94. Doctor’s Orders: 7 Ways to Get the Rest You Need

Episode Transcript

Verbs: Welcome to another episode of Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the Internet, so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs, here with Courtney Baker, Blake Stratton, and a very special guest. Happy Monday to you guys.

Blake: Hello, and happy Monday. I’m excited for this episode.

Courtney: Yes. I am getting out my notebook. I’m getting ready to take some notes. For all of you listening, if you’re not driving… Don’t take notes while you’re driving.

Blake: Pull that car over. This is a pull-over. If you’re on the treadmill, just put it down to the slow walking pace, because you’ll want to have your head in the game for this one. We have an amazing guest. I was telling her when she jumped on she’s really upgrading our level of knowledge on a lot of stuff we’re passionate about when we talk about productivity.

So often, when people think Focus on This (and maybe you think this if you’re listening to our podcast for the first time), they think, “How am I going to get more done? What’s a tip to do more?” and all of those things. We oftentimes neglect something that is a huge driver of productivity and fulfillment, which is rest and rejuvenation. Our theme this month is, in fact, re-June-venation.

Courtney: I feel like as soon as you say that our guest here is going to be like, “You know what? I made a mistake.”

Verbs: “What did I sign up for?”

Blake: She’s like, “Can I unsubscribe from this interview? I don’t know…” People are unsubscribing left and right. But we are talking in the month of June about rejuvenation because it’s so important. So, Verbs, I’ll kick it to you. Tell the people the gold, our wonderful guest, who she is and what she’s bringing to the table today.

Verbs: Today, we’re talking with Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith. She’s the author of the book Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, which is the perfect topic for our month on rejuvenation, and we can’t wait to dive in. So, welcome, Dr. Saundra.

Saundra: Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

Verbs: Dr. Saundra, if you don’t mind, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and why you started developing an expertise on rest specifically?

Saundra: Yes. Well, I’m a board-certified internal medicine physician. I’ve been in practice now for over 20 years, and about 10 years into practice I burned out. That’s the simple answer of how I started looking into this. I needed to survive, and I wasn’t in what I was doing at the time. The strange thing was I consider myself a high achiever, so I’m always setting goals and always trying to accomplish things.

So, in the middle of my burnout, I became what I call a functional burnout. From the outside, everyone looking at my life was like, “Oh, isn’t that great? She’s on this, and she’s doing that, and she’s on Dr. Oz, and she’s just living the life.” I was living this life that looked so impressive from the outside but felt so horrible to live. Every day I was like, “Okay. I get to do this again. I don’t want to do it again.” I just had to find a way to survive.

I started off thinking, “I just need to get more sleep.” You know, internal medicine. I was sleeping maybe six hours a night on a good night. I had two toddlers at home. I was married. After I started getting eight to nine hours of sleep and was still waking up exhausted, that’s when I said to myself, “There is something more to this, and I’ve got to figure it out, because I can’t keep living like this.”

Courtney: That is awesome, and I already have written my first note: functional burnout. I love that term. It looks okay from the outside, but inside it’s really painful. I would love for you to talk about what happens when we don’t get enough rest. What causes that internal terrible feeling?

Saundra: Well, I think that’s the thing. It depends on where the rest deficit is. When we talk about not getting enough rest… It’s almost like when someone tells me, “I’m tired.” My first thought now is “What kind of tired are you?” because depending on where the fatigue is determines what’s suffering. If it’s social rest where you have the deficit, then your relationships are suffering. If it’s mental rest where you have the deficit, then your ability to actually do your job effectively is suffering. If it’s creative rest where you’re having the deficit, then your innovation is suffering.

So, you really have to first identify where it is you have a rest deficit. That’s oftentimes the disconnect. We say we’re tired, we’re fatigued, we’re burned out, but we haven’t been really intentional about identifying the area that needs an improvement. You can’t improve something if you don’t even know it’s broken yet.

Verbs: We’re only four minutes in, and that just blew my mind as far as where is the rest deficit and then the categories of life where those could exist. I’m just saying that now. I’m going to let Blake continue to talk while I write down a note on what you just said.

Courtney: Before Blake talks, can I just get you…? Again, I’m taking notes over here. You said, “Is it mental tiredness? Is it creative?” What were the other two you listed?

Saundra: There are seven types of rest altogether, so I’ll just mention all seven so I make sure I cover them. There’s physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative.

Blake: Your book is called Sacred Rest, and my first thought was this morning when my alarm went off and I was like, “No, no, no. This is too sacred. I must hit ‘snooze.’ This is too beautiful.” I’m curious. Where does that term come from? When we think sacred we think spiritual. You mentioned spiritual as a type of that. I’m interested to hear your perspective. Why use the phrase sacred rest?

Saundra: For me, I had made work sacred. Work was my only focus. If I was knocking them off my goal list, I was hitting it. I needed to understand that to work at my highest level of capacity I needed to put an importance on rest that I had not been giving it. For me, when something is sacred, you esteem it. You elevate it. You make room for it in your life. That’s what I needed to do for myself to get back on track. That’s where the subtitle comes from: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. I needed to put rest back up in its proper position in my life for those things to occur.

Courtney: This overlaps really well with what we teach with the Full Focus Planner. When we set goals, we’re talking about all of these different domains in your life and how to not just set goals for work. I think we’re really good at setting goals for work and not good at setting any others. For everybody listening, I think this next quarter might be a great time for a goal on rest. I mean, that sounds like something I want to do: a goal around rest. It’s almost like taking a deep breath, like, “Yeah. That feels good.”

Verbs: Even along with that, Courtney, in our segment of the Weekly Preview when we’re doing that self-care section… Dr. Saundra, in the planner there’s a self-care section, and it asks us every week what we want to do or what our goals are for rest or connecting with others. I believe this is going to help put language around what areas of rest we can seek and not just leave that area blank every week or just say, “Go to sleep by 10:00 p.m.” but really give us some more language to help us fill those out. I have a question. This may help those listening. How do you make the distinction between sleep and rest?

Saundra: Oh, absolutely there’s a distinction. I think that’s probably why so many of us feel like rest doesn’t work, because we’re thinking of just sleep. Sleep is a type of rest, but as I mentioned, there are seven different main areas I look at when I’m looking at rest or restoration in my life. Sleep really only falls under the physical type of rest, and even in physical rest we have two different types. We have the passive physical rest, which includes sleeping and napping. Then we have active physical rest, which includes anything that improves your circulation, your lymphatics, how your body feels, how your muscles feel.

That includes everything from leisure walks to yoga to stretching to massage therapy to using your foam roller. I mean, it includes so many different areas of your body. When you just say, “I’m going to rest on the weekend” or “I’m going to go for a rest” or whatever… If you’re not identifying something specific, rest just looks like the cessation of activity. That’s why people call resting on the weekend watching Netflix. “I’m just not going to do work” is what they’re saying, but that’s not restorative, necessarily.

Blake: I’m curious. Saundra, you self-identified as a high achiever, and I can relate to that. I would love to hear your own experience with your perspective shift around rest, because sometimes, if I’m honest, I view rest as something that’s a luxury or something that’s a reward for a job well done rather than, necessarily, like, “Oh, this is something I have to do that’s important to prioritize or that is actually helpful to me.”

For those who are like, “Okay. Here’s another lesson or a slap on the wrist to ‘Oh, I know I need to rest more…’” I’m curious. What changed in your life or changed in your perspective about rest as you were going on this journey of self-discovery, and what advice would you give to another self-identifying high achiever who’s going, “Okay. Let’s get to the good stuff. How am I going to accomplish more if I’m resting?”

Saundra: I love that question. Honestly, this was probably the hardest struggle for me, more so than medical school, more so than anything, because I don’t have an issue with work. My work ethic is on point. I can work, work, work without ever stopping, but the problem with that is… What I started to notice was if I can produce at the level I was producing in the middle of exhaustion, what would I be capable of if I actually felt well rested?

For someone who always wants to feel like I’m giving the best of myself and working at my highest level of capacity… It’s no different than an athlete. My husband just finished his first triathlon. He can run on completely exhausted legs after swimming and biking forever, but when he goes out for a run on fresh legs, his pace is faster, he gets more accomplished, he gets his times. I’m thinking, if I applied that same concept to my mental work and to my creative work, how much better can I be?

So, I started looking at it as not just that, just the productivity part of it, but “How much more joy will I have in the doing of it?” I had started working almost… I kind of use the analogy sometimes of a worker bee. The bee is always producing. They’re great producers, but they never actually stop to enjoy what they’ve produced. Other people are always consuming their goodness and telling them how great it is, but they have no idea.

That’s the life I felt like I was living. I was always producing, and people would tell me how great I am and how much I’m blessing their lives and how much my work is affecting them, and I would go home and fall out in the bed and wouldn’t have time for my husband, my kids, my dog, or anybody else. I thought, “Is this really benefitting me?” When I’m coaching other high producers or high achievers and they tell me, “I love doing the work, but I don’t love the work I do…” That’s a sad position.

We see so many people like this. You’re looking at their life and thinking, “Wow! They have such greatness in them.” But if you don’t become a consumer of some of your own greatness, then your life starts losing its meaning and you start feeling as if it doesn’t need you to be a part of it. I’ve had to start really being real with myself. I start my book off lying on the floor of my foyer after picking up my kids from day care and dropping them in front of the TV, my electronic nanny for the moment, to babysit them as I laid on the floor and contemplated “Do I want to keep living this life?”

Just to be completely honest with you, I don’t want to ever see anybody else get to that point. I wrote this book from a place of complete rawness. What happens when your life looks beautiful and you’re living in it and it feels like crap? How do you get out of that? How do you get back to that place where you actually love the work you do? What happens is you become such a high producer that what you’re producing after you come out of the burnout is amazing.

Blake: Wow.

Verbs: Can you say a little bit more about what you just mentioned as far as being a consumer of your own goodness? What does that look like?

Saundra: To me, what that is is I’m actually able to do the work, finish it, stop long enough to not just jump to the next goal (which is what I do; I’m a goal jumper), but to sit there in the moment and say, “Wow! Wasn’t that amazing?” to take a moment to reflect on it. That’s what rest allows me to do when I stop long enough to actually look back and reflect on what’s accomplished, to be able to dive deeper into it. Experiences like…

A lot of people have found me through that TEDx moment. I didn’t even know at the time that they were going to use my talk as the opening talk and frame the whole day around it. They didn’t tell me that, because they probably knew that would freak me out a little bit, to be honest with you, to know that.

But when I got to that moment and I found that out… After I got done, rather than being like, “Oh goodness. How did that go?” I was like, “Thank God for this moment. Thank God that I’m not looking at what’s going to happen next. I’m not looking at the next talk, the next interview. I’m just going to sit here and enjoy this moment. I’m not going to allow myself to overprocess it,” which is what I think a lot of high achievers do. We overprocess things to the point that they lose their joy. I had to start practicing being in the moment, shutting myself down from that “What’s the next on the list?” and be able to have some space between accomplishments.

Blake: I’m curious about some of these types of rest that may be off our typical rest radar. For me, it’s like, “I’m physically tired; I need to go take a nap” or “I’m mentally tired; let me meditate for 15 or 20 minutes and come back to that.” There were two on that list that stood out to me. Courtney and Verbs, maybe you have your own, but I’m sure they stood out to some of our listeners. One was spiritual, to be spiritually tired or to need spiritual rest. The other was sensory, which is something I don’t think I typically think about except…

The first thing that came to my mind was… Does anyone have kind of phantom…? Like, if they put their phone in the other room, they find themselves reaching in their pocket for their phone, and they’re like, “Wait. I haven’t been stimulated in 0.8 seconds. I need something.” What do you mean, I guess, by those two in particular, and what would be an example of getting sensory rest or spiritual rest? How do you know you are rest deficient in those two areas and what’s a practice you may incorporate to get rest?

Saundra: As far as how to quantify it, that’s actually where the whole restquiz.com came from. I think so many people have trouble quantifying “Do I need more rest in this area? Am I getting enough in this area?” When I’m looking at spiritual rest… Spiritual rest doesn’t have to do specifically with religion. That could be a part of it, but it’s really more about our relationships with others and with the world.

It’s focusing specifically on “How do I feel as if I belong, accepted, loved, appreciated, useful, giving back?” Some people get that in a faith-based situation. They’re seeing that within churches or synagogues where they feel like they are loved, they’re accepted, they belong. Other people experience that through groups or through associations they may be affiliated with. Different people relate to that in different ways depending on their own faith beliefs.

For myself, I have a specific faith belief, and I elaborate on that from that standpoint, but everyone needs to feel as if they’re giving back to the greater good, as if their life has meaning, purpose, and that they are accepted for who they are. That is at the core of what spiritual rest is. As far as how you get it, being with others, oftentimes, and feeling as if you are contributing to your relationship in that regard.

Now, as far as sensory rest, sensory rest has to do with downgrading some of the sensory input we experience throughout the day. I think most of us aren’t aware of how much sensory overload we experience, everything from the lights in the room you’re in to the background noises, whether there are phones ringing in the background or people talking or if you’re on back-to-back Zoom meetings and every little box has its own little individual sensory input you experience as you’re looking at different people.

We’re not really aware of how much sensory input we are experiencing and how that affects our behavior, our personality, and our attitude. Oftentimes, we are responding to sensory overload that we’re not even aware that we’ve experienced the sensory input. It’s kind of the same thing with road rage or you have people go off at the office, and they’re screaming at everybody, and no one knows why. Oftentimes, they have experienced sensory overload that they didn’t recognize.

We’re honestly no different than the 2-year-old at the birthday party, where they are perfectly happy, and two hours in… Nobody took their cake. Nobody said they had to share their toy. They’re just screaming their head off. Sensory overload. There are a lot of adults experiencing very similar effects in their professional lives, and they don’t understand why. Now, downgrading that could be as simple as turning off the radio on the way home and having a few moments to defuse with no background sounds or, as you mentioned, with our devices, turning down some of the notifications.

I find that a lot of people can greatly decrease their sensory overload just by limiting the notifications on their phones to just the phone and the text. You can keep all of the other apps on there, but rather than having the news send you a notification every time something happens or social media sending you a notification, you can choose when you want to go into those apps and select when you want to engage with them rather than having them impede upon your sensory rest whenever they decide to.

Blake: I feel like we’re each getting our own “wow” moments from Dr. Saundra in this episode. For me, as you’re saying that, I’m realizing… My wife and I talk about this a lot. We do have a 2-year-old, and we recognize, even from our own childhoods, moments where maybe our parents just didn’t understand why we were having a reaction, and as a result… As a kid, sometimes you learn “Oh, I’m bad for this” or “This is a personality trait…” Hot-tempered, strong-willed child, or something like that.

I wonder how often, maybe even myself, where I say, “Oh, this is just a personality trait.” If your lifestyle is sensory overload or needing spiritual rest… “Oh, he has a depressive-type personality” or “This person flies off the handle.” We can adopt something as a personality trait that really is just an ongoing symptom of a lack of rest. Do you ever see this?

Saundra: That’s a great point. It pulls into some other areas as well. There’s a term of HSP, or highly sensitive person, that some people identify with. They feel as if some things hit them a little differently than other people. Well, if you’re someone who identifies with being sensitive to sounds or smells or things like that, then sensory overload is something you may experience significantly quicker than someone else who isn’t as sensitive to those things. So, yes, absolutely. Your job, your personality, where you live, and the general makeup of your lifestyle… All of those play a role in how quickly you can become deficient in any of these types of rest as well as how you may need to adapt to be able to get rest in those areas.

Courtney: Verbs, Blake, have either of you ever gone to one of these sensory tanks?

Verbs: No.

Blake: No.

Courtney: I know Dr. Saundra probably has heard of these. I tried to go do this. It’s basically a pool, and it closes. It has a cover on it, and it has salt in it to the amount that you can float in the water. Basically, the idea is it takes all sensing (you can probably say this much better than me) to zero. You are in a very limited sensory experience. I hated it so much. There are a lot of people who love them, and it’s great, but I realized how much… It’s like my body is so starving for all of these inputs constantly.

Honestly, it was kind of sad. It was like my body can’t even relax and just sit in this pool. My mind started wondering, “Did I get left here? Has the place closed down?” I had no sense of time. It’s just interesting. I think maybe taking a practice of really engaging with that more… We on this podcast are huge fans of limiting notifications, but it’s just how do you continue to improve in that area? To Blake’s point, maybe even see something new in yourself that you wouldn’t have discovered because you do have these constant inputs. And, Verbs, Blake, if you want to go try those… What are they called?

Saundra: Sensory deprivation tanks.

Courtney: Thank you.

Blake: Oh, okay. I was like, “A sensory tank… Is this an experimental bar and club in New York, that you get in this tank and you have a drink?” I was just imagining.

Saundra: They usually do have some type of really interesting water cocktails, but they’re water. Oxygen-infused water normally. Yeah, honestly, I love sensory deprivation tanks. I did go to one, one particular location, as I was doing the research. We’re going to call it research while I was there. Honestly, my very first experience was similar to yours. This is the reason why: I also had a lot of sensory input in my day that I really wasn’t aware of.

What a sensory deprivation tank does is it actually makes you weightless. The amount of salt makes you weightless, it’s soundless, and it’s pitch black inside there when they close the pod. All of your senses go from a hundred to zero in a matter of seconds, and it’ll freak you out. It actually will produce anxiety. I probably had my very first panic attack inside of one, because my body was like, “What is this?”

Blake: It sounds great.

Saundra: I’m telling you, I don’t actually recommend them to people until they’ve started practicing some sensory rest first. If you’re someone who tends to have the radio playing all the time and your notifications are going off, then to take your body from all of that to complete zero… It’s traumatic, honestly. It’s not something that’s healthy.

So I recommend people work up to the sensory deprivation tanks. Then, after I started getting some sensory rest and doing them, it’s almost heavenly. Once you’ve trained your body that it’s okay to not have the input and then you get an experience where all of it’s gone, it’s really an amazing experience. But I never recommend people go straight to that from their high-stress lives.

Verbs: Right. I was going to ask Courtney for clarification when she said you get in the tank and they close the lid. I was like, “That’s like a crockpot, me sitting in a crockpot.” I don’t find that comforting. Anxiety might peak a little bit as well.

Blake: Someone who’s listening is like, “Oh my gosh. I could never do that because I’m so addicted to achievement, to doing stuff, to inputs, to all of these things.” Where does someone begin? Outside of go to take the…

Verbs: The crockpot.

Blake: The rest quiz. Go to restquiz.com. Go get the book. What are some practices, proactively, that you’ve found are a good starter kit, I guess, for these different kinds of rest that someone may want to adopt after listening to this episode?

Saundra: Well, particularly for people who classify themselves as either high achievers, entrepreneurs, or leaders in general, there are three areas I see they tend to require more rest in or they tend to become deficient in. The first is sensory, as we mentioned, the second is mental, and the third is creative.

I’ll start with creative, because I think, oftentimes, that’s the one they all skip. It’s the one I find tends to have one of the greatest deficits, because although they know they’re using creative energy to some degree, they don’t tend to recognize how much creative energy they’re using. Really, problem-solving, being innovative, thinking outside of the box, coming up with new ideas… All of those are creative-type processes.

So, creative rest deficits happen very quickly in those fields, and if you’re not intentional about getting more creative rest, then that’s an area that can become a deficit. When we talk about creative rest, we’re really looking at the rest we experience when we allow ourselves to be inspired, to appreciate beauty in whatever form that is. It could be natural beauty, like the mountains, the ocean, the beach, or it could be man-made beauty like art or theater or dance.

If you’re a leader or an entrepreneur or someone who doesn’t necessarily think of themselves as a creative, then you would think, “Well, is there any benefit for me to do this…?” Let’s say, going for a walk or going to the beach or going to a museum. “Is there any benefit in that?” They don’t realize that that part of you can get drained, just like every other part of you can be drained. We have to appreciate the need to pour back into the creative side of ourselves.

A lot of the big companies now are using this creative rest concept. You’ll see places like Google or WeWork, even, that’ll have these rooms that’ll have these great color themes or patterns in them. That’s the concept behind it. You can’t get creativity and innovative ideas out of gray-brown walls. You have to be able to inspire people. Just something as simple as if you know that being at the beach is inspirational to you and it makes you feel better, change the lock screen on your phone or on your computer so you get bursts of that creative inspiration in the middle of your day.

Or bringing in fresh flowers. If you like being outside taking your runs or your jogs, bring some potted plants into your surroundings so that you’re bringing in the creative rest elements into your workspace. This doesn’t mean go take a vacation every time you need to go to the beach. You can bring some of these creative rest elements inside of your work area.

Courtney: That’s awesome. I feel like all of the plant stores are going to need to restock after this episode. We’re all going to be… I’m like, “Yes. More plants.”

Blake: I was just thinking that. I was looking around. You know what, though? You’d be proud of me here, Saundra. I did this in the third or fourth week of quarantine time. I was so stressed out. I went and I bought a keyboard, an electric piano, because I was like, “I just need some kind of restorative, creative outlet.” I brought it into my office here. So that’s here. That counts. Right? Even though I’m doing something and I’m participating in music, is that a form of creative rest?

Saundra: As long as you’re not putting a demand on yourself, because that’s the thing. Work is demanding something from you. If you’re learning the piano… Like, sometimes someone will ask me, “If I go to one of those art painting or pottery classes with my friends with the glass of wine and we’re doing that one evening, is that work or is that rest?”

Well, most of the time, because you’re putting a demand on your creativity, it’s creative work, because you’re telling yourself you need to come up with something creative, but the time spent with those friends enjoying each other, and they’re not requiring anything personally from you, you could possibly be getting both emotional and social rest with your friends while doing creative work trying to paint something in the class. That’s the interesting thing about how these work together.

Oftentimes, I’ll have joggers who will say, “I feel restored after I get done jogging. How can that be? I’m sweating and my legs are exhausted.” Physically, it’s not rest. Physically, they’re using their body, but as I mentioned, mental rest is a huge one for a lot of people who are high achievers, high producers. In that process of jogging, the brain gets to a quiet space. Instead of thinking about all the things, it’s thinking about breath and cadence.

It has focused the attention down on something that’s so niche and specific for that activity the brain actually gets to a quiet space, and if you’re doing it outside and not on the treadmill, you may be bringing in some creative rest elements as well. So, you’re getting rest even while your body is working. But if you work at a desk all day, then your body isn’t what’s really needing the rest. It’s your mind that may be needing the rest. So, that’s why I think we have to disassociate a little bit and get really niche on what is being restored in the moment.

Courtney: Speaking for myself, but I think Verbs and Blake would agree, this has been so helpful. For me, personally, a lot of what you’ve talked about is giving me language around some of the things I’ve felt or intuitively know but just don’t know quite how to communicate it and to connect those dots of “Oh, that feeling is because you’re missing in this one area of rest you really need.” For everybody listening, I’d love for you to share a little bit about your assessment and how they can best take that if they’re feeling like, “Oh, okay. This is making a lot of sense for me. How do I find out how to determine which areas of rest I may be lacking in?”

Saundra: Absolutely. You have to begin by understanding… I sometimes get the question, “What if I feel like I need all seven?” Well, you can’t hit all of seven anything at the same time. You really have to focus in on one. That’s where restquiz.com comes in. It’s an assessment to let you see where you score in each of the seven types of rest. That way you can focus your attention and be really intentional about getting more rest or, as I like to say, doing more restorative activities in the place of your greatest deficit.

Rather than just trying to sleep, which is only going to hit the physical, passive part of rest, you can determine if maybe what you’re needing is mental or emotional or spiritual or creative. You can identify which of these seven you need most and then from there pick one or two ways you’re going to start implementing getting rest in that area. It can be something as simple as, if you’re needing more mental rest, maybe doing a brain dump at the end of the evening.

Rather than having one of those situations where you’re lying in the bed ruminating over all of these to-do lists, you jot it down, which is what a brain dump is, and that releases your brain to then go into deeper levels of sleep. Or maybe it’s something as simple as turning off the radio on the drive home from work to get more sensory rest or taking a moment in between meetings to go outside and do a walk around your building to get a little bit of creative rest or taking some time to sit down with your spouse and your kids at the dinner table with no cell phones and have conversations eye-to-eye to get more social rest.

Every type of these rests I’m talking about doesn’t require you to go on vacation. They don’t require you to carve out massive amounts of time during your day. They are simple strategies you can do in the middle of your busy life with all of your responsibilities to start integrating rest as a part of your lifestyle.

Courtney: I love that, and I love that the timing for when this episode is going to air is right before the next quarter. You all listening, if you are doing your Quarterly Preview, it’s a great time to look at… Maybe this is something you want to incorporate as part of your Daily Rituals or your Ideal Week or maybe it’s a habit goal. It’s like, “For the next month I’m going to take a drive once a day where I don’t have the radio on.” Whatever would work for you. I think this is so timely. Thank you so much for being here with us today. I think everybody listening has benefited greatly from it.

Verbs: The good news is you don’t have to experience constant exhaustion. When you intentionally create space for the seven types of rest, you can have the energy and the enthusiasm you need for the people and the work you love. Dr. Saundra, we’re going to let you have this final thought for our Focus on This listeners. Anything you’d like to leave them with today?

Saundra: Life should be enjoyable, and if you are a high producer and you’re producing out of your emptiness, I want you to envision what it looks like when you are actually producing from your place of fullness. It’s time to stop living burned out and start living a life that’s more passionate and on fire.

Verbs: Fantastic. Thank you, the listener, for listening to Focus on This. This is the most productive podcast on the Internet, so please share it with your friends. Remember to use #focusonthispodcast. We will be here next week with another great episode. Until then…

All: Stay focused!