[00:00:00] When we get overly busy, the things that are truly life-giving to our soul are the first to go rather than our first to go to. Welcome back to another episode of the Milspouse Mastermind Show. Today, we’re digging into something that we desperately all need, but most of us fail to prioritize so often it’s this thing we make a nice to have and the first to go, rather than the starting point for how we build our lives and our schedules.

It’s indicative that our priorities are probably out of order. But we’re not sure what to do about it or how to fix it. It’s something that we need to talk about if we truly want to live a life of purpose of joy, of impact, and yes, even happiness today, we’re talking all about rest.

Now, before we dive into talking about rest, I want to remind you about this concept that I call the growth wheel. It’s basically a guide for all the various components of our lives, our health, our relationships, and our contribution. And when we have a healthy balance of all of these different components. Actually helps us become the healthiest version of ourselves and allows us to show up and serve others in the way that we were meant to show up.

[00:02:32] I created a free assessment that helps you walk through each of these areas of our lives. So you can see how you’re doing, where you’re struggling and what you need to focus on to help you become who you were meant to be. This free assessment is available. You can find it on our show notes or by going to milspousemastermind.com/growthwheel.

[00:02:59] All right. So let’s dive into this concept of rest. It is the foundation that allows us to pursue our dreams and purposes from a place of health and wholeness, rather than a place of striving. Let’s talk about how I got to this idea and this concept of rest. I think I mentioned a few episodes back that my word for 2021 is rest, and it’s not a word of the year that I was really excited about having when you’re in this process of trying to figure out what your word of the year is going to be.

[00:03:40] You want it to be something that’s meaningful and honestly I wanted a word that was a little more exciting and accomplishment driven, but this was the word that I really needed for this year. When you are building a business, there is a certain amount of time and energy and effort that goes into getting something off the ground.

[00:04:06] There is always something that needs to be done. It takes a certain amount of time to build all the systems and the structures in place to help your business run. And especially as a solopreneur or somebody starting out there is a definite correlation between how much time you put into something and what you get from it.

[00:04:28] There’s always something more that can be done that needs to be done and that you will probably see more reward, more progress, more results. Especially in the beginning, the more work you put into it. And so it’s so easy for us to get wrapped into this idea of hustle and just, you need to be doing all the things.

[00:04:50] When I built my first business, I was growing it and doing great things with it. But I was putting in 70 hours a week. Now at the time I did not have any kids, but I also realized that that was not sustainable, that it was not going to lead me to a place of healthy relationships with my spouse, with my friends, with those I was in community and it was not helping me ultimately show up as the person I wanted to be.

[00:05:21] So as I have been building this podcast and putting together ideas for how I want to help you in life and business, I want to prioritize rest in my own life so that I don’t get caught up in that hustle. And my hope is that as I am setting that example and talking about why we need to operate from a place of rest, it’s going to help you avoid stepping into that place of hustle and hurry as.

[00:05:55] The more that I’ve dug into this concept. The more that I’ve realized that this is really foundational for all of our lives, and it’s incredibly difficult to implement because we live in a culture that is based on hustle and hurry and accomplishment. And. Although, there are so many studies out there that show us that rest is important and that we are more productive when we rest that we respond better, that we are just emotionally healthier.

[00:06:30] When we are operating out of a place of rest. It’s not something that we know or find easy to implement in our day to day. My first step towards this journey of rest was I think last summer I read this book called Rhythms of Renewal: Trading Stress and Anxiety for a Life of Peace and Purposeby Rebecca Lyons.

[00:06:56] This book is so foundational to my journey because it really put in proper perspective for me, this idea of having healthy inputs so that we can have healthy outputs. I had been so focused on the outputs of my life, how I show up for those around me and make contributions and try to do things for people, whether it was for work or for volunteering or whatever.

[00:07:29] And I just felt like there was something off, but I didn’t know how to put words to that. And it was really this idea of, we have to start from a place of rest in order to then do the inputs that fill us up. So our physical health, our spiritual health, our emotional health, then. Allows us to pour into our spouse, our kids, our friends, and then finally make that contribution.

[00:08:04] But if we don’t have those priorities in the right order, we operate out of this place of hustle and hurry and stress. And we just have this feeling of anxiety that we can’t shape. And if we really want to live into that life of peace and pursue purpose without sacrificing the things that matter most to us, then it needs to start from this place of rest.

[00:08:35] And this is hard for me because I am a type A, go getter. And prior to kids, I was an over committer. Yeah. After having kids I’m still in, over committed. I’m slowly developing this journey to set back and not commit to all the things, but before kids, I could kind of just push through that overwhelm, push through my exhaustion and still do all the things.

[00:09:01] And having kids made me so much more aware of my own limitations and the inability to do it, all this idea that. Rail against somebody telling us we can’t do it all or have it all. We feel this need and our culture to prove them wrong. But I learned that when I am pouring from an empty cup, I don’t believe that’s where God designed us to spend our lives.

[00:09:33] We were meant to live to the full, to have the abundant life, to really operate out of a place of health and wholeness and ultimately show up as the best and fullest and most alive versions of ourselves. And that has to start from this place of rest, especially for those of us who are military spouses, there is already an undercurrent of stress and anxiety in our lives.

[00:10:06] We’re going to have these frequent deployments moves living far away from family being forced outside of our comfort zone. And that just adds to the stress of our lives. So what do we do with that stress and how do we build those healthy rhythms into our lives?

[00:10:32] So we all know that rest is this great idea, right? We know that there are studies out there that show that rest contributes to our overall health, our wellbeing, better productivity, emotional resiliency. But this head knowledge doesn’t always equate to practice. So let’s talk about this chasm between what we know is good for us and what we actually do.

[00:11:01] What obstacles stand in the way of us pursuing a life of rest and what are some practical steps that we can take to start building our life on that foundation of rest? One of the books that I read most recently on this topic was The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comber. There’s so many great nuggets in this book, but the thing that I struggled with was he went from a place of hustle and striving to this place of living out of rest.

[00:11:37] But there was a disconnect in how you got from point A to point B. You’re telling me you were at point A and now you’re at point B and you would never go back because it’s awesome. But how did you get there and what specific sacrifices did you make and how did you structure your life to move in that direction?

[00:11:58] And so that’s some of the practical components that I think we all at our heart really want to know. Okay. What does this look like and how do you still get all of your projects done and do all of them and still make that time and space for rest? So let’s talk about what this looks like and some of the obstacles that stand in the way and how we can move forward.

[00:12:23] So the first thing to note is that this is a cultural problem. Especially if we live in America, this is something that we’re all going to struggle with. I also recently read Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen. This book focuses on how, especially, the millennial generation is a generation that is overwhelmed, burned out and ultimately two times.

[00:12:57] To engage in true rest. Now there’s a number of reasons and factors that influence where we are as a culture today. But for those of us who are millennials, life can feel like it’s a never-ending to-do list. We get to this point where we feel guilty, relaxing, we know how to work, to do more, achieve more outcomes.

[00:13:25] But as a culture, we don’t really know how to rest. And I think her point especially is a valid that we are actually too tired to engage in true rest. So when you become overtired, when you have some downtime, what’s the first thing that you do? You need something that numbs you out, whether that’s turning on Netflix or pouring that glass of wine or whatever that thing is that allows you to just kind of zone out because you’re too tired to think or do anything else.

[00:14:07] This is the thing that I found one of the most intriguing parts of the book. It was talking about how initially you had the richest people. And they were the only ones that really had time for leisure. And then you had the assembly line and the standardization of the roughly 40 hours a week work week.

[00:14:32] And so much was changing that in 1930, the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that his grandchildren would only work 15 hours a week. And with the abundant time for leisure across all classes, society would flourish. Now, if we look around today, we don’t know hardly anyone that works 15 hours a week.

[00:15:01] Around 1970, there’s been a steady year after year increase in the amount of work that Americans perform and a dramatic decrease in leisure time. Okay. So what we do as a culture is work and more work and everything we do has this ability to turn into work or income. And Helen Peterson talks about this idea that if somebody has a hobby today, we have a hard time just enjoying a hobby for the sake of being a hobby.

[00:15:40] It’s all about, well, how do I monetize this hobby? And not to say that there’s anything wrong with monetizing a hobby, but sometimes you just want to do something because you love it. If you are a great baker, you may just want to bake cakes for people because you love to bake cakes. You don’t actually have to try to sell your cakes.

[00:16:02] Sometimes we just need to be able to enjoy an activity for the sake of enjoying that activity. As A.J. Swoboda wrote, “We have become perhaps the most emotionally exhausted, psychologically overworked and spiritually malnourished people in history.”

So we have this culture that is all about overwork and busy-ness, and it’s so easy for us to get sucked into this. But this matters because the rhythm of rest is the way that our souls were designed to flourish and thrive.

[00:16:47] Busyness cuts us off from connection with God, with others, with our own souls. And instead leads us to a place where we struggle with irritability, with restlessness, with nonstop activity, and emotional numbness. Priorities that don’t actually line up with what we say we want. Lack of care for ourselves, escapist behaviors, anxiety, and isolation.

[00:17:19] When we get over busy, the things that are truly life-giving to our souls are the first to go rather than our first to go to, because the things that make for actual rest take emotional energy and self-discipline, and when we’re overtired, we don’t have that energy and that discipline to do what’s actually life-giving to our souls.

[00:17:49] So let me say that again, the things that actually make for rest actually take emotional energy and self-discipline. The truth is we all have a finite amount of time. There are 24 hours in your day, whether you’re rich or poor employed, unemployed, have kids. Don’t have kids. All of us have 24 hours in our day. But ultimately how we spend our time is how we spend our lives. Ultimately that impacts who we become.

[00:18:23] So how do we actually rest, and ultimately live into what really matters? Okay. So let’s talk about some of these practical habits of rest that we can start to prioritize, that will help us live that rich and satisfying life. Now, I also want to caveat, I understand that all of us are at different points in our life.

[00:18:56] Some of us are having to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet or we’re dealing with major health crisis, or just a stage of life where it’s not possible. And I just want you to give yourself grace and say in this season, what I’m saying today may not be possible. But the point is that we are constantly working to align ourselves and to pursue that place of rest and those habits that lead us to health.

[00:19:31] So the first thing I would say, as a habit of rest is stopping. Inventory of our lives to figure out where we are, and what actually fuels and fills us with life. So often we get in this into a rhythm, we go into autopilot and we move through our day without conscious thought. But if we really want to live a life that incorporates.

[00:20:04] We have to have time and space to have that margin, to evaluate where we’re at and what needs to change so that we can be intentional and make our actions align with our values. The problem is when we allow our schedule to rent. Rather than the other way around. So the first thing I can tell you is just to find a way to pause and take inventory of your life.

[00:20:38] How are you doing? Are you feeling drained and depleted or full of life? Are you living the life that longs to live through you? What are you doing that you love? What are you doing that you don’t love? How can you incorporate more of what you love into your everyday rhythms? What does your starting point look like?

[00:21:09] Okay. So we have to be able to step back and look because when we are too overtired, we don’t even have the capacity to think about. What’s wrong and what we don’t like. We’re just looking for an escape. So there’s going to be a starting point. And it starts with just having that time to take an honest assessment of where things are.

[00:21:33] The second habit or rhythm is to develop these moments of regular reflection through silence and solitude. So when I say silence and solitude, if you have young kids running around the house screaming, and you’re like, what in the world is silence. But the best thing that you can do is to have these moments where you allow yourselves to start to feel again, this is where we start to find ourselves again.

[00:22:06] And we can kind of understand that. Just because someone else has an expectation or an opinion of us that ultimately doesn’t matter. What really matters is that we are living into our true selves, that our souls find rest. And so we need this quiet space to be able to process, to discern, to evaluate, to understand.

[00:22:39] Now this time for reflection. When I say it’s regular, it doesn’t have to come in huge chunks of time. It can be something like five minutes, a day, 15 minutes a week. So one thing that I am working on this year is developing these daily, weekly and quarterly times for reflection. This is definitely a work in progress.

[00:23:05] I’ve gotten better about my daily and weekly reflection. I am working on the quarterly reflection. Came almost a month after I really wanted to do it, but I had to be able to carve out that time and space where I had a break from my family and I could just get away and be quiet and evaluate. How are things going?

[00:23:31] One easy way to start. Your time of reflection is to ask four basic questions. What’s right?In other words, what can I be grateful for? What’s right? What’s wrong? You know, what feels off? Where has things gone off course? What areas am I struggling with? What’s confused? Am I prioritizing the right things right now? And then what’s missing?

[00:23:58] Do I have any blind spots in my life right now? And I’ve found that even with young kids, five minutes a day, 15 minutes a week. That’s really doable. And you may ask, okay, how do I find five minutes a day and 15 minutes a week? Well, this leads me to our second habit and that’s establishing a morning routine. I have been working on establishing my morning routine for a while, and it’s gotten a lot better.

[00:24:30] I will say the key to really having a morning routine and being able to regulary reflect. You have to get up before your kids. I don’t know what time your kids wake up. And if you have school aged kids and you’re trying to get them into a rhythm, or you’re trying to get out the door to work, whatever that looks like for you just to wake up early enough that you have time for quiet space for reflection.

[00:24:59] I can’t tell you how important it is to be able to. Wake up to have that quiet space for reflection, prayer and mindfulness. I know not all of us are morning people, but I really understand now that I’ve gotten that morning routine dialed back in that it’s so valuable and I am able to show up. For my family so much better when I had that space, that quiet time in the morning.

[00:25:34] Now for me, my older two have had an okay-to-wake clock in their room. So they know before a certain time they’re not supposed to get out of that. My youngest, we just established this rhythm with her. We actually just moved her into a toddler bed. So we’re working on establishing. When the clock turns green, then you can get out of bed.

[00:25:56] There are definitely mornings where I have kids yelling for me before the green comes on. It’s not perfect. My morning routine doesn’t always happen the way that I want it to happen, but I am intentionally carving out that quiet space in the morning.

The third rhythm that I highly recommend is getting good sleep. And this is probably one of the hardest rhythms for me, because I still don’t have kids that sleep through the night. There are lots of studies out there that will tell you how important sleep is to our emotional and mental health and all of the other health benefits of getting proper sleep. Now, there are lots of elements that can contribute to good sleep.

[00:26:47] Number one, having a quality mattress can help having a quality pillow, but ultimately it’s making sure that you get sleep for your body. And that starts with how, what time you go to bed and what time you get up. So if you know that you need that quiet space in the morning, then you gotta move that bedtime back up.

[00:27:12] And this is something that I continually have to struggle with. I was really good when my kids were newborns, because I knew that they were going to be waking me up. Now I think I just have this hope that my kids are going to sleep through the night. And so I find myself wanting to push back and stay up later in the evenings.

[00:27:32] Especially as my kids start to stay up later themselves, then I want that space after they go to bed. But I will say. Trying to make sure that you’re going to bed at a reasonable time, that allows you to get a reasonable amount of sleep, and then being consistent with that bedtime each night, because studies show that when we are on that consistent sleep, wake schedule, our bodies ultimately perform better than if we were going to bet at a different time each night. So sleep.

[00:28:04] Now the fourth habit is that habit of Sabbath. What in the world is a Sabbath? Well, the Sabbath was a sacred part of the ancient Jewish tradition a day where everyone rested from their labor six days they would work. And then the seventh day was set apart as a day of rest. And it’s rooted in the Genesis narrative.

[00:28:34] God created the world in six days. And then on the seventh day he rested. And if you’re anything like most of us, we don’t actually know what a day of rest is. If you are in a space where you have young kids, you have kids that need you all the time and you can’t really just rest. And so what does it practically look like to have a Sabbath?

[00:29:03] Well, I would say that a Sabbath is how we feel our souls back up with life. If we are going, going, going 24-7. Then we’re depleting our souls of life. However, studies have shown that when we take that time for a rest, we are able to work and be more productive and to be able to respond with more emotional agility and bring life to ourselves, to those around us. And ultimately make that contribution.

[00:29:41] So what does that practically look like? Well, in the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, Comer actually has an entire day where they don’t do anything, but things that fuel them with life. They don’t do the household chores. They don’t do the laundry. They don’t do all those things.

[00:30:07] And I don’t know, I’m still not there. I have not figured out how you actually get a whole day that’s devoted to rest. Take a Saturday. Cause usually you, Saturday is, you know, we went to go get all the things done. We want to go have fun family and ventures together. But my husband and I just, we wanted a chill day where we just stayed home and I’m like, we live on this beautiful island.

[00:30:37] We need to go be exploring everything. But I can’t tell you, it was just good for our souls to stay home and just rest. I read a lot. We played together as a family. We went out to eat. Sometimes it’s not about going and doing. It’s just sitting and being, and fellowshipping together. It’s whatever you figure out that fuels and fills you with life and create that space.

[00:31:09] For your soul to catch up with your body. He gave this story that he told of, I think it was like a missionary or somebody American that traveled to Africa and he was going to go on this safari. And so he hired these people to help him carry all his stuff. And they traveled this long day and they went to bed and he got up and he was like, okay, let’s keep going in the Porter’s.

[00:31:37] We’re not going. And he was like, well, I heard you like, let’s, let’s continue on this journey. And they were like, no, we have to wait for our souls to catch up with our body. They were so in tune with what their body needed. To be able to continue on the journey. And so much of the time we push past that and try to keep going.

[00:31:57] So what Sabbath practically looks like for me in this season is making sure that I have time on Sunday afternoons to just enjoy and do nothing except what fuels and fills me with life while my kids are still young enough that they are having rest time. We have rest time every Sunday afternoon, and lately I’ve just been going and sitting on the back porch and reading and feeling the cool air breeze.

[00:32:30] And that’s what I’m doing. I’m also making sure that I am taking 100. Out of the week that it’s just something that is life giving to me where I’m not trying to get something done, because I feel like there’s always something that needs to be done. And I want to make sure that I’m having a night where I can just rest after the kids are in bed.

[00:32:58] Why this is important to me is because in the last season, when I realized that I had no margin in my life, The thing that I had sacrificed was that night of rest, I had something that needed to be done every night after the kids went to bed and I felt exhausted and I realized I needed to build in that margin of just a night to rest, to do something that was fun for me.

[00:33:30] And that didn’t need to be a constant. So what does building Sabbath rest into your weekly schedule look like. The best thing I can say is that you have to prioritize it, or it won’t happen. If you don’t build it into your weekly rhythm, it will not happen. There will always be things that take its place.

[00:33:55] So take some time to stay. How can I intentionally make rest a part of my weekly schedule? And then the fifth tip I would give you is to focus on what matters most. This idea of simplicity, of taking stock of our lives and saying, what is time consuming? What are the things that we are doing simply for the sake of doing that don’t need to be part of our lives?

[00:34:30] Are we prioritizing the things that matter? Are we making them a part of our daily, daily, weekly, monthly rhythms? How can we simplify and make our lives more manageable for our family? We were excited about this new season of life on an island because it forced us to simplify. It was so easy to get caught up in the race of having a big house, take care of the big house, do all the things, go to the places, be involved in all the activities.

[00:35:05] And we knew that we didn’t have margin in our lives and that we needed to take some steps. So really we sold the house and we’re now living on base housing. 1950s, we have the tiniest closets, the tiniest bathrooms. We’ve given up all of the spacious walk-in pantry, and we still miss that, but we know that our lives.

[00:35:30] We’ve been able to simplify and obviously COVID has helped because we couldn’t do all the activities for so long, but it’s helped us to have that time to prioritize what matters most, what do we care about and how can we continue to make the rhythms that we want part of our schedule instead of letting our schedule dictate.

[00:35:55] And then finally, what I would just say is figure out how to start small it’s again. And I will say this over and over again. This is not about having the perfect rhythms. It’s about figuring out where you are and what that next step looks like for you. It’s progress, not perfection. It’s learning to. Baby steps in a forward motion, figuring out what you actually want your life to look like and what you need to change about your life to get there.

[00:36:33] It’s one thing to long for the spacious place of rest and too long for the benefits of living out of rest. And we want to get to this place where we can be present. Be mindful. And enjoy what we have wherever we are and bring our best self to it. We want to be able to do that, which really matters. And the best way to get there is to start small, to start moving towards a place of presence.

[00:37:20] Of reflection and to rest my prayer and hope for you today, is that something that I said really resonated with you and that you understand that even if life feels overwhelming, there are baby steps that you can take today. I would love for you to talk about this in our Facebook. The milspouse mastermind community on Facebook.

[00:37:49] You’ll find the link in the show notes, or by going to our website, pop in there. Talk about what you specifically struggle with defined dress. You can also DM me on Instagram @milspousemastermind. I would love to dialogue with you and figure out what our biggest struggles are as we pursue rest and how we can intentionally take small steps in the right direction. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope this resonates with you. Until next time may you live filled, fueled, and full of joy.