In this episode of Bulletproof Radio, you’re going to learn a lot about your rest deficit. I’ve brought a guest on the show today to talk about ways you can get real with yourself about how you’re getting rest wrong. It’s not sleep. And it’s not simply stopping activity. What she had to say certainly gave me pause, and I think you’ll do the same.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith is a board-certified internal medicine physician, work-life integration researcher, speaker, and best-selling author. She’s been the featured wellness expert for numerous media outlets including MSNBC, Dr. Oz, Fast Company, and Psychology Today. She joins me from the Birmingham, Alabama, area where she’s practiced clinical medicine for over 20 years.

One thing that we haven’t been doing enough of during the coronavirus pandemic is resting. Not sleeping, but actual rest. Stress and anxiety have been high for months.

In her book Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, she describe seven types of rest that underlie how we show up in the world. All of them affect your performance in different and unexpected ways. Find out which one allows you to experience beauty, which one affects your authentic self and which one attacks your senses.

“Rest really is about restorative activity,” Dr. Dalton-Smith says. “What are the restorative activities you do to help pour back into these seven areas to counteract the ways that you pour out within your day-to-day life.”

As a teaser, I’ll let you know that you pay a steep price if you’re not getting one of the seven types – emotional rest.

“The part of emotional rest that gets very difficult and that I tend to see a lot in professionals is when it gets to the level where it's affecting people to the point where they don't feel like their life has worth,” Dr. Dalton-Smith says. “So, we're seeing suicide and depression and those types of things when emotional rest gets to a climax. And the problem with that is, if no one knows that you are down or depressed or anxious, then intrinsically, you start feeling like something is wrong with the true me, that I can't really let people see who I really am. And that's a very toxic situation to be in and that kind of increases the risk of some of these greater levels of mental health diseases.”

To see how well you may or may not be resting, take the Rest Quiz at https://ichoosemybestlife.com/quiz/rest-quiz-test/.

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