Description: This week Dr. Boogren presents part 2 of the Sacred Rest series with additional tenents to inspire your team.
Resources:
1. Feel inspired by Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith's TedTalk here.
2. Order your copy of the Sacred Rest text here.
3. Finally, explore the rest of Dr. Dalton-Smith's work here.
Listen Now:
Transcription: Hi, and welcome to episode 14 of our third season of Self-Care for Educators. I'm your host, Tina Boogren, and this week is part two of a three part series that started last week, all centered around rest. To kind of get you up to speed or remind you, what we're doing is we're digging into Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith's incredible work around the seven types of rest. I gave you an overview last time, and I'll do the same. So, as a reminder, there's seven different types of rest, physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative. And, last week you might recall that we talked about physical rest and mental rest. So, today we're gonna dig into the next three, spiritual, emotional, and social.
So, let's start off with social rest. So, here's what she says about social rest. Social rest is the rest we experience around life giving people. Oh, oftentimes we spend a lot of time with people who are actually pulling from our social energy. Think of how true that is for us as educators, it's not that they're negative. It's just whether that's your spouse, your kids, your students, your coworkers. They all need something from you, so they are pulling from that social energy. You can tell that you're feeling this if you ever hear yourself saying like, Can I just get a moment for me? You feel like everybody's taking, and you never feel like anybody's ever pouring back into you or contributing back into your life.
So, one of the ways of evaluating your social rest is to think about all of your relationships. Ask yourself, are you the one that's always pouring into the lives of others? Do you spend time with people who don't need anything from you, where you just simply enjoy each other's company and each other's presence? That's what we want in our lives--people we just flat out enjoy spending time with. Your kids and your spouse can obviously part of be part of your social rest, but you do have to be aware of the dynamics of that relationship, so you don't spend all of your time pouring into them. Let them pour back into you. That's social rest.
Next up is spiritual rest. So, spiritual rest needs vary based on someone's own belief system. So, at the very core of that is the need that we all have to feel like we belong. We've talked about this sense of belonging. Remember, this is level three of Maslow's hierarchy. We need to feel that our work and our efforts. We've got that sense of belonging. We want to also contribute to the greater good that would be the top of Maslow's hierarchy. We need to feel like we are pouring ourselves back into humanity. And, this is something that if we remember this and hold onto this, this is a gift that we have as educators. So, someone who might be suffering from a spiritual rest deficit as someone who goes to work for a paycheck, right? But, they have this feeling of like, what I do doesn't really matter? What I do doesn't benefit anyone if I do it or if I don't do it with excellence or not? It doesn't make a difference.
Now, that is not where most of us are as educators, but remember, one of the things that we know, one of the signs of burnout is that decreased sense of self-efficacy and that negativity and cynicism. So, if we find ourselves kind of succumbing to those burnout symptoms where we really feel like we're starting to kind of get sinned. One of the kind of canary in the coal mine warning signs is that feeling of it doesn't really matter when we have that decreased sense of accomplishment. So, that's a really good indicator that we need some spiritual rest. So, that's where the burnout comes in, and that's what we want to do here, is we wanna find a way to connect to our meaning, our purpose. Resit down and rediscover what your why is. Think back, why did you sign up for this in the first place? What is, what is that deeper sense of purpose and meaning that you have that is really going to help you feel that sense of belonging, feel like you are contributing and help to kind of, of mitigate some of those symptoms of burnout? So, that's spiritual rest.
And finally, for today is sensory rest. Oh boy, this is a big one. So, sensory rest is the idea that whether you're ... Whether or not you're conscious of it, there's tons of sensory kind of inputs going on around us, around our body that some are conscious, some are subconscious. This is everything from the sound of the phone ringing the ding on the computer, the lights on your computer, the noise in your classroom, the noise in your own home, notifications going off, even the visual background of everyone if you're on like a zoom call and all those distractions. So, what happens is these sensory inputs over time can cause you to develop sensory overload syndrome. And, the number one way that most of us responds to this is get irritation, agitation, rage, or anger, whew. That's not what we want, right? And so, people with this sensory rest deficit may find that they're good at the beginning of the day, but can't understand why at the end of the day you're so agitated or irritable, so sensory rest.
Here's what you can do. You guys just sit in silence. This is why so many people tell me that they have a playlist that they play on the way to work, but on the way home, they just have silence. Maybe this is you close your eyes, maybe you turn off some of the lights. Maybe you make sure that there's no sound in your home when you come home. You know that importance of finding that sensory rest time to just kind of take a break from all of it. Keep our eyes away from the screens, turn off the notifications. Sensory rest is huge. So, this week, those are the three we're gonna tackle. We're gonna think about social rest, spiritual rest, and sensory rest. Maybe you tackle all three. Maybe you tackle one, maybe you tackle a couple of 'em, whatever. I just want you to really think about what's going to work for you this week. What can you kind of play with there and see if you can add a little bit of rest into your days and see, see if it makes a difference, because I'm doing the same, and I really suspect it will. I felt a big difference last week, and I hope you did.
As always, a huge thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you to Brooke for making this happen. Thank you to Solution Tree and Marzano Resources for this incredible work I get to do, and to you, my bad-ass Self-Care Squad. As always, I'm cheering so hard for you. You've got this. Make some time for rest again this week.