Conscious Relaxation Time

I’ve found that it doesn’t matter how long or short a time you’re awake, your best days are when you have some time for conscious relaxation.

Each day and each person is different. Some days you might only need 5 minutes. Other days you might need an hour or more.

By “conscious relaxation” I mean taking time to regenerate, reinvigorate and revitalize. You can’t keep going 24/7 without a break to refresh your mind. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Not having that conscious relaxation time is a recipe for burnout. Sleeping isn’t enough. You have to be awake for it to be effective.

How do you reset? Do you listen to upbeat music? Read a chapter of an inspiring book? Meditate/pray? Play with your children? Spend time with your significant other?

What do you do to keep the spark alight?

I kept a perfect sleeping record from Wednesday night (midnight) to Sunday night (midnight). On Sunday night, I had a really bad headache and was feeling sick, so I slept from 2am to 7:30am. I’m pretty sure the headache and feeling sick was due to a combination of wine, rice (we had Chinese for dinner – yum!) and general dehydration, rather than to “sleep deprivation”. I wasn’t feeling unusually tired and the sleep was a conscious decision I made, especially given I knew both my 8am and 4pm scheduled sleeps were going to be massively interupted.

It meant I was over the not feeling so good by the morning and was able to devote time to family and friends that I may have struggled to do otherwise.

Comments

  1. I completely agree! There have been many days when I’ve been pretty tired to exhausted, but because I work in a job where I don’t get any real breaks or times when I’m not ‘on’ (almost always in a one-on-one situation), I found that I couldn’t go to bed until I’d had some conscious alone/relaxation time. If I just went to sleep, I quickly became disillusioned and unhappy with life in general as it felt like my days consisted of work and nothing more.

  2. Tess Haydon says

    Couldn’t agree more. Especially when I’m at work, I just need a few minutes to take a deep breath so that I can deal with customers calmly because otherwise I find myself getting easily frustrated and annoyed by things that wouldn’t usually bother me.

Speak Your Mind

*