that had never considered like medicine. No one ever thought about telemedicine for their physician. And that was kind of like an oddity. OK, if you were out of town and you had to see your doctor, maybe we’ll do it by phone, but that was not the norm. And so, there were even careers that never were remote. Suddenly, we’re remote. And so, there was many people who, first, probably use their gadgets too much at home anyway. Now their work and their home life all involve the same computer phones, whatever it was, and there was no separation. So, the natural boundaries that have been in place that helped people have some level of work life integration and keeping things kind of segmented, all the segmentation broke down. And so, we saw that people were spinning this ridiculous amount of time on their gadgets because everything from school to the news to their work, to their health care, to ordering their food, everything was electronic for the first time in probably ever. And so, I think, you know, one thing to keep in mind was that is how important it is to have some level of kind of natural boundaries in place. You know, none of us like to feel confined, but those natural boundaries of I must get I have to close my office door, get in my car, go home. It helped some of us stay in a place of healthy work life integration and healthy boundaries. When that broke down, it put a lot of the ownership on each of us individually to it reinforced to enforce that for ourselves, and many of us did not do that.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:14:19] Now I’m one of those persons. Yes, and now the seven types of rest. So, we have the physical rest, the mental, rest, sensory rest, creative rest, social rest, emotional rest, and spiritual rest. Let’s start with the physical wellness.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:14:36] Yes, so physical, as we talked a little bit about, is divided into two sections. There’s passive physical rest, which is sleeping and napping, and then there’s active physical rest, which are those things that you do that improve the lymphatic circulation in your body or the muscle flexibility and integrity. And so that includes anything from leisure walks to stretching to honestly to your body ergonomics and where you do your work. You know, for oftentimes when I’m doing this with corporations, part of the evaluation of a physical deficit is if you’re having a lot of employees that are going to their doctors complaining of back and neck pain. Often, you know, they come into work, they feel great, they leave work there, had their head, back and neck and legs are swelling and all these things, that’s a body ergonomic rest deficit that has to do with their workstation. And a lot of people are experiencing that with their home workstations. You know, particularly echo that you always had an office you went into with a great desk and a chair. Now you’re working from your kitchen table kitchen table probably is not ergonomically correct to your body for you to be there for eight hours, you know, working. So that’s all included under the physical right.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:15:49] And this is very important as it relates to the way we’re going to continue working in the future and. How companies right now are going through this talent shortage, where employees are being more demanding of these sorts of things. Employees want more ergonomics, as you mentioned, and more health benefits to combat these. The way they’re hurting person in the office or at home. So, it’s very crucial that companies right now and managers alike really focus on the well-being part of the if the employee, because I feel like a lot of companies or managers are just hearing who I want to stand up, that’s who I want a nice chair. It’s not just because they’re nice, which they are. It’s because we’ve all experienced these problems physically from not resting while we work as well.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:16:44] Well, that’s a great point because, you know, I think too often when we’re thinking about these body ergonomic things that we can add, we automatically think of the most expensive thing.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:16:56] I need a standup desk!

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:17:00] And that there can be thousands of dollars to help to get one that’s equipped to do all these things. But what I’m finding is when we evaluate a lot of people’s workstations, it’s very simple fixes that oftentimes will fix whatever that ergonomic imbalance is. For example, a lot of people are less than five foot five inches tall, whereas most office chairs are made for somebody that tall or taller. And so, what happens is people will come in and their legs will be swelling of that pain and cramping in their legs and feet, which can simply be solved by putting just a stool underneath their death. So, when they sit in their chair instead of the chair pushing back on the back of their legs and thighs, causing that vein compression, it’s elevated just a little bit. The stool cost $20, and nobody even knows it’s there because it’s underneath the death. That’s the problem. It doesn’t require a full standing desk to alleviate that pressure. Now, that doesn’t mean the patient. The person rather can take a five-minute break and go walk around, you know, take a break here and there. You don’t need a $2000 desk with that.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:18:13] Yeah, exactly. There are more economic cheap fixes. I know, for example, our screens must be at a certain level so that we’re not doing this with your neck, right? Yeah. Even if you think, oh, I’m just doing it a little bit, it affects your whole spine, right? And what I do is I just take some old DVDs, some old VHS and I put them under the screen and, you know, elevated.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:18:38] But you’re right, use what you have, especially if you’re working from home, you know, you’re working from home, you have control over your ergonomics in that situation. Do what you know. Be aware that your body is trying to tell you have problems long before they ever occur. So, if you sit down at your desk and nothing hurts and then four hours in your risk, you know your fingers are numb. Your body’s trying to tell you something. So, you know, listen to it, and start evaluating What was I doing before that? And what are some changes that can be made?

Daniel Lamadrid [00:19:11] Awesome. These are awesome tips. Let’s dove into mental rest and mental rest.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:19:18] The best example I could give us somebody who is suffering from that would be if you lay down your exhausted, you lay down to go to sleep at night and your head won’t shut up. You’re thinking of your to do list the next day. You’re thinking of the conversation you had at the office that afternoon. Yeah, you’re thinking of all the things and can’t go to sleep despite being exhausted. Another example of that would be if you’ve ever if you’ve ever gone into a room and you’re like, why am I in here? I don’t know why I walked in this room. Your concentration is so scattered that you can’t hold on to a thought, even to why you walked into a room. And I’m not, you know, this is not if you’re 85 and you potentially have dementia, I’m talking about people who have normal cognitive function.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:19:59] People with anxiety.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:20:01] Yeah, exactly. It feels like you have dementia, but you’re young and you know you have normal cognitive function. So just be aware of that when you have difficult time focusing, concentrating, or clearing your mind. Those are all signs of a mental rest deficit, and there’s lots of ways to improve that. I’ll give an example that’s a little bit hard sometimes for people to visualize. But you know, if you have a hard time concentrating it, but you enjoy jogging, I find that a lot of joggers or runners experience create experienced mental rest when they are jogging, because that’s one of the few times that they’re able to focus their attention on a single thought like cadence or breathing. So, they’re focusing all their attention down to this kind of finite couple of things that relate to the jogging or running. And they’re able to clear out some of this other stuff now running doesn’t sound like wrath because physically it’s demanding. But if your problem is mental, rest is what you’re needing, you’re getting the mental wrath even while your body is physically under a demand. And you know, a lot of us are our work. Our day-to-day work is not physically demanding. So that’s not the part of us that’s getting depleted. The part that being depleted is our mind because it’s so busy, it’s always processing, it’s always thinking, and we’re needing some of those things that can help us either clear it out or focus it down.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:21:30] Let’s move into sensory rest. I think this is something very important. This type of rest is something very important right now as we’re practically addicted to screens. If you’re not looking at your screen for your work reasons, you’re looking at your phone. If you’re not looking at your phone, you’re watching the TV. If you’re it’s I believe that screen addiction is another pandemic no one’s talking about.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:21:53] That’s very true. Yes, I 100 percent agree with that to the point that, you know, and it’s even more than the screens at this point. It’s including like the notifications from our screens because our screens now we’ve given them the right to kind of talk back to us and to invade our piece whenever they feel like it. So, I think it’s important to kind of be aware of how much screen time you’re experiencing, how much, how many notifications you get from your different devices. And then on top of that, what are the other sensory inputs in your environment if you are going into the office? Are their phones ringing in the background, elevators beeping? Are you hearing other people’s conversations in different office spaces? What are the lights? Are there bright lights and workspace? All these things influence us. And I think unfortunately, with sensory overload, oftentimes we’re not aware of how we respond to sensory input that we may not even be aware of. You know, when we look at like a two-year-old who goes to our birthday party has a great time, you know, having fun. And then like two hours end, the child starts yelling and screaming and stomping their fist and hands into the ground. And you’re like, what happened? You know, nobody took their cake or a toy. I mean, why are they so upset? They’re sensory overload. We say this naptime, right? They need to go take a nap. Well, when we get a certain age, we don’t have a temper tantrum. We just bite people’s head off. We just start raging in our car. We, you know, we start having more aggressive, agitated, irritated behavior. And so, what I always tell people is if you notice that towards the end of the day, you don’t like yourself too much because you know that you’re not a nice person after a certain period, start evaluating your sensory input because whether you are aware of it or not, your personality is going to respond to the sensory inputs around you. So, you may not even be aware of why you’re so agitated after a period. When you start looking at the sensory input, you may notice that your notifications on your phone’s going off every 15 minutes. Well, turn off whatever that is. Most of us, as far as notifications, we only need the actual phone and the text messages, everything else you can choose when you want to engage with that app, but you probably don’t want to give that app the ability to invade your peace and your sanity whenever it feels like you’re going to want to take back some of that control.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:24:23] Yeah, and I yes, that’s especially now in the world of likes and hearts and social media. We are we’re always waiting for that next notification, even when there isn’t one where we’re looking at the phone. How about the creative rest?

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:24:42] Yeah, creative rest is probably the one that a lot of people are like. I never thought about it because most of us don’t think of ourselves as creative speaking that with. So, we don’t see that as a type of energy that we’re using because we don’t, we don’t think about ourselves that way. But really, you know, at the very heart of creativity is any kind of innovation. So that includes problem solving, which through the pandemic, even if you didn’t see yourself as a creative, I can 100 percent guarantee that there was at some point a problem that you had to solve or something that you used to do. One way that now you must do differently, so you had to you had to change things around and improvise and how you did things. And so, we’re always using creative energy without really being aware of how we pour back into that part of ourselves, how we fill it back up. And so, when you when we look the creative Roth, there are many people who said that they experienced that feeling of kind of awe and wonder and inspiration when they were around nature, rather bodies of water or mountains or flowers or trees. But a lot of us, we are particularly the beach, was the number one place where people said I just fell back. Peter, I can’t explain it. I can’t, you know, I can’t rationalize it. But something about being in this setting builds up something inside of me and it makes me feel better. Well, that’s what’s creative. Rest is, is the rest we experience when we just allow ourselves to appreciate beauty in whatever form, whether that’s natural beauty, like the like nature or if it’s manmade beauty like artwork or music or theater or dance. Is that opportunity to just marvel at what’s already been created and let it kind of inspire and awaken creativity inside of you?

Daniel Lamadrid [00:26:29] OK. And correct me, I’m maybe this is wrong, but would this also fall into the work environment people are in? These awe moments. These feelings of inspiration. Are managers also at fault here for not providing these environments where in this case, creative rest can be achieved, but these other types of rest as well? Who’s responsible for the rest of employees?

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:26:57] I think that’s a great question.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:27:00] Yeah, exactly. And maybe we’re not going to be able to answer it. But whose side of the court does this fall into? You know,

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:27:08] I think I think both because that’s really the that’s really what I propose to companies when I’m working with them on wellbeing initiatives is that first, you must have a company that has a cult that is trying to at least build a culture of well-being. Because if from the very top, the leadership has a let’s grind till we drop mentality, it doesn’t matter how much I work with the employees as individuals, they’re going to be coming up kind of butting heads against a system and a culture that is not allowing them to to become well in that environment is the toxic environment is what it is. So, it’s hard to become well in a toxic environment. So, it always starts with companies first understanding that your greatest resource are the people within your organization and that if they don’t understand their own personal energy management, if they don’t understand change management and how to develop resilience, you know, we talk about resilience as the ability to not break. That is a horrible definition of resilience because that means we take everybody to the breaking point in this try to keep them from snapping. I like the resilience to represent inner growth and strength, which then allows you to then focus on how do I help people build that? What are the things, the tools, the tactics, the strategies that I can give people to help them do that? So that, to me, is what an organization’s goal should be to build up their resources so that they can get the most from them, but they’re also caring for them in the process. So, you’re getting more out of them because they’re going to be more productive when they’re happier. But you’re also caring for them as people in the process. And then as an individual, we do have to have some ownership of our own well-being. You know, so if a company is supplying maybe with the training on energy management and what that looks like and the office space, particularly right now, the basic training we’re doing is based around hybrid environments. So, you spend a couple of days in the office, but a couple of days at home, you’re a little bit, you know, segmented in kind of how you even are living because two days here, three days, they’re just helping people understand how to integrate those in a way so that it doesn’t feel so, so disjointed and so that they feel comfortable in both settings. You know, that’s been a huge thing, but that is dependent on the employee because when they’re at home, that’s all on them what their workstation looks like. You know what their work environment looks like, how they have set boundaries up within their home as best they can, depending on their situation. So, both must have some level of responsibility.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:29:54] OK, yeah, I agree. I it’s sort of what you’re saying. I believe companies are responsible of taking care of their employees while they’re at work and then empower them to ask workers to continue that wellbeing path at home, if we’re well at home, we can go into work feeling well and be productive. And if we’re being productive and happy at work, we can come back home and rest and use our personal time because when one of those fails, it’s hard to get to you. Really happy on the other one. Let’s dove into the social rest,

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:30:30] Social rest deals with people. So how people pull from your energy? Most of the people we spend our time with are negatively pulling from our social energy. Now that mean they’re negative people, it’s just the nature of the relationship. They need things from you. So that includes your kids, your spouse, your elderly parents, your clients, your coworkers, you know, they all have a demand upon you. So, we must also be aware that there should be some people in our lives that act that don’t always need stuff from us that are pouring back into us, those adult relationships that are life giving you just enjoy spending time with these people. They support, they’re supportive, they make you feel accepted. And to be aware of that, now your spouse and your kids can do both. They can negatively pull from your social energy and positively pull back into you. But that’s very it takes a very intentional mindset to evaluate kind of if that those relationships have become one sided. Yeah, sometimes you can be in a pull pull relationship where one person is always the life-giving support to the other and the other person just kind of enjoying the benefits of that. So, you just must be aware of that.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:31:40] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It’s basically not identifying people that are bad for you, but people that are absorbing your energy. They could be good people, but intentionally or unintentionally, they could be. Sucking your energy is totally. And now for the final two types of rest, the emotional rest, and the spiritual rest, which I also found that the spiritual rest doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. So, we’ll dove into those two.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:32:06] So emotional rest it’s simply the ability or the freedom to express what your feelings, your emotions, what’s going on with you just being able to be very authentic. A lot of us carry emotional labor, sometimes due to our professionalism. You know,

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:32:23] you may be the manager of a company and you had to lay people off, you know, during the pandemic. And those people might have been people you enjoy. Maybe you had barbecues, company barbecues together, and so they were friends. But now you must let them go. So, you know, you feel bad about that. But oftentimes we don’t talk about that with anybody. We hold all that in. We hold all those feelings in. And it’s important that if you are carrying a lot of emotional labor related to things that that you feel emotionally, strongly, emotionally about, that you have at some time a chance to express that, whether that’s in a journal, whether that’s what the counselor or therapist or somebody you actually pay, or whether that’s just with a trusted friend and you’re not necessarily giving the details of what happened, you know, that’s not necessary for emotional rest. It’s you are sharing how it made you feel. It’s very specific to allowing your feelings to be expressed without having to put make up on them or make it more palatable for somebody else to consume.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:33:23] And I think that it would be better if people go to a third person who can judge them. No, that’s what therapists are for, because if you’re telling something to a friend, you’re always sure sugarcoating it. Whether you like it or not, you’re not telling it how it is. And I go to therapy. I’ve been in therapy. A lot of people think therapies for crazy people, it’s not, and it’s somehow very magical. How would this person you don’t know, this person you don’t know knows more about you than sometimes your family or friends.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:33:55] That’s so true. And I think that’s a very true statement that a lot of people probably need to hear, because sometimes, you know, there are some emotions that you may never feel completely safe to share with people who can then come back and throw it in your face like family or friends or spouses or whoever else they love you. But, you know, we all have our tempers and get angry. You don’t want to hear some of that coming back at you. So that’s one thing about therapist and counselors. It feels very safe because, you know, they’re not going to use it against you and that you know that you can just say it like it is and they’re able to help you oftentimes process for that.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:34:34] Yeah, that’s totally true. That’s totally true. I agree. Spiritual rest?

[00:34:40] Yes, spiritual rest is at the very core. That is the need that we all must feel as if we belong as it were contributing to the greater good that our life has meaning and purpose. So, some people experience that and faith-based type systems, specific religions, other people experience that through community in different ways. And I think it’s just important to recognize that we all have that need for that kind of interconnectivity where that’s on a deeper level. And so, understanding that allows us to kind of explore what that looks like for ourselves and then to make sure that we do find those places where we feel loved and accepted and that we belong.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:35:17] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree. And this is also very important for companies, managers alike. As younger generations, I’m included within these generations. Why not? I feel that we’re making a change in the world. I think this episode will serve a lot of people, workers, managers, companies alike. So, I really appreciate the time you have here with us for this conversation.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:35:40] I want to end with one statement, and I’d like for you, in your opinion, to say if this is true or false and why.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:35:48] OK.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:35:49] Rest is a luxury.

Dr. Dalton Smith [00:35:50] No rest is a necessity that each one of us need if we want to be our personal and professional best.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:35:57] Awesome. Yeah, I agree. Remember everyone new episodes every Thursday? You can listen to our episodes on Allwork.Space, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and YouTube for the video conversation. All the resources we talked about will be in the resources section in this episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you, Doctor.

Daniel Lamadrid [00:36:20] Thank you!