Thoughts about the importance of Mental Rest

Life can be stressful sometimes

The daily stress of work, the punctuality to get to a meeting, the family, among others can become many factors in which we are mentally overwhelmed, trying to organize everything in our head, saturating it and filling it with information that can end up paralyzing us and causing us problems such as depression or anxiety.

What is anxiety:

Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress. It is a feeling of fear and apprehension about what’s to come. The first day of school, going to a job interview, or giving a speech may cause most people to feel fearful and nervous. But if your feelings of anxiety are extreme, last for longer than six months, and are interfering with your life, you may have an anxiety disorder. | Source

Sometimes having stress is totally natural, the important thing is to first try to prevent it, and second, be prepared in how to manage it

What is depression:

Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease a person’s ability to function at work and at home. | Source

In order to avoid suffering from this consequences, it is important for us to take some time to recharge our energy, to enjoy a mental break, so you can keep up your productive in your daily life.

Why are mental rests so important for us?

We are always accustomed to hearing that the rest of the body is one of the fundamental pillars of a healthy life, since, if we feel constantly lacking in energy, we are prone to get sick and our performance is diminished. I believe there is not enough talk about mental rest, and it is important to don’t forget about it, because in the long term, it can really decrease the level of productivity of the individual, causing problems that we would not have imagined in the first place, since our mind is what controls our mood, our emotions as well as our body, It is very common to find cases of psychological disorders that are related to a lack of rest.

What is a psychological disorder?

Psychological Disorders are a pattern of thought or behavior that is outside the expected norms and impairs an individual’s ability function in ordinary life in some way. Such disorders are generally defined by examining how a person feels, acts, thinks or perceives. | Source

We have to think that our mind is a kind of warehouse that keeps all kinds of information. That is stacked according to the organization that we have in our brain, sometimes we can get important information placing it in a privileged place, but, however, when we have different data to remember, that warehouse that at first seemed orderly, will begin to look like more to a disorganized storage room, and this is caused by the lack of mental rest.

When having difficulties, the first thing we need to do is accept it. Only then would we be able to act upon it

The mental rest helps us to keep all the information properly distributed by itself in our mind, causing that when we return to work, we can deal much better with everything we have to face. In other words, much more technological as I like it, it is when our smartphone has many open applications and we notice a slow down or even an overheat, but when we click on the optimization button all applications are closed and the phone works much better, in this same way the mental break for us would be this same button that allow us to optimize our brain, we do not have fans in our head like computers do, so we need to manually turn us off whenever is required.

Psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne says that ” When you're stressed out and tired, you are more likely to become ill, your arteries take a beating, and you're more likely to have an accident. Your sleep will suffer, you won't digest your food as well, and even the genetic material in the cells of your body may start to become altered in a bad way. Mentally, not only do you become more irritable, depressed, and anxious, but your memory will become worse and you'll make poorer decisions “. | Source

Doing this not as complicated as you could imagine, since there are many methods to disconnect from daily stress, and I want to give you some tips that can be very useful

Enjoy your hobbies

Something that with time we forget and makes us feel more stressed is that we might not live life as we would like, focusing on work and all the chores. We must give ourselves some moments to do exactly what we like, whether it is writing, reading, playing football, just taking a walk, watching a movie or some good series. During this time it might be better avoid talking about work problems or any topic that may stress or create us discomfort. Maybe it's hard for you to do this the first few weeks, but when you get used to it and have educated the mind to be relaxed, everything will go much better.

Nowadays, the fact that meditation can help us become healthier is sort of an universal truth

Meditation

Meditation mixed with physical exercise is something that always comes perfectly to the well being of our mind. Although you may think that meditation is only going to be done by the elderly or the orientals, this is a mistake, since everyone who has tried it, can corroborate that they are much happier and have a much more organized mind, which of course, can help us maintain our level or productivity in our jobs. Another common activity that can help is obviously Yoga and other sports that have very low impact but also help to leave the mind free of problems.

Surround yourself with positive people

Something I'm sure of is that when a person surrounds himself with positive people, everything that comes to his/her life is good, however, when we meet and stay together with negative or very toxic people, in the end they are going to cause more damage than we could think of. For this reason, it is always preferable to get together with people who are not going to cause you problems or whose life is clean and clear, without stress, because in the long run what they will achieve is transmitting that harmful energy, making you feel more and more miserable and therefore, unable find peace in your mind.

Conclusion

Understanding the fact the we need to cool off from some time can be difficult to accept for people who are use to run through the day without being able to stop. The problem comes when this type of person one day finds him/herself suddenly with no energy left? What happened to all the energy required to comply with all duties and the responsibilities than the person needs to attend?

Being on a permanent calm state can help us a lot when having our time off

It got burnout. Our energy is not infinite, it is impossible to maintain peak productivity 100% of the time, we can see a perfect example of this in sports, where the teams usually have good and bad months, it can be seem as a cycle.

The same happens in our brain, if we don't take care of it, by switching it off from time to time, it will get one day, so tired you would not be able to function properly, among other consequences.

To avoid reaching this unhealthy state, we need to periodically give ourselves some time to take proper mental rest. If we find the time to do this occasionally, we can even find ourselves feeling better than ever before.