Sign up here for Woo Corner, and to get the lists of Pleasures and Restorative Practices: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WZQeNDDqtk0q95dQBZJzO7dW8My2TRVrIaScq6iW_4c/edit?usp=sharing
Article about the 7 different types of rest: https://mindfulhealthsolutions.com/embrace-these-7-types-of-rest/
I'm on a quest to understand the critical difference between passive pleasures like binge-watching your favorite series and active pleasures that require your energy and focus. This episode aims to give you some tools to help you steer clear of burnout. We dig deep into the difference between pleasure and restorative activities, sharing our collective experiences with a comprehensive list of over 200 pleasures and almost 50 unique restorative practices (crowd-sourced!).
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
Sign up here for monthly blasts and functional woo
Find me on Instagram
Support this podcast on Patreon
Sign up here for Woo Corner, and to get the lists of Pleasures and Restorative Practices: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WZQeNDDqtk0q95dQBZJzO7dW8My2TRVrIaScq6iW_4c/edit?usp=sharing
Article about the 7 different types of rest: https://mindfulhealthsolutions.com/embrace-these-7-types-of-rest/
I'm on a quest to understand the critical difference between passive pleasures like binge-watching your favorite series and active pleasures that require your energy and focus. This episode aims to give you some tools to help you steer clear of burnout. We dig deep into the difference between pleasure and restorative activities, sharing our collective experiences with a comprehensive list of over 200 pleasures and almost 50 unique restorative practices (crowd-sourced!).
Don't go back to sleep.
xoRachel
Sign up here for monthly blasts and functional woo
Find me on Instagram
Support this podcast on Patreon
Welcome to Audacity Works, a podcast inspired by and dedicated to the working artist, the creative, entrepreneur and generally doing the damn thing. This exists on the premise that the world belongs to those who have the audacity to believe that their lives have value. This is for you. Welcome to Audacity Works. I am your host, rachel Strickland, and this is episode number 53, in which we're going to talk about pleasure, restorative activities and the different kinds of rest. But first let me wish you all a very happy November, and we are now firmly within Scorpio season. It's all. Happy November everybody.
Speaker 1:I hope everybody's little holiday gigs Halloween gigs went well if you had them and if you wanted them. I had two and they were lovely, although the rig did fall on my hand. This sound that sounds worse than it actually was. It was a bundle of legs and, yes, the legs were steel. So, yes, it hurt and my hand is bruised, but it is not broken. It was just a freak accident, because those things happen and you can never move too slowly, I guess, when you are setting up or tearing down from a rig. But the performance went well. My hand is fine. The people that hired me were happy, cried a little bit always happy to make someone cry and I got to bring a giant poster of Bernie Bernie's my cat, if you're new here and I was performing for PetHelperscom, which is an animal adoption site, an organization, and it's a non-profit, and we were raising money and we did like a lot of it, so huzzah. So since Samhain that's Halloween for you non-witchy types it's come to a close and that is the third harvest in the Wheel of the Year and it's just before we start prepping for the long dark of winter and, hopefully, the rest and restoration that comes during that time.
Speaker 1:This episode is a request and it's a request from a couple of people, namely my friends Jen and Sean. Both wrote in separately asking about restorative practices and asking about different kinds of rest. This is something that I've been addressing on my email list, which I write to pretty frequently, and I love to ask questions and gather the answers, and we've been investigating pleasure together as something to be prioritized and that led to us creating together a big list of pleasures and everyone was invited to add to this list and there are over 200 items, 200 separate pleasures that people have helped compile onto this list, and it's wonderful to Peruse and that kind of got me thinking about active pleasure versus passive pleasure, particularly because I've been thinking about addiction quite a lot and that addictive activities. I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with that, unless they have harmful side effects. An example of an addictive activity with a harmful side effect is smoking. Everybody knows this. So why do people smoke? Because it's pleasurable and it's pleasure that you don't have to work for. It requires little to no participation on your part, as most passive pleasures do it. Just you sit back, you let the chemicals do their thing. Drinking wine is another good example. Netflix and chill is another good example. None of these things are inherently evil, depending on how you consume them, but they are all passive and they're like my favorite things to do Not smoking.
Speaker 1:I'm not a smoker, but you know I love a Netflix marathon and it's gotten kind of to the point I can stand back and watch myself. I'm like this is literally my go-to thing that I like to do, and I think I would like to have more active pleasures at my disposal. So now I have this huge list of pleasures and I'm going to republish this list on November 2nd, that's tomorrow, because this episode airs on a Wednesday, november 1st 2023. So tomorrow, november 2nd 2023, woo Corner is coming out for the month and I'm also going to republish both the big list of pleasures and the list of restorative practices, which I'll tell you about in a second. So if you want to get in on that, it's going out at 10 am Eastern Standard Time, so you have a little bit more than 24 hours from the moment this episode drops. The link is in the show notes. I would love you to have access to this. All you have to do is just sign up for the list. You can always unsubscribe directly after. I won't even notice, so no worries. So passive pleasures are really easy. Active pleasures are a little bit harder because they do require active participation from you. So having this big list has been really helpful. And Then I started thinking about restorative practices, which are Different.
Speaker 1:They're not the same as pleasure for pleasure's sake, even though they can be pleasurable. The differences a restorative practice Expands your capacity. They can be pleasurable, but pleasure isn't the only part. Sorry, it's. Pleasure isn't the only point. The point is restoration, refilling the well, recharging the batteries. And In my, in my VIP mentorships, which are one-on-one, people frequently arrive to those exchanges vastly depleted and in need of recharging and they're either burnt out already or very dangerously close to burnout, which really requires a lot to come back from, and An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when it comes to burnout and most things.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I would ask them to do is to make a list of restorative practices that they could do to refill their well, but this Didn't always have great effects, because when you need Restorative practice, you don't have the energy to think about activities that you find replenishing. So while they always did come up with a list of at least five things, and then that list was useful to them, when they Didn't have the energy to try to remember these things, they could just look at a list me like what did I say was replenishing? Oh yeah, that I'll go do that for a while. But they were already burnt out and you know the best time to learn how to swim is before you're drowning, and that Includes restorative practices and activities that refill your batteries. So, since 1077 brains are better than my one, I took this to my mailing list and I asked what are your favorite restorative practices? And we talked about the difference between those things and, loosely defined, we decided that a restorative practice Left you feeling better than you did before. In very vague terms, it expands your capacity, and I got a lot of great responses and I compiled them into another list I deleted.
Speaker 1:I deleted repeat entries and I've just put them all into a Google sheet, and that sheet is also public and I'm going to be sharing it tomorrow, november 2nd, along with a Woo Corner In my email blast that's going out tomorrow, and this list is Gold. It contains things that I never would have thought of and I feel Really happy to have access to it. I want you to have access to it too, just in case you know. It's just helpful to have a list of shit that's replenishing that you can just look at like a menu, because when you're depleted you don't have the energy to think of these things. So I'll share a couple of them with you.
Speaker 1:By far the most often repeated one that I got was walking outside. Absolutely no one said walking on a treadmill, because it isn't necessarily just the walking, it's being outside. I think I heard that choice at least ten times. Number two most often mentioned was any kind of physical activity, and this could range from playing a sport to gentle stretching to taking a class that's being led by someone else, so you don't have to be in charge of making the choices or just taking five minutes to move intentionally between tasks. So walking outside was number one. Number two physical activity of any kind. Number three journaling writing things down. Some people said morning pages, some people just said mental vomit on the page, but they all had one thing in common, which was sitting down and writing about stuff, just like just writing. How are you feeling? What are you thinking writing?
Speaker 1:Number four was a hot bath, and some people really like Epsom salts with these, some people like music, some people like candles. Also, saunas were a popular addition. So number four baths. I love a bath. I think it's a great reset as well. I have, I have renaught syndrome, which sounds scary but it's not really. It just means that the capillaries in my fingers and toes clamp down when they get cold, and when it's really cold they can turn this sort of like light minty green color. That's kind of alarming and to get rid of it you get the warm again, and warm water or hot water, if you're like me and want your skin to basically burn off is the best remedy for that. So in the winter, when it's harder to keep myself warm, even here in South Carolina, hot baths are the way to go. Such a reset and number five, most popular option for replenishing activities is reading fiction. Just reading for pleasure, not for education, not a self-help book, not the news oh god, save us. Just reading for pleasure. I'll read you a couple more of these, just because it gives me such joy to look at this list. Daydreaming very popular option as well, cuddling an animal going to look at the ocean.
Speaker 1:Manual labor, sleep. I was surprised how seldom sleep was mentioned and I hadn't even thought of it. Someone, like two people, wrote in and they were like sleep and they're like, oh right, the OG replenishing activity that I didn't even think of. In fact, ramit Sethi, one of my favorite internet thought leaders on personal finance and psychology. He says if all you have the energy to do is lay on the couch and watch Netflix, sleep, which is great advice and advice that I find absolutely impossible to follow.
Speaker 1:Sleep is not a talent of mine, waking up is so I've been learning to sleep. I've been learning very slowly over the past five years and cracking that code and learning how to sleep through the night is amazing. Like do other people know about this? I kind of feel like I invented it and that it's going to make me super rich. But obviously we need to sleep as well. If you're trying to learn new things and or build muscle, sleep is doubly important because most of the learning process happens while we're asleep and muscle recovery happens while we're asleep. So when we're not doing that, we're like why aren't I getting any stronger? Also, why am I having a hard time retaining this information? It's because we're not sleeping.
Speaker 1:Neuroplasticity requires rest, and rest is important enough for me to ramble about it for this whole. 20 minutes Pleasure and rest. And speaking of rest, that kind of leads me on to part two, and this is where my friend Sean wrote in. He reminded me actually, I used to coach Sean when I taught Ariel in San Francisco, and he says he still quotes to his students something that I told him rest as hard as you train. I want you and your comfiest sweats on a couch with a pint of ice cream and a Netflix show to be benching, and I've no doubt that I said that and I stand by it. But let's investigate further, shall we? Now? Sean shared with me a link to a pretty short article that's entitled the Seven Different Types of Rest Embrace the Seven Types of Rest and kind of divide rest up into different categories because we don't always need to be resting the same things and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was interesting, so I'm going to link that as well in the show notes and this article which is from mindfulhealthsolutionscom not familiar with the website, but I do enjoy this article.
Speaker 1:The seven types of rest they're talking about are physical, mental, emotional, sensory, creative, social and spiritual rest, and I think it's useful to sit down and sort of ask ourselves where is our energy the most finite, especially if you're tired and if you've been tired and you're tired all the time, which most of us are because we live in late stage capitalism. So what is the, what is the energy resource in which you are the least abundant? For me, the most finite energy is physical energy, because it's dictated by my body, by the meat suit, and in terms of physical rest, this article says stretch, take a nap, so sleep again, get a massage, take a break, go for a walk. Not all of these are just laying down being. Oh, my God. I'm leaving all of this in, by the way, because, humanity, you don't have to be lying perfectly still. You can still be moving and achieving physical rest, just not, you know, like lifting weights. So for me, this one is pretty easy to accomplish. I've made my peace with it. You know, when I was in my early 20s I was like no resting ever. Now I love it and I know how important it is and that nothing's going to be accomplished without it. So physical rest resting the meat suit For me.
Speaker 1:The second two energies that are most easily depleted are mental focus and emotional energy. I believe that particularly emotional energy and that's probably because of the nature of the work I do in coaching and mentorship does involve a lot of emotional labor and it's something that I'm very good at and that I really love doing. Also, I know that it's finite. The amount that I can do in a day is finite. So, mental rest, taking a break from mental stimulation, problem solving the article recommends things like turning off your phone, which I'm a big fan of. I haven't had notifications on in like four years. Basically, it's saying avoid screens, which is not bad advice.
Speaker 1:Emotional rest is taking a break from emotional demands, like emotional labor, I think the best way to rest your emotional energy is one of two ways. One, be by your damn self and be quiet, or talk about your feels. I think emotional energy is so easily depleted because it can be very outward and then we don't. We're not actually processing the things that we are dealing with in our own emotional states, and dealing with those emotions can be exhausting, but it's it's also better than just waiting for it to quietly die in the corner. It's not going to die, it's just going to be suppressed. So getting it out, you know, talk, talk aloud, talk to your dog, talk to a trusted friend, journal, sit quietly and talk to a emotional rest. I think this is probably a good place to point out that. Uh, like I, you know I mentioned that old axiom before an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you are living in outrageous circumstances that require constant emotional labor from you just to survive, you don't think any amount of restorative practice is going to be as effective as changing your circumstances. Much easier said than done. However, infinitely more effective than self-care practices I mean real self-care is changing your circumstances, and I know I'm speaking in extremes right now, but I just wanted to point out that sometimes it's not adding more practices. That's the best medicine for you. Sometimes it's giving something the axe, something to think about.
Speaker 1:Sensory rest is the next thing on the article and that's not something that I ever really think about, but you know, I'm used to it because we're all constantly stimulated all of the time and again they're recommending things like taking a break from screen time. My friend, sean, actually wrote in. Using float tanks is a may. Have never had an experience in a float tank, have you? But I either think that it would be horrifying or spectacular, and I'm not sure I'm ready to find out. But yeah, let me know. Have you ever been in a float tank? Kind of want to know what that's like, but not enough to actually try it myself yet. I'm going to skip number five and come back to it.
Speaker 1:The sixth kind of rest is social rest, taking a break from all of the people. You know there's so many peopleings, especially if you identify as an introvert. I do, and one of the suggestions is actually having a picnic by yourself. I love that. That's actually my favorite artist state activity is to pack a picnic lunch, take a walk and go and sit by myself and eat it and look at a tree Very pleasant, very restorative.
Speaker 1:The seventh type of rest is spiritual rest. This is the one that I have the least amount of experience in. They define it as spiritual rest means taking a break from the spiritual demands that we face every day. It can include activities like meditating, prayer, engaging in a spiritual practice, spending time in nature, etc. That definition spiritual rest means taking a break from the spiritual demands that we face every day. I got to say I don't feel that pressure, I don't feel spiritual exhaustion and I wonder if that means that I'm not engaging as much as I could be with that aspect of my humanity. But I'm also not super involved in that question.
Speaker 1:I think I have been spiritually exhausted before, particularly Like when I was 18 and 19 and in the throes of a deep spiritual awakening. And it's funny now that I'm thinking about it, I'm actually like remembering that time very fondly, even though it was utter chaos and very exhausting. But I was like, hmm, it was fun. Waking up is fun, so it's good food for thought for me. But I saved number five for last because, shockingly, I have more things to say about it's creative rest, taking a break from the constant creative demands that we face every day, and I wanted to talk about creative energy because I think it's different from any other kind of energy and any other kind of rest.
Speaker 1:What makes creative rest unique is that you can refill your well of creative energy by using creativity. There's no other energy that I know of that responds in this way For my, for myself and in my own lived experience. But if I'm creatively depleted in terms of, let's let's just say, aerial work If I've been choreographing an act, working on an act, it's got a deadline, but I'm tired and creatively I'm depleted I can refill that well by doing something creative in a completely different discipline, like cooking dinner Not a great example for everyone, because not everyone likes to cook, but I do. It's creative problem solving that does not require a lot of brain power or doodling or making some finger paints or singing a song that you've known for a long time. I just think that's amazing Like you can replenish the well of creative energy by using creative energy just in a different way than your primary discipline. Incredible, incredible. And it also just more firmly underscores my belief that we are hardwired to create. Birds make nests, beavers make dams, humans make meaning, and we make meaning by way of creating things.
Speaker 1:Looking at the time I'm going to wrap this up today, I wanted to say thank you to my friends, sean and Jen for writing in with such an excellent topic and sending me down the rabbit hole of investigating rest, restorative practice, pleasure and letting me report back to you. So if you want to see these lists the big list of pleasures and the big list of restorative practices, follow the link in the show notes. It's coming out tomorrow, november 2nd, at 10 am Eastern Standard Time. Thank you for sitting with me, for listening to me and for being here. Extra special. Thank you to my wonderful patrons for supporting this work and making this and so much more that I do possible in the world. Thank you for being here. Thank you for standing with me. If you have further requests, you can find me on Instagram, at Rachel Strickland Creative, or on Patreon at Rachel Strickland Creative. Happy Scorpio season. Don't go back to sleep, or maybe do, because maybe you need some sleep, okay?