Rest: Choose Your Own Adventure

It’s the Friday before Spring Break.

The clock is at 4:59 and you are itching to switch that vacation auto-reply ON.

Sayonara, suckers! I’m on vacation!

If you’re traveling this spring or summer, you have probably done all your research on the place you’re going: what restaurants to try, what room has the best view, and a stack of books in your reading queue.

Sometimes we take so much time scheduling vacation, but once we get there, our itinerary is too full that we skip the rest part, or we are bored because we’re used to being overstimulated.

Just like any other discipline in our health, rest takes practice.

And rest looks different for every person and in every season.

For entrepreneurs and enneagram 3’s or 7’s (it’s me, hi), rest might look like setting aside an entire day to get off technology, do a puzzle, or take a nap, even though it’s uncomfortable at first.

For anyone who has a propensity to binge watch shows every weekend, maybe healthy rest on vacation looks like going on a hike, a yoga class, or exploring a new city.

If rest is difficult for you (and you’ll know it if you come back from vacation more tired than when you left), I would love to encourage you to take small steps of relief for yourself.

Here’s something else about rest they don’t tell you: you don’t have to wait for vacation to practice it.

You can start with 1 hour a day or your evenings, or 1 day a weekend.

Most of the time, the only thing getting in your way is you.

So clock out, and let [you] lie down for a bit.