The Role Of Rest In Mindset

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yes, so I spent 20 years in clinical practice with an internal medicine and loved it. But I also realized that the medical profession and medical education kind of lends itself to the, to those who are in the practice, to burning out. It’s actually built around a culture of that and at some point about 10 years in that’s what happened to me, I burned out and it was during that time that I really start seeing that there were very little information about Burnout recovery and stress management other than to say you need to go on vacation. You need to take breaks, you need to get more sleep. Well, what happens when you do all of those things and they don’t seem to work? And so that’s where I found myself. I was a mom with two toddlers at the time, working 40, 50 hours a week minimum this week and had to find a way to recover my own life. 

And so that led me into the research that I started to do. I started to look at that specifically. How do I determine what aspects of my soft, our fatigue, what got me into this place in the first, you know, in the first place, how did I get to this stage? What are the underlying root causes? That led me to working like that and getting really, you know, out of a proper alignment with work life integration and understanding that work life balance isn’t exactly something I wanted. I didn’t want my family on one side and my work on the other and teeter totter, which one was going to get, you know, the high point of the week, I wanted them to be integrated. I wanted there to be a harmony and flow between the two so that boats that could succeed and both could be in a thriving place. 

Jana Danielson

See? And I think you’re hitting on such important points and, you know, you can probably see me nodding because it feels like you’re speaking directly to me for whatever reason. I feel like there was a time in my life and I’m the mom of three boys . Where I would wear my 50 and 60 hour weeks, like a badge of honor, right? And people would say to me, you know, how do you do it all? Like, you’re swinging a hockey bag on your back and you’re answering emails And it gave me almost like this really sick boost of, I don’t know what it was that I was like, yes, I how do I do it? Like not many people can do what I do and so high. How do we, how do you think? How do you think we get there?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

I think we start wrapping are worth up in our work. And that is like, if I’m working more and I’m producing more and I’m checking more of that to do less than than my worth is more is like, I’m more, I’m more valuable of a person because I can accomplish all of this without taking into account what we’re losing in the process, without taking into account. You know, how we’re feeling, Not just what we’re loo using within ourselves, our own personality at times, but what we’re losing with our physical help, what we’re losing with our relationships, what we’re losing with just understanding our own needs and desires and wants. And so I know for myself that was a huge part of it, I had to break away from this feeling that productivity was the end, all be all of my happiness.

Jana Danielson

So we’re here talking about mindset today and I’ve heard you mention rest, you know, in your kind of your opening monologue. So I know that you have defined seven types of rest. Let’s start to educate our audience with that piece. Can you take us through that?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yes. So in my book, sacred rest. I talk about these seven different types of rest and the seven types include the physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social sensory and creative and really the precepts around that is, you know, as a physician, if someone came to my emergency room and said, you know, hey doc I heard, okay, that’s good information, you know, but it’s not helpful information because how do I even know where to look? Where do I order a test to begin? How do I know how to even begin the process of diagnosing and treating you? But too often most of us, when we say we’re tired, it’s the same thing, I’m tired. Well, what’s tired? 

Where is the exhaustion? How do you even know where to look or where to begin? The process of healing. If you haven’t defined well enough what the actual area of issue is. And so for me that’s what these seven types of rest were in my own journey. Honestly, it started off very organic. It started off as I needed a physician heal thyself movement, I needed to figure out how to survive my life. And as I was walking through that researching, pulling data, looking at what was, what was being talked about and what wasn’t being talked about because some of these were things no one was mentioning like the creative rest aspect of it and then taking that back to my patients and actually having a chance to do just some, some true grassroots research with real people in all different walks of life to see what were the areas that cross over and then going from there.

Jana Danielson

And so would you say that as a physician you have pull hold? Well I know the answer is going to be very obvious to this question, but mindset is I would imagine that you believe that it’s critical in the health of our body, correct? So of those seven types of rest that you’ve just identified, Are there ones because I can imagine some people being like, you know, frantically writing the seven, you know, the seven down, are there some that can plug into, you know, giving that mindset a boost or a reset or a little bit of the do over that, if someone was like, which one do I start with, where do I start with those seven? What would you say?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Well this is the thing, The area of your greatest rest deficit typically has to do with the area where you’re using the most energy. So I usually have people first start thinking about what types of energy are you using throughout your day. Are you someone who’s always mental, mentally processing and kind of having to calculate things which is mental rest or mental rest deficit? Would you be more prone to experience, you know? Or are you someone who is dealing with people in their emotions and having to process through your emotions dealing with them? Which would set you up for an emotional rest deficit? You know? Or are you someone who’s having to be creative and think outside of the box and be innovative and solve problems which would then set you up to be more likely to have a creative rest deficit. So depending on the type of engagements and roles that you have within your career can lend themselves to specific rest deficits. But as it relates to mindset, what I’m finding is there are a couple that are specifically kind of push us towards certain behaviors and certain attitudes and moods that sometimes we’re not even aware of. 

For example, sensory rest. Sensory rest deficits are were through the roof with our rest quiz when we look at through the pandemic prior to the pandemic mental rest was always the number one. When the people submitted their assessments on average during the pandemic and sent sensory rest has consistently been higher. And what we noticed specifically when people experience sensory rest deficits, they have symptoms of sensory overload syndrome. So they have that irritation agitation, sometimes even rage and anger that come from too much sensory input. But the problem is most of us don’t even evaluate our sensory input. We don’t take into account the sounds of our office space. We don’t think about what are the lights, the sounds, the sensory involvement that I’m experiencing in my home. You know, something as simple as working from home and having your kids play the tv all day in the background can lead to sensory overload where you may only be responding with why am I so agitated at the end of the day and you think that you’re zoning out those sounds? But even the process of zoning it out requires your body to process it. To be able to make you think that you’re not experiencing it. You may not consciously be experiencing it, but subconsciously your body is still processing all of that sensory input and we need to be aware of that and how it’s affecting us.

Jana Danielson

So what would you say? And you know, what I found so fascinating is when you were talking about the seven types of rest. For some reason my brain equated rest with sleep. And then as I heard you, you know, just in the last couple of minutes I’m like wait a minute. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it could. But what about restful moments during the day? Is that what you’re kind of alluding to is can we find moments to be restful during the day, our waking hours so that we’re not as irritable when our kids have had, you know, their iPads are on and the TVs are on and you know, someone else’s is on their phone. Can you differentiate between that between rest and sleep and then maybe let’s flow this conversation into what are some of the things we can be doing mindfully during the day that can ensure that this deficit that you’re talking about can be decreased.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yeah, you absolutely nailed it. Rest and sleep are not the same thing and that is the problem. Most of us have been treating it as if they are and we put all of our eggs into the sleep basket and that I will feel refreshed and restored and rejuvenated when I get more sleep. Well, the problem is sleep is only one of the seven types of rest. It’s only in the physical rest bucket and physical rest actually has two different components. You have the passive which is sleeping and napping. Then you have the active component of physical rest which include those things that improve, improve your circulation and your lymphatic and your muscle flexibility and all of those things like yoga and stretching and foam rollers and leisure walks. All of that is in their physical when you put all of your rest theology into sleep, you’ve in essence omitted all of the other types of rest that I discussed. 

And so is it any wonder people go to sleep at night and they lay in the bed for 78 hours and they wake up and they say, okay, is it another Monday? How many Mondays must I have this week? Because they are still experiencing rest deficits in one of the other areas where honestly some people maybe have never thought about specifically identifying the type of rest deficit that may be affecting their lives. And some of the mindset shift that has to occur that there is this mindset shift that rest is not simply about cessation activities. Rest are those restorative practices that pour back into the places of depletion, that pour back into the places where we expend energy throughout the day. It’s really radical self awareness of the places where you are using energy so that you’re intentional about restoring that same energy to be ready to do whatever you have to do the next.

Jana Danielson

Okay, so let me, so first of all, I wish I had like some sort of a sound machine like you know, mind blowing or like drop the mic because you know, thank you for bringing so much clarity to that that we do put I think we put all of our eggs in the sleep basket and that I think what it did for me just now is it helped me to detach from that feeling of I need more restful sleep so that I can be productive the next day. But what I actually feel like I’m probably, I’m gonna ask you this is gonna become like a personal counseling session for me is that let’s use creative rest as an example. What would someone do during the day to improve that part of their rest formula? Give us an example.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yeah. So creative rest. Let me explain it a little bit because I think most of us have experienced creative rest and we had no idea what we were experiencing. We probably thought it was just all in our head. So if you’re someone who’s ever been at the beach or at the lake and you’re like, I just feel better when I’m in setting. It just makes me feel energized and rejuvenated and I feel motivated and you know, I don’t understand why I feel this way. Well that’s what creative rest is, is the rest we experience when we allow ourselves to appreciate beauty in whatever form and allow it to awaken creativity and inspiration inside of us. So rather that beauty is natural beauty, like the ocean or the mountains or the trees or if it’s man made beauty like artwork or music or theater or dance. We have, I understand that it has a place and a value on the restoration of our own inspiration and creativity. And so some of the studies that were done specifically one that I quote in the book, Sacred rest is about a study where, for those people who said that they experienced creative rest around bodies of water. 

They looked at the MRI’s of their brain after they had looked at the actual ocean, they looked at it after they had looked at pictures of the ocean and then they looked at it after they looked at CAA colors that resemble the ocean, the aqua marines, the till, the blues, all of that, that the activity in the brain for all three were the same. Regardless of if they looked at the actual ocean, a picture or color of the ocean when they saw grass, it did nothing for people who said that forestry was what made them feel this, it did nothing. So it’s one of those things where I feel like it gives us a lot of freedom to be able to remove that mindset that I can only feel this when I go on vacation because if you’re using vacation as your burnout prevention strategy, you’re gonna burn out because you can’t take that many vacations because life is going to continue to drain you every day that you go in. However you can incorporate creative rest elements within the middle of your busy day, Something as simple as changing the locks on your lock screen on your laptop so that there are pictures of something that’s inspirational putting artwork on your wall, of something that inspires you. 

I’m inspired by flowers. So I surround myself with by myself fresh flowers. I don’t wait for my husband to do it. For me. It is part of how I keep myself in a healthy place. I like to make sure that pictures are on the wall. If you’re someone who enjoys the ocean, why not have a nautical theme maybe in your are? There’s so many ways of bringing this these elements in, but and it doesn’t require you to even have to always be thinking about them. Some of these are things you can set them and forget them. So if you’re changing the lock screens on your phone or on your computer, your wallpaper or even changing your colors of your room, all of those things can add to your creative strategy and creative rest is needed for every person. I mean, it does, this is not just something for creative, if you’re a problem solver, if your mom having to figure out how to balance the bills, you’re using creative energy. Creative energy is consistently used in many professions. Practitioners of every sort use creative energy to make a diagnosis, you take different elements, put them all together, like in a like you’re making a cake and you spit out what the diagnosis is so much creative energy is used throughout the day. And most of us have no system in place for restoring that part of ourselves.

Jana Danielson

So, for the parents who are watching this interview right now, how do we do the same rules apply for our Children?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Absolutely. And I love this question because I feel like we have an ability to stop the toxicity that has taken over our culture with this mindset, as you just mentioned that both of us have suffered from at some point where it feels like you just have to work till you drop. I feel like we can start injecting a really a new legacy of what it looks like to live a healthy life with our kids, where they understand that there is an important to both the work. We’re not saying work is an important work is important, but there has to be times of restoration as well. And there has to be opportunities for you to restore yourself. So you don’t get to that place of depletion and burnout and depression and all those things that come when we allow too much stress and pressure on our lives.

Jana Danielson

And so how do you think that these forms of rest or are there ones that would be closer to the top of the list when we start to feel ill when our body starts to not live with ease but dis ease and we get maybe like the chronic headaches or you know, the back pain or those things that we would naturally maybe just go for some over the counter medication to deal with the symptom what forms of rest, I mean, can you draw a direct line between the deficit and one of those are two of those seven forms of rest and those, what I would say those seemingly day to day pain in the butt kind of things that we just deal with with those over the counter meds.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yeah. So many of the things you mentioned, like the body aches and pains and some of those things, I tend to relate more to a physical rest deficit because what I find is often times specifically with the physical rest deficit. As I mentioned, it’s not just about sleep. So it’s talking about those things that improve your your muscles and your body and your spine and all of these things work and I find that often, but the work that I’m currently doing with my company restores this, We go into the workplace within corporations and organizations and help them restore the health and well being of their, their teams and their leaders. And one of the things we’re finding is that that is a huge complaint is this chronic just aches and pains and like swelling and varicose veins and all of these things. And typically it has to do with some of the body organ ah mix of even just some of their workstations, chairs that are putting pressure on on the back of the leg where something as simple as having a little footstool underneath the chair on the desk where they elevate the feet just slightly, so you’re not having the pressure and you’re not getting the leg swelling in the varicose veins, adjusting the height of monitors. 

So people cervical spine is in the proper and anatomical position and not curved downward because their screens are too low, making sure that people are mindful and aware of when they feel tension. We get in the habit because you know, a lot of us do activities for physical health outside of the office. So you might run or jog or you know, do a marathon or triathlon or something like that. And you know, we get in the habit of telling our bodies to shut up. You know, I’m gonna push through, just be quiet and let me get done whatever I’m doing. But we have to understand the body is constantly trying to warn us and tell us throughout the day if something is not in proper alignment. And so whereas I understand the need to tell the body to shut up when you’re trying to run you know, eight minute mile and you need to push through your own mental limits. 

You then have to disassociate that from the body, telling you at your desk I’m hurting because you know, the screen is not at a proper angle. So you’re next in a wrong position all day long, we have to be able to check in with ourselves and say I’ve been sitting at this desk for five, you know for five hours. I wasn’t hurting before I sat here, why am I hurting now? What can I change and adjust here so that I can experience the physical rest of proper body or economics or do I just need to get up, you know? Sedentary lifestyles killing most of us. So just knowing that I’ve been sitting here for five hours, I need to get up and just move around a little bit and practice body fluidity. Just let the circulation, he’ll heal me just in the process of moving.

Jana Danielson

So then I want to draw this back to, I mean we’ve kind of leapfrogged the mindset piece a few times but I want to look back in a little bit of a different way. So the physicality of our body and you know obviously we feel that pain or that discomfort but when it comes to our mindset we often don’t necessarily feel it or notice it or recognize it so overtly. Whereas like if I have a headache, I have a headache like right now and it’s either it’s like yes I have a headache or no, I don’t, it’s very easy to discern mindset can be a little a little trickier, right? And I don’t know, I mean there are people in my life that will say about other people in my life like oh that’s just the way she is. Like maybe don’t tell her that until after, you know, until next week because she’s just gonna fly off the handle or he’s not gonna be able to understand it that way. Or you know, they never their glass is always half empty. Mindset can be a little trickier like that. It’s more of a gray area and yet we know how impactful it is. I’m sure you can draw a very straight line between mindset and all seven types of rest. 

How do you think or what do you think? I’m not sure if the question is how do you think or what do you think is a simple shift that someone can make in their rest? There was there was like a radar like you know an airplane with all the little dials on where am I in the air and where is the runway? If there was one shift that someone could make and maybe they’re here on this summit this week thinking you know what it’s time like I’ve been operating from that glass half empty and it’s just you know, maybe maybe these things aren’t happening to me but maybe they truly are happening for me and I need to open my eyes and my heart in a different way. How would you use your work on rest to position them to do. They might if they’re asking like what is the first thing Dr. Saundra, what should I be doing today that will start to shift that for me?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yeah, I think for me, when I think about rest with mindset, the very first part of that most people have to approach is what is the reason you haven’t been resting in the first place. So we have to address the mindset of face to rest because I think sometimes it’s resisted because we feel like I don’t have time to rest. I have so much going on. And so the mindset is if I can’t carve out this gigantic bit of time, you know, this day of rest or this weekend of rest, if I can’t carve out this big block, then I just shouldn’t try it at all. And I think that’s the first mindset shift that has to occur, that rest isn’t something that you carve out a big block of time for that rest is something that you integrate in the middle of your busy life, if there should be an ebb and a flow between the working and the resting, so that every day you’re having moments when you can incorporate some rest. And so the second part of that for someone who’s just starting and they’re saying, you know, because I hear it all the time, I don’t have time, I don’t have time to rest. I always try to find what’s something you’re already doing. What is something that’s a normal part of your day is a habitual part of your day where we can layer on a restorative activity because we’re not talking about sleeping. 

So this isn’t just to lay down, you know, where is something you’re already doing an activity and we can layer on a restorative process because since we’re not talking sleeping, we’re also not talking about cessation. So it doesn’t mean that you have to completely stop your entire life. You can be working in one area while resting in another. I’ll give an example I mentioned about joggers oftentimes people who are joggers might be someone who, you know, they are sitting at a desk job all day. You know, they’re not physically using their body most of the day, but they’re using their mind and they’re staying mentally engaged and over processing. But when they go for that job, they feel rested because they’re in those moments there expect experiencing mental rest. It’s a moment of mindfulness where they’re focusing their attention down on their cadence and their breathing. They might be outside looking at the flowers or the trees, getting a little bit of emotional rest in those moments and so they’re experiencing rest and air is that they may not be able to experience during their day. So although their physical body might be exhausted at the end of it, that wasn’t the one that was experiencing, the rest of the deficit was in the mental area. And so when they leave those moments of jogging, they feel more refreshed and restored because the place of deficit is the area that actually got depleted.

Jana Danielson

So the deficit in the seven areas will ebb and flow. I’m assuming. 

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Absolutely, because you’re gonna be using energy throughout your week in different ways. One day you may have your child being difficult and so you’re using a lot of emotional and social energy the next day they’re an angel and you’re having to deal with a problem at work and so you’re using a lot of creative energy. The issue is you don’t want to get into a situation where you’re letting all your buckets run dry and then you’re feeling like you’re at the end of yourself because that’s what happens if we never have moments where we’re pouring back into these, these buckets.

Jana Danielson

So you mentioned the emotional rest just a second ago and can you give an example because during my day, you know, if I, even if I have just two minutes in between meetings, I’ll go out if the weather is good and I’ll, you know, get my bare feet on the grass and maybe get my hands on a tree and really try and ground or go fill my water bottle or go to the bathroom, you know, try and get that my, you know, my blood circulating, but it’s all now what I’m learning from you is those are all like physical things, although if I do go in nature I understand that part of it, but can you give me an example because it’s not clear to me right off the top of my head what is something that someone could do to support their emotional rest deficit?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yeah, I’ll discuss emotional and social together because they both deal with people and I think that’s an important differentiation that people need to understand. Emotional rest specifically is dealing with your feelings and the ability you have to be able to authentically and transparently share it with someone. So you’re not having this feeling that you have to hold them in. Your not having this feeling that you have to hide them or constrain them in any way that there are some people in your life who you experience emotional rest with, where you can say it like it is truthfully and unload those emotions in a way where you feel still validated, you still safe. You still feel supported and so that’s the emotional rest aspect of it. The social rest aspect of it is looking at the different people in your life and how they pull on your social energy because every relationship is either requiring something from us or their life giving. They’re pouring back into us. They’re they’re kind of building us back up. And so unfortunately most of us spend the majority of our time with people who are negatively pulling from our social energy and who are not people we feel safe to have emotional rest and so we have to keep, we have, I call it the professional stress of keeping our emotional mass gone because you don’t really want them to see if you are upset or you don’t really want them to know if you’re anxious or going through any of those things. 

So you you hold your emotions tight and you don’t allow those people through that gate. Now, the problem is if there’s never a time that you feel like you can release those emotions, there’s never a place that feels safe or a person or situation that feels safe, that emotional labor just keeps compounding on itself. And so then you start experiencing the emotional weight of that and you start feeling the heaviness that comes with that, the stress, the depression, the anxiety, all these things that come from emotions that never have the freedom and the liberty to be expressed as they should be. And if you don’t have any people in your life who just you enjoy being with, who don’t need anything from you who aren’t pulling from you socially, but that are simply people you love to be around and they love being around you and you pull they pour back into you, you will feel as if you’re always being used and abused and taken advantage of because no one is pouring back into you. 

And so we have to make sure that they’re at least someone in our life, whether it’s a counselor or therapist or coach someone you’re paying or it could be a truss friend or family member or honestly it could be a journal where you feel like it’s safe to write down those emotions. But we all need to have a time where we can just say what we truly feel without fear, guilt and shame. And then we also need those times when we have people in our lives who don’t need anything from us. So we don’t always feel like we are being, we are having to kind of be pulled from but that we can simply just be and have those people who we just love being around and love being around us and that really make life worth living that poor back into us.

Jana Danielson

I, as you were talking it made me think back to a conversation I had with a friend last week and we got on a zoom call and my, you know my first question was tell me how you are like let’s catch up and 45 minutes later and tears and like you know her Her response to me at the end of 45 minutes were aren’t you are you regretting that you asked me how I was and I knew I was that safe place for her. But the way that you just explained, you know we need those outlets. It makes me realize that she was experiencing probably extreme rest emotional rest deficit and maybe on a different day or a different time. That question would have produced a different result because there are moments where you know, you feel like you’re just venting but it feels so good. Like it feels maybe a little out of character. You’re using some colorful words that you don’t normally use, but it just feels so good. That is what you’re talking about. As far as the emotional side of of rest deficit, correct?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yes. But you have to be careful with that because what I find is especially with your friends, it can become easier for people to trauma dump than to do true emotional rest. You see that this is the difference, trauma dumping is. I’m going to tell you about whatever it is that troubling me, but I’m gonna give you all the graphic details. I’m gonna tell you what that person said, I’m gonna tell you the experience. I’m gonna I’m not gonna bring you into the movie with me. You’re gonna like be fully engrossed in what it was that I experienced that you truly understand me. But the reality is you don’t get to understand the person when they trauma dump. You just get to understand the experience of what the person went to when they trauma dump. What emotional rest is is getting to the core of how the trauma made the person feel. It’s much more vulnerable. It requires you to evaluate this was the situation. I don’t want to hear about the situation. I want to hear what the situation did inside of you, What did it break inside of you? What did it hurt or wound inside of you? That is a much deeper place. And as a place most of us are afraid to go and it takes having that person in your life who you feel like you can say yes, I had this colleague question, my my suggestion at work and I’m so ticked off about it and not and you’re you know, going over all the stuff the colleagues and how it made and all this stuff without saying how it actually made you feel. So when my friends do this, I tend to ask them, I understand that situation hurts you, but I want to know why it hurts you so deeply. 

What did it make you feel when they said that and usually when we get to the core of it is things like it made me feel insignificant. It made me feel like I wasn’t valued. It made me feel like they didn’t hear me. They don’t see what I bring to the table within this company. And that’s when the true tears fall because now we’ve gotten to the root issue of what inside of you felt broken from their lack of sensitivity in that moment. And so that’s what I mean by emotional rest and many of us are not getting it because we’re afraid to get to that level of death and to be that honest and truthful. But it’s when we get to those moments and we’re able to evaluate the root causes of why we feel and respond to certain things. That’s when really our mindset can change because that’s when you can start reaffirming those things like I am valuable, my opinion does matter. I can be a competent woman or man or whatever it is. You know, I don’t have to listen to their situation and allow that to change what I believe. I feel like that’s the part. We don’t often get to that deeper level that that requires a little bit of a lot, a lot a bit ourselves to really get there.

Jana Danielson

I appreciate so much that you clarify that because that experience now with these with this new set of lenses or this new frame around it more, most likely didn’t really touch her rest deficit in that emotional part of the formula. So. 

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

She relived it.

Jana Danielson

She relived it. Yeah.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

And that’s what most of us do. We relive it without killing it right?

Jana Danielson

And then yeah, it’s like a snowball rolling downhill. Like really doesn’t impact, you know, our mindset shift or the way that we’re seeing the world is because we’re just playing that movie over and over in our mind. So I can understand that. That was okay. So in your area of work, I want to ask you this, do you feel like there is a piece of it that’s not being, you know, talked about enough that you would like to, you know, in this moment, take, you know, get on your soapbox and let people know we need to start talking about this part of you know, rest with mindset or whatever that might be. How would you answer that question?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yes, I would say that the thing that has not talked about enough is really the need to explain this within organizations and companies, that’s the heart of the work that I do right now, primarily is working with leaders, leaders and teams globally, to help them understand that you cannot expect your team to be at its highest level of capacity if you don’t give them the tools and strategies to be able to restore themselves. I have so many companies that I work with and their concern is typically around the mindset of my people are they’re leaving because they say they’re burned out, you know, over almost 70% of the population says they’re burned out. And so they’re leaving their job because they said they’re burned out. We want you to come in and give a, you know, a 45 minute pep talk to help them be able to to all get back on track and really helping them understand that yes, we can do the 45 minute pep talk to get them back on track. But there has to then be a system in place to help them read to help reinforce that. So if I’m walking into a company where all of the leaders work 80 hours and they’re down on their entire team every time someone wants to take a break to do anything and they, you know, they push all of the zone meetings back to back with no sensory reprieve in between them. How can then their team ever become restored? 

And then they’re demanding, we want to be more innovative. We want, you know, that’s the theme tech teams, agricultural teams, educational teams. I can’t, I mean so many different avenues that I’ve seen this. We want them to be more innovative, but we’re not gonna actually allow them to do the restorative processes to get to the level of innovation that is possible. I feel like most of us are functioning from our empty cup. We go to our jobs, we function from our places of depletion. We pour out the best we can with the depleted energy that we have and then we go home on the weekends, we veg out, we escape out. We don’t do restorative processes. We lay on the sofa and we watch networks for eight hours and then we show up on Monday and run the same gamut again over and over without ever truly getting to a place of rest and restoration and without ever really realizing what our full potential would be if we honored our need for rest.

Jana Danielson

So when you go into these organizations and you offer them the 45 minute pep talk, but you know, what they really need is, you know, a shift in the culture, in the way the business operates. How does that fall on deaf ears or how open are your clients to hearing the message and then taking that message and deciding to take inspired action on it?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yes, it’s been honestly, I would say that um, the pandemic helped a lot because it really with the, you know, the great resignation as they call it with so many people leaving and the reason many people leaving coming down to the work life balance as they say issue. It really opened up a lot of years because I don’t think people were listening prior to that. So after that I started noticing a lot more companies that were particularly the Fortune 100 type companies that were a lot more open to. Okay, yes, we need the pep talk but we also need a year long program. Can you sit down with us and consult with us and help our team develop some training some usually internal video series and things that we can use to walk people through a process of being able to see just simple techniques and I find that’s the easiest thing that most people are needing, they’re needing some simple techniques that are practical that are easy to implement, that don’t require them to take a vacation because let’s be honest, nobody wants their whole team on vacation all month, but to be able to do it in the middle of their busy day and that has been the mindset shift that that has really opened a lot of doors within some bigger companies and within their leadership teams.

Jana Danielson

Well, that’s great to hear. And so I wanna ask you more of a personal question since we’re, you know, in this, in, in this mindset realm in your interview, what are some will you share some of your mindset, you know, hints and tips that you are literally utilizing in your life daily or weekly? We’d love to know?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yeah, I have a daily practice that I do to really it’s my own self assessment to be able to determine kind of how my day is going to go. Every morning I wake up, the very first thing that I kind of process is how do I feel, you know how, how energized do I feel? Do I feel like I’m well rested? Do I feel like I have a good starting point with my energy and on the days that I wake up and I feel like, no, I don’t feel, you know, as good as I typically do. I start looking back and saying, you know, what was it the day before that I did that, I might have drained energy that I didn’t restore. I started doing an immediate assessment so that as I’m planning out that current day, I’m planning it out with an intentionality on the type of restorative practices I want to start incorporating so that I don’t further deplete the place that already is feeling depleted and can start building that area back up. And I never go about it thinking, oh, you know, I’ve got this other thing I’ve got to add to my day, I think, oh, I get to add this thing to my day that’s gonna make me feel so much better so that I don’t have to get at the end of this day feeling depleted.

Jana Danielson

I love that and they get to write it, it’s like, it’s a choice. So it’s, you know, what is your present self doing to, to nurture your future self. That’s one of the little, the little hints and tips that I use all the time, because some days it is, it feels like it’s a darn good choice to roll back over in bed and just and just stay there as we wrap this interview, I would love to know if you feel like there’s anything maybe that’s been left unsaid into the conversation that you would like to leave our audience with?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Well, I, we mentioned the rest quiz. I would definitely recommend anyone who is feeling, who has experienced that you’ve gone to bed and woke up the next morning and you’re like, I’m still exhausted. That restquiz.com is really simple to find. Go there and take the quiz. It takes about five minutes, you end up getting exactly one email, you do not get added to my email list and I will repeat that. You do not get added to my email list with that. I consider that my service back to the world um over a quarter million people have taken the assessment. There’s an option where you can choose to join my email list if that’s additional information you want. But I feel like many of us we get too many emails as is where it’s I don’t want to add to your sensory overload by giving you emails you don’t want. So you get one email that tells you what your rest deficits are and it gives you a score in all seven and then from there I bless you to do what you need to do to get the rest that you need information can be very empowering.

Jana Danielson

And so can you repeat that website one more time for our audience?

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Yes, it’s restquiz.com. Perfect. Perfect. And if someone wanted to follow you on social media or you know, connect with you in different ways, what’s the best way to do that.

Jana Danielson

My main website is drdaltonsmith.com and then I’m that on everything that’s D. R. Dalton smith dot com, on Instagram, Facebook all the places.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith

Dr. Saundra, this has been so eye opening for me and I am sure for our audience as they’re really said and focusing on the concept of you know, the medicine of mindset and what that means and and rest versus sleep and all the different ways we can have deficits. And I just want to thank you, I want to thank you for showing up in this world the way you do. And I am going to restquiz.com as soon as we wrap up here and see where see where I’m at. So thank you so much again.

Jana Danielson

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.