Is the amount of rest we need different for everyone?

It goes without saying that the amount of rest required depends on your individual needs. When you don’t sleep well, have a busy schedule or feel stressed, you might feel like you need more frequent breaks. What’s most important, though, is that you allow your body adequate time to activate its healing cascade and return to a state of homeostasis, when it can repair and recover.

According to the experts at coaching platform BetterUp, focused attention on a task uses about 5% of the body’s energy, whereas rest utilises about 20% of the body’s energy. So your rest, in whatever form it takes, should aim to replenish that.

Rest can also be difficult to define because it looks different for everyone. In her book Sacred Rest: Recover Your Life, Renew Your Energy, Restore Your Sanity, physician Dr Saundra Dalton-Smith identified seven types of rest: creative, mental, physical, social, emotional, sensory and spiritual rest.

While you’ll probably need a little bit of all the different types of rest to function well, certain people will need certain types of rest more often than others, for example if you’re an introverted person or more of an extrovert.

This is how much rest we really need – and how to make sure we get it