Whether it's merely a few minutes, a night, or an extended vacation, rest is essential to your health, wellness, and wellbeing. You might have things that need to be done frequently, but you still need to rest and relax from time to time. It is utterly essential to your health, wellness, and wellbeing.

Despite negative connotations in the idea of rest, such as slacking off, laziness, or other similar perceptions, there is tremendous value in resting.

Resting allows you to change your focus. Resting will enable you to recover from strains physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual. Getting rest gives you a chance to restart, alter your approach, and examine where you have been, where you are, and where you're going.

So how come society doesn't seem to like people to rest? I suspect that this is borne of the incessant need to always be productive, always be doing something, and always be in motion — lest you be perceived as inferior and as such get passed up, passed by, or otherwise fail.

It often feels like society rewards people who never stop, never slow, and never seem to take a break from action. However, you're only human. Hence, you need to take breaks, to collect your thoughts, rest and recuperate, and take new directions and actions in and for your life.

Rest has many options

Rest can take any number of forms. These include, but are certainly not limited to:

· A few minutes reading social media or playing a game on your phone at work

· Taking a walk outside in the sun

· Grabbing coffee and chatting with friends and/or coworkers

· Meditating

· Falling into your favorite spot on the couch and watching something on TV for a while

· Playing a game

· Taking a trip to the beach and lying in a hammock with icy beverages for a week

Rest in all these forms is hugely restorative and great for your health, wellness, and wellbeing, on every level.

It's important to recognize the difference between rest and distraction. Rest is just that, a break, a pause, taking a time out or time off for a period. Distraction is taking a new action or following a new process that is just a different form of busy work or pseudo-productivity. It doesn't provide the break from stimuli you need for your greater health, wellness, and overall wellbeing.

Nobody can go 24/7 all the time. It's just not possible because you need to rest, which is different from sleep. You need breaks that allow you to shift yourself physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or some combination of these.

Rest is good for your health on every level. Further, it shouldn't be something you deny yourself or put off endlessly because of how ultimately beneficial it is. You deserve to rest for your greater health, wellness, and wellbeing.

Knowing that everybody needs to rest and that it benefits you in lots of different ways, you can seek out and find ways to take necessary mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual breaks. When you allow yourself to rest — whether it's short breaks or lengthy vacations — you uncover better means to empower yourself.

This makes you stronger not weaker

The idea that pausing to rest is a sign of weakness is ludicrous. Human beings are not meant to be always on the go at all times. Rest is utterly natural, and making time to get it is hugely beneficial.

All four levels of your health, wellness, and wellbeing — mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical — get value from rest. Big or small, long or short, the time you take to reset, recuperate, and relax is the equivalent of plugging in any battery-powered device to increase its charge.

Last but not least, no matter who you are or where you come from, you are worthy and deserving of finding and making time to rest. It's not lazy, useless, or any other negative connotation you can think of. It's perfectly natural to need and get rest.

Thank you for reading. You've got this. We've got this. Namaste.

Website | Facebook | LinkedIn | AmazonAuthorPage

Thank you for reading. I'm Murray "MJ" Blehart. I write about mindfulness, conscious reality creation, positivity, wellness, wellbeing, and similar life lessons.