The 7 types of rest—and how to incorporate them into your business as a neurodivergent, disabled, or chronically ill online service provider.
Rest doesn't just come from sleep or having a chill day on the sofa watching your favourite show. There are actually 7 different types of rest we need in order to actually feel, well, rested!
The 7 types of rest:
1. Physical
This includes both passive physical rest (like sleeping or taking a nap) and active physical rest (like stretching, changing your position frequently when working at your desk, or going for a walk). Both are equally important!
2. Mental
Mental rest is all about letting your brain chill from time to time — ya know, so it’s not constantly moving at 100 miles a minute, processing different inputs, ideas, and trying to keep up with life under late-stage capitalism 🫠
3. Emotional
Emotional rest is about allowing yourself to feel your feelings, authentically and regularly (rather than letting them build up). A big component of this is making sure your schedule isn’t so packed that you are constantly telling yourself “I don’t have time to feel this emotion right now”.
4. Sensory
Running a business can come with a lot of sensory overload — notifications for emails and socials, jumping onto multiple calls a day, and scrolling through Instagram and Threads can leave us feeling sensorily overstimulated, especially if we're not getting sensory rest to reset our nervous systems and bring balance into our days.
5. Creative
As human beings, we are naturally creative creatures — but capitalism has taught us that all acts of creativity need to be good, have monetary value, and be productive in order to be worth spending time on. That’s not true! Create for the sake of creating, and don’t worry about the end product.
6. Social
Social rest is about getting the right amount of social time with the right people, but also having the chance to be alone and switch off from socialisation so you can recharge! Having time and space to be our authentic selves and not mask or put on a persona is way more restful than you may realise.
7. Spiritual
When we talk about 'spirituality' here, it doesn't have to mean a religious type of spirituality if that's not your vibe.
Spiritual rest is especially personal and unique to each of us, so let these prompts offer as a general guide as you figure out what this rest type looks like for you — but the main focus of your spiritual rest should be grounded in connecting with yourself and the world around you, be it through meditation, nature, community, tarot, astrology… whatever suits you best!
As neurodivergent, disabled, and chronically ill people working as freelance online service providers, rest is vital in the long-term sustainability of our businesses.
We're often working while managing low, fluctuating, and/or unpredictable energy levels—not to mention all the extra time and energy that goes into managing disabilities and chronic illnesses!
As a neurodivergent/disabled holistic systems strategist, a key part of my work is helping my clients map out the ways they can rest best across the 7 rest categories, because this helps us to understand the kind of life we're designing their client and project management systems to support.
→ If you realise that your daily morning yoga session is key to being consistently physically well-rested, this helps us create boundaries in your systems that ensure you're never forced to give up this time in your schedule for client calls.
→ If you know you have a hard time saying 'no' to out-of-scope client requests, we can plan out scripts for difficult conversations, so you have the tools to maintain an emotionally restful headspace in your working hours.
→ If you reflect and notice that you need space for passion projects in your schedule instead of back-to-back client work, we can work on processes and systems that map out your availability for client projects and ensure you've always got some capacity reserved for you.
Building new rest habits to support your health, wellbeing, and business:
Long-term habits are built slowly and sustainably, bit by bit, so when you introduce new rest rituals into your routine, it's important to start with manageable changes that you can keep up with, and that you've got the right tools to support you in practising them.
Start by sketching out a couple of ideas for each type of rest—try to think of examples of how you can incorporate rest practices into both your personal life and business schedule.
Choose one rest activity to focus on first. You might want to choose one that feels the highest impact, or one that feels easiest to bring into your routine right now—whatever you feel like you've got capacity for.
Consider what you need to turn this idea into a habit. Do you need to start or stop something to make it possible? Are there physical items you need, like a notebook for journaling, or a yoga mat? Are there non-physical things you need, like protected time in your schedule? What are the first 3 steps I need to take towards building this habit?
Once you've got your resources from step 3, set aside some time for you to reflect and review how your habit-building is going. You might want to plan a shorter weekly check-in with yourself to see how things are going, plus a longer check-in after a month to review what worked well for you, and where things need adapting going forward.
After a month of practising your new rest activity, you can choose to keep working on building that new habit if you feel it needs more time to embed in your routine, or you might feel ready to incorporate a new rest practice into your routine!
Need support figuring out how to create more restful, supportive systems and processes in your business?
The Rebalancing Review is my holistic systems audit and support sprint for neurodivergent, disabled, and chronically ill online service providers, where we work together to design processes that support your wellbeing and long-term success in your business—and my Rest Envisioning Workbook is a key resource included in your 2 weeks of support.
