Hey there! You are listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today is episode 258, the seven kinds of rest and how to know which one you need. I'm so obsessed with this episode, even though it has not even started yet. It's just so needed.

Rest itself is such a needed thing for all of us. After all, a lazy genius principle is to schedule rest. Mostly because we just kind of let it happen. We assume rest is going to come, but then it never does, right?

But I also have been paying a lot of attention to the different kinds of rest and why certain kinds don't always land for us. Or why we take the time to rest, but then we still feel kind of unfulfilled after.

I think a conversation around the nuance of rest is desperately needed, especially when a lot of us are working with less margin than we ever have before. So I'm so excited about this episode. We're going to dive in.

First, I'm going to share the seven kinds of rest and then I'm going to share just a few words about how you might know what kind you need to pursue and schedule.

Also, these seven kinds of rest are totally made up for my own head, right? So this list is, it has nothing scientific about it. It's not researched. It is anecdotal. It's anecdotal. But I also think it's super helpful.

So these seven kinds of rest are, do you need to number one, relax, to reset, three, recharge, four, you need a break, five, you need to rest before something busy, six, rest during something busy, or seven after something busy.

So there's a lot of nuance in these seven things. And the problem with scheduling rest broadly without naming the nuance of what you need is that you end your time of rest, whether it's an afternoon, an entire weekend, or just a walk around the block, you end that time unfulfilled, and you're still tired or drained or overwhelmed or whatever, because you didn't fully engage in the detail of what kind of rest you need.

And once I started noticing the differences, though, I was like, gosh, I just rested. Like, what's wrong? Why am I not rested? Once I started to notice those differences, it made a huge difference.

Again, I'm sure that there are more kinds of rest that I'm sharing here, like these are just my own experiences. But I think even though these are anecdotal examples, they're still going to be helpful.

So I want to break down the seven individually. First, relax. I think this is sort of this standard, like most necessary kind of human rest, we should all pursue for the rest of our lives. Like we all need to relax.

We all need to not be productive purely for productivity sake, right? We all need to just be a person enjoying life without feeling guilty about it.

Now, the lovely thing about relaxation is that we all have different kinds of things that help us feel relaxed. It could be reading or doing some kind of quiet craft or activity.

It could be moving your body with a hike or a walk or dancing or playing a sport with a friend. It could be hanging out in a friend's living room or at a cocktail lounge or at a park and just chatting with your pals, right?

It could be doing yard work. It could be sitting on your porch, watching a frava show. Like it could be cleaning your house. Now, that is not me, but I know a lot of you experience actual relaxation when you turn off your brain and you move your body and scrub something.

Now, that one is like productive technically, but the relaxation builds out the task getting done. You know, like it's more important or whatever.

Now, whatever it is, we all need to be able to relax to take a breath to feel slower on the inside.

This type is the first type I'm mentioning because again, I think it's the baseline. This one never goes away, you know? Like relaxation will always be or should always be part of your life.

So that you can do the work that matters and you can, you know, fulfill your life's purpose in a way that is healthy and balanced and fulfilling.

And I believe it's something that we should all do every day that it is available to us.

And if it's not available to us often to relax, I would ask you to schedule it to work relaxation in some form for some period of time into your daily life.

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