After our three day weekend, it’s time to start looking at mental rest. Mental rest is probably the 2nd most well-known type of rest, right after physical. If you aren’t getting enough mental rest, you may feel like you’re unable to focus or like your mind is always thinking about something, even when you’re trying to get to sleep.
Mental rest is where we start to have some more variety with the things that count as restful. While physical rest tends to be straightforward, mental relaxation is different for everyone. None of these recommendations have to take hours. See what happens when you do one for even 15 minutes a day! With that in mind, here are 7 ways to get more mental rest.
- Do something easy. Challenges can be fun, but everyone needs a break. Take some time to do something that lets your brain pause and recharge. Short breaks throughout the day allow our brains to, metaphorically, take a breath.
- Try doing some exercise! Moving and getting our heart rates up can be helpful in allowing our minds to take a break.
- Start adding some relaxation techniques into your day. These could look like meditation, deep breathing, or yoga.
- Write. Writing can help unclutter our minds. By getting your thoughts down on paper, you don’t have to keep them in your head all the time. You could even start carrying a little notebook around with you to make this easier.
- Allow yourself to be bored. Our world has so much stimulation and input nowadays that we have to intentionally take time to be bored. However, being bored is a great way to let your brain relax because it means that you’ve been able to deal with everything that’s been on your mind.
- Enjoy a hobby. Maybe it’s time to take a break from the tasks that you’ve been working on and move to something fun. This could be anything from listening to music to going on a walk outside.
- Take a technology break. Technology is filled with wonderful things all vying for our attention. But that means most of the time that we’re on our computers or phone we aren’t allowing ourselves time to rest and process the events in our lives. So step away and put your phone on do not disturb for a little while.
In our next post, we’ll take a look at emotional rest and how to further incorporate emotional rest into our lives. For this week though, how do you prioritize mental rest?
