what you may be missing on your wellness journey

Eating real, whole foods, moving the body, and taking the right supplements are important foundational tools for health and wellness. However, one of the most valuable pieces along your wellness journey will be rest. Rest, in mind and body, is essential to a sustainable lifestyle change.

Let’s explore my experience with rest and how I’ve made a change.

Rest is something I have genuinely struggled with in the past. And, it’s something that challenges me daily. While I have found a healthy balance, in both a mental and physical capacity, it is something I still check in on every single day. Why? Because it is so incredibly important.

Our culture praises and promotes the belief system that rest is for the weak. You can sleep when you’re dead. I, unfortunately, fell prey to this belief system and sacrificed quality sleep and rest in general as a result. We’ve romanticized this idea that rest is unnecessary and productivity has become a measure of one’s worth. What we don’t realize is the serious damage this paradigm can bring to brain and body.

Rest looks different for each of us, but regardless of what it looks like or how we integrate it into our lives, it is so needed. We are bombarded by stressors daily, both in a physical and emotional capacity, and we just don’t have enough bandwidth sometimes to manage it all. Stress comes in all shapes and sizes and it is important that we familiarize ourselves with the areas, circumstances, and factors that present it most often.

While some stress is out of our control, we reserve the ability to choose how to respond to it. Similarly, stress comes in the form of the foods we eat, the toxins we’re exposed to, the level of movement we choose to integrate, the quality of sleep we get — and more. These are the stressors that are not commonly recognized but still have a significant impact on our health and wellness. Understanding the impact of physical and psychological stress is critical on your wellness journey.

What is most alarming is the impact that chronic stress can have on our bodies and our minds — promoting the onset of chronic illness, premature aging, neurodegenerative disease, mental illness, and more.

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned: If I don’t allow myself to rest, my body will take it for me. The same goes for you.

Rest is not negotiable — it is essential to any wellness journey. Whether we want to recognize it or not, our body and our brain will set a harsh limit with us, come to an abrupt stop, if either our body or our brain has reached capacity.

According to State Change (one of my favorite books) by Dr. Robin Berzin:


“Feeling like general crap is so pervasive, in fact, that in 2018, the World Health Organization added “burnout” as a diagnosable medical condition. Today, more than 90% of US workers say they feel burned out, as if they can’t wake up and don’t have the will or way to try.”

This is huge. Burnout is real and it is impacting our quality of life both in the immediate term and in the long term. Put simply, we are doing way too much and resting way too little.

For example, I pushed myself too far on Saturday during my workout, and paid the price for the week to follow. With rest, stretching, heat, and icing my injury, I’m feeling much better, but it has also given me the opportunity to reflect on the role that rest plays in our health. Similarly, as it relates to my mental bandwidth, I find myself over-committing or overextending myself from time to time, maybe something you can relate to also, and my productivity ends up imploding on itself and I fail to make any real progress in the tasks I’ve set out to do. It is an ongoing work in progress — perpetually checking in, listening to my body, and responding based on that.

Mentally, it is restful to disconnect, to decompress, to slow down from time to time. Unfortunately, however, our society feels otherwise. We are immerse within hustle culture and toxic productivity — that even if you’re doing enough, you’re still not doing enough.

Physically, sleep longer, stretch more, skip a workout. Be patient with yourself, be flexible with the ebbs and flows of life. You can’t expect to perform the same every day, every week, every month — the sooner you can give yourself grace in this capacity, the greater distance you’ll go in your journey.

Both mental and physical rest influence our wellness, and both mental and physical rest need priority.

I encourage you to work towards finding a balance for yourself, in both physical and mental rest. The most productive thing we can do amidst our wellness journey is slow down.

Mental health is just as important as your physical health, and rest is important in both regards. 

This is your reminder to schedule REST for yourself daily. 

If you need support in establishing rest in your routine, in developing an effective self care strategy, or just want to learn more about rest, stress, or burnout on physical and mental health, schedule a free consult below.