Oh so tired

I’ve been really tired lately and can’t seem to get on top of it. Yesterday I read an article about the work of the US physician Saundra Dalton-Smith, the author of a book called Sacred Rest. According to Dalton-Smith there are seven different types of rest we need:-

Physical Rest
Mental Rest
Emotional Rest
Spiritual Rest
Social Rest
Sensory Rest
Creative Rest

She has devised an online test that indicates which type of rest is most needed https://www.restquiz.com/quiz/rest-quiz-test/

I did the quiz and discovered I scored really high on everything. A couple of results were close to the level where they have a negative impact on all areas of life. When I read this alarm bells went off. In 2009 was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I spent most of 2009/10 in bed then began the long, slow climb back to health. I had been seeing doctors and therapists but nothing really shifted the condition. Towards the end of 2010 I decided to take charge of my own healing. Through a combination of herbal remedies, vitamins, meditation and self help modalities I made enough of a recovery to get back into the world. I would not say I made a complete recovery but at least I could function relatively well. Since then I’ve had bouts of extreme tiredness but have managed to pull myself together before things got really bad. Too think that I am now hovering on the brink of another collapse into exhaustion is beyond frightening.

According to Dalton-Smith the place to start the recovery is with the area that has the highest score. For me both the need for emotional rest and for social rest scored equal first. This puts me in a strange position for one of the steps in recovering from emotional exhaustion is to stop relating to toxic people while social rest is best dealt with by spending time with people who are emotionally supportive. As most of the people I currently relate to face-to-face fall into the toxic category and one of the symptoms of needing social rest is the inability to form new friendships I am faced with a quandary. Just how am I supposed to get this emotional and social rest?

The next area that rated high on the test was the need for creative rest. This was followed by sensory rest. While the need for spiritual and physical rest was quite high, the need for mental rest rated the lowest of all. At least my mind is still functioning ok!

Meditation kept coming up as a remedy across many of the categories so I thought I’d take a look at Dalton-Smith’s recommendations for spiritual healing. Here I discovered an extreme bias towards Christian religious practices. I was raised a Christian but no longer consider myself to be a practitioner of that religion. I am spiritually inclined but am not religious. I’ll keep doing my daily meditations but there’s no way I’m going back into a church. My god (though even the word god makes my hackles rise) is quantum rather than dogmatic.

I ‘m still processing just what the test results mean and just what I can do about them. At present my plan of action is similar to that which pulled me out of chronic fatigue. It involves daily walks in places that stimulate me (not around the block as so many people recommend but which I find deadly boring) and activities that stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system – music, art, meditation, relaxing, laughing, reading and watching movies that aren’t stressful. One idea I read for recovering from creative expression is to do creative activities you did back before life got so exhausting. To that end I’ve decided to combine the walking with photography like I used to do but somehow got out of the habit of with all the pressure I put on myself to write poetry for blog challenges while also doing a heap of difficult creative work offline.

Today I took myself to a local marina and wandered about taking photos of boats. I’d forgotten how much I used to enjoy doing this. The photos I took weren’t very good but here’s a few I like:-

I quite like the photo below but the composition isn’t quite right

and I like the idea of the one below but the photo didn’t turn out as well as I hoped.

There’s something about these last two photos that tells me my tiredness is getting in the way. There’s a level of anxiety to me right now that must be part of the tiredness. I’m finding it hard to relax and get into creative flow. Hopefully the rest processes will ease the tension and I’ll find my back to the flow zone. I probably won’t do blog challenges for a while because I find they make me tense at present. I worry whether I’ve done them right and obeyed all rules (I’ve had experiences in the past where I broke some challenge blogging rules and earned myself some severe criticism from the person who set the challenge – I don’t want to go through that again).

Thanks for reading. Hopefully I’ll find my way back to my own personal guiding light and get back into creative flow sometime in the next few months.

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