How to Fix Your Lack of Rest
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Mr. Biz Radio: How to Fix Your Lack of Rest!
Unedited transcription of the show is included below:
(00:02):
Welcome to Mr. Biz Radio! Biz Talk for Biz Owners. During the next half hour, Mr. Biz, Ken Wentworth, a leading business advisor, and two-time best-selling author will cover topics that'll help business owners run their companies more profitably and more efficiently. If you're ready to stop faking the funk and take your business onward and upward. This show is for you. And now here's Mr. Biz, Ken Wentworth.
(00:28):
All right. Welcome to another episode of Mr. Biz Radio. With me Mr. Biz, Ken Wentworth. And this week, we're gonna talk about something that sorry, I'm just dying right in here. I'm excited about the topic and I know you guys will be as well. I wanna talk about something that as business owners, entrepreneurs, we all face this on a regular basis. I, I know I do, and I try to be pretty mindful about it, but even still, there are challenges that, that pop up and that is around rest. How many of you guys, let me see a raise of hands. Okay. How many of you guys, you know, maybe get a you're you're in bed asleep for eight hours and you wake up and you still feel groggy, or maybe you feel okay when you first get up. And then all of a sudden at like 11 o'clock in the morning, even just three hours, you know, four hours after you've been up, you're like, I'm tired already.
(01:16):
Like, what's going on here? We're gonna talk about that this week. We're gonna talk about how to identify some of those things. We are causing some of that. What are the seven types of rest how we can optimize those. And most importantly, you may be saying right now, that all sounds great, but I'm working my butt off. I don't have time. I don't have time. I don't have time. How do I do that? We're gonna talk about some ways to incorporate rest in the midst of a busy day. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm excited to, to hear that because I know it's gonna be really good. And so for this week's guest, we have Dr. Sandra Dalton-Smith. She is a board certified internal medicine physician, a speaker, and award-winning author. She's an international wellbeing thought leader featured in numerous media outlets, including prevention, MSNBC, Women's Day Fox, fast companies psychology today, Inc, CNN health and ted.com. And we're honored to have her here on Mr. Biz radio. She's the author of numerous books, including her bestseller "Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity " Dr. Sandra, welcome to Mr. Biz radio. Please help me get my sanity back.
(02:24):
Oh, well, thanks for having me.
(02:26):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm, I'm honored to have you here. I know we talked, it's been a few months back since we talked to and talked about bringing you on the show, but I've been looking forward to it because it seems like inevitably, as I sort of alluded to it, the outset, you know, know as business owners, a lot of people are just, you know, the grind, the hustle, everyone's running around doing 20 many different things, and sometimes we don't get the best rest. And so I want to talk about that, but before we dive into all that, let's go back a little bit and talk about your personal entrepreneurial journey and how you've come to do what you do now.
(02:58):
Yeah. So I started off in internal medicine. I've been in clinical practice for about 20 years and with the release of the book and really just seeing how many people were struggling with this and with the pandemic. There's just a lot of opportunities that opened up to be able to share on a wider scale. And it's amazing just how, how many corporations are needing wellbeing, initiatives, wellness initiatives, and are wanting to help their staffs actually have the ability to self-diagnose the ability to be self aware of where their personal deficits are, so that they're able to be the best version of themselves. And that opened up in our opportunity for me to start a consulting agency around that. So that was the initiation of my entrepreneurial journey. It's been really interesting seeing all of that develop growing to the point where I can no longer kind of manage the speaking engagements myself and having to bring on a team of wellness experts to kind of help go into corporations. So that's how my, my company restores this was birth. And from there we are just continuing to grow.
(04:07):
So let me ask, let back up a little bit, if you would. So when you were in your clinical practice, where, what, where were you focused on at that point?
(04:15):
Well, I was traditional internal medicine. So ER, ICU, you know, the high blood pressure, your diabetes, heart attack, strokes, cancer, you name it, all the things. And because internal medicine is considered a primary care one of the primary care specialties, a lot of people saw me as their primary care physicians. So they weren't just the people who showed up in the emergency room or the ICU. They were the ones who were coming to my office of just their general complaints. And often those general complaints included things like, Hey doc, I'm just tired. You know, <laugh> nothing more specific than that, but enough of a deterrent to their health, that they were not able to do things that they wanted to do, that they didn't feel like they were able to, you know, even start businesses or be able to function within whatever career they were currently in.
(05:05):
And so that's, you know, at, at first it was like, oh, okay, you just need more sleep because that seemed like the easy answer. You're tired to get sleep. And then just for myself, I got to a place about, really about seven, eight years into my medical practice, where I was getting great sleep. You know, I was actually getting my 6, 7, 8 hours, however many I could get a night, but I would still wake up exhausted. And so that's what really kind of put me on the course of evaluating, is there some other type of fatigues out there that we're not really addressing? And when I burned out myself that really took me down the rabbit hole into the research and the discovery of it, it kind of turned into a physician healed by self moment because sleep alone, wasn't solving my problem. And I found out there were a lot of people who even when they tried to get more sleep, they were just still staying exhausted.
(06:00):
Well, the interesting part about that to me, well, several interesting parts, but just like most of the guests we have on, even though you you're a medical doctor, you're a physician. You are you, whether you wanna believe it or not, you're an entrepreneur at heart because even in your practice, you, you saw there was a need. And so you created a consulting agency around it. And so that's, that's entrepreneur with a big capital E for sure. So how long have you been on your entrepreneur journey? So how long has it been since you left your, your practice?
(06:31):
Yeah, so at December 15th, 2019 is when I actually left my practice. My there was a transition period there where I was doing a lot of speaking and, you know, doing a lot of media and speaking things related to the book and it just got to a place where I, and I'm still a partner at my practice, so it's like, I've left it, but I'm still like involved with it. So it's one of those things. I don't think I'll ever be completely away from medicine, cuz it's just my heart to be involved with it to some degree, but it's not my day to day anymore. It's not where all of my focus and attention is because I just found, I really couldn't be available for my patients. I hate telling people I have to reschedule them, you know, and, and those types of things. So I, I just needed more freedom to be able to help people. And it's just really, really been interesting because I can actually help so many more people now in what I'm doing as well as bring on people. And like I said, and build out a team so that I'm, I'm not just helping the clients who we work with, but actually my staff as well. So it's really been fun to watch.
(07:36):
Interesting, interesting. Well, we, we've only got about a in and a half, but I, I have to ask what, what, as, as so far in your journey, which by the way, the timing right, you were right before the pandemic hit <laugh>. But what have you found? What, what's the biggest contrast you found that's between being in, in a clinical practice and being an entrepreneur and doing the speaking gigs and helping people in a consulting fashion?
(08:00):
The biggest difference has been marketing <laugh> oh, there you go. Market as a physician as hard. You know, I was in a, a practice where I'd been there so long that it grew by word of mouth. You know, people are like, oh, well you need to see my doctor. She's the best, you know, <laugh> kind of thing. I think we all do that with our personal healthcare team. It's like, you love your personal physician or people, you know, that you get attached to. So I was building a medical practice with no marketing, other than word of mouth. And, you know, we gotten to the point where I could, I mean, I don't, I didn't market at all. It was more turning people away. So it was great positioning because you never had to feel like you had to sell yourself. However, as you know, if they need type of consulting, there is a salesman's approach that has to go with that. Guess some people come in, but a lot of them, you have to be ready to explain why they need you.
(08:54):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it's, it's, it's, it's it's very common. So we've had other people who've transitioned out of other careers and that's the thing they always mention is the difference is, you know, a corporate career to, to consulting or anything it's always marketing. So interesting that you very common, even from a, a medical practice. So we're gonna hit a break here, guys. We'll come back. We'll continue talking with Dr. Dalton-Smith and we're gonna find out more about how we can get better. Rest
(09:22):
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(09:53):
Thank you for listening to Mr. Biz radio. Did you know our show airs seven days a week for more than 30 hours. Now, if you are in the B2B space and we'd like to reach thousands of business owners every week, including our more than 250,000 social media followers are thousands of daily internet radio listeners, our email list fans and Mr. Biz solutions members email us at
(10:23):
Check out both of Mr. Biz national bestselling books, "Pathway to Profits" and “How to be a Cashflow Pro" on Amazon. Now, once again, here's Mr. Biz.
(10:35):
All right. Welcome back to the show in is time as we always do at the top of the second segment where we give the Mr. Biz tip of the week. And this one I promise I did not, I, I say this all the time, but it's just weird timing all the time. This week's tip actually is found in shameless plug coming. My most recent book don't fake the funk. And the, the tip this week is consistent. Perseverance, forges your path to endless achievement. It's the thing we talk about all the time on the show. It always pops up and in regards to getting knocked down and getting knocked down seven times and getting back up eight times as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, you're gonna take some losses here and there. You gotta keep getting back up. It's absolutely critical skill to have to be a, a successful business owner and entrepreneur. So that's Mr. Biz tip of the week. And I want to get back into this because I wanna find out a little bit more. So Dr. Sandra, what's the best way to determine if we have a rest deficit.
(11:34):
Yeah, that's the, that was the number one question. <Laugh> that I started to kind of dive into with myself when I was experiencing all of this and going through that time of burnout, because I think you know, if I, if we look at it this way, if someone comes to me in the emergency room and they say, Hey doc, I have a pain. Well, what do I do with that? You know, exactly. <Laugh> I can't help you with cuz I don't even know where to look or where to begin testing. However, that's how most of us approach our fatigue. We just tell everyone, Hey, I'm so tired, but we don't have a way of quantifying it or even identifying it so we can move in the right direction. So when I started this process in my own life and when I work with my patients, it, it was really initially looking at identifying which type of rest were you most efficient in.
(12:23):
That's where the idea for the rest quiz came from the
(13:13):
Well, it's very interesting. So literally the timing couldn't be better. Our, our oldest daughter affectionately known as junior biz. She literally just told me, so we she and I talked on on Monday and she said, dad, I don't know what's going on. But literally over the weekend she said, I slept about 28 hours. And I don't still don't feel like I've, I'm, I'm caught up. Like I still feel groggy on Monday after sleeping, like crazy over the weekend. And then she's scrambling because she said, you know, I slept all that time. Cause I felt like I needed it, but now I'm behind because I was supposed to get things done over the weekend. And so now it's this vicious cycle, right? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so of those seven, what are the most con what's the most in one or two that you see that people have a deficit in?
(13:59):
Yeah, the good part about that is it's not kind of what I'm seeing is actually what the research is showing because with we've had over a quarter million people actually take that
(14:48):
So you're processing all the information from the day. You're having conversations in your head about the colleague that you had a meeting with earlier and wish you said things different, you know, you're going through all of this stuff, but your head space doesn't get cleared out. And the problem with that it's, if you're a chronic processor, you may find that it's a hard, you have a hard time holding onto information. A like you can't remember things or you can't, you know, clear your thoughts well enough to be able to even attempt to, to come up with new ideas. And so for someone with that rest deficit, it's very beneficial to learn some meditative type practices or some way that you can actually focus your thoughts and clear your head space. The second one sensory rest deficits and someone with, with a sensory rest deficit tends to respond with either irritation, agitation, rage, or anger, for reasons they can't explain like they're highly agitated and they can't explain it.
(15:45):
And part of the reason being is that there's so much sensory input that they may not even be consciously aware of, but it's negatively affecting how they respond. So they may be in a situation where they're hearing phones ringing or they're, they're in a home office and they're hearing the kids laughing in the background. They're not thinking about those sounds or that sensory input, but that consistent sensory input negatively affecting their sympathetic system and how they're responding to their environment. And then the third one I mentioned was creative rest, a creative rest deficit occurs if you're someone who has to solve problems. So you're using creative energy, either in innovation or you're using creative energy and problem, or in brainstorming and coming up with new ideas. And unfortunately, during the pandemic, whether you tried to be innovative or not, everything we did was changed. So you had to come up with new ways of doing old things.
(16:48):
So we had kind of a global sensor global creative deficit in people who didn't even know creative rest was a thing. And creative rest is the rest we experience when we allow ourselves to, to really appreciate beauty in whatever forms, rather that's natural beauty, like the ocean, the mountains, the trees, or manmade beauty, like music or art, you know, a lot of will say, oh, I feel so much better when I go to the beach and they can't explain what it is that they're feeling, what they're actually experiencing is creative rest. If that restorative process that occurs inside of you, when you allow yourself to appreciate beauty. And I think that's really at the core of this understanding of, of rest is that rest isn't simply about stopping. Cuz sometimes stopping is just stopping the bleeding. You stop the drainage, but you're actually not pouring back in to fill it back up. And that's what rest really is. Rest are those restorative activities that pour back into the places that you deplete with the work that you do?
(17:56):
Well, first of all, I feel like you may have had can cameras following me around literally in the last 24 hours, because last night I could not get to sleep. I, I was dozing off on a couch at 7:45 in the evening. I go to bed at like 10, 10 30 and I'm wide awake and I cannot, I cannot get to sleep. Right. I'm my brain is just going crazy this morning. I'm on my way to, to an offsite with a client and literally something, I can't even remember. Someone was driving in front of me and I got super agitated for something completely inconsequential that would no, normally never bother me. And I remember literally saying out loud to myself, what is wrong with you? Like what what's going on? And then the other thing that I'll mention you, you know, you mentioned about the the creative is one of the things I do for stress relief when I'm really feeling stressed is I like to go get in my car, open the sunroof, as long as it's sunny, not raining, listen to loud music and just drive around aimlessly.
(18:53):
And that's one of the things. So it makes complete sense. Again, I feel like you've, you've been follow me around with cameras or something, Dr. Sandra, because <laugh> that's, that's what it's been for me. Well, again, go out. We're talking this week with Dr. Sandra Dalton-Smith, you can find out more at drdaltonsmith.com. That's drdaltonsmith.com again. She mentioned she has a, a free quiz at restquiz.com to find out what types of rest issues you may be having come back. And she's gonna teach us more about how to get more rest and better rest.
(19:24):
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(19:55):
To submit questions to the show, email them to
(20:05):
All right. Welcome back to the show. And I wanna jump right back into this because I, I, I, we were really rolling there and we had to take a break, but so one of the questions I, I was thinking about during the break, Dr. Sandra is, you know, how does, so you, you touched on, you know, those three most common and all seven, but then the three most common you've seen with your your quiz on restquiz.com. But how does that the rest or lack thereof, how does that really affect productivity and creativity in each of us?
(20:34):
Oh, greatly. Because what I'm finding is that there are a lot of entrepreneurs and people within corporate America who, who have passion for the work they do. I mean, they are high achievers, go getters, wanna get it done, but don't have the energy actually to do the work. So what ends up happening is they have all this passion and they don't have the energy, which then just kind of leads to this frustration <laugh> cause is like, I, I know what I wanna do, but I just don't have the strength to do it. And so I'm finding that a lot of people who in the past have, have kind of like I did, I, my personality is, is, you know, rest before all of this happened, my personality is rest is for weak people, you know, get out of the way and let the rest of us who handle business, get business handled. And so <laugh>, so you can imagine my, my shock in awe when I burned out.
(21:26):
Right, right. Because
(21:28):
I had to kind of completely redo my framework because the way I, now, the way that I function, I do so much more than I ever did. <Laugh> when I was saying that, and I'm actually able to do it with a smile on my face and, and being nice to people. And, and actually the way that I wanna show up in the world, I, I was showing up in the world before, but I was showing up from a place of emptiness. I was showing up from a place of depletion. Whereas now I show up and I'm able to do more from an actual healthy place. I actually can do it from a good place. And I think that's really what every successful leader wants. Every thought leader, every entrepreneur, every, every person who is wanting to affect the lives of others. You don't wanna do it with a nasty attitude that, that, that kind of defeats the purpose.
(22:17):
Yeah, definitely. And it's, so it sounds like, you know, in those instances, you know, again, I I'll relate it to, to, to where with myself, it sounds like in those instances where you are, you have a rest deficit, you're really in a position where you're you're, you still have things to do. And so you're either doing them and you get easily agitated, irritated, and, or you're kind of just checking the boxes and you're kind of in a funk, a little bit of a fog and that you need to kind of snap out of.
(22:43):
Yeah. Because you know, we look at the world health organization, how they define burnout are three categories, three criteria. Number one is you're tired. Well, that's most, a lot of people, number two is the you're producing work. But the work you're producing is at a lesser quality of what you're capable of producing. And then the third aspect of that is that you no longer like where you're at you no longer kind of find joy and pleasure in the work that you do. And I think that a lot of people right now are functional burnouts. So they are showing up every day at their job or within their career. They're just showing up meeting all three of those criteria. So they're functionally producing, but they're producing from a burned out state. That's not what anybody wants. We wanted to be on fire for the work that we're doing. Not necessarily burned out in the process.
(23:37):
Yeah. I literally on my way to the offsite, as I mentioned this morning there's an old college buddy of mine reached out to me. He had read my book and the book is about achieving goals and things. And he said, look, I, I need some help because I'm just, he's, he's fits, fits this description. These three aspects of burnout, as you mentioned to a T and he's like, can you help me get out of this? You know, he said, that's what he said. I'm kind of in a funk, I'm in a fog. I just can't get out of it. So I'm gonna talk with him every week for the next eight weeks. And we're gonna, you know, kind of put together a plan and everything, but all that being said, let's, let's, let's hit pay dart here. How can we, we're all busy. So can you share with us some ways that we can get incorporate rest in our lives, in the midst of a busy day?
(24:20):
Absolutely. That's the, that's the point? It has to be something that you can and do every day kind of incorporate it within your day. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> because what we already know, when you talk to people, they automatically say, oh, you just need to go take a vacation to take more time off. Well, that's not realistic to just take a break every time that you feel tired, you know, you're not gonna necessarily be able to take a vacation and vacations are not really rest for most of us. We go on vacation to do fun, work away from home, not to be restored. And so you end up after the vacation, even being more tired. So it has to be stuff you can do kind of incorporated into your normal life. So always like for people to take a look at their, their normal routine, and then we integrate red within your work.
(25:07):
So for example, let's say if you're someone who works on a computer, your, your primary job that you, or as an entrepreneur, you're spending a lot of time electronically engaged with zoom meetings or with clients on the computer, start looking at ways to downgrade some of the sensory input related to what you already do, gonna get rid of the zoom meetings. But what you could do is when you're on zoom focus the screen so that you're only looking at one person at a time. So yes, you might be in a meeting with 15 people, but our sensory input can't consume 15 different rooms at one time without becoming overwhelmed. That's why that whole zoom fatigue happened. People for like, oh, I get zoom fatigue. Well, you know, zoom didn't do anything wrong. It's just how we are consuming it because they actually made it.
(25:53):
So you could zoom it down to one person and only focus on that one person. Cause that's how we naturally kind of engage with a room full of people. We don't, we're all in the same room together normally. So the sensory input is very control rolled in that I'm not looking at 15 different rooms. I'm looking at one room when we're normally together. So you can reenact some of that. Another one, if we're looking at the three top ones with mental rest, mental rest, if you're ha, if you're someone who's struggling with that, start looking at some ways that you can brain dump, but that's a very simple solution for someone who's an over aprocessor you're lay down at night. Your brain's thinking of all the things. Take a moment just to have a posted note, a piece of paper to jot down whatever those thoughts are, to be able to, to dump them outta your head onto something concrete.
(26:45):
Cuz in the moment, what happens with that is gives the brain permission to release it and in the middle of the day. So you're at work working. What we find is that people who have a tendency to have multiple tabs open on their computer all the time and are jumping from one bit of information to the other bit of information, have more of an issue with mental rest deficits. So start practicing what some people call deep work. In other words, don't let your brain kind of be scattered in 15 directions at one time practice fo going deep, focusing in on whatever that is and time blocking off some of your mental energy. So for my, if I get it very drained, every time I do emails and a large part of my work right now is looking at and responding to and, and you know, dealing with things electronically by email.
(27:33):
So if you time block some of the mentally taxing things in your day, you can have a longer time block in the early part of the day, followed by a mental break where you do something, something that kinda allows your brain to kind of go away from that for a moment. And then you can reengage and go deep for another period or block of time. But what happens is you're scheduling it so that you have some reprieves in between. Whereas what most of us do we just plug away at the emails all day long. So it's eight hours of churn out to the emails and it makes you feel even more mentally taxed than if you just blocked off some periods of time to handle that.
(28:14):
I, I love it. So I learned thankfully about a year ago. I, I can't remember if it was a book I read about having the multiple tabs open. I was a, a terrible person with that. I would have, you know, 6, 8, 10 tabs open. And so I challenged myself. And so now I very rarely have more than one tab open. And in regards to email, I agree with you a thousand percent on that. I have certain periods during the day when I check email, otherwise my emails even shut off. So I don't get the little pings. I don't become P labs dog. Like, Ooh, I got an email. Let me check it, which I think is natural for a lot of us. Oh my gosh, this, this is so good. So good. I know personally, I've, I've gotten a lot outta this myself. So unfortunately we're outta time, but I really, really appreciate you coming on the show again, go out to drdaltonsmith.com. Follow her on LinkedIn. UDr. Sandra, I really appreciate you coming on this show.
(29:07):
It has been my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
(29:09):
Yeah, absolutely. And go out to restquiz.com as well. Take the free quiz to find out where you might have rest deficits guys. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And as always, you know, I'm gonna say flow is king.
(29:27):
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