I spend a surprising amount of time, given my profession, telling people to rest. However, sometimes when we’re feeling low-energy and tired, we don’t actually need rest; we need to get moving.
I know we’ve all had days (or maybe even weeks!) where we’ve had a lot on our minds and we feel stressed out. We may have “treated” ourselves to less healthy foods as a stress management technique, or leaned on the caffeine to make up for the sleep we can’t seem to get. It is tempting, at that point, to crawl under the covers or cocoon ourselves on the couch, but if we want to get our minds and bodies back to life, we’d do better to throw on some shoes and go for a walk.
I am not saying that we shouldn’t sleep when we need to, or that we should go run a marathon to beat the fatigue. I AM saying that some moderate exercise and maybe a dose of fresh air is the kind of break we need even more. Cardio, once we get started, increases our energy level and boosts our mood. Our brains start to work better. Going outside literally changes our perspective (bonus points for going outside into a natural setting, where “forest bathing” can occur to soothe our souls).
It takes determination to get started when we feel blah or worse. We can talk ourselves into it by giving ourselves stupidly easy goals, like walking around the block one time. We may discover that that is enough; we’ve earned our nap at that point. We may, however, realize that we feel better already and we’d like to do another lap or two.
Go play.
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