I had Omicron last week. My symptoms were pretty light: snotty nose, congested, achy body and fatigued. It wasn’t too bad, thankfully. And, I am very fortunate to have had a warm, comfortable place to rest, recover and be out of contact with anyone.

Having Omicron got me thinking about rest.

Before Covid-19, if I had a cold there is no way I would have taken it off work. Indeed, in the past I have gone to work with flu and cold symptoms (not my finest decision making) and thought pretty much nothing of it. It’s what you do. And colds that probably should have lasted only a few days dragged on for WEEKS. I don’t get sick often, but whenever I got a cold, man did it last forever. And why was that?

One big glaring reason I’ve picked out: I didn’t rest.

What!? I know, with the amount of times I’ve spouted off to you how important rest is, you’d think I would follow my own advice.

And I DO! Well… I am. I’m trying. Resting is not the easiest thing for me.

But what last week made VERY obvious, was how important rest is in making a more timely recovery. Don’t get me wrong, I’m well aware that rest isn’t the end all. There are many things that add up to keeping us healthy. And yet, if we slowed down more, if we took more time out for ourselves, what would our lives be like? Would we be healthier? Happier? Honestly, I think so.

Imagine you are drinking a glass of water. At some point, that glass of water is going to empty and you will have to refill it. The liquid in the glass is not infinite.

Now take your imagination even further and imagine that YOU are that glass and our energy (the stuff that keeps us healthy, happy, joyful, creative, even adventurous) is the water. We can’t keep sipping from the glass without filling it up. We need to take time to top up—that time? You got it: Rest.

Sometimes all we need is to fill our energy glass up from a pitcher we have nearby, it doesn’t need to take long and it does the trick. Other times, we need to take a longer time out to walk to the tap to refill. These are the moments when we need to take more time for ourselves.

I use this metaphor because, from my own personal experience, it’s so easy to just keep going without pause. Keep pushing. But this constant pushing causes burnout, illness (physical and mental), and complete disconnect.

November 2020, the first time I caught COVID-19, I didn’t rest. I continued to work two jobs from home, take care of my husband who was much more ill than I, try not to freak out because we had very little knowledge still of what this virus was, and outwardly remain calm and collected so my family didn’t worry. Did I rest? No. Did I make it through? Yes. Was I damaged in the process? Yes. I herniated a disk in my spine so badly that it will affect me for the rest of my life.

I learned my lesson. This time I rested. And now a week later, I’m pretty much back to 100%. I’m still a little bit depleted, but honestly I can’t complain. (Also, let’s give some credit to the vaccines and having prior cell knowledge, too.)

Rest is important for our physical and our mental health. It’s not easy to rest, especially in the 24/7 always-on society that we live in. But, the better we are equipped at maintaining rest in our daily lives, the better we will be for it.

I was listening to a talk in a Mental Health & Yoga Summit over the weekend with Dr. Lauren Tober and Physio and Yoga therapist, Simon Borg-Olivier that was quite interesting. One comment that Simon made really put things into perspective. He said olympians tend to train 90% of the time at a pace that they can reasonably keep a conversation and only 10% of the time do they push themselves to extremes. But in every day, for our non-olympic pressed lives, we should really be truly exerting ourselves for 2-5% of the time, the other 95-98% of the time we should be able to keep ourselves at a pace that can be sustained. In general, after our exertion we should be able to feel happy and energized.

At the end of your day and if all you feel is tired, sore, grumpy and maybe even angry… perhaps you have surpassed your 2-5%. Perhaps it’s time to reel things in, to refill your energy glass, to rest.

If you’re looking for a community to connect with over this, I’d love to have you join us in the Tytoni Membership. Part of the membership is access to an ever growing on-demand library of Yoga Nidra recordings. Yoga Nidra is an amazing yogic practice to help the body and mind truly rest. Not to mention, you’ll also get access to all the Live small group sessions and the breath and movement on-demand videos.

>>Join the Tytoni Membership<<

What’s your experience with rest?

Do you feel you rest enough?

What do you notice when you don’t?

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