Course Excerpt: Wellness for Academic Leaders

Rest is the work we do to restore–to come back to wholeness. During the Academic year, it’s all too common for Academic Leaders to decide they can put their own rest on hold until they solve others’ problems. Missing out on rest, however, can start to chip away at your ability to attend to details, encode memories, and think creatively. Summer is the perfect time to consider your restful practices: what they are, why they matter, and how you can make more time for them. In this excerpt from our course, Wellness for Academic Leaders, we share strategies and practices that can help you to restore and retain energy. Want to learn more? Wellness for Academic Leaders launches June 12. Registration is included in Association membership. Learn more about membership.

Did you know there is more than one form of rest? As a society we conflate sleep with rest, but sleep alone can't always restore us to the point that we feel rested. According to physician Saundra Dalton-Smith, M.D., rest should equal restoration in seven key areas of your life:

• Physical

• Mental 

• Emotional

• Social

• Sensory

• Creative 

• Spiritual 

If you are getting enough sleep and still feel exhausted, you may potentially be struggling with a rest deficit. Being deprived of sleep and rest takes a toll on the body physically and emotionally. This could show up as decreased attention, impaired memory, slowed processing and retention, worsened sequential thinking, and reduced creativity. 

Rest doesn’t require a long vacation–it just means finding moments for “restorative, restful activities in the middle of a busy day,” says Dalton-Smith. “It’s those little things that we do to keep pushing us back to a place of restoration, and a place of feeling better in our bodies.”