How to Find Time to Rest with a Busy Schedule

Recently we have had a lot of coming and going of guests in our home. Squishing as many as 5 people in our 600ft studio apartment!

We have had late nights chatting and movie watching as well as early mornings whether it be for work or adventuring.

The last few days I have been feeling the exhaustion creeping in as I started to learn more and more on coffee and chocolate every day to keep me going. Not to mention my extremely extroverted self was slowly turning into an introvert.

The problem is that I spread my time and energy way too thin. Today everyone went home and I completely crashed. The feeling of sleep exhaustion, dehydration, whacked-out hormones, and sore muscles had me in bed for a nap at noon and fell asleep for over two hours! My husband has even taken a siesta today, and when we both need a nap you know we are tired.

So here I am re-evaluating how I approach the rest of this awesome summer and realizing that what we need in all the busy and exciting times is to slow down.

SO how do we slow down during one of the busiest seasons of the year? Well I totally get it, you have kids, you work all the time, have school, or maybe you're doing all three! Life won't stop for you, so you have to take responsibility for finding the time and ability to slow things down. Even though slowing down is important, it’s hard to know where to start, so here are a few tips to help you answer that question for your own life.

First of all, you want to begin to think about the time-wasters in your life. And by time-wasting, I don’t mean sleep! I mean mindless activities like social media that drain our time to rest and regroup in our day to day life. I am not saying that you have to go to the extreme and cut out all social media because life doesn’t work well on extreme restrictions. You are more than likely setting yourself up for failure when you have extreme restrictions and this doesn’t actually solve the problem of creating solid boundaries in life. There are things you can do like set times on your social media apps or leave the checking of social media for specific times of the day, away from bedtime when you are supposed to be taking time for yourself to rest and recover. What I do is set a 30-minute reminder on Instagram since its what I am on the most. Then over the course of the day if I have spent 30 minutes on Instagram it lets me know. It doesn’t shut off the app but is a simple reminder as to how much time is spent there. When I first started my average time on just Instagram was almost 2 hours a day, but now it has gone down to about 55 minutes a day! This is just a small example of how just becoming aware of time wasters we can cut back on to regain time to rest.

My second piece of advice is to recognize where you often say yes even though saying no would benefit both you and your family. Usually, these are fun activities or events that when you have energy sound great, but at the end of a long week are more taxing than anything. It’s hard to say no to something that is fun like a night out with friends, or a day spent at a theme park with your kids. These things aren’t a bad thing to have in your schedule, but we need to remember the importance of having a weekend or day off for rest and recuperation.

Lastly, I want to talk about asking for help. For me, this is very relevant because I hate to ask for something, even if I need it and the person has expressed openly their will to give it. This can be anything from a loved one watching your kids so you can take a nap, asking your spouse to run to the grocery store for milk, or seeing if a friend can cover a shift at work. The worst they can say is no, but more than likely if they love you, they will do what they can to help even if it doesn’t work out this time, it might the next! This is not one of those suggestions where you use and abuse the kindness of others without paying it forward because when you get these moments into rest and recuperate you begin to see the importance of them. Since you are better rested you can take the opportunity to do the same for someone else in need. It is a great opportunity to reach out to others and build stronger bonds as a community when we begin to work together to benefit each other.

SO first we find the time wasters and set some boundaries, we find where we say yes to plans when we should be saying no, and then we learn to say yes please to help from others instead of saying no thanks.

If we can incorporate these little changes into our day to day lives, we will find ourselves rested and able to give more to others around us!

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