The 6 Types of Rest (And Why Sleep Isn’t Enough)

Sam Vander Wielen: If you’re in that stage of business where you’re building and building and building, you’re posting, you’re selling, you’re tweaking, you’re trying to stay consistent, and you’re already tired, like I haven’t even arrived yet and I’m already exhausted, tired. You are not alone because what you want is pretty simple.

You want to grow a business that actually works. You want momentum, stability, more money, more breathing room. You wanna feel proud of what you’re building without it costing you your whole nervous system. But the way most people talk about rest makes it feel like something you earn later. Like rest is the prize you get after you hit the revenue goal, after things feel secure, after you’ve made it. And that creates this brutal loop where you keep pushing and pushing until you’re so burned out that you either resent your business or you need some huge, dramatic break you can’t afford to take.

In today’s episode, I want to reframe what rest can look like when you’re still in the building season. I’m going to walk you through how to give yourself permission to rest now, the different kinds of rest that actually matter because it’s not always sleep or rot.

How do weave tiny pockets of relief, play and creativity into your daily routine so you can keep growing your business without running yourself into the ground?

Welcome back to On Your Terms®. I’m your host, Sam Vander Wielen, and this is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses, and there is zero way to be profitable in your business if you are burnt out. So today’s conversation is such an important one.

Now, before we get into today’s episode, I’ve gotta pull the Tell Me More card of the week. And by the way, I wanna hear from you if you want this, because starting pretty soon, I’m gonna cut it if I don’t hear from you. So, all right, let’s pull a random card.

Today’s question is, if you could be famous for something, what would you want it to be? Okay. I know the exact answer to this. I was just talking about this when I was on the Aspen retreat for my mastermind last week. I want to figure out a way to get into the Olympics for some sport that’s like an unknown, like a, like people didn’t see it coming like something random and I, we were talking about it.

I was like, I’d be willing to move. I’ll change my citizenship. Like whatever I have to do, I just want to go to the Olympics. I think like in my mind, being an author and being an Olympian are just like the coolest things in the world and apparently I’ve already checked off the author thing, but I really wanna figure out a way to break into the Olympics.

And you know what’s so funny? You have to write me and tell me what sport you think I should try. But everybody at my mastermind was like, curling. Curling, like you should do curling. And I’m like, curling is not as easy. Curling is a sleeper difficult sport. And people think it’s easy. It is not.

My husband is from northern Wisconsin. I, they have curling clubs everywhere. It is not easy. It is very difficult. So I don’t know. Some people suggested that one where you like ski and then shoot stuff, but I’m not really into that. So I don’t, I don’t know. I’m still in the, I’m still in the thinking phase, so I’m open to suggestions, but that’s what I wanna be famous for.

Last year, 2025 was a really busy year full of so many exciting things, like all very good things,. My first book came out, it’s called When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy. It’s available wherever books are sold.

Um, but also I had a bunch of really big launches with the business. I got to speak at Craft and Commerce. So many cool things happened last year and the three years proceeding last year were all just pretty rough. Like it was still running my business and then writing my book, but I just, it was in general very rough because I had lost both of my parents and it was full of a lot of grief.

So as 2025 came to a close and 2026 was approaching, I knew I needed and wanted rest but I wasn’t necessarily thinking about this from like, I want a full on sabbatical. Like I want to stop working or like out of the business, right?

For one, I would need to and want to plan that much more and like much more in advance, right? So that’s not something in, in an ideal scenario, you don’t just like walk out on your business for a while, um, at the drop of a hat.

Two, this is like always hard for people to understand or I don’t know, maybe I’m just bad at articulating it, but I really love what I do and even more so I actually really love the tasks that I get to do in my business.

Like recording this podcast episode, writing my newsletter, my weekly newsletter called Sam’s Sidebar, you know, writing on my Substack Beyond Business, like posting on Instagram, whatever it is, like whatever we get to do. I really, really enjoy that. Like I’ve definitely found my, my home in terms of like what I think I was meant to do on this Earth in terms of how I get to do it.

And maybe for anybody else who’s listening who’s worked in corporate in the past, like it’s just a bit of a, I don’t know. Like I feel so much like lightness and freedom, having found something that feels so much more fun than, you know, what I felt as a corporate attorney that that was going to be the rest of my life, and I was very, very worried about what that life was going to look like so sitting here. Almost 10 years later, I’m like, this is what I get to do for a living, and I get paid for it? Like, this is great. Right? So I really, really love what I do, and I enjoy working, like working doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It’s, there’s just, just such a balance with everything, right? But I love working.

And three, I, I really so like wholeheartedly believe that not everything in life needs to be so black and white. In fact, I work really hard too try to see where I’m making things black and white, and where other people are seeing things as black and white, and there’s a lot between working too much and not working at all.

Having your life be defined by work. Not having any like purpose or drive being too wrapped up in your business or avoiding your business, like there’s so much in between, right?

There are so many ways to just change how you work, your relationship to work, even what you work on, like maybe your current business or like the individual things that you get to work on in your business right now, don’t make you happy. You have the ability. That’s the beautiful thing about owning your own business is like the, the man is not controlling you. You actually get to decide. So make sure that you’re taking advantage of it.

And the fourth thing and the fourth kind of reason that I wasn’t like looking for sabbatical like full on out of my business this year. Is that I’ve saved and saved, and saved, and saved. I’ve been very, very good about saving my business money. The business profits we’re very profitable. Every year I save it. I stash it away. I don’t spend on anything. I am not sure though what I want to do with it ultimately, and I like keeping a nice big nest egg. For me and for the team, to be honest, it’s always makes me feel more comfortable and I hope it puts the team at ease too. That there’s so much stored up that if we hit a quote unquote rough winter, we’re going to be okay. Like we’ve stored up enough nuts for a long, long time, we’re going to be okay. And it makes me feel better. It makes them feel better.

It also gives us a lot of freedom and flexibility, and it allows me to maintain this like very open and curious mindset as an entrepreneur to be like, I have this idea, I wanna run with this or like, I wanna try this thing with my next promo and like, it’s okay if that costs me some money. And there’s not a huge ROI on that. That’s okay. I have saved up enough to be able to afford that.

Also, the truth of it is that I have a lot of people relying on me and like, maybe that’s just a story that I, I’ve kind of conjured up. Like I have a team, I have contractors, I have people relying on me and my business, also my customers, right? Relying on me. So it’s, there’s just like a lot of things to consider before you just like, I’m outta here. I’m not, you know, I’m taking a full on sabbatical.

I needed a different kind of rest this year. I needed rest, honestly, from all of the mental and emotional pressure that I put on myself. No one else was doing this to me but me, right? This was my own thing. I needed that kind of rest. That became really apparent to me because I spent all of 2025 with my hands death, gripping this like, um, what’s next idea? Like, what’s gonna come after this book? Do I wanna write another book? If so, what’s it about? Like, what’s my thing? What do I wanna be? Uh, like what do I wanna focus on? What do I wanna write about? What do I wanna be known for?

Should I sell something else? I was just so death gripping, like this idea, I don’t know how else to put it. Putting so much pressure on having that figured out. That I think the amount of pressure that I was actually putting on myself was hindering me ever being able to come up with it. And so it was just becoming more and more apparent as 2025 ended that I needed to, like, something needed to give, I needed to like surrender.

That was the word that I kinda kept coming back to, like loosening the grip, kind of visualizing that idea of just like letting it go. And as I started to do that, what I realized was the kind of rest that was really calling to me for this year is that I needed more play. I needed more joy in my life. I needed creativity specifically like expressive, expressive creativity, but also creativity and creating things, even if it was for kind of related to business, but also outside of the business of things that I don’t care about how they go.

How well I do at it or how well like, uh, consumed it is, right? Like, so if I write a substack post for fun, like working on this idea that it’s okay if I wrote this thing for me, it’s okay if I just like wrote this thing because it was a really like big message on my heart that I felt like I needed to get out there.

And I just came off a mastermind call before recording this episode where we were talking as a group about how difficult it is to create without having all these like, but how does this, like how does this serve the audience? And what if people don’t like it, and what if it doesn’t resonate?

And what if I’m in a different place in my life or my business than my audience is? So then it’s not that helpful to them. And everybody was just like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who are you creating for? Because right now in this, exploration phase you’ve gotta create for yourself. It’s really, really important.

So I’m kind of undoing and like untangling that mindset that I have developed as a business owner over this many years of the, the fact that everything has to be for performance.

Everything has to be something that other people see. Everything has to be something other people like and that they find some use in it, right? I’m like addicted to being helpful and I don’t see myself being valuable or worthy if I’m not helping other people.

So that’s not a great thing for your creativity and that’s, that was more of what I felt called to this year. It was like, that’s what I want more of free creativity. That’s not tied to performance. Maybe other people don’t see it. If it’s something for public consumption, I don’t care how it goes, that kind of stuff.

So all of that led me to writing a post on my substack. So I have a substack called Beyond Business, which is where I write about building a life beyond business, building a life after you’ve built a multi seven figure business and kinda lived a lot of your at least career on social media and like what I’m doing off offline.

And I wrote this post there about my, what I was calling my entrepreneurial gap year, like how I was considering 2026 to be that. And it was so interesting ’cause then people started writing me and they started saying like things like, oh, congrats on like the year off. Or like, it’s cool you’re not working this year. And I was like, did I say something like I, or I was like, maybe the team, created a post that then like gave that. I’m like, I don’t know where everybody’s getting this idea.

And then somebody even DMed me and they kind of you know, chatted me, I think like in good fun, but they were, you know, taking a dig per ush and they were saying like, how’s the whole thing going with rest? Like, it doesn’t look like you’re resting very much. And I think this was like on the heels of me saying I maybe was like sharing my workout or something, which I’ve done for a million years, so it’s nothing new.

And I thought like, oh, this is so interesting. First of all, it was just interesting off the bat because I was like. That to me at least, is not what a gap year is like when you think about people who take a gap year, like I remember when I was in Israel, I met a bunch of Australian kids that were on their gap year ’cause it’s very, very common in Australia, which it’s not, you know, not as common here in the US but they were on their gap year and this gap year was just exploration, like that’s what I would call it. They were just traveling the world, meeting new people, like getting to see new cultures, ex having all these incredible experiences. Kind of all without a purpose. Like they weren’t like, I’m doing this so that I can do X. Like there wasn’t an outcome, I guess, that they were wanting.

The outcome was like, I wonder what will happen at the end of this year. Like I wonder what my takeaway was. Like they were just doing it for the experience. And so for me, this is how I’ve always thought about gap year. Gap year, is synonymous in my mind with exploration and experimentation and experiences.

And so that’s really how I meant it. So I don’t know. I guess on the one hand I was like, oh, that’s interesting that also as entrepreneurs, sometimes we can be so like, oh, you’re working or you’re not working right? It’s like so black and white.

The other thing that I thought was really interesting, especially when it came to like the dig about me not resting and how like I’m not resting ’cause I’m still exercising or something like that. Is that i, I learned this a long time ago, and I guess I didn’t realize how impactful it was on me until some of these comments started rolling in, but this is the idea that rest comes in many forms . There are many, many different types of rest, all of which we’re gonna talk about today. And it might look differently for different people at different times, right? Like everybody needs a different kind of rest at a different time.

And I think it’s also an important part of the conversation ’cause kind of tied in together with this like whole black and white. Like you’re either working or you’re like completely on sabbatical thing. It’s also this idea that you can integrate rest as part of growing your business, you don’t have to be off work completely outta your business, completely off of social media completely in order to integrate rest.

I basically kind of did it last summer, like I kind of do. Again, I’m not a super black and white person, so like I did this a bit last summer where I was like, I’m kind of on sabbatical. But I took some important meetings, I recorded my content ahead of time. I batched like, so things were still rolling out.

, I checked in with the team, so like I wasn’t like a nobody contact me. I’m off for three months thing, which I also think could be great. Like that sounds wonderful, but that’s also like the type that has worked for me, right? And so I just realized that this was worth a bigger conversation about how we can integrate rest so that we don’t get to the point that we’re so burnt out that you need to take months and years off your business. Or you don’t need to be like, I’m leaving social media only to return three months later, which is like typically what happens when people make these big announcements.

I also, just being practical, I imagine that a lot of you listening aren’t in a position in your life maybe financially yet, or maybe like your business isn’t, uh, like mature and set enough that you can just be like, peace out. My business will run on its own. You might not have a team, right? Which I’m so fortunate to be like, if I really did need to peace out, which I did when. When my parents died, like my team is so good and, and so like set in place that they were able to go and do what they needed to do and literally nothing changed.

The sales didn’t change, nothing changed. They really don’t need me, honestly. So I, if they could clone me and get like an AI version of me, they would, they would be fine.

So I thought it’d be helpful for us to talk about three main things today. First of all, this idea around permission to rest at any time. Second is I wanna go through all the different kinds of rest, and these are not ones that I just came up on my own. These are from the American Psychological Association,. And then I also want to talk about how we need to be flexible with rest because rest and the kind of rest we need changes during life’s different seasons.

First up, let’s talk about permission to rest at any time. So I just first and foremost wanna give you permission that you don’t have to wait until your business is successful to integrate things like rest or play or fun or creativity for creativity’s sake or starting a substack. ’cause you have like a Lego hobby on the side and it has nothing to do with your business and you just wanna write about it.

Like you can do any of these things before your business is a six figure business, a seven figure. It doesn’t have to have any figures after it. I think this is something really important to do along the way. This is not something that’s on the other side of success. It’s something that will actually contribute to your success. Like if I could get anything across you today, it’s that rest will be the thing that will contribute to your success in the long run.

And once your business gets stable, once your business hits six figures, seven figures, a bajillion figures, however many figures you want. I have bad news for you. I think it actually gets harder to rest.

Like this idea that when you get to have a business my size or bigger than my size, , that you’re all of a sudden gonna be blessed with rest. No, it, first of all, you have to build the skill of understanding how to rest. You will never get there if you’re so burnt out. Like that’s a really important thing, right?

And also you’re always going to have more and more stuff. Like, it would be easy for me now to be like, well, I’ve got all these people relying on me and like I haven’t, you know, posted on Instagram as much as I used to and all like, it just, you start to create more stories as things go along about what’s required and what you do, what you used to do, and letting certain things go.

It gets harder and harder to delegate and let go of things. So yeah, it’s not something that’s just gonna magically like hit you or be delivered to you when you get successful. This is literally why I name my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy because it’s such a common thing that we all do, that we make up all these stories along the way of like, well, when my business finally gets successful, I’ll stop checking my phone at 10:00 PM or like, you know, when my business gets successful and it makes money, then I’ll be happy, I’ll be, I’ll feel like fulfilled and worthy of success.

No. In fact, what most of the time what happens is that you achieve a lot of success and you still have whatever mindset issue you had before.

So I really want us to think about building these rest skills now, and I want us to start integrating rest with work, right? If you’re in a position of building, great, these things can go together. They don’t have to be one or the other.

Now the second thing we’re gonna talk about today is that there are different kinds of rest. I’m gonna link down below in the show notes, but, I, I had heard first about this concept through one of my favorite Susbstacker’s, Leslie Stephens. She has this great substack called morning person. I can leave a link down to that below and also to the specific article I’m talking about where she talked about rest.

And Leslie was kind of the first person that opened my eyes to this idea about the kind of rest, , that she needed she just went back to grad school and became a therapist and so she was talking about like the different kinds of rest she needed. And then she was talking about how she accidentally mistook, like resting with this idea that she had to be rotting essentially.

Like, so she would say, she, I remember she wrote this post on Substack about how she felt like she needed rest. So she laid around on the couch and she binge watched Netflix and she’s like, why don’t I feel any better?

Because she actually didn’t need that kind of rest. But also, she would even talk about sometimes how she would do that like she would quote unquote rot and lay on the couch, , or binge some series or whatever. And how she had noticed that she was so uncomfortable, even with that kind of rest, that she’d pick up her phone or start reading a book or like start multitasking, right?

So then even in that rotting rest, she wasn’t actually letting herself rest.

So this is sort of where my mind was started to be open to this idea, which then led me to a little bit of digging and looking at the American Psychological Association. ’cause I was like, is this concept of there being multiple kinds of rest, uh, an actual thing?

Or is this something like we’re just, you know, talking about? So it turns out it is. And there are many, many different kinds of rest. And one of the things I think in order for us to start off with, we have to talk about like, how do you actually slow down enough? And get in touch with what kind of rest you really need.

So I think over time I’ve gotten faster with this where I’m like, oh, I feel it happening again. Like I’m doing the thing again where I’m booking myself too much, or I am not leaving myself enough time between things. So I feel rushed and hurried. Or I can tell like I get to the end of a day and I’m just so burnt out that I’m like, oh, I see that.

Like when I have days like. X. That’s what ends up happening. Like I, I feel like this at night, so you get better over time. But I would encourage you now to really pause and check in with yourself and see really what’s coming up for you. Like does it feel like one of these types of rest is really calling out to you that we’re gonna talk about today?

So the first one is the, is the one I’ve hinted at many times throughout the episode already, but like the more, I guess, obvious one or the one that everybody assumes that you should do when you feel like you need rest, which is physical, right? And physical rest can look like sleeping, napping, you know, the, uh, even things like getting a massage can make you feel relaxed, right?

Or you fall asleep like I do. . Or even maybe things like mobility and stretching, because if you’re somebody like me who likes to move and exercise, then the kind of rest you might need might be restorative movement, not more movement.

The second kind of rest is mental rest. To me, this is one of the big, big ones that I need this one and the next one. Um, so mental rest is when it really comes up when you’re feeling mentally drained. I think we can all relate to that when you’ve just gotten to the end of a day where you’re like staring at the ceiling and you like, can’t move.

It’s really about giving your brain a chance to refuel. I kind of think of it as like resorting the files, like letting the files like settle and clearing out some files, and then like allowing myself to then build back up again. At least for me, some of the ways that I tackle mental rest when I need it is a lot of my mindfulness practices.

I am obsessed with meditation. I was never a meditation person, honestly until I got into Peloton and I love Peloton so much. On Pelotons app, they have really great guided meditations. I personally prefer guided meditations, and I like doing their morning meditation because it has this really great visualization for your day and how you want your day to feel, and then like how you envision things throughout the day going based on how you want to feel in it.

And then at night I do the nighttime meditation, like a sleep meditation, and I think the cool thing for me about having built a meditation practice is that I’ve noticed that it’s not what I do in those sessions. I actually, after doing it enough times, started to notice when I’m out and about I can tell when I’m clenching my jaw or when I’m taking really shallow breaths or when I do feel really overstimulated. I think it was yesterday I felt really like overstimulated about something and I just paused and I took three really deep cleansing breaths like I, I, I’ve learned, I feel like I’ve like learned how to integrate it throughout the day, which has been a really, really huge plus for me.

Mental rest for me has also looked like doing less at once. So I used to wear my, uh, productivity badge, like on my chest, you know, like, oh, I can do a hundred things at one time, like, juggle and record a podcast episode and like do all this other stuff. Um, it’s not that great for your brain and it, it started to take a toll on my brain.

So I really came up with this little, like one task at a time mantra. It’s probably the thing I have to call myself out on the most, even down to like, I will be sitting, watching TV and then I’ll be grab, I’ll grab my iPad and like pull up Substack. ’cause I’m like, oh, I wanna read people’s Substack and I’m like, which one of these two things do I wanna do?

Do I wanna watch TV or do I wanna read Substack if it’s, I turned the TV off, I also stopped like playing background music a lot of times, like even just little things like that closing out of, literally closing out of all the tabs that I have both literally and figuratively.

The next kind of rest is emotional, and for me, this has to do with expression and processing emotions that you maybe haven’t been able to, haven’t had the time, energy spaciousness for whatever reason to process. I’ve learned a lot in therapy, uh, going to so much therapy over like the grief of losing my parents about how at some point emotions like, get stuck like, I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s like they get, it’s like there’s like a traffic jam in your chest, right? And it’s like a hundred car pile up of all these emotions. And my therapist always says emotions need motion. So if you don’t deal with it, then you don’t process it and at some point you get to the point of not just processing internally, like through things like therapy and meditation, you get to the point where you need to process emotions by expression. You actually need to move them out of you, right? And it’s like it has to go somewhere. It’s like that pile up. You need to have like a tow truck come and start towing away like one car at a time.

So a lot of that for me, uh, you know, I think about this in terms of creativity, doing something that feels expressive to you. I think that’s tapping into what we talked about earlier of like doing some creative expression that is not for your business, that is not for monetary gain. Or that’s not for like, oh, I hope I get a ton of followers on Patreon by me writing here, or like, whatever it is. But the point is that you’re doing this for the purpose of actually just moving something through and expressing whatever is on your heart on a more practical level, a lot of the times I think about emotional rest as setting boundaries with people, then actually sticking to it, um, limiting time with people who maybe just don’t make you feel that great or make you feel bad and spending more time with people who fill you up. I think a lot of times we’ll talk about like cutting people out who are toxic or something like that, I think it’s even more important to talk about like who, who are you replacing it with? Like who are you actually spending your time with?

Where is your community? How is that community supporting you or not? Is that a place in your life where you need rest in a sense that it’s causing you a lot of angst, like the people you spend time with, and then you don’t have people who make you feel restored?

Maybe this is just me, but social media is one of the biggest things that destroys this category that we are talking about. So just the other morning, I, and I don’t typically look at social too early, but just the other morning, for whatever reason, I did and I opened up social media and I saw I saw like all these posts ranging from like a 5-year-old who got taken by ICE. And so I was like outraged to like, um, somebody saying that they had just gotten this like huge book deal.

So then all of a sudden I was feeling jealous and then like just seeing somebody else who was like talking about how they had secured already like 10 speaking gigs this year. And I’m like, I’m not doing speaking gigs this year. Which by the way, I’ve chosen to do, but I’m like still now like, wait, should I be doing that? I’m behind and then I’m gonna be left behind. I saw so many things, like my, my emotions were everywhere from like jealous to angry, to sad, to annoyed, to frustrated, all the things. And I came out of it just like a mess, like not confident, already in a bad mood. And I had planned to sit down and write something creative, and now I felt all messed up.

Like I couldn’t, I couldn’t sit down and just move this through me because now it was like, I don’t know, whatever I wanted to express had kind of gotten like clouded in a way.

So that’s a, I guess an example of where we talked about earlier of being checking in with yourself, right? Like so at the end of that whole scenario, that very quick spiral for me, I was like, oh yeah, this is what happens when I look at social before I create.

I have a pretty good rule with myself that I like to create before I’m consuming, and this is why. And you don’t need to beat yourself up about it. It’s just like, oh, I notice that when I expose myself to this, I get really, uh, out of sorts. I don’t feel my best, and I certainly don’t feel creative. So therefore, I am not going to do this in the future like I’m honoring my boundaries and my needs.

The next kind of rest is social rest. , I’m sure all the introverts listening are like, thank God this is my excuse to never leave the house again. But this is not just for introverts. I consider myself to be an ambivert. , Which basically means you have a bit of both. , I always talk about this on social, and then people ask me like, what does that mean?

So it’s, it’s like you’re half and half introvert, extrovert. I don’t know what. Exact ratio I am, but I’m a bit of both. And essentially for me, that means that I am totally comfortable being in social situations, meeting new people, making conversation. Yes, I don’t even care about small talk doesn’t bother me.

What does bother me is if I do all of that and then never have alone time. So it’s really important to me to balance both of those out. Like so a lot of times when I look at my weekend even, I’ll be like, oh, we have this kind of like one social thing. So then I know I want one of those weekend nights to be free of that because I like to have time to just be quiet or to do something I wanna do, and that’s it.

Even in the mastermind that I’m in, like we were away last week and I’ve gotten better with as much, especially as much like business travel as I’ve done in the last couple of years, that I will steal away and go be by myself. Even though I, the, the extrovert in me feels so much fomo of like in our mastermind, everybody was sitting around the fire and like they had all pulled up these big chairs and it was just like so fun and they’re the best people. And so I just wanted to sit and talk to them more. And I was like, I know if I don’t take like 15 minutes to myself right now, we have a dinner scheduled after this. Like by the dinner I’m gonna be just staring into the barbecue. So I went and took 15 minutes, kind of reset and went from there.

The next kind of rest is sensory rest, which I can’t tell you how much I have come to need sensory rest. I don’t know what has happened to me, but I get like, like porky pig. I get like very overstimulated by a lot of noise about a lot of like, yeah, just like a lot of sound or a lot of social interaction. Like I just get so much more easily overwhelmed in those scenarios, and I definitely notice this a lot with social.

The world is so loud and social media, oh my God. To me, it just feels like someone’s taking a dial on a boombox and just like, like going all the way up. It’s so much, and you have to remember with what we all do. We are taking in more of this than probably the average person. You know, you’re going between things like Instagram or Substack or TikTok or your podcast, YouTube, your clients, your email, Asana, Clickup, like it’s just so much.

We take in so much. So personally, I do five minute stare breaks. This has worked really well for me. Actually, when I notice that I’m getting really overwhelmed, I will literally just lay on the ground in my office and stare out the window. , And there’s some, something about that that just kind of gives you a mental reset.

I also do little things like if, you know you’re already gonna have a day of like a lot of meetings or, , you’re creating a lot of content or something like this, I drive without my music on, uh, in the car. I drive in complete silence. I do this all the time. Not every moment needs to be fulfilled with like, learning how to make yourself or your life better, or your money better, or your business better. It’s okay. I shower in silence. I take a silent bath. Like anything that you can do to just turn down the noise on the overstimulation.

Now, at least the last one we’re gonna talk about today is creative rest and creative rest is when you really need to engage in creative hobbies, just for fun, not for performance. What a concept, right? This is new to me. I didn’t know this was a thing people did. Turns out you’re supposed to do things for fun.

That don’t have to do with growing your business. Who knew? So it used to be foreign to me. Not anymore. I’m getting much better at this. But, you know, doing things like taking a pottery class, just ’cause you’ve always wondered what the deal is with pottery or joining a garden club, painting for fun, learning how to doodle, right? Maybe you take on more cooking or baking projects you like, finally start working on that skill that you’ve always wished you were better at.

The other day I was telling somebody about how I really want to do a triathlon and that I’m sick of talking about this because I’ve been saying for years, like actually the year before, like months before I had brain surgery, I didn’t know I was going to have brain surgery, and so I was training for Amer uh, triathlon. Then I had the brain surgery obviously that went out the window for a while, but now since I’ve been better, I’ve been telling people for years like, oh, I’m gonna do a triathlon. And then lately I’m like, I’m done talking about this. I wanna go do this. And I said this to someone the other day and they said, oh, I didn’t know that you like to swim. And I said, oh no, I’ve never been swimming. I dunno how to swim. And they were like, wait, you wanna do a triathlon? You don’t know how to swim. I said the fact that I don’t know how to swim. In fact, back the train up, I am terrified to swim in the open water. I’m gonna get eaten by a shark. You heard it here first.

I’m terrified to get eaten by a shark or like caught up in a fishnet or a number of other scenarios I’ve already played out in my mind or kicked in the face. That’s my real fear is like, I’ve heard with triathlons, you get kicked in the face and I’m like, I can’t. I can’t do it. So. I’m ter even just talking about it makes me sick and I’m so terrified of it.

That is why I actually want to do it ’cause I’m afraid to do it. So like, what a concept. Maybe we can attack something that it’s like the fact that this thing scares me and you know, I’m not encouraging anyone to go out and do something irresponsible. Like swimming is not gonna kill me. It’s, and training for it, I think is actually very healthy. It’s such a great way to move your body and like low impact and everything. My nephew who has hemophilia has become like an amazing little swimmer ’cause it’s the only, uh, sport he can do, you know, no contact and everything. So, yeah, it’s so, it’s so good for you. So like, there’s nothing bad about swimming and the fact that it scares me. Is motivation to me to be like, I, I think it’s so good to be outside your comfort zone to a point. Um, as long as things are safe and maybe that’s a little bit of what my brain needs because I’m so used to, first of all, only doing things I’m good at, , or doing things that are comfortable and certain, and I kind of like already know what the outcome is going to be.

And it’s just so good to be a beginner at something. Getting out of your head and being like, I have no idea. It might take me three hours to swim from the shore of Long Island to the buoy that we gotta swim to and back. Like maybe it will. I saw the cutoff time and I was like, I might not make that time. It’s okay. It would be, it would be fun. Right? And like I will still learn something, , in the long run.

I’m also starting to take these little like artist dates. This is something from, uh, the Artist’s Way. If any of you have read the book or ever done the Artist’s Way. , But this is something that she encourages you to do on top of, uh, the daily morning pages.

She encourages you to take these weekly artist dates, which are just like going somewhere fun, having fun, visiting, inspiring places. Being around art I think really helps, um, for me personally, being around other creative people, creative things, things that people have created really helps me even just like switching up my work environment.

Yesterday I went into the Hamptons and like worked from a little coffee shop that had really good donuts and then, um, I went to the beach and walked around. It was like 16 degrees. It was like 50 mile an hour winds. It was horrible, but beautiful at the same time.

Everyone else was like, I’m not, I’m not doing this. But me and this one, Sandpiper, we were, we were there on the beach, on Main Beach in East Hampton in my favorite place. And um, yeah, it went to my favorite bookstore, like just mixing it up honestly. And like you, this was a great example where it doesn’t have to be so black and white. I went there and I worked and I went and walked around and just tried to like switch up my environment.

Last but not least, I wanna talk about how rest also changes with the seasons. And so we need different kinds of rest at different times. I mean, heck, I feel like on every different day I kind of need, like yesterday I needed like creativity and play. , Today I had like a lot of physical energy, so I like went and did a run. Like it just is very, it. I’m okay with it also being day to day or season to season. Sometimes it’s play, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s creativity. Sometimes it can even be rot. Sometimes it’s just easing up on how much you’re taking on at once or maybe letting go of something like mentally letting yourself chill a little bit.

Maybe even letting go of something that you’re strangling, like what I was strangling last year, to like have all the answers and know how everything’s going to go or stop strangling a decision or an outcome you want that’s not happening right now and honor the kind of rest that you actually need.

So I’m really curious to hear from you what type of rest after having listened to this, do you need in this season? And are there like little ways that you’ve thought of as you’ve gone along with this episode where you’re like, oh yeah, I could do that, or I could integrate some of that pretty easily? I would love to hear from you. So hit reply on any of my emails that you get from me or DM me on Instagram at sam vander wielen, and please let me know. I absolutely love hearing from you and that you listen to the podcast. And I wanna know what type of rest you need in this season.

And before you go, if you’re building a business and a life, then you’ll wanna check out my legal resources, like my free legal class, Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow your Online Business. I’ll leave the link down in the show notes or sign up for my free weekly newsletter that 56,000 of your online business peers get already called Sam’s Sidebar, also linked in the show notes.

And as we talked about, I write my personal essays over on Substack about building a life beyond business. So we’ll definitely make sure we link that in the show notes as well. With that, I’ll chat with you next week. Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.