Under sustained stress – which many of us have experienced in the last couple of years – it’s easy to tell ourselves we’re exhausted and conclude that we need more sleep. What we miss in this state is that there are many different ways of resting other than (trying to) sleep.
This article lists seven types of rest – physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social and spiritual. It provides some good prompts to think differently about how we spend recovery time.
It’s also a good prompt to think about how we help to manage energy in meetings, getting away from binaries of high or low, on or off, working or having a break. By changing the way we’re asking people to work, we’re giving them a kind of rest. And, of course, we can prompt different kinds of rest by the way we set up our breaks.
For example, if we sense people need a sensory rest from staring too long at a Zoom screen, we might get them to do an activity on their own – say with pen and paper, or involving walking around their space. They’re still doing work, but getting a change of stimulus. And when planning breaks themselves, it might be worth creating an activity that’s not just grabbing food and coffee, but that gets people moving in different ways.
And, of course, as facilitators it’s easy for us to get exhausted by the work – what sort of rest do we need more of?