Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Secrets to Increase Your Endurance & The Complexities of Rest

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

If you want to be happy, it helps that you have happy friends. And it helps even more if your friends’ friends are happy too. I begin this episode discussing how social connections can influence our health and happiness. Source: Tom Rath author of Well Being (https://amzn.to/3xcMYUM)  You probably think you know what your physical limits are. For example, when you exercise, you know when to stop because you “hit the wall.”  Actually though, that may not be such a good indicator. You could likely do more. That’s according to Alex Hutchinson. He says human endurance is flexible. After all, people break records all the time. People can achieve what was once thought to be impossible. How does that all work? Listen to this fascinating discussion with Alex who is author of the book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance (https://amzn.to/3n9j7I7) You could define rest by what you are NOT doing. We often look at rest as something we do to take a break from something else. However, that may be looking at rest all wrong. Rest turns out to be more complicated than that. Board-certified internal medicine physician Saundra Dalton-Smith says humans need different types of rest to restore different parts of ourselves. Even if you get plenty of sleep, there are other things that can mentally exhaust you and people who can leave you drained regardless of how much sleep you get. For those things you need a different kind of rest. In fact, Sandra has identified 7 kinds. She joins me to explain rest in a whole new way. Saundra is author of the book Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity (https://amzn.to/2RA9t5w). Spring can be very uncomfortable if you have allergies. Listen as I reveal some simple yet effective strategies to fight back against those allergy symptoms that make you miserable so you can enjoy the pleasures of spring. The website I mention to check the pollen count in your area is www.aaaai.org. Source: https://www.consumerreports.org/allergy/how-to-ease-seasonal-allergy-symptoms/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match If you own a small business, you know the value of time. Innovation Refunds does too! They've made it easy to apply for the employee retention credit or ERC by going to https://getrefunds.com to see if your business qualifies in less than 8 minutes! Innovation Refunds has helped small businesses collect over $3 billion in payroll tax refunds! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, discover why you're more likely to be happy if your friends are. Then, the extraordinary limits of human endurance and how you can probably do a lot more than you think you can. I had a really interesting chat with the guy who set the American record for breath folding. He held his breath for 8 minutes and 35 seconds. His brain was convinced he was going to die at 4 minutes.

He held his breath until 8 and a half minutes. So there's a big gap between where the warning light comes on and when the car actually runs out of fuel. Then, some effective strategies for allergy sufferers and a fascinating discussion that will change the way you think about sleep and rest. When we talk about rest, the general population thinks about sleeping or they think about just the cessation of activity. And really rest is about restoration. It's those restorative processes and activities to pour back into the parts of yourself that you deplete.

All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Something you should know. Fascinating intel.

The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know, with Mike Carruthers. Hey there, welcome to Something You Should Know. We have a lot of interesting topics to cover today, so I want to start with talking about your happiness. Did you know that your odds of being happy increase 15% if your friend is happy, and 10% if their friend is happy,

and your odds of being happy increase 6% if your friend's friend's friend is happy. These are the results of a study by Gallup, and here's what else they found. Social circles have a direct impact on your physical health. You're more likely to be healthy if your friends are healthy. And the reverse is also true. If your friends are unhealthy, then you're more likely to be. In fact, there's such a thing as second-hand obesity, and it means that if your friend is obese, it increases your chances of becoming obese by 57%. They also found that a

good marriage is good for healing. 42 couples were studied, and it turned out that it took almost twice as long for physical wounds to heal if the couple reported having hostility in their relationship. And the study confirmed that we are social creatures. To be our happiest and at our best, we need six hours a day of social time. And that is something you should know. One topic that has always fascinated me is the subject of human endurance, physical and mental. The limits of human endurance are really nothing short of miraculous, in my opinion. I love those stories of people who really push those limits.

And yes, we all have limitations, but if we so desire and are willing to make the effort, it's extraordinary what a person, any person, can do beyond what they think are their limits. Someone who's explored this topic thoroughly is Alex Hutchinson. Alex is a columnist for Outside Magazine. He's a two-time finalist in the 1500 meters at the Canadian Olympic trials, and he holds a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge.

He's author of the book, Endure, Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Hey, Alex, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So I know why I like this topic so much, but why do you like this topic so much? Yeah, for me, it comes from my background as a runner. I've been a competitive runner since high school. And so that means you're basically trying to push to your maximum limits in a way that we don't always in regular life. And you're doing that every Saturday, pretty much. And so pretty soon you start to ask well what what is it

that's defining those limits yeah see that to me is what's so interesting is that yeah yeah we have limits and we think we know what our limits are but isn't it interesting how when you have to go further than what you think your limits are somehow you can at least in many situations. To me, the real insight that I think is important to understand is that from talking to scientists over the years and coaches and athletes and all these other things is that limits that feel to us like they're just sort of straightforward physical limits. I was going as hard as I could or lifting as hard as I could, whatever the case may be, they're almost always informed or dictated or influenced by the brain.

The brain decides when you've hit your limits. It doesn't mean you can do anything you want, but it does mean that there's a little more wiggle room than we usually think of when we talk about our absolute limits. Yeah, well, I've heard certain military disciplines that say, you know, whatever you think you can do, you can do more. That the human body can always do a little more than you think. And that's been my experience too, that like if I go to the gym and I'm lifting weights and I've already in my head thought I'm going to get to 15 reps and I'm done. Well, guess how many I do? It's amazing how the body knows what the mind thinks. And if you change that, if someone tricks you, if you lose count, and that's kind of one of the things that happened to me in one of my

early races in university was the timekeeper was giving us the wrong splits. And so I had a mistaken impression of how fast I was going. And I had a huge breakthrough. I'd been running roughly the same time for about four years. And I had a nine second breakthrough from 401 to 352 in the 1500, thanks to a mistake. And it totally changed my life in a sense. So when you get to your limit, or what you think is your limit, you can't run anymore, you can't study anymore, if it's a mental thing,

when you get to that point where you're done, there's nothing left, what is it that makes you determine that? What happens? Yeah, you know, this is still a topic of active debate among scientists. So let me say that for sure that we're still trying to figure out the answer to that. But I think that what a lot of scientists are now starting to argue is that your subjective sense of effort really is the master switch.

And this is just for background. This is, you know, this is actually a pretty good design decision because the brain is trying to protect you from doing yourself harm. If you think of, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, if you're chasing an antelope across the Savannah, if you're willing to just keep chasing that antelope until you keel over, you don't make it back to the campfire that night and you don't pass on your genes. So we're strongly wired to protect ourselves. And the way we seem to do it is not with some, you know, you'd think that if you put someone in a lab and we're going to measure and we're strongly wired to protect ourselves and the way we seem to do it is not with some you know you'd think that if you put someone in a lab and we're gonna we're gonna measure i'm gonna figure out what level of lactic acid or what body temperature or what oxygen saturation levels

are correspond to the absolute limits and none of those turn out to be really good predictors of when you hit your limit the best predictor that scientists have found is if I ask you to rate how hard you're working or how hard you're pushing on a scale of zero to 10, when you say 9.9, you're about to quit. And that's a much better predictor than anything science can give us. And so the people who hit that wall and keep going, what makes them keep going? What separates the people who, who subjectively think that's it. And the other people who subjectively think that's it, but I'm going to keep going. There's a lot of factors, you know, motivation is obviously one of them. And one of the sort of cliches is if you're out running a, let's say you're out running

a 5k and you think, Oh my God, I can't keep going. You ask yourself, well, what would happen if a lion jumped out from behind that tree over there and started chasing me? Yeah, I'd probably be able to sprint. And so you discover that you can do this. And if you expose yourself, and this is what athletes, this is what, you know, obviously military personnel do. This is the whole, you know, one of the fundamental aspects of military training is put you in a place of discomfort. Don't give you a choice, you know, uh, force you to endure discomfort and force you to discover that,

Hey, I was at that place where I thought I was going to die. And it turned out I was just out of breath and that I wasn't actually about to die. And so the next time you take out some of that fear, some of that, uh, that conviction that you've really reached your limits and you're able to, to interpret those signals differently. You're able to say, I feel my discomfort. I'm aware that, uh, my body is sending me signals that I need to slow down, but I'm not scared of it. And so I know I'm not going to die so I can keep going for a little bit longer. And why would you want to do that? Well, for, for what purpose? If, if you're subjectively telling yourself and that switch goes off that this is it, what's the purpose of going any further? In a competitive context or a military context,

you know, there's obviously because you don't want to get shot or because you don't want to win the race. In a broader life perspective, you have to weigh what it is you're trying to achieve and whether it's worth enduring some discomfort. And the body is telling you to stop, or the brain, let's say, is telling you to stop. What we have to weigh is, is it being overly cautious? And one example I would give is, I had a really interesting chat with the guy who set the American record for breath holding. He held his breath for eight minutes and 35 seconds, a guy named Brandon Hendrickson. And the body has all sorts of defense mechanisms to make sure we don't run out of oxygen. One of them is that if you keep holding your breath after it gets uncomfortable,

your breathing muscles will start contracting involuntarily. You'll get these spasms in your diaphragm. And that's a pretty good sign that your brain thinks you should stop. So this guy, Brandon Henderson, he said those involuntary breathing movements started at about four minutes for him. So his brain was convinced he was going to die at four minutes. He held his breath till eight and a half minutes. And so there's a big gap between where the warning light comes on and when the car actually runs out of fuel. So I'm not saying that I have no desire to hold my breath for eight minutes, and I certainly couldn't even if I tried. But when the goal is important and you want to achieve it, it's important to understand that just because the warning light comes on on the dashboard, that doesn't mean you've actually hit your limits.

It's just a warning that you're going to hit your limits, and you might want to be aware of that and make adjustments accordingly. When it comes to physical endurance, the way to build up your endurance, I think people would assume is, well, if you can run 10 minutes, one day run 11, and then maybe the next day, see if you can do 12 and see, is that a valid way to build up your endurance? Absolutely. That's a valid way to build up your physical endurance. It's also a valid way to build up your mental endurance. That if you feel like, you know, you're maybe quitting before you really needed to,

you don't have to have a sudden conversion or discover the magic secret. You just need to learn to push a little bit harder each time. And there are actually Olympic teams around the world are experimenting these days with what they call brain endurance training. And so you'll see athletes doing physical workouts, let's say in the weight room. And then when they're taking a break from lifting weights, they'll rush over to an iPad and do some mentally fatiguing tasks on the iPad during their three-minute break between sets in the gym. And what they're trying to do is build their ability to keep on pushing,

to stay fresh, to stay, you know, motivated and on task, even when they're getting mentally fatigued. We've been talking mostly about physical endurance, but there's also mental endurance. And in fact, mental endurance is part of physical endurance, right? When I think of endurance, I actually think that it's the mental endurance that's more important than the physical endurance. I absolutely think that being physically fit and healthy is a good thing. And so exercising on a regular basis is important. But in terms of the whole building your endurance, I think there's much greater crossover or much, much, much more broadly applicable benefits to learning to endure discomfort. And whether that's, you know, sitting through a two hour meeting at work or for students, you know,

studying late into the night to prepare for an exam or sitting on a cross-country plane trip in a cramped seat. We're constantly having to deal with things that are not a barrel of roses. And so having the mental skills to be able to say, I feel uncomfortable right now, but I'm not panicking. It's just, you know, this, this too will pass and, and we'll get over it. I think it, it, it allows us to enjoy life without getting stressed out by minor inconveniences and also allows us to, to maybe, you know, achieve goals outside of the sports, sports sphere by, by being willing to, to, to push through the hard times. We are discussing human endurance and the limits of human endurance with Alex Hutchinson. He's a columnist for Outside Magazine, and he is author of the book Endure,

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lot of stuff like, this is stupid. I hate this. This is so hard. Why do I sign up for this? There's no way I'm going to be able to make it to the finish line at this pace. And this is a very, very common. There've been studies that show that negative self-talk is dominant, certainly among marathoners. And that has a real effect because when we're talking about your subjective perception of effort, it's affected by what you're telling yourself. If you're telling yourself this is super hard and then you're making a decision on how fast to go based on how hard it feels, you're putting your finger on the scale to make it feel harder, seem harder than it really is. And so there are systematic ways of trying to identify those negative thoughts and then think of alternatives

that you replace them with. And you practice saying to yourself. So when you practice so that when you get to the halfway point of a marathon, you're going to say to yourself, not this is stupid. I can't keep going. You're going to say, it's tough, but this is how it's supposed to feel. I've trained for this. I can do this or whatever. It's very personal. People have to find the phrases that work for them. But that's been shown to have a measurable effect on performance. One of the things about physical endurance that really fascinates me is, I know I've heard the stories of, and you probably have too, of the four minute mile was never going to be broken. Nobody could run a mile in less than four minutes. And then when it happened, a million people did it.

I mean, it was like, isn't that weird that it seems like a stone wall that no one can cross over. And as soon as one person does, it's no big deal for lots of people. That's amazing. And it goes back to this idea of, you know, how do you know you can run for 11 minutes? Well, yesterday you ran for 10 minutes and we can extend that to how do i know how does a great runner know they can run a mile in 359 well they know somebody else ran a mile in four minutes so they think to themselves why not 359 what's the difference between you know it's one second and so if you

look at the progression of world records one one really interesting sort of detail is that horse racing and dog racing records have kind of plateaued since the 1950s. Now, there's lots of money in horse racing and dog racing, so people are spending all sorts of effort on nutrition and training and stuff. But horses and dogs fundamentally can only race against themselves in that moment or their competitors in that moment. Runners always know, or humans more generally, always know what any other human has done anywhere in the world. And so even though we may not be learning a lot of new stuff about nutrition or training or technology, human records keep inching down. Because as soon as someone does something, there's someone somewhere in the world who's thinking, well, if they can do that, I can do a little bit better. You know, I wonder if you want to push beyond what you think are your limits, what are the things that help people do that? Is it just willpower?

Is it, you know, frame of mind? Is it thinking about what you're going to have for dinner tonight? I mean, what helps people to push past what they think is the limit? One of the studies that really kind of opened my eyes was one that was done with cyclists who had to do an endurance test in a lab. And they flashed pictures of smiling or frowning faces on the wall in front of them. But the pictures were only up for 16 milliseconds at a time. So that's like a tenth of a blink. So the cyclists weren't even aware that these pictures were being shown. They were just unconsciously aware of them.

And when they were shown smiling faces, they lasted 12% longer in this endurance test than when they were shown frowning faces. So this is nice because it's not like, it's one thing to say, oh, you need to think positive thoughts or whatever. But it's hard to get over the placebo effect. You know you're being manipulated. In this case, the cyclist didn't know anything was happening, but just the flash of a smiling face put them in a more positive, optimistic frame of mind. And so when they're asking themselves, can I keep going for another five seconds on this test or 10 seconds, they're just a little bit more likely to say yes. So to me, that really kind of demonstrated

the idea that really the limits are in your brain. It's, it's, it's, it, your brain is deciding the point at which you say, I've had enough. What's so interesting to me is that your brain is deciding that based on something. And it often is the pain that you're feeling or the there's some other sense that's telling you probably for a very good reason as you pointed out earlier if you could just chase the leopard until you drop dead well that's not a good thing but but those those signals are there for a reason yeah you're right that the perception of effort, your perception of how hard something is, it's absolutely affected by all the sort of traditional physiological things that scientists have studied, whether it's your body temperature, your lactate levels, or your oxygen levels. Those all

contribute to your sense of effort, but they're not the only things that contribute. So there's other things like your mindset, your frame of mind, how optimistic or how positive or negative you're feeling, that also just contribute on the margins to that sense. So it's not that the body doesn't matter. The body absolutely matters in how your body is feeling, what your physiological status is. But it can also be manipulated by whether it's a smiling face or a cup of coffee.

A cup of coffee doesn't make you stronger and it doesn't give you more energy. What caffeine does is it interferes with a chemical called adenosine in the brain that's associated with mental fatigue and with your perception of effort. So caffeine just makes things feel easier. You're not stronger, you don't have more energy, but since it feels easier, you're able to keep doing things for longer or do it at a higher intensity. An observation I made pretty early in life related to this topic. When I was a young teenager, I learned how to water ski on Lake Rescue in Ludlow, Vermont. And I got pretty good at water skiing. And people would come up to the lake and they would want to try to water ski. And I learned something watching people trying to get up on two water skis.

Getting up on two water skis is relatively easy to do if you just keep your arms straight and let the boat pull you up. But people don't expect to get up the first or second time. They expect to fall. So I would watch people, the boat would pull them up, they'd get up and they'd have that like surprised look, the boat would pull them up, they'd get up and they'd have that like surprise look on their face that they got up and they'd immediately fall over because they expected to fall over. The mismatch between expectation and reality

really gets to the heart of what we're thinking about. And it's the same with, you know, what we've been talking about, about dealing with discomfort. One of the real problems is it's the same with what we've been talking about, about dealing with discomfort. One of the real problems is it's not the discomfort itself. It's did we expect it to feel that way? And so what the experienced athlete is able to do is start running and it feels hard. And that's exactly how they expected it. There's no surprise. They don't slow down because it feels exactly how they knew it was going to feel because they've done it so many times before and what the inexperienced athlete experiences is something there they weren't expecting

and that throws them off in the same way that suddenly finding oh my god I'm standing up on the water skis the surprise or the gap between expectation and reality I think is something that we all struggle with well it's so interesting and you've really confirmed it in our discussion here, that humans' abilities far exceed what they think their abilities are in so many areas, physical and mental. And I guess that those warning signs serve a purpose so we don't kill ourselves. But it is so interesting that we can do more if we just, I guess, if we just try. Like you said, it's perfectly logical. In 99%

of the situations in our lives, we should be very happy that that kind of warning system exists and it keeps us safe. But maybe there's 1% of the time when we want to push a little harder or keep going despite the warning signals. And it's nice to know that there is some wiggle room. If you're motivated and if you're willing to put up with a little discomfort, you can generally find a little bit more in the tank. Well, and I think that negative self-talk thing that you discussed is so important. I mean, my example of water skiers trying it out for the first time, I'm sure they tell themselves for the most part, this is never going to work, that I'm not going to get up. And, and so in, in order for their self-talk to match

reality, they don't, but it, that self-talk is so powerful. As a science journalist and a guy who I kind of pride myself on being a sort of just give me the facts kind of guy, I honestly had to struggle a little bit with that because it sounds like a sort of motivational self-help book of like, you know, if you believe you can achieve and it's all in your head, it sounds like too easy a message. But, you know, I've spent a decade looking at the science here and the truth is that is what the science says. It really is. Not that you can do anything, but that if you're telling yourself you can't do it, you're more likely to fail doing it. And if you're able to alter that message in your head, it absolutely alters the likelihood that you're going to succeed.

And so as cliched as it sounds, it really does matter how you're thinking about it. You know what you said that was really interesting about how dogs and horses, they run races, but they don't have the mental wherewithal to compare themselves to others, know that other dogs run faster than they do. And so it plateaus off. But the human mind is what keeps pushing us. And I think that's such an important part of this whole subject. Alex Hutchinson has been my guest.

He's a columnist for Outside Magazine. And his book is called Endure, Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Alex. Thanks for being here. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings

and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

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Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered why it is that you can feel tired even though you know you've had enough sleep? Or why you feel tired after talking to certain people, because those people just seem to drain you and make you feel exhausted. Well, it turns out that sleep does very little for that kind of tired, according to Sandra Dalton Smith, who is a board-certified internal medicine doctor and author of the book Sacred Rest, Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity. She says there are different kinds of rest, and we have to get them all. Rest is so much more than sleeping or not doing something, as she's about to explain.

Hi, Doctor. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So I think people believe that if you get enough sleep, that means you're rested, or at least if you get enough quality sleep, that means you're rested, or at least if you get enough quality sleep, that means you're rested. But you say rest is more than just sleep. When we talk about rest, the general population thinks about sleeping, or they think about just the cessation of activity, just not doing something. And really, rest is about restoration. It's those restorative processes and activities that you do to pour back into the parts of yourself that you deplete. Well, it's interesting because when I think about rest, when I rest, it's because I'm stopping

doing something. I need to rest because I've been doing that. Now I'm going to stop doing it. Now I'm resting. But you say there are several different kinds of rest and we need to be very intentional about getting these different kinds of rest. So let's dive in and talk about the different kinds of rest. Yes. Well, in my research, what we were working on is really the different types of rest. And out of that, we determined that there were seven main areas where we need rest on a consistent basis. So those seven areas included physical, mental, spiritual, emotional, social, sensory, and creative. And so just to put it into real practice, if we have someone who is getting decent sleep, they work a sedentary job, so they're not physically exerting themselves,

but they're tired every time they wake up in the morning, something is being drained, but it's not necessarily a physical part that's being drained. So if that person is working with others and having to deal socially with a lot of people or deal with a lot of other people's emotions, or if they're a problem solver, there's someone who's constantly thinking outside of the box, being innovative, always processing information. They could have a deficit in mental rest, emotional rest, or creative rest. So sleeping alone is not going to restore you in those areas. You have to get rest specific to the area of where you're having the

deficit. Well, as I said in the introduction, I find it interesting how some people can be so draining that having conversations with certain people, they're just exhausting. Yeah. So specifically, and what you're describing, I sum that up under the social rest aspect for the most part. Social rest is the rest we experience when we are around people that are life-giving, that are positive. The problem is most of the people we spend our time with are people who need things from us, who have demands upon us. So our clients are, honestly, our families, your spouse, your kids, they all need things from you. So they're pulling from you socially. So we have to be aware who are the people in our lives who don't need anything from us. Because most adults don't spend time with

those people. It's the ones who are always putting demands on you who are going to be the loudest, who are going to be forcing themselves upon your schedule. We have to make sure that we're actually allowing some time for those people who restore us. And we need times when we can let down our guards and be more emotionally open. So can you talk about the different kinds of deficits that we have and the remedies? Because I imagine that it's not all the same. When you're socially exhausted, it's different than when you're physically exhausted. So the remedy is probably different as well. Absolutely.

So I'll just kind of quickly run through each just to give a glimpse of what it can look like. So physical rest, we look at that primarily with sleeping, but physical rest includes both an active and a passive component. So the passive part of physical rest is sleeping and napping. The active part of those things we do that restore our circulation, that help our muscles be less tight and less tense. So that includes things like stretching or yoga. Then we have mental rest. Mental rest deals with clearing out our mental space, not having so many, I call them tabs in our brain open. You know, if we look at our computer screens, most of us have multiple tabs open at any given time. Our head space looks

very similar. Our multitasking lifestyle kind of creates a mental space that has all these tabs open at the same time. And we have to learn how do we focus our attention? How do we calm all of the noise that's in our headspace? Otherwise, you may find yourself laying down at night to go to sleep. You're tired. You want your brain to turn off, but it's got too many tabs that are open. And you're just going to sit there and ruminate over your to-do list or conversations you had. And you have to have a process of how to clear out that mental space. And that process looks like what? Well, one tactic that some people find a lot of benefit from can be something called brain dumping.

So rather than allow those thoughts just to ruminate in your mental space, if you write it down on something concrete, it allows the brain to release it. So it doesn't feel like it has to be responsible for holding on to that information. Okay. What else? The other type of rest is spiritual rest. Spiritual rest is different for each person, but at the core of it, it's basically this feeling of connectivity with others. And as connected with something bigger than yourself, a level of belonging and acceptance. Emotional rest is one that most people are not getting enough of. There should be some people in your life or at least one person in your life where you

feel the liberty to just be authentic, where you're not putting makeup on your emotions. You're not trying to make how you're feeling easy for other people to digest. And that person could be a therapist. It could be a coach, a counselor, a mentor. It could be a trusted family member or friend, but we all need someone where we're able to let our guard down and be just very truthful about what we're feeling and experiencing. Another type of rest is really sensory. I think it's the one that sometimes we aren't aware of how it's affecting us. Sensory rest is basically downgrading the level of sensory input that we're experiencing. So just being aware

of how much sensory input is involved within your day, the lights, the sounds, the number of hours on your gadgets, because excessive sensory input leads to sensory overload, which leads to agitation for most people. It's the same thing that happens to a two-year-old when they are at their birthday party. They're great when it starts. Two hours in, they're screaming their head off. Nobody did anything to them. They've just become sensory overloaded. Well, the same thing happens after you spend hours on, let's say, Zoom doing meetings, or you spend hours on your computer doing something, or if you're getting excessive numbers of notifications on your phone, you can find that you start getting more agitated as the day progresses,

and you may not really be aware why, or you're more anxious. You have a tendency to be a little bit more on edge. And so some simple ways to downgrade that would be looking at the number of notifications you're getting. Doesn't mean you have to turn off your social media forever, but you can take back over control over when you engage with it. So here's a question I've always wondered about, and that is, so I could be like feeling really wiped out, and I don't normally go through the list of different kinds of tired and deficits that you have,

but you know, the feeling of just feeling like, oh my God, what, I'm tired. And then I go exercise, which is the opposite of rest, and I feel great. Yes, but what is being restored? I love that question because I have a lot of runners who say, you know, is running rest for me? Running in itself is a physical activity. The physical part of you is not resting. But what I find is with a lot of runners, they get significant amounts of mental rest during that time because their focus is not on their brain noise, but on their breathing. Or they're

running outside. And if there's someone who uses a lot of creative energy in their work, whether they are someone who's problem solving, or there's someone who's having to be innovative and think outside of the box, being outside helps with creative rest. Creative rest is the rest we experience when we allow ourselves to appreciate beauty in whatever form that is. So that could be natural beauty like looking at the mountains or the flowers or the trees or the ocean, or it can be man-made beauty like looking at artwork or listening to music. And so, yes, you can be physically active in one of these areas and still be getting rest in another area. Because what I find is those people who are getting rest while running are not physically active in their day-to-day

job. That's not what's getting exhausted. What's getting exhausted is their brain. And so are there things you can do in more of a preventative way that if you did this differently, you wouldn't get so tired? Or must you just get tired and then restore? No, it's really best if you take a look at your day, do an assessment of what your day looks like. And for some people, it's very hard for them to determine where they're getting deficient in their rest. That's where restquiz.com came from. I had so many clients and patients who would say, I'm tired all the time, and I just can't seem to figure out which of determine where they're most efficient. Then they can look at their day and determine where am I pouring out in this area to become deficient.

Then you can do some small things and inject some small tactics in the middle of your day to help reverse that. Well, that is such a common complaint that people have that, you know, I sleep all night and I wake up exhausted. I don't feel rested. And, you know, I've had that plenty of times. And I just figure, well, when you first wake up, you're tired because you've been asleep for eight hours and that eventually you'll wake up. And so which is the, should you wake up and feel fabulous or should you wake up and feel fabulous, or should you wake up and feel a little tired in the first few minutes until you actually really wake up?

Well, the first few minutes you hop up, your body's circadian rhythm has to catch up with you. So what I usually say is once you are 30 minutes into your day, if you're already feeling like, where's the mega cup of coffee? I need that to jolt myself, my energy up. Then something else is fatigued in your life other than just sleep. But what about coffee, though? I mean, is that a problem or is that a help? I mean, millions and millions of people can't start their day without it. So it seems like it helps. But does it help? It's a crutch. It's like with anything else. If you're needing wine to get to sleep and you're

needing coffee to wake up, that has become your drug of choice, so to speak, to maintain a culture really that's against rest, that's against really getting to the place where you stay and restored, and you're able to naturally restore yourself in ways that doesn't require chemicals. Well, it almost sounds like if you were to summarize this, that if you do any of the things that you're talking about for too long, that you're going to get really exhausted. And the solution is to go do something else and not keep doing the same thing for so long that it just sucks the life out of you. Yeah.

For every activity you do that's draining you, there's a restorative activity that will pour back into that same bucket. So every one of us, we're using our gifts, our talents, our energy in different areas. And as we're pouring out in those areas, you need to be really intentional about making sure you're getting poured back into those same areas. And what about just the time spent? Because I find like when I'm really deep into work, I forget to take a break. I mean, I'll just work for hours and then realize, oh my God, it's been four hours and

I haven't even, you know, left the room. And my guess is that the work is probably not as good in hour four as it was in hour one. But I just forget to stop. This is where flow break cycles can be very beneficial for some people. Basically, it's you preset an amount of time that you are able to flow within the work that you do before you start getting suboptimal work. And so for some people, that might be 90 minutes, for others it might be two or three hours. But when you start feeling that decline

and you're basically just grinding out more productivity, that's a good time to inject flow break cycles. And it can be done as a, you can set something to kind of remind you. Oftentimes I like for people to be a little more self-aware and kind of in tune to how they're feeling so when you get to that place where you feel like you're just pushing through to just take a break for a moment but it does seem and I guess people believe that that ultimately sleep will fix

it because if you're sleeping you're not doing any of these things that are draining you because you're sleeping and that that should restore you regardless of what kind of tired you are. And that's where we are in trouble. That's why most of us are chronically tired and it's not getting fixed because we're getting plenty of sleep. We've spent thousands of dollars on pillows and mattresses and lights and glasses and all these things to try to help improve our sleep. But what we're not understanding is just stopping does not restore, does not actually fill back up the place that is empty. And that is what rest should be doing. It should be restoring the places where you've been depleted.

Is there kind of a general philosophy when you step back and look at all these types of tired that people get, is there kind of a, are we just moving too fast through our lives that that's what's causing this? Is this like a recent problem or, you know, did people 500 years ago have the same problem? I think the main issue we're seeing now is that we have a burnout culture and we're aware of that. We're aware that our lifestyles lend itself towards burnout. And what we're seeing is that because we have so many people who are high achievers, who are doers, who are the type who can push through and continue to function even in the middle of their burnout. And so that gets very confusing for a lot of people because we see people who are functioning, but they're still not really functioning at their highest capacity because they're functioning out of their exhaustion. They're not functioning out

of a good place. So they're producing, but what they're producing is not their best work because they are not at their best. Is it safe to say that sleep, though, is kind of the baseline, that even if you do these other things, if you're not getting enough sleep, then doing the first aid for these different types of tired isn't going to help if your body is physically exhausted because you only got two hours of sleep last night? Yes, sleep is a part of it. Sleep is, as I mentioned, passive physical rest. So it is one of the types of rest that people need. But what I'm finding is we're putting so much focus on sleep

and most people can't sleep well because their body is not rested well enough to get into the deeper levels of restorative non-REM sleep. If you're laying down trying to sleep and your mind's racing, then you're needing to focus on getting more mental rest so that your sleep can actually be deeper and your cerebral space and all the noise there isn't interfering with it. If you're sensory overloaded and you think your body's going to flip off like a light switch so that you can go to sleep, you're laying in the bed for eight hours, but you're not getting the sleep you could get

if you fixed some of these other and worked on some of these other areas of rest deficit first. Rest is really the bridge that takes us into the type of sleep that we want. Now what we're doing is we're taking pills and taking all these other things, trying to force our bodies to rest, rather than doing some of the work to evaluate where am I getting deficient, and then doing something to restore back those areas. When it comes to these different types of tired that you talk about, is it fairly easy to self-diagnose? Do people, when they hear this, say, oh, well, I have mental tired or I'm spiritually tired. Can we see it in ourselves? I find that a lot of people have a hard time describing the type of tired they are.

They're saying I'm tired, but they know that it's not physical. They just don't know what it is and they don't know how to verbalize it. And because they don't know how to verbalize it, And because they don't know how to verbalize it, they can't explain it to their own physicians or their own healthcare team. They can't explain it to their family or their spouses. So they don't know how to improve, and the people who care about them don't know how to further help them. Once you're able to give language to it, I find that that has been the biggest key for most people. If there's someone who is really using their skills to create and to answer questions, some of them have never thought about that being a creative rest deficit.

They know that they feel better in certain situations, but they don't understand why. They weren't able to give a language to that. So I find that has been what's helped most people. Well, I think everyone listening has got to be thinking to themselves, yeah, what she says makes sense, because how many of us have felt as if we have enough sleep and yet felt exhausted for whatever reason? And it's because there's different kinds of tired,

and I think understanding that goes a long way to fixing that. Dr. Sandra Dalton-Smith has been my guest. She's a board-certified internal medicine physician, and the name of her book is Sacred Rest. Recover your life, renew your energy, restore your sanity. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, doctor. Thanks so much. Have a great day. If you have allergies, you probably know it's that time of year again. So what really works to control allergy symptoms? Well, in a survey of 2,000 people, here's what they said.

Avoid the source. Just stay away from flowers, grass, or whatever it is that sets you off. Experts say allergen levels are highest between 5 a.m. and 10 a.m., so stay inside during that time if you can. Drugs seem to help. Among the allergy sufferers, the top choices were Claritin or Zyrtec or their generic equivalents. Doctors help too. 60% of allergy sufferers who saw a doctor were satisfied with

how they were managing their symptoms. That compares with only 40% of those who did not see a doctor first, but tried to manage the symptoms on their own. And one excellent tip is to shower and wash your hair before you go to bed. Otherwise, all the allergens you picked up on your body get deposited in your bed and on your pillow, and that can make sleeping very difficult. You can check how bad the pollen count is in your area day by day by going to the National Allergy Bureau website. That website is aaaai.org, and there's a link to that website in the show

notes. And that is something you should know. We need your review, preferably a five-star review. Take a moment and leave a review of this podcast on whatever platform you listen on. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions.

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