Zachary Stirewalt"I don’t need rest! I’ve been going my entire life and can continue until I’m in the grave!"
Rest is one of those things we don’t consider when healing from serious mental illness. It’s not something we necessarily have to, but it does come and hit us upside the head like a ton of bricks when we have been ignoring it for long enough.
A Personal Discovery of Rest
When I graduated with my Bachelors of Science in Public Health – after 7 years in the mental health system, after 3 years at another university, after K-12 – I bought a camper and moved into the woods. My intention with this move was to decompress emotionally enough to better understand what happens with trauma, conditioning, and the emotional process as a whole.
During this time, I meditated often, but more importantly I noticed myself taking weeks to lay in bed and stare out the window, listening to the A/C whirring. Emotionally speaking, I experienced deep periods of regret, depression, and rage; the first time any of these three were felt. And they wouldn’t have been possible without this concept of rest.
Nervous System Regulation
A common conversation with friend groups includes the concept of Nervous System Regulation, which is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as:
“an instance or period of relaxing or ceasing to engage in strenuous or stressful activity.”
By regulating the nervous system, we are allowing our mental, emotional, and spiritual ways of being to naturally flow through our experience without us interrupting them, usually thinking something should be different. And sometimes there is a decompression period that needs to take place.
For myself, this decompression period for the emotions was the 8-month period I lived in the camper, in the middle of the woods. Of course I was still around people, but I chose to limit my interactions so I could maintain this trajectory to regulation.
These days were not necessarily pleasant. Much of the time was spent avoiding feeling, and choosing to play on my phone rather than engage with the thoughts that were created by the emotions and feelings in the first place. This period of avoidance is natural and necessary for our integration. If we are constantly judging ourselves and our experience, we may just choose another path where we’re experiencing the same tone but in different setting, with varying characters. Sadly this means we still have underlying issues to address.
When we engage with these uncomfortable parts of the psyche, we allow the voices of our past to express themselves, potentially for the first time. During this period, I would often find myself in bed, weeping from the pain of loss of my life before being affected by mental illness. Sometimes the despair was so deep I wished it to never end. Other times the emotion was rage so strong that I’d be punching the air until my body was exhausted.
Emotional Release to Provide Space for New Experiences
The importance of emotional release was for me to regulate the body in how it was holding these emotions in a place that blocked the ability to grow beyond the energy held that is limiting in its natural state.
Let me get back to the title of this blog, rest! Rest is essential to this process of emotional release because otherwise the emotion would have to boil over for us to feel. If we think about a pot with hot water and a lid on top, the hot water gets hotter with more emotions. The heating element is on and gets turned up each time we aren’t able to provide efficient space for our body to release. By introducing and allowing space for rest, we are intently offering our body and mind a place to experience something different and new.
If we are going about life in the ways we always have, the space for emotions is probably limited to those we feel comfortable feeling while working, socializing, or going about our other day-to-day responsibilities. During these times, the space we can offer ourselves for rest is most likely hindered or limited at best. By setting an intention to have dedicated space for rest and subsequent emotions can be rewarding for the process of nervous system regulation.
For each of us it’s about finding the sweet spot of rest. My own system usually needs to be in silence, not talking to others using my vocal cords, and oftentimes I’m in bed or on the couch. I honestly feel like I’ve come close to developing bed sores, noticing time spent in bed by the hours and days rather than hours and minutes.
Unexpected Benefits of Rest - Spiritual Attunement
Stillness and rest present the opportunity to try another way of life that is reliant on intuition and trust. It isn’t an overnight transition like a goal that we can reach, but it is one we can find ourselves continually relying on through the applied self-experimentation and seeing how it works for ourselves.
Two of the practices that seem to cultivate this deep rest effect for myself include both meditation and simply gazing out the window. Oftentimes it’s by staring out a window when my body notices there’s some insight that’s necessary to introduce to the mind. There’s a similarity to this process of insight and finding ourselves in the midst of creation or mental exploration based off our interesting shower thoughts. When we gaze off at nothing, the entire world can naturally shift to another way of being. It can be an easeful and rewarding process.
And there’s always the question of “what if I lose myself” as can come up for those of us diagnosed with mental illness. I’m still working on this one, honestly, and it’s one I’ll continue to question and look at, but I have never lost myself to rest. Rest feels like one of those safe spaces for me to decompress in a way that’s essential for me to have the capacity to be in all ways, including productivity, for the remainder of life.