Have you been wondering if you’re experiencing burnout? Feeling exhausted no matter how many hours of sleep you get at night? Finding that the ding of notifications and glow of screens grates on your nerves? Getting to the end of the day or week and feeling like your brain has melted to mush? All of these are signs that you may not be getting enough rest. 

When people think of rest, they usually think of sleep. Sleep is crucial for physical and mental health, and psychologists at Aviva Psychology Clinic even offer specialized insomnia treatment through our Insomnia Specialty Clinic. However, sleep is not the only type of rest, and without getting other forms of rest, we may experience exhaustion, burnout, or stress. We may also develop conditions like anxiety or depression. 

What is Rest?

One way of defining rest is any activity that allows us to restore our capacity to function. Because we have many different types of capacity, such as physical capacity and mental capacity, there are also many different types of rest. 

Historically, rest has been largely overlooked by medical and psychological sciences, which frequently consider rest and sleep to be synonymous. However, in other areas of scholarship and in some cultures, rest has been considered differently. 

For example, Black queer, feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde identified rest as a form of self-preservation and resistance to political oppression. Indigenous care practices have approached rest as a relational practice that supports the wellbeing of communities and the environment. Saundra Dalton-Smith, M.D. wrote in her book Sacred Rest about seven forms of rest useful in addressing chronic feelings of exhaustion, stress, and burnout. 

Types of Rest 

In a 2021 TED Talk, Dr. Dalton-Smith explains that by considering only sleep as rest, American society experiences “a culture of high-achieving, high-producing, chronically tired, burned-out individuals.” She goes on to identify seven types of rest that can help Americans prevent fatigue and burnout:

1. Physical Rest: This type of rest replenishes our physical capacity by resting our body. While sleep is part of physical rest, it can also involve activities like message, stretching, yoga, Tai Chi, progressive muscle relaxation, or simply sitting or laying in a peaceful place, like in a peaceful natural setting or in a comfy chair.
   
   
2. Mental Rest: Mental rest involves restoring your cognitive resources, like your ability to plan, think, and analyze. Mental rest comes from taking breaks from mental work. This can look like stopping tasks entirely, but it can also take the form of switching tasks to give your brain a rest from a prolonged, complex activity. For example, after working on paperwork for a period of time, you could switch to another task like cleaning to allow your mind to rest before returning to the paperwork. Other examples of mental rest include mindfulness, meditation, and journaling.
   
   
3. Emotional Rest: Emotional labor is work, too, and we will experience fatigue if we do not take emotional breaks. These breaks can take many forms, such as expressing emotions via journaling or talking to a therapist. Emotional rest often looks like setting limitations to the emotional intensity we experience, which might mean reducing our consumption of high-intensity media or being thoughtful about how much time we spend with people that we experience as emotionally draining.
   
   
4. Social Rest: While humans are social creatures by nature, we also need social rest. Finding a balance between engaging with others and taking time for ourselves can be tricky, and our needs might vary over time. When we realize we need more social rest, it might involve scheduling fewer social activities, but it also might involve scheduling time with people who we feel connected to and supported by.
   
   
5. Sensory Rest: Modern society is loud, bright, and often overwhelming to our senses. Allowing time for our senses to rest is essential for our physical well-being, such as looking away from screens to rest our eyes if we work at a computer. Sensory rest can also look like using blackout curtains at night, muting notification sounds on devices like cellphones, or taking entire “tech breaks” over a weekend.
   
   
6. Creative Rest: You might think creative rest is only needed by artists, but creativity includes any kind of planning, problem-solving, or imagining. Those are tasks that most of us do everyday, and those tasks can fatigue us over time. Creative rest can involve slowing down our creative efforts, such as spending time in nature or practicing mindful awareness of sensations or feelings. It can also look like pursuing inspiration and low-stakes creative hobbies.
   
   
7. Spiritual Rest: Spiritual rest isn’t only for those who are religious. Instead, spiritual rest involves connecting with anything we value or find meaningful, even if it’s not a higher power or organized religion. For some people, this might involve prayer or spiritual practices, but for others, it could involve connecting to a cause they care about, such as via volunteering, mutual aid, or donation. 

How Therapy Supports Healthy Rest 

Knowing the seven types of rest is an important first step, but for most people, simply knowing them isn’t enough to begin regularly practicing them.

This is because change is always hard for humans! Changing our behavior is always challenging, even when we really want to make the change. Many people want to change their health habits but still have trouble following through with diet and exercise. Many people want to improve their mood but still haven't reengaged in hobbies to to do so. Many people want to improve their relationships but still haven’t managed to schedule a couple's therapy appointment. 

It’s hard to get started enacting change, and it's especially difficult for people to make lasting changes to our habits. After all, learning new habits takes time and is often uncomfortable at first, as when we begin forming a new habit, we are uncertain, unpracticed, and outside of our familiar comfort zone. If you’ve ever started a new routine but failed to stick with it or taken up a new hobby but didn’t keep practicing, you’ve felt this first hand. 

There’s good news: You don’t have to go it alone! 

Psychology is the science of behavior, and therapy is the work of enacting behavior change. By engaging in therapy, you’re enlisting the help of a trained expert who can help you clarify your goals, understand the personal values that drive them, adjust beliefs that interfere with your progress, and learn new and sustainable ways of behaving. Over time, these changes help create the life you want. 

For people who want to improve their habits of rest to reduce burnout, therapy can also be a place of rest. After all, a therapy appointment can offer minimal distractions, guided relaxation exercises, training in skills like mindfulness, and more. 

Getting Started in Therapy

At Aviva Psychology Services, your psychologist can help you explore what types of rest may be missing from your life and help you build perspectives and routines that support consistent, restorative forms of rest and self-care.

Psychologists at Aviva are trained to help you develop a customized treatment plan that allows you to explore the causes of your burnout, challenge the beliefs or habits that might maintain it, and build a restful, fulfilling life. All therapy at Aviva is evidence-based, trauma-informed, and tailored to each unique client’s needs, preferences, goals, abilities, and readiness. 

You can get connected with a psychologist who has expertise and experience in working with clients who are experiencing stress, fatigue, and burnout by filling out the Request an Appointment form.

Selected References & Suggested Reading

Cain, J., & Thornby, K. A. (2026). Rest as strategy: The importance of psychological detachment from work for sustained career productivity. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 102025.

Dalton-Smith, S. (2017). Sacred rest: Recover your life, renew your energy, restore your sanity. FaithWords.

Dalton-Smith, S. (2021). The 7 types of rest that every person needs. In ideas.ted.com. https://ideas.ted.com/the-7-types-of-rest-that-every-person-needs/

Dudgeon P, Carlin E, Bray A. Rethinking self-care through an Indigenous lens-the importance of community. BMJ. 2023 Nov 13;383:2494. doi: 10.1136/bmj.p2494. PMID: 37957001; PMCID: PMC10641685.