Would you know you needed Mental Rest?
I was yawning before I’d even got out of Thirsk.
It was still early. I’d had a normal night’s sleep, got up at my normal time and had my normal scrambled egg for breakfast. Nothing was off. And there I was, driving my youngest to Stockton, twenty-five miles away, in the rain, in busy traffic, yawning like I’d been up all night.
We tried shoes on. We went into a few shops. That’s it. We didn’t do miles of walking or lift anything heavy or run round after anyone. And by the time we drove back I was really tired, and cranky, and everything felt like effort, and I hadn’t expected it at all.
So I sat on the sofa afterwards and tried to work out why.
It wasn’t food, because I’d eaten. It wasn’t water. It wasn’t my body, not in the way I usually mean when I say I’m tired. It felt more like my brain had just switched itself off at the wall. I didn’t want to make a decision, I didn’t want to talk, and I didn’t want to do anything that made me think.
Then I started counting back through the week.
I’d had three weeks off. Then I went back for three days, only eight till four, only two children, and I did think that would be gentle. But two children who are brother and sister and have just had three weeks of being off, and that shows. Jealousy. Rivalry. Tantrums and tears. Boundaries that had gone a bit soft over the holidays, instructions that weren’t being followed the way they normally are, food left on plates. All the usual bits you get after a long break, and every one of them needs a decision from me. Do I step in, do I leave it, what do I say, how do I say it.
On top of that, all the travelling. New places, different activities, then home again for something else.
Monday and Tuesday were my Gemini AI course. Wednesday was the first evening I didn’t have a great long list, and I still spent it on business admin. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t look like much from the outside and takes a lot of brain. Thursday was my last day and I was tired then. I’m still tired now.
None of those things on their own is a big deal. That’s the trouble. It’s the stack. Every one of them is a small load, and they’ve all been sitting on top of each other since about the first week of September, and Stockton in the rain was just the thing that made me notice.
I’ve been thinking about how often we say, “I’m tired, I need a rest,” and automatically assume that means we need more sleep or an afternoon with our feet up.
But there’s an interesting idea from Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith, who talks about seven different types of rest: physical, mental, emotional, sensory, creative, social and spiritual. The basic idea is that rest isn’t necessarily one-size-fits-all, because you can have had eight hours in bed and still feel completely drained if the thing that’s exhausted isn’t your body.
You might be physically rested but mentally overloaded because your brain has been making decisions all day. You might be mentally fine but socially exhausted because you’ve spent hours talking, responding and being “on”. You might be physically and mentally rested but creatively flat because you haven’t had any space for curiosity, inspiration or doing something simply because you enjoy it. Equally, sometimes what we really need isn’t sleep at all, but ten quiet minutes without anyone needing anything from us.
I’m not presenting the seven types as proven scientific fact, because the framework itself isn’t a clinical diagnosis or a definitive model of how rest works. I actually think it’s more useful if we treat it as a prompt for reflection rather than another thing we can somehow get “right”.
Instead of simply asking, “Do I need more rest?” perhaps we could ask, “What kind of tired am I?”
Because the answer might not always be “go to bed”.
Sometimes the most restorative thing we can do is change what we are asking of ourselves.
And the question I’d been missing was “what kind of tired is this?” Because mine wasn’t physical. Mine was mental rest.
So I didn’t push through it. I did a bit of cleaning, because that doesn’t need any thinking. I read a magazine. I drunk a cup of tea. I baked a cake. That’s it I’m not going to add anything that makes my brain work, not because I’m being lazy but because my brain has been making decisions non-stop for weeks and I have forgotten to take extra time to pause and shut down.
If you’ve gone back to work after the summer and you’re wondering why you feel flattened when you haven’t done much, look at the stack. Count it back. It’s probably not one big thing. It’s lots of small ones, and you’re allowed to rest from those.
Claire x
Link: Autumn Anniversary Issue, “Why Do I Flop When I Stop?”