You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, it's Mariel.

Sometimes I like to sit still, close my eyes, and just take a little rest.

I don't mean take a nap.

I mean, I do like to do that too.

What I'm seeking here, though, is not sleep, but a reset take a nap. I mean, I do like to do that too. What I'm seeking here, though,

is not sleep, but a reset, a moment of conscious pause. If I don't allow for these moments,

I hit a wall and every other part of my life starts to suffer. Dr. Sandra Dalton Smith remembers

when she hit her wall. There's this moment when her kids were young.

She'd just picked them up from daycare, set them on the couch to watch TV.

And she had this realization.

She had everything she'd been dreaming of, a life that she'd worked hard to build.

I had a successful practice.

I'd already written a couple of books, had children, husband,

house, you know, all the things. My life on the outside looked extraordinarily successful,

and it did not feel successful at all to be in the middle of. And so that particular day,

I just kind of laid on the floor looking up at the chandelier in my foyer, thinking, how did I get here?

Sandra is a doctor of internal medicine. And when this happened, she was splitting her time

between the office and the hospital and never taking time to recover. This lying on the floor

moment led her to write another book called Sacred Rest, Recovery your life, renew your energy, restore your sanity.

In the book, Sandra outlines seven different types of rest that we all need,

based on decades of experience seeing patients.

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