You Don’t Need More Sleep
“Being a mother is learning about strengths you didn’t know you had.”
– Linda Wooten
I want to start with something a lot of people feel but not many say out loud.
You are getting enough sleep. Or close enough. You are going to bed at a reasonable hour, waking up at a reasonable hour, doing the things you are supposed to do. And you are still exhausted. Not tired in the way a good weekend away would fix. Tired in a way that seems to sit underneath everything, that rest does not seem to touch, that you have quietly started to wonder might just be who you are now.
It is not who you are now. There is something else going on.
I came across the work that explains it through Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, a physician who wrote a book called Sacred Rest after spending twenty-five years watching patients arrive at her clinic depleted in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. They were not sick. Nothing showed up in the tests. They simply looked, as she describes it, like people running on empty in a way that sleep was not filling.
What she found is something I think more people need to hear.
Rest is not one thing. Sleep is one kind of rest and there are six others.
Most of us have never been taught to recognize them, let alone to give them what they actually need.
When I first read through her seven types, I had that specific feeling of something clicking into place. The kind where you think: so that is what that has been. I suspect you will have at least one moment like that reading this too.
🧘 Physical Rest - Not just sleep. The rest that comes from actually caring for your body: the stretch, the walk, the moment you stop bracing and finally let go.
🧠 Mental Rest -The pause the mind never gets. The quiet between the decisions. The moment, however brief, when the list is not running and the brain is simply allowed to stop.
💛 Emotional Rest - Not venting. Not catching up. Being genuinely honest about how you feel with someone safe enough to receive it. The relief of not performing fine.
🌿 Spiritual Rest -The need to feel that what you are doing means something. That you belong to something larger than the next task. That your presence in the world is not accidental.
🤫 Sensory Rest - Silence. Stillness. The absence of input, even briefly. The reset that comes from giving your nervous system permission to stop filtering everything.
🫂 Social Rest- Not time away from people. Time with the right ones. The people in whose presence you feel restored rather than further depleted.
🎨 Creative Rest - Not making something. Receiving something. Letting beauty do something to you that you did not have to earn.
Here is what I want you to sit with.
Most of us have been trying to fix all seven of those with sleep. Which is a little like being hungry, thirsty, cold, and lonely, and only eating. The food is good. The food is necessary. But it cannot do the work of all the other things.
Dr Dalton-Smith asks a simple question worth asking yourself tonight: in the last twenty-four hours,where did you spend energy? And did anything you did put any of it back? Not all of it. Not perfectly. Just: was there anything that actually restored something, rather than simply filled the time?
If the answer is mostly no, you now have seven places to look.
You do not need to address all seven at once. You do not need a program or a plan. You just need to notice which one is most depleted and find one small, real thing that speaks to it. That is enough to begin. And beginning is the whole point. 💕🫶
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